And in that same way that my in­ners had ex­ploded and burst like a split atom from my gut when Tycho ini­tially pro­pelled me into the third, I ex­ited with the same force, through worm­holes and fourth, fifth, sixth di­men­sional pas­sage­ways, through space and time, on the bor­der of re­al­ity and the Pleasure Garden, only to ar­rive in a void of dark­ness, where my mem­o­ries of the sur­real, of Tycho, Adolf, Adnan and Omar, of the match of Tug-o-war to de­cide my fate, of my van­tage point in the third, van­ished in a sin­gle in­stant, where all I ever knew and would know turned the color black, as if I was in a dark­room, or dead, but ob­vi­ously not dead, but sim­ply asleep, where I could dream vivid dreams, but where a fine dis­tinc­tion lay be­tween dream­world and re­al­ity, far away, far away from the pure­ness of the Pleasure Garden. What stayed with me was noth­ing tan­gi­ble, nor con­crete, but rather a feel­ing of hav­ing lived im­por­tant ex­pe­ri­ences, hav­ing met im­por­tant peo­ple whose names I did not yet re­mem­ber. Of hav­ing learned that I have much more to learn—all this ac­com­pa­nied with a firm­ness of char­ac­ter.

***

I opened my eyes in the flu­o­res­cent hos­pi­tal room and jolted my torso for­ward only to be de­nied by the ar­ray of tubes at­tached to me. No longer was I the wind. There he was, my fa­ther sit­ting in the cor­ner star­ing at me with his owl gaze, ready to tell me a story about two men, Adnan and Omar, who wipe out a baker named Momin clean of his stock. A story that takes place in Ottoman Beirut at the end of the 19th cen­tury. Dad will then tell me that these are my an­ces­tors, that I am re­lated to them and that my ex­pe­ri­ence, my ac­tions, were in ac­cor­dance with tra­di­tion, and he will look at me with fright­en­ing eyes, owl eyes, per­haps in dis­be­lief. I won’t un­der­stand him. Not yet. I won’t re­mem­ber Adnan or Omar, Tycho Brahe or King Adolf Frederick of Sweden, the orig­i­nal mar­tyrs of food. Nor the Pleasure Garden. I will lis­ten to my fa­ther with cu­rios­ity. I will en­joy the deep trem­ble of his voice; I will smile at his story—that I will—but it will not make any sense. Not un­til later. Not un­til I be­gin to write down all that I can re­mem­ber per Anne’s in­struc­tion. Not un­til I pick up the pen and be­gin to pour every­thing I knew into three Okinawa note­books. Not un­til I be­gin the ther­apy that would last one full year.

But on that day of my re­vival, my new birth­day, I knew noth­ing. I was re­born, a blank slate.