Now I have added to this recollection a vivid memory of the being pushing a bladder down my throat. This is not the only recollection I have of being made to eat things by the visitors. In 1968 I ended up with four to six weeks of "missing time" after a desperate and inexplicable chase across Europe. This is associated with a perfectly terrible memory of eating what I have always thought was a rotten pomegranate, which was so bitter that it almost split my head apart. A nurse put drops on my tongue to help me keep it down. But what nurse? Where? I was never in a hospital.

Something might have been stuffed in my mouth on the night of December 26. I certainly remember them trying to -get it opened. And afterward I brushed my teeth.

This is about the most disturbing thing that I have yet come across in this whole, vast experience. It is not the eating that disturbs me, because I seem to have lived, but rather the structural coherence of the thing. First I am fed and it comes back up. Then I am fed again and this time drops are used to prevent the material from returning. Years later, the feeding is such a minor part of the experience that the memory of it is covered by other things.

In short, my hallucinatory friends seem to have learned something about how to get me to digest whatever it is they are trying to feed me.

I have not thought of those hours of sickness on that train for a long, long time. I remember, though, how my father labored to help me, and after he grew tired the sleeping-car porter came in and held me over the toilet. A doctor appeared in his bathrobe and tried to get me to drink some water. The illness had begun suddenly in the middle of the night and continued until morning. I was sleeping like the dead when the train finally pulled into the old MoPac station in San Antonio. My father carried me to a cab, and we went home.

By the time I got there I was feeling much better and was eager to see my friends. We had, after all. been away for nearly two weeks in the middle of the summer, and during the last summers of childhood I sensed the increasing rarity of the days. I was fill of excitement as we drove down Elizabeth Road. No sooner had I gone through the motions of helping with the luggage than I was off, my sickness forgotten.