Michel watched out the window, his face turned from the other passengers, so they could see only in the reflection of the window and the light over the trees that his face was damp. He wanted to say something to himself to prove he didn't stutter. He might have said something to his travelling companions, asked the time perhaps, but the prospect of failing was too humiliating to risk. Now he remembered quite clearly his first truly incandescent memory since he'd met Lauren, and that was of talking to himself as a child. He talked to himself in his room, walking in circles, and on the stairs to his aunt's and uncle's house, and on the way to and from school, and in the back of the limousine. When he talked to himself he was fully aware that it looked foolish to others, but this was the trade-off: that he never stuttered, that in conversation with himself he was always eloquent and lucid, articulate and impressive in ways he never was in dialogue with anyone else. So now Michel understood that when he forgot who he was that morning in Paris he forgot how to stutter, and now he sat in his seat terrified to make a sound, verbally paralysed, struck dumb. He struggled to take hold of himself. I cannot have come to this, he thought: I've taken so many chances already, I have to take one more. He made himself turn to the banker and his daughter to ask the hour, but they were gone.
[Days Between Stations, Erickson, S.]
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