I awoke and my mother was there. Her hands descended upon me and she picked me up. It seems I was mildly constipated. She sat me on my potty on the dining-room table and set herself in front of me. She began to coo and urge me on, running her fingers up and down my back.

But I was not receptive. I distinctly remember finding the woman quite tiresome.

She stopped. She placed her elbows on the table and propped her head on her hands. A period of fertile silence ensued. I looked at her and she looked at me. My mood was in suspense. Anger was there, lurking. So was reconciliation. Humor was hovering. Sulking was seeping. It could go any way, nothing was decided.

Suddenly I stood up mightily, like the Colossus of Rhodes, I bent forward a little, and in one go I produced. My mother was delighted. She smiled and exclaimed:

"Gros caca!" (big poo!)

I turned. What a sight! What a smell! It was a magnificent log of excrement, at first poorly formed, like conglomerate rock that hasn't had time to set, and dark brown, nearly black, the resolving itself to a dense texture of a rich chestnut hue, with fascinating convolutions. It started deep in the potty, but after a coil or two it rose up like a hypnotized cobra and came to rest against my calf, where I remember it very, very warm, my first memory of temperature. It ended in a perfect moist peak. I looked at my mother. She was still smiling. I was red in the face and sweaty from my efforts, and I was exultant. Pleasure given, pleasure had, I sensed. I wrapped my arms around her neck.

My other earliest memory is vague, nothing more than a distant feeling that I can sometimes seize, most often not. Being so dimly remembered, perhaps it came first.

I became aware of a voice inside my head. What is this, I wondered. Who are you, voice? When will you shut up? I remember a feeling of fright. It was only later that I realized the voice was my own thinking, that this moment of anguish was my first inkling that I was a ceaseless monologue trapped within myself.

Later memories are clearer and more cohesive. For example, I remember a cataclysm in the garden. At the time I thought the sun and the moon were opposite elements, negations of each other. The moon was the sun turned off, like a light-bulb, the moon was the sun sleeping, the dimples on its surface the pores of a great eyelid, the moon was solar charcoal, the pale remains of a daily fire— whatever the case, one excluded the other. I was in the garden at a very late hour. It was summer and the sun was setting. I was watching it, blinking, squinting, burning my eyes, smiling, imagining the heat and the fire, the sizzling of entire neighborhoods. Then I turned and there it was floating in the sky, grey and malevolent. I ran. My father was the first figure of authority I encountered. I alerted him and dragged him out to the garden. But his adult mind didn't grasp how this apparition threw my understanding of astrophysics topsy-turvy.

"It's the moon. So what?" I was hiding myself behind him to protect myself from the radioactivity. "Come, it's late. Time for bed."

He took my hand and pulled me indoors. I glanced a last time at the moon. My God, it was a fire orb. It moved at random in the universe, like the sun. Surely one day they would clash!