Et Ceteriad

'One, two, three, down!' And down went the baton of the police officer onto the sleeping figure of Edward Irving, startling him awake and, although yet unbeknownst to him, setting in process the destruction of his identity. Another officer, younger although of senior rank, stood in the doorway, smiling wryly at his partner's antics. Edward Irving struggled to catch his breath between blows, barely taking in the fact that two State officers had just broken into his apartment, entered his newspaper-strewn bedroom. Much less so did it occur to him that after delivering to him the standard preliminary beating, the officers would then proceed to take him to a station, place him in a brightly-lit cell, administer further beatings, put him through a perfunctory interrogation (in which further beatings might or might not be involved), before returning him to his luminous cell: repeat from step one. Edward Irving could only guess that this would happen, or something to that extent, because he did not have the ability to see beyond the curtain hiding the forward direction of a linear narrative.