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Now in the latter days of physical reparation, he began to walk less gingerly, working to straighten the limp, fine-tuning his stride. He worked at invisibility, too, hiding away what had happened, packing it up and storing it so that it would not be apparent to those he did not know. He had begun experiencing that strange sort of uncanny encounter: meeting someone new, someone utterly unaware of the recent trials, and feeling the short shock of misapprehension when it became clear that this someone, like so many others, assumed he had lived a straightforward and clear trajectory, uninterrupted by clinical strife. This produced in him an unresolvable antagonism, between private and public knowledge, between intimacy and banality, between longing for recognition and hoping that no one could tell. We were with him then; and we knew, but he did not know that we knew.