The thief refers to Anders as a "smart boy" and asks him some highly inappropriate questions. The robber was right, Anders was brilliant. He had a skill with words, a critical skill. That was his life, and that's what put a bullet in his brain. The bullet's path through Anders' brain is very particular. It begins and ends with the cerebral cortex. And the memories that do not “pass before his eyes” are, once again, peculiar. Why doesn't he remember his wife or his daughter? Why doesn't he remember his first lover, Sherry? Or the traumatic scene quote of his mother telling his father that she “should have stabbed him in his sleep”? These memories are heartfelt, embarrassing, even scary. “He didn't remember when everything started to remind him of something else” (205). Anders' last memory took him back to a time when he wasn't such a critic. To a time when he didn't comment on the words people said around him, but instead embraced their words. The narrator takes us back to a warm day on a baseball field for a pick-up game with some of Anders' friends. As they argue about who plays which position, a new boy, Coyle's cousin from Mississippi, tells them, "Shortstop.. Shorts in the best position they have" (205). Anders wanted to hear it again. Not to mock or make a sarcastic comment, but to embrace those words. Those words were for him, they were unexpected, new and...