Angst Giving

ONCE, AS A CHILD, I had visions. This took place in a children’s hospital decorated with murals of sea creatures. During the several hours I was in surgery, they had come alive. An octopus crawled along the plaster. A sea dragon undulated. I might have been frightened, except the ocean in the walls simply confirmed a phenomenon I already knew to be true: it was evidence, as Nick, the fifteen-year-old narrator of Michael Clune’s debut novel Pan, might say, of “the beautiful glow of something you didn’t have to open your eyes to see.”