After Brenner left, Jay noticed the nozzle in the ceiling 14 feet overhead followed him around as he shadowboxed. Thanks to thousands of hours of training and dozens of boxing matches, stick-fights and cage-fights he had an internal action clock that he could set for two, three or five minutes. The room was six feet wide and 18 feet long. He did sprints in between rounds. He practiced 500 hammer fists and palm strikes against the concrete wall after every drink he took out of the bowl that seemed to magically refill while he slept in the continual light. A tube of protein paste was occasionally dispensed through a chute. He would start the training cycle again after each of those he ate.

The best thing about being in “the slit” was that he had no nightmares; no disembodied heads of slain horses or ghostly faces of betrayed friends to terrorize his already fitful sleep with their moaning reminders of war crimes past. He felt almost as if he belonged in this concrete box.

This is kind of nice really.

After six tubes of paste and 180 rounds of shadowboxing he became bored and began to practice parallel climbs between the walls. He mixed it up by running around the corners at three, six and nine foot heights. Back flips off the wall were a lot of fun too. After a dozen more tubes of paste he felt completely healed up and began pushing the floor exercises: 2,000 pushups; 130 handstand pushups; 23,000 sit ups; 1,800 squat thrusts; 700 cartwheels—boy those are fun—and 32,000 jumping jacks.

Dude, don’t you think it’s odd that you can’t count to ten unless it’s arrows, bullets, miles, kills or repetitions?

How do you feel about that?

I can’t hate Mamma Wolf, but I can’t forget Ma Bracken and Mom. Marge Bracken raised me. She washed my clothes and read me bedtime stories.

This is confusing.

Listen, the outer door—a lot of them!