I understood, watching it, just how much intelligence and will it must have taken.

To be genuinely paralyzed much of the time, and then, in the brief windows when some movement returned to him, to deliberately hide even that, to keep playing dead so that his enemies would not know he was clawing his way back, required a discipline I could barely imagine.

Every time Christopher entered that room, Raymond had to suppress the very recovery he was fighting so hard for, had to let his hard-won progress vanish behind a slack face and empty eyes.

It must have been agony, to work all night toward moving a hand and then have to pretend, all day, that the hand was dead.