Back Communion: A True Story
Chapters (14)
  1. Cover
  2. Communion: A True Story
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. PRELUDE
  5. ONE
  6. TWO
  7. THREE
  8. FOUR
  9. FIVE
  10. SIX
  11. EPILOGUE
  12. APPENDIX I
  13. APPENDIX II
  14. About the author

"Well, I was dreaming that I was on a boat with Ezra [a friend of his] and someone was attacking and we were about to dive off and I was in the middle of the air when I switched to this dream where I was in the hospital in the future where they were trying to cure some kind of disease. I'm not sure what it was. And I was taken out of my bed and onto a cot and out on the porch."

"Who took you out of your bed and onto the cot?"

"Some kind of doctor."

"What did he look like?"

"Oh, he was a very short and fat man with glasses that came out pointed upward like that.

[Gestures as if eyes have a pronounced slant.] And he always has a big fake smile on him.

[Smiles from ear to ear with his mouth closed.] He kind of kept it there except when he was asleep."

"How did you know he was asleep?"

"Well, he had — well, that's because he worked in the night and slept in the day "

"What did his eyes look like?"

"He was wearing regular glasses. His eyes were a kind of greenish-blue color. Dark. The only two faces he had was this. [Again demonstrates smile.] And then a small one when he was sleeping. [Makes an O.]"

"Mouth open?"

"Yeah."

"When his mouth was opened, it was round?"

"Yeah. Puckered. Big puckered."

"Did you see him when he wasn't smiling?"

"Yeah, when he was doing the operation on me." "What kind of operation?"

"Well, it was kind of like a test."

"What did he do?"

"It was a disease on my arm."

"He did something to your arm?"

"No, wait. He kept your nose cold like when you eat a lot of ice cream."

"Did it hurt?"

"No, not really."

"You say you were examined on the porch. What do you mean by that?"

"Well, they took me onto the porch. There was no way to get me into an operation room because of all the moving equipment. And then by the porch light I mean kind of like the outside lights at the country house. You know at the country house there's that porch light?"

"Yeah."

"That's the light that was on. Then they took special lights and examined my nose and took X rays and stuff." (This last statement could easily be a buried memory of a babyhood injury to his nose. which involved an X ray to determine whether it was broken. But this memory seems to be mixed in with other material of a totally different nature.)

"What kind of lights?"

"Some were blue lights and they would look through the front of it and the blue light would make them see through me without an X ray."