The thing I must remember, I told myself, was that my recollections
were false and unreliable. It would do me no good to keep following
these false memories in a closed curve.
I touched my navel area and flinched. The beating, I was confident, had
been real. But it had been a nightmare. Those cops couldn't have been
true. They were a small boy's bad dream about symbolized authority.
They were keeping me from re-entering the past where I belonged,
punishing me to make me stay in my trap of the present.
Oh, God.