When the doctors asked him if he wanted to hop into a frying pan, Alexander of Severe Level III, long acquainted with doctor tongue, knew they meant they wanted to trial a new drug or a new treatment. Alexander said okay because he was tired of being shut up all day in the institution, and wanted to travel to the testing lab. More importantly, he had lost a central piece of himself to shrapnel when he stepped on a landmine eleven years earlier, and continued to perplex what was left of his cerebral cortex with the hope of its recovery.
The doctors assured Alexander that the new treatment, which had to be administered far from the city to avoid electrical effects, had worked well on animal subjects, and if Alexander of Severe Level III would scrawl his agreement on the bottom of a standard form, he could find his way home again. Home seemed a dream, but a pleasant one. Once, when he was a small child at the county fair, Alexander, then of Innocence, had far wandered from the hand of his mother who was busy with cotton candy or ice cream.
He had been blinded by the midway bulbs, deafened by the shouts of shills, and had begged a tall cowboy for help. Home at that time was not only a pleasant dream, but the possibility of its loss a nightmare. Now, absent an essential piece of himself, and with the prospect of finding it again without the need to return to the war jungle of snakes and booby traps, Alexander scrawled his agreement, and climbed into an institution van with a docto.