Anyway: To have woken up in a room that is not one's own, and is not where one remembers having gone to sleep, what does one think once the initial perplexity wears off? It is difficult to imagine. There is no popular yardstick for this sort of situation. One may have seen something similar in a spy movie, but one is not a spy.

There is too much that could be said about this man (some of interesting, much of it not—all very related to the matter at hand) to attempt to say much of anything, except that he was as idiosyncratic as you are and should not be taken as an Everyman, even if we still don't give him a name. Call him "the patient," because that is what he was.

The doctor entered the room shortly. He was entitled to the honorific because he held a Ph.D. in neuropsychology (he would have had a thing or two to say about the second paragraph of this story), wore a long white lab coat, and carried a clipboard. He knocked brightly as he opened the door. He was tall, broad-shouldered, wore his hair very short, and impressed the patient with a 1950s-style authority. The patient felt a surge of an emotion that might best be described as a hybrid of fear and relief in unknown proportions. Here was the embodiment of an institution, an arbiter of power and powerlessness, of safety and knowledge, of yearned-for sympathy, of responsibility, of uncomfortable necessary procedures.

Continuation of 11.2.07 4:22 PM, first draft
C.f. 11.2.07 4:22 PM; 17.2.07 3:50 PM