He wasn't like that before. He's just having a hard time dealing with it.

For maybe a month or two, we were getting calls from the school every day. He was getting in fights. He was just angry.

It's always about somebody killing somebody.

I was learning the importance of names -- having them, making them -- but at the same time I sensed the dangers. Recognition was followed by oblivion, a yawning maw whose victims disappeared without a trace.

. . . I improvised, crazed by the music. . . . Even my teeth and eyes burned with fever. Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.

In hospitals there is no time off for good behavior