They call him the man who forgot the name of things., but it means nothing to him for it sounds like another name and he has gone somewhere beyond that. He sits contentedly wherever he is placed, chews food if it is fed to him and swallows the pills they give him. He does not discriminate between wakefulness and sleep, nor dreams and reality, moving from one to another with equal grace, watching and waiting.

Though the others cannot see into his mind, they have tried to name it. They have lent into him like little boys playing at catching fish with their hands and each time the little minnow slips between their fingers, they try again.

Sometimes he looks at the names they give him and touches them from every angle. If it were something he could eat would it taste like this, smell like this, feel like this? If it were a place he had never been would it be like this or that? He imagines it were a bird caught between his fingers, he imagines it were a insect.. a beetle crawling over his palm.

The men that come are never satisified.. He suspects them of hiding behind names that he cant understand because they are afraid of him.

He has memories, but without names, they fray and dissolve in his head.

He remembers a woman shedding tears and shaking him, he remembers touching her tears and being suprised to find them warm, like living things, but not that she was saying, love over and over, like a mantra.

He remembers a woman stroking his forehead and her hair white like snow, that he touched and found it neither hot nor cold but that it smelled deliciously of sandlewood instead. He remembers an old man with a face like pouched leather looking into his eyes and not seeing him, seeing instead mysterious names engraved there and shaking his head sadly.

He has trouble seperating the clouds from the flowers, caught up in the dazzling whiteness of petals and mist. When he is wheeled through the grounds he is only slightly suprised that what was hard and white becomes soft and blue and green, stirred by a wind that he can feel as a stroke of an angels feathers on his cheek but cannot name.