JULIAN

I did not speak.

I want to account for this because the not-speaking was not the particular and stunned quality of a man who had been rendered speechless, who had received something so large that the language function had simply stopped. I had language. I had the specific and considerable resource of a man who had been using language professionally for twenty years and who understood its capacity and its limits.

Its limits were what I was in.

There were no right things.

I understood this with the specific and complete clarity of a man who had, in the particular and professional lifetime of his experience, occasionally found himself...