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The migraine now tightened around my head like a vise and jabbed behind my left eye as if trying to punch it out. I knew that I had expelled most of the medicine I had taken, but I was unable--physically unable--to reach for the bottle on the nightstand to get some more. Many times I imagined myself lifting my arm, groping for the bottle, seizing it, many times I was ready to try--but it never came to pass. I just remained as I was, lying flat on my face as if frozen in place. I was desperate for sleep. All I wanted was the forgetfulness of sleep. And like the pills on my nightstand, somehow sleep seemed near--physically within reach--like an ocean of sleep sloshing about in the very next room or just outside the window. I tried to picture this ocean. I pictured it as a calm midnight ocean with the moon blotted out by a thick layer of clouds--no light on this ocean. And far away I imagined the sound of waves...and saw their spill upon the sand...

When I awoke, my face was stuck to the pillow, moist with drool. I flopped onto my back and stared up at the darkened ceiling. I remembered the migraine--distantly now, because the pain had lessened tremendously. Only a dull ache remained behind my left temple--an acceptable outcome after such an enormous upheaval. Then as my waking mind ricocheted from thought to thought--from What time is it? to Should I get up and apologize to Millie?--I caught hold of a dream I must have had while sleeping through the worst of the migraine. I pictured the dream from beginning to end so vividly that it seemed like a lived experience, though I clearly recognized it as an acting out on some subconscious level of my former searing pain. I had been in a basement-like room that was lit in a hellish red hue. Even in the dream, I had said to myself, "This is one circle of hell old Dante never imagined." I stood in a long line of men awaiting their turn--for what, I didn't know. There were men waiting in other lines as well, and somehow I understood that each group was waiting for something specific--but, again, I had no idea what they were waiting for. As my particular line moved forward, however, I began to catch sight of what was ahead. Off to the left I saw a man resting his head sideways on a wooden stump. He gripped a large mallet in one hand, and when he turned his gaze toward me and his eyes locked with mine he began to hammer away at his own head. Blow after blow he delivered, his force hardly diminishing, before his arm fell limp, and he released the hammer to the ground. By that time the red pulp of his brain had oozed onto the wooden platform and one eye, still directed at me, dangled from a tendril of nerve. I looked away only to see that at the front of another line of men some poor soul was lowering his head between the jaws of a vise--the kind my father had used when I was a boy to secure the bullet casings he would fill with gunpowder. But this vise now held the man's head in place while he himself proceeded to twist the handle ever tighter.