You find me much as I found myself, without explanations or preconceptions. Books always begin, or should, in such a place, at the point of least solidity. Hamlet mourning his dead father, Aeneas at sea in a storm, media res. A fiction must be pinned down to something insubstantial if it is not to collapse. Life does not: at the moment one becomes aware of it there are already a thousand explanations and structures in place, and it is impossible to think of the world except in terms inimical to those one wakes with. Even an amnesiac operates on a certain set of a priori assumptions; unaware, of course, of their sources.

So what are we to make of this: my shirt was stained with blood. It stuck to my skin when I later tried to take it off, and in truth I was unaware of it until then, though I can recall it feeling stiff as I stood in the street and tried to remember where I lived.