If I was to survive, I must literally believe myself into being. This, of course, was essentially no different from what I'd always done. I'd simply believed in myself until, in fact, I existed.

I was dying. Of course. This was it. Curtain. Finis. I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk and prayed to Jesus for another crack at life. But then I became confused, unable to recall who Jesus’s father was. Why this should have been important I can’t venture to guess, but it got me on the subject of fathers. I realized, with an incredible sensation of vertigo, I was old enough to be my own father.