The paper bag finally started to work, and everything began to settle down. “What?”

Eagle removed a notepad and pencil from his desk. “Take this. I want you to jot down your feelings every day. This is just between you and me. I mean, it can be anything. If you were a kind of breakfast cereal, for instance, what would you be? Would you be—oatmeal? Would you be—mush? Would you be—FrankenBerries? Would you be—Count Chocula?” Eagle reclined in his chair, extracted a Lucky Strike, and lit it—with the same effeminate gestures, I noted, that Chandler used to light his Salems. Eagle had very broad shoulders for such a thin man. The sleeves of his tropical uniform were rolled up past his elbows. He brushed what few strands of hair he had back across his shiny pate. It was impossible to ignore his nose. He looked like an enormous carrion bird, and although I knew I could break him in pieces, he terrified me. He took a deep drag and exhaled through his tin nose. “Would you be—a Wheatie?”

“Don’t try to fuck with my head!” I protested, crushing the McDonald’s sack. I got up and stalked out of Eagle’s office, but that night, when I went to bed, I found the notepad and pencil on top of my footlocker.

To disprove Eagle’s theory that I was borderline psycho, I began to write what I thought were mundane and ordinary things in the diary, things which I thought proved my mental health, e.g., “A good day. Read. Played volleyball and had a good time smoking with the brothers. Picked up a lot of insight in group. Favorite breakfast: Shit on a Shingle. Two hundred push-ups. Happy, happy, happy!” I found such a release in writing that I started a diary of my own—a real one, a secret one, which I recently glanced through, noting that the quality of my penmanship was very shaky.

JANUARY 11, 1975: Sick.

JANUARY 13, 1975: Sick. Managed to read from Schopenhauer.

JANUARY 15, 1975: Borrowed some reading glasses and read Cioran. Sickness unto death. Better in the evening. Constipated. Food here is awful. There are bugs crawling on the wall and through the sawdust that is my brain. My personality is breaking down? I am having a nervous breakdown? Curiously I don’t have the “stink” of schizophrenia.

MARCH 14, 1975: Vertigo. Double vision. Sick. Can’t eat.

MARCH 18, 1975: There is a smell. A mousy smell.