The Jeremy: Snaps Of The Dragon

By Jo S Wun

What could be worse than waking up in a strange place, not knowing how you got there? Well, waking up in a strange place, not knowing how you got there and finding that you were unable to speak would qualify. Waking up in a strange place, not knowing how you got there, finding that you were unable to speak and that you also had very little control over your body would qualify with honours, and might well reduce a person to tears.

It's not as uncommon a situation as you might think.

What you do next is when it starts to get interesting...

The story of an English boy's life in Britain during the 50's and 60's.

Born into a Catholic household in the Year of the Dragon, his progress is revealed through snapshots of the milestone events which forge his character. Life's oddities, including family, religion, education and sex, regularly present themselves for attention during his quest for that elusive thing called 'enlightenment', but fortunately, he is not alone. Help arrives in the form of Mrs Bulging Bosoms, the Colonel, Professor Melchior Da Maven and Lewd Rude Dude, to name a few of his advisers, who endeavour to guide him in the ways of the world. Unfortunately, they don't always agree.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jo S Wun
• Release date: Apr 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452325811

Jo S Wun

Strange name for an English bloke but nobody can choose their parents. Jo cannot remember being born but assumes he must have been. He has done a fair bit since, including working for a short while on a farm cultivating mushrooms. They were not magic, although, as if by magic, he always got a seat to himself on the bus home after work - work which included manually filling the wooden boxes, in which the mushrooms were grown, with exceedingly fresh horse manure. On balance, Jo prefers reading and writing books. Jo is the author of The Jeremy - Snaps Of The Dragon

Book preview

PART ONE

Snapshot No. 1

¹On the 4th day of June, in the year 7460 – according to the Byzantine calendar – an event took place the real significance of which was barely conceived at the time. Nevertheless, we can be reasonably sure that the conception of the Jeremy did, in all likelihood, happen while his parents were indeed stark naked. After all, although not entirely beyond the realms of possibility, it seems unlikely that the Jeremy’s father – despite his generally conservative British attitude – kept his socks on during a warm African night in June. However, this fact has never been verified – it seems an indelicate question to ask – which adds a modest amount of mystery to the event, don’t you think?

   His conception was significant in as much as the creation of any child is significant. Of course, the creation of children does not absolutely guarantee the continued existence of our species; there may be some catastrophic event – perhaps a cosmic process – which kills us all off, or we may even manage to make ourselves extinct through some lunacy of our own, a possibility which seems to be gaining ground in an apparent race to oblivion. But for many of us, creating children is the best and possibly only way to make a meaningful contribution to the future.

   Later in his life, the Jeremy would struggle with the morality of the argument that, in certain cases, the best contribution to the future some persons could make would be not to have children at all.

   But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. He wasn’t even aware of his own existence yet. That happened some days after the closing ceremony of the Spermatazoan Olympics, so graciously hosted by his mother.

   In true Olympic style, one sperm, who at the start was merely another contender among many, having proved beyond doubt his absolute fitness for victory – over a long and gruelling course – thrust himself headlong into his moment of glory with a cry of, Long live the embryo!

   As challenging and arduous as the course may have been, this Prince of Sperms was but a sprinter carrying the baton of life to the marathon runner who would be the Jeremy.

   We can safely leave it to qualified scientists to determine the exact moment that his awareness began to flourish. For our purposes, the knowledge that there was such a moment – a moment at which he began to feel – which inescapably occurred at some point between the Prince’s victory and the emergence of the Jeremy into the outer world, is sufficient.

   What was it that he felt? His very first sensation? Did he feel warm? His environment was undoubtedly warm by our standards, but to judge warmth he would have needed some experience of different temperatures against which to make a comparison. His mother’s body was working hard to maintain a Goldilocks environment for him, one in which conditions were just right, where variations were kept to a minimum.

   His first sensation didn’t really do justice to the word. It was nothing more than the registration of the state in which he found himself – the norm, the baseline, the point of reference by which he would notice changes as they happened.

   And happen they did, and he was duly aware of them. But at this stage, it was very much a case of things happening to him, rather than him making them happen. He was pretty much a sitting duck at the mercy of his surroundings. And, as it happens, he looked much like a duck at a similar stage of development, too.

   However, life was easy. He didn’t have to do anything much at all, except grow at an astounding rate. But that also just happened, without any conscious effort on his part. Indeed, very little seemed to be under his control, but it would not be long before he could deliberately dip his toes into the deep waters of human endeavour, by literally wiggling them.

   At first, his source of knowledge about his environment was restricted to the detection of movement. But as time passed, his other senses began to awaken, and in due course, he was able to make his limbs move, blink his eyelids and hear sounds. Most of these sounds were of his mother’s body gurgling away as it carried out its normal digestive processes, but later on, he began to detect sounds from the external world, a world of which he had no comprehension.

   The Jeremy inhabited a perfect playground, where he felt safe and secure. But, as the saying goes, ‘all good things must come to an end’. And what an abrupt end it was. One moment he was playfully kicking with his lower appendages while simultaneously attempting a spot of rolling and tumbling, the next his world had literally collapsed around him. And before he had time to come to terms with that, he found himself being forcibly pushed towards a gash in the now fluid-less sack which had so recently been his haven. He struggled violently against this unwelcome turn of events, but no matter how hard he tried, he was powerless to prevent it. It seemed he was about to die!

Waarrrghhhh! he screamed (and had this event occurred at any later, vocabulary-rich date in his life – as if that was possible – he would still have screamed ‘Waarrrghhhh!’ ), in precise expression of his feelings.

   And so it was, that at a few minutes after midnight on the 11th of March, in the year referred to in the Christian calendar as 1952, the Jeremy found himself forced into a cold and uninviting world.

*

   And the rest, as those fond of a cliché might say, is history.

~:~:~

Snapshot No. 2

   History? That’s as may be. It was all in the future for the Jeremy. In the present, ‘cold’ and ‘uninviting’ about summed it up. It was cold, not just because he was naked, but also because, ’twixt conception and delivery, his parents had returned from East Africa to dear old blighty. And it was uninviting because – well who in their right mind could describe the clinical environs of a hospital delivery room as inviting?

Waarrrghhhh! he yelled.

   The shock of recent events was of galactic proportions in his mind, and on top of that, he was experiencing new shocks, nasty ones which were jostling for pole position in his consciousness.

Waarrrghhhh! he screamed again, without any thought for the fact that he was repeating himself – something he would later be taught, somewhat dubiously, is a heinous crime against both literary and oratory style.

Waarrrghhhh! Waarrrghhhh! Waarrrghhhh! he shouted.

   There was nothing about his new environment which could persuade him there was any more suitable comment to make. These sensations were not pleasant. He’d never felt cold before, and now that coldness had somehow got inside him, apparently through the holes in his face.

Waarrrghhhh!

   And it was noisy. The gently muffled sounds he’d been used to, had been replaced by sharp, harsh noises which managed to find their way right inside his head. And that could only mean one thing. He had more holes in him.

Waarrrghhhh!

   Even his ‘Waarrrghhhh!’ attacked him.

   And there were completely new sensations. There was this stuff called light which was bouncing around all over the place, and some of it was getting inside him too!

Waarrrghhhh! How many holes have I got in me? he wailed, in a state of near panic.

   He was shortly to discover there were indeed more, but he would find, to his relief, they were for output rather than input. Much, much later, he would initially be very surprised to find that, for some people, this was not always the case.

   What horror would be next? During his teens, he would hear stories about alien abductions wherein strange beings would – amongst other unspeakable deeds – prod, poke and peer at their victims, who were completely powerless to do anything about it. These stories would trigger an uncanny resonance within him.

   It took a moment for him to comprehend it, but the next sensation was pleasant. He was nestling on some sort of soft, warm cushion. He could hear reassuringly gentle sounds, and the cushion moved ever so slightly, in a pacifying, rocking motion. There was an attractive smell too. His fear and panic began to melt away, and practically without realising it had happened, he found he was drawing in a warm fluid which had a very pleasing taste.

   It was almost as if things had gone back to the way they’d been before. At least, if he concentrated very hard on this latest development, he could very nearly convince himself it was so.

   His distraught ‘Waarrrghhhh!’ turned to a contented ‘Mmmmmmm’.

*

   Mmmmmmm, he murmured.

   What a wealth of meaning in a single, barely spoken word. In the following days, weeks and months, the Jeremy fluctuated, often erratically, between ‘Mmmmmmm’ and ‘Waarrrghhhh!’ From this elemental vocabulary, an eloquent verbal practitioner would eventually grow, but there was an intermediate stage through which he would first have to pass.

   Gurgling, in all its varied forms, was his first step on the road to literacy, and soon after the start of his journey, his verbal expertise would expand to include not only ‘Wahraarrrghhhh!’ – an extension of ‘Waarrrghhhh!’ reserved especially for use on any occasion which required extra emphasis – but also ‘Gusk’, ‘mish’ and ‘guck’.

   In the meantime, in common with most babies, he displayed an effortless capacity to seize the moment. ‘Seizing the moment’ often meant taking the opportunity, when lying naked on his back, to conduct experiments regarding the capacity of bodily fluids, of the not-so-precious variety, to combat gravitational forces when expelled. Unlike some babies, he had an insatiable appetite for experiments of this type, industriously persevering long after most of his contemporaries had succumbed to the bidding of their mothers.

   This behaviour should not be confused with what some say is the dark art of pooping in a freshly donned nappy. While he did indulge in this form of behaviour on more than one occasion, it was merely an example of the natural proclivity of living creatures to dispose of waste material with little regard for the convenience or sensibilities of others.

   Whether accidental or deliberate, his pristine-nappy soiling activities provoked his mother to respond, Oh you naughty boy!

   But although those were the words she used, she always said them as if they meant, How sweet you are!

   Language comprehension was not his strongest suit at this early stage of his life, which was probably just as well. He would have plenty of opportunities later on to figure out why people say one thing, but mean something else. In the meantime, even though he’d neither understood the words nor that he’d done something ‘wrong’, he was astute enough to decipher the underlying message.

   His mother was full of love for him. Given time, he would learn to exercise some control over his bodily functions, but there was an implicit promise in her tone that his failure to do so would not result in any form of punishment. Nothing he could do would make his mother angry. Nothing he could do would make her say ‘Waarrrghhhh!’

   His conclusion that his mother doted on him was entirely accurate. Nevertheless, he appeared to test this theory on a daily, hourly or, on some occasions, even a minute by minute basis, but it would be many months before he faced the first hint of his mother’s wrath.

   What a joy it was to have the freedom to explore the limits of his world, even if it was a relentless struggle to overcome the barriers to his explorations. Barriers which included, for example, his propensity to poke himself in the eye whenever he grasped an object and raised it with the intention of giving it a thorough once-over.

   For the most part though, the Jeremy’s life was everything he could hope it would be. His apparent efforts to test his mother’s seemingly unshakeable love for him had done nothing but confirm the truth of the hypothesis. Consequently, he trusted her with his life. Of course, he had no other choice, but there is a world of difference between absolutely trusting someone because you believe you can, and trusting them because you have to.

*

   Where, you might be wondering, was the Jeremy’s father during all this time? Working of course! And if he wasn’t working he’d be in the pub, or failing that, in his chair, reading the newspaper or listening to the wireless, or perhaps snoozing off the effects of a visit to the pub. Like most British men in the nineteen-fifties, in his view, it was a man’s duty to be the breadwinner and a woman’s place to be at home, looking after the children. Actually, that attitude had begun to change as a result of the war. Women had taken on traditional male roles while the men were away fighting, but it had yet to be fully accepted as normal, especially now that things were back to normal! Men and women knew their respective roles, and woe betide anyone who voluntarily crossed those invisible demarcation lines.

   So it was that the Jeremy had the equivalent of an unreliable dial-up line to his father, and an always-on broadband connection to his mother.

*

   There was another face which sometimes appeared in his field of vision. It was curiously similar to his mother’s, but smaller, not only in its physical aspects but also in its capacity to convey the impression it could be consistently relied upon.

   Sometimes it smiled and chattered noisily, sometimes the opposite. Sometimes the face would be contorted into a strange caricature of itself, sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing. At other times, it would extend its tongue and waggle its fingers while inserting its thumbs in its ears. But its most distinguishing feature was that it appeared at seemingly random intervals, for no apparent reason, did whatever facial gymnastics it deemed suitable, and disappeared again, often without warning.

   He’d utilised his entire vocabulary in an attempt to establish a stable relationship with the small face. But the inconsistencies of its responses had defeated all his efforts. Even his trump card, the judicious use of a well-timed ‘Wahraarrrghhhh!’, failed to produce predictable results. Sometimes the small face would attempt to use its diminutive arms to pick him up, more often than not failing miserably, leaving them both in complete disarray. At other times, it would disappear before he’d even finished the second syllable. Its erratic behaviour remained a mystery.

*

   Much of the Jeremy’s world was a source of mystery.

~:~:~

Snapshot No. 3

   The day started like any other. The Jeremy woke to find himself presented with a slightly blurred view of the ceiling, adjusted his focus to include Gusk – his name for the little furry creature that always hovered a few inches above his face – checked he still had the use of his arms and legs, and in so doing, confirmed what had come to be an unsurprising and exceedingly tiresome fact; he was lying in a pile of shit which had been generously marinated in urine. The knowledge that it was his own shit and his own urine was not much of a palliative. There was only one possible course of action.

Waarrrghhhh! he shouted.

   He knew he’d probably have to repeat it several times before his mother’s face appeared next to Gusk. He also knew that some days he’d have to repeat it more times than others. But it rarely got to the point of ‘Wahraarrrghhhh!’ And on those very rare occasions when it did, his mother would be extra loving when she arrived, apologizing profusely.

   The crux of the matter was, he knew she would come. She would appear and that would signal the start of the morning ritual. Not a ritual he particularly enjoyed, having exhausted his fascination with fluid mechanics, but one he happily endured because the end result was worth it. Besides, all through it, his mother would speak to him in soothing, reassuring tones.

   On this particular morning, she appeared right on cue. She had an exceptionally chirpy disposition too – it was as if her face was bathed in the light of her own personal sun. He smiled and gurgled appreciatively.

Mish, he said.

   Often, he would find that his ‘mish’ – a multi-purpose word somewhat similar to the Joker in a pack of playing cards – would be followed, moments later, by an involuntary ‘guck’. The ‘guck’ would be in response to his mother touching parts of his body. It was a touch which produced a pleasurable sensation, but one which could not be endured for too long.

Guck, guck, guck, Guck, GUCK, guck, Guck, guck, Guck, he giggled, as his mother playfully tickled him.

   He noticed, with some interest, that he was being dressed in new clothes. Mostly white, with a bit of blue here and there. They had a smooth feel where they touched his skin, and made a rustling noise when he moved. He laughed, jerking his arms up and down. These were funny clothes! His mother laughed too. There was a hat as well, made of the same material. It felt a bit cold to the touch when his mother put it on his head, but not an unpleasant coldness. He laughed some more, and dribbled some saliva down his chin.

   He was startled by his mother’s swift reaction. In a blur of movement, she produced a handkerchief and the saliva was wiped away. The Jeremy found this unexpected behaviour disconcerting and expressed it with a ‘Wrhgh’, an abbreviation he sometimes used as a forerunner to a full blown ‘Waarrrghhhh!’

Oh I’m sorry my darling. I didn’t mean to startle you. I just want you to look your best today. There, there …

   The sound of her words permeated his mind as she gently picked him up, clasping him to her. He didn’t need to understand their linguistic meaning. He settled into his mother’s arms, listening to the beating of her heart while searching for the nectar. Soon his startlement was forgotten.

*

   He must have drifted back to sleep for a while, because the next thing presented to his conscious mind was the movement he’d come to associate with an influx of lots of interesting visual stimuli. His mother was carrying him while she walked. Not the way she’d carried him earlier – that was comfort mode. This was travel mode. She’d propped him up so he could see over her shoulder. He liked it when she carried him that way because things stayed in his field of vision for longer. When he was facing the direction of travel, things were forever disappearing before he could get a good look at them. Besides, it was a bit cold today, and it felt warmer this way round.

   There it was – the big expanse of grass. He’d seen it before, but when he wasn’t actually looking at it he could never picture it the way it really was. The green of it. He spent a little time pondering the different greens he’d observed and their relative greenness. But it taxed his faculties just imagining colours in his head.

   There was a bird strutting about in the grass. It spent most of its time looking around with little darting motions of its head and neck. Every once in a while, it would apparently glimpse something, and pause to peck at it before resuming its staccato perusal of its environment. Then, in a flurry of jumps, skips and wing-flaps, it took off and flew into the sky.

   The Jeremy was not in the least bit amazed by the bird’s ability to fly. Birds just did that. But he was fascinated by their flight. He watched the bird fly away, first in this direction and then another. It held his gaze for a long time, until his concentration was interrupted by a change in his mother’s pattern of movement.

   He felt the g-force acting upon him as his body was accelerated upwards with every step. His head wobbled in response, echoing the motion. He heard the change in the sound of his mother’s footsteps as her shoes made abrasive contact with the stone steps, which obligingly appeared under her heels. And then he heard other footsteps from unseen feet. Whose feet were they?

   His mother paused. He noticed there were hundreds of little specks of colour randomly placed on the ground. Of course, he hadn’t yet mastered the art of counting, so for him, quantity was a simple matter of one or many. In this case, even ‘many’ seemed inadequate as a descriptor. As his mother turned through ninety degrees, he was just able to catch a glimpse of a cluster of the coloured specks rising from the ground. Picked up by a gust of wind, they swirled about as if they were all joined together by invisible elastic ties.

   In his new orientation, that which came into view was the small-faced person, who was looking up at him from below. One of its hands was clutching his mother’s coat belt. It made no funny or peculiar facial movements. It just looked up at him, and began absent-mindedly twisting the belt. He returned its gaze. It wasn’t a stand-off sort of gaze, just two observers observing each other but having nothing to say.

   He tried to adjust his position, but found his movements were restricted. He gave another wriggle. As he did so, he felt his mother’s grip on him tighten very slightly, and then the steady thunk, thunk, thunk as she patted his back. The rhythmic thunking had a hypnotic effect and was sufficiently distracting that he forgot about being unable to move. Dr Benjamin Spock would have been proud of the Jeremy’s mother. She adjusted his shawl to keep it snugly wrapped around him. He quite liked his shawl. It kept him warm even if he couldn’t do much wriggling, something he liked to do for no particular reason now and again.

   They were on the move once more, and he detected the change in ambience as they passed through the big, open doorway. He’d noticed the effect before, but it was still interesting.

   There were a lot of people inside, mostly of the big variety, and more were following behind him. He thought he might have seen some of their faces before, but things were moving fast. He found it hard to focus on any one face long enough to be sure. But he could detect that lots of them were smiling, and the smiles appeared to be aimed in his direction.

Mish, he said.

   But this time there was no involuntary ‘guck’.

*

   The Jeremy resurfaced from a reverie. A quick check of his sensory inputs told him he was still in the big building, safely in his mother’s arms.

Mish, he said again.

   Still no ‘guck’, but it did generate a gentle squeeze in response. His mother stood up and moved again. Not very far this time. She simply took a few paces forward. Then he heard a voice which was vaguely familiar. ‘Familiar’, in as much as he’d heard it in this building before, but not in the sense of being particularly fond of it. It sounded slightly surreal. Of course, he had no awareness of the surrealist movement, but even so, the voice was no less surreal.

   It was a good deal closer to him than usual. Every so often it would pause and his mother would speak. Her voice was slightly odd too, not at all like the way she talked to him. Then she fell silent, gently rocking him in her arms. The voice continued on in its surreality, this time the pauses filled by his father’s voice. It was more difficult to tell if his voice sounded odd because the Jeremy had much less historical data to go on.

   The surreal voice was at it again, the only noticeable difference being the filling of the gaps, first by one voice, then another. He thought he might know those voices too, but he couldn’t see the faces to which they belonged, so the identity of the speakers remained just out of reach. His mother continued to rock him gently.

   Things were happening again. His mother was removing his hat which was a bit of a surprise. The contact with the air made his head feel somewhat chilly. It didn’t make any sense to him, but she often did things he didn’t understand. He was used to that.

   What she did next was strange. She held him out in front of her, not quite at arms length. It was as if she was going to give him to someone, but he couldn’t feel any hands preparing to take hold of him. He lay there in her outstretched arms, looking up into the vast space between him and the curved shapes of the far away ceiling.

   A face appeared a short distance above him. When it spoke, it proved to be the source of the surreal voice. He couldn’t remember any previous occasion when he’d seen it at such close range, and certainly not from such an angle. It was smiling, or rather, had the appearance of smiling. He felt unsure if this was a face he could trust, and he was certainly glad his mother was holding him, no matter how strangely. The face spoke again and, as it did so, in to view came something else.

   It took a moment for him to figure it out, but it looked a little like the jug his mother used when she bathed him, except this one was a bit more fancy. It had a pattern on the side, but he couldn’t make out the detail due to the angle at which it was held. Almost as if it was able to understand his difficulty, the hand which held it slowly began to turn, enabling him to get a better look.

   Time decelerated to very nearly a complete stop at the exact moment the meniscus of the water appeared at the lip of the jug. That is, of course, everywhere except inside the Jeremy’s brain where the neurone cavalry had already begun its charge, mobilising all idle cells as it went. The order for adrenaline was given and it was there in an instant, a testament to the impressive efficiency already in place in this developing environment. Next up was the order to take evasive action. Like fire-fighting bucket-chains on steroids, the message was passed from cell to cell on its concurrent journeys to the muscles in his arms and legs. The muscles obeyed without question, but in a tiny fraction of a second, the feedback showed their efforts were not producing the expected results. In a last ditch attempt to prevent what was rapidly becoming inevitable, the Jeremy’s vocal chords were primed for action.

   In the conscious part of his mind, the foregoing events could be translated as, WHOA! BE CAREFUL! THAT WATER IS GOING TO FALL OUT OF YOUR JUG AND LAND ON MY HEAD! HEY!! IT’S SPILLING!! IT’S SPILLING!!! WHAT’S GOING ON!!? HELP!! I CAN’T MOVE!! SOMEONE HAS PUT ME IN A STRAIGHT JACKET! swiftly followed by, MUM!!! HELP ME!!!!!

   But help was not forthcoming. As the cold water splashed onto his head he yelled ‘WAHRAARRRGHHHH!’ as loud as he could, over and over again, partly because of the shock and partly because he desperately needed his mother’s help. This was a living nightmare. Dreadful things were happening and yet his mother seemed oblivious to them. No, it was worse than that. She was aiding and abetting the perpetrator, and, at the same time, she was smiling and talking to him in the gentle tone she normally used after he’d had a bad experience. But this one was still going on!

   The Jeremy was frantic. His safe world had been shattered. And up from the depths of his mind came horrific memories. Something he’d previously buried so deep he had no knowledge of its existence. But now the memory of the terror and pain came flooding in like a mental tsunami. He could see the eyes peering at him from behind the mask. He’d been just as unable to protect his penis then as he’d been unable to protect his head now.

   He could yell ‘WAHRAARRRGHHHH!’ no more. His defence mechanisms had done all they could. His mother was holding him close again, but there was no substantiating evidence to suggest she’d retracted her arms in direct response to his cries.

   His vociferous yelling subsided, becoming virtually silent sobs. He was quiet. Not the contented quiet of an infant-in-arms, but rather, the quiet of a creature whose nervous system has been so overloaded, it is afraid to open its eyes for fear of what it might see.

   And just to top it off, he was pretty sure he was lying in a pile of shit again. But it would have to wait until a lot later in his life before he would see his plight in regard to the wretched contents of his nappy as having any symbolic significance worthy of a smile.

*

   Afterwards, there had been spirited attempts at urbane conversation, interlaced with tea and cucumber sandwiches, about the standard of the catering, the décor and Mrs You-Know-Who’s ‘misfortune’. But that had all passed the Jeremy by. He was far too busy conducting a large-scale damage limitation and repair exercise. It demanded, as a pre-requisite, copious amounts of sleep, which the remains of the congregation indulgently interpreted as him being ‘watched over by angels’, with much attendant ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’.

   Had he remained awake and also been endowed with the superhuman zapping powers he would later imagine for himself, the ‘remains of the congregation’ would not have been a polite reference to the fact that not all the attendees at the earlier ceremonious violation had accepted the invitation to partake of tea and cucumber sandwiches

   He slept, but he wasn’t aware of any angels. Indeed, for quite some time he wasn’t aware of anything at all. His sleep was the deepest of sleep. The sort of sleep that is needed to shut down the system for essential maintenance. The sort of sleep from which we emerge a slightly different person.

   When he did emerge, life appeared to be normal. The rest of the day was

Reviews for The Jeremy

[ccourtland_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

From the moment of conception the reader is placed intimately inside the head of the Jeremy. Stylistically, Wun achieves respect by remaining dedicated to the intense process that adopting such a perspective entails. This is a fantastic example and exercise of ‘being inside the characters head,’ literally. While inside, the reader not only sees humanity through the eyes of the Jeremy, but also is presented with questions that might spark one’s own self-awareness and exploration. Why do we ‘remember’ certain events and forget others? Is the brain really like a computer with filing components and sub-categories? And, if this is true, what happens when it becomes fragmented and crashes. Perhaps, the Jeremy will inspire different questions for other readers, but it undoubtedly will raise some kind of questioning and if nothing else, make for a great debate even if it doesn’t inspire enlightenment.The achievement of successfully accomplishing this choice of perspective, ‘inside the characters head,’ might also be a deterrent for readers seeking a less literary, stylistic read. The intensity can be overwhelming and a bit exhausting. It may feel disjointed or scattered at times, but I believe this is vital to portraying the thinking and memories of the human mind. However, some readers might not care for the style used to tell the tale. This is no light read, so settle in and get ready to question as you go on a crazy journey.