An Elephant of One's Own

Now is hell. I mentioned this discovery in a previous post, but it's as well to recapitulate: I woke up once, maybe thirty-five years ago, in pitch darkness, and after a few seconds of vague panic, realized that I had forgotten everything, including who and where and when and why I was. Imagine a computer booting up and then, on attempting the routine peripherals checks, finding the hard disk not working. That feeling. My memory was completely inaccessible, if not erased. I may have groaned, or cried out. I scrambled to my feet, stumbled a few paces, felt around blindly. Eventually, after perhaps thirty seconds, I found a light switch. When the light was on, I was even more terrified to see a room I did not recognize. I sat down on the sofa where I had been sleeping, and tried to remember. After about a minute the hard disk started whirring, belatedly. I identified the room as my mother's living room, and the sofa as the one I was meant to sleep on. Half a minute more a...