given a pen and still unable to say the simplest thing — "Again it looks cuneiform though, illegible…"

The notebook doesn't rescue him. Forced to write left-handed against nothing, Gately produces marks that come out cuneiform, illegible even to himself — the channel handed to him fails at the first word. And the muteness keeps him from the smallest human data: nobody thinks to tell him what day it is, and he cannot form the question, so a man who wants only to know the date is locked out of it entirely, wanting to scream and unable even to do that. [sweep · shared-ground addiction-recovery]