Finally found a sequence that’s concise and wouldn’t ruin the reading for others to illustrate what I’ve been saying are the more scientific workings of Ham Sandoval’s mind that he applies to his view of the more mundane reality of daily living:
(Pen on boats)
A squirrel leapt onto a boulder near the edge of the river, the Rio Grande. The heavy rains had made it swollen and dangerous. The animal jumped and ran a linear path toward bushes. (Squirrels may only run forward on an imaginary two dimensional curving plane. It’s an ambulatory axiom, set into existence at the Beginning. We move forward on curves because the earth is round, although from our limited point of view they appear as straight lines.)
This one, fortunately, is one that’s more easily understood. We’ve all known people like Ham, those who think on a different level, whose mind is constantly forming relationships between data gleaned from normal conversation, observance, reading, experience. Thoughts of sausage and peppers as a possibility for supper will, if uninterrupted by something more titillating to the passionate interest in a particular field, wander into the coordinates, volume, gravitational resistance of a dirigible, all from an image of sausage.
And when it starts to make sense to the reader, as the obvious reference to curvature did to me, it brings one to a new level of understanding of the main character.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology