


His daughter, Iva, an emergency-room physician, persuaded him to go to the hospital, but the MRI scans were inconclusive. Delany, who is eighty-one, began to suspect that he’d suffered a mini-stroke. When he came to, everything looked different, though he couldn’t say exactly how.

Delany experienced a mysterious episode that he calls “the big drop.” His vision faded for about three minutes, and he felt his body plunge, as if the floor had fallen away. In September, 2021, while working at his desk in Philadelphia, Samuel R.
