Young Jim, his father, and the mattress (p. 503)
It occurred to me that the movement of the amputated knob perfectly schematized what it would look like for someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor. This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation.
Context
The memoir's last lines, and its whole retrospective machinery showing: an afternoon of paternal collapse, vomit, and a broken bed frame is remembered — publicly, in a physics anthology — as "The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems," the trauma curated into an origin myth. What the document claims the day meant is annulation; what it shows the day was is the father face-down in the dust. The annularity anthology owns the knob; this theme owns the reframing.