Nick remembers like a story from kindergarten what it was like. Maybe he once lived life, not suddenly choking and then shitting all over himself. Before Casey died; before he too got sick; before the dreams came. Nick is not sure if his memories are truths, but knows the shadow people who put needles in his arms will clean away the shit. As he gags and defecates, the shadow people with the needles come for him.
He again remembers like a kindergarten story how he should not want to bite the shadow person who says soft things to him and strokes his back; the one with a voice like music who, the more she comforts Nick, the more he wants to tear out her throat. Yes, he should not want to bite the shadow person but, oh, he wants to bite. Yes.
Then he is back in his bed, arms and hands tied up, safe in straps and buckles because he DID bite the shadow person with the voice like music. Only once, and he bit hard, but did not taste blood.
The shadow person did not stand so close to Nick after he bit. And the other shadow-people all gathered around Nick and held him while they put straps and buckles on, then put a needle in his arm again.
So sleepy now, and he feels nice, happy since they gave him the needle; eyeballs feeling big, wanting to close. And if he lets his eyeballs do what they want, Nick knows he will fly, fly away to dream space, to the other, other place.
In the dark, as the others leave, registered intensive care psyche nurse Debbie Kaine returns to Nick's bedside.
"You poor, poor man," Debbie whispers, as Nick slides deeper and deeper into sleep, the two milligrams of lorazepam they gave him by injection pulling him into warm oblivion.
"I know you didn't mean to bite me," Debbie continues. Nurse Kaine is well-aware of Nick's condition, having spent more time with him than any one of the several doctors visiting him on their daily rounds.
Though Nick is unaware, Debbie knows the Kaposi's sarcoma now overwhelming his ravaged body has moved into his brain. She knows Kaposi's lesions have reduced Nick's general intellectual capacity to that of a dull 5-year-old. That he is legally blind. She knows about the rage Nick began exhibiting when he was first admitted about four months ago.
Nick's naked rage, Debbie knows, was determined by psychiatric evaluation (when he could still articulate) to be rooted in the death of his love, the girl from whom he contracted the HIV that had led to his present condition.
Nick's rage over the loss of his love and now the dissipation of his own life, Debbie knows, is essentially all that remains of this man. Stripped of all his higher functions, Nick has become a kind of primitive man.
With nothing more than grief and rage struggling in his basic mammalian and reptilian neural clusters, his rage feeds on his grief until nothing is left. Put simply, Nick Fenton IS rage. And from his "kindergarten memory" of what he was before he came here, of the broken love that brought him here, he again summons the scenes and perceptions of a dream within a dream.
