My new isolation doesn’t help either. Almost everyone has left campus for spring vacation. I stayed, because I expect a letter any time from Sarah: Her baby must be due this week or next, and ex-wife or not, I still bear her good will. In any case, I was alone here the afternoon after my visit to Ram-Ram, when I suddenly found myself reliving the experience through this manuscript itself.

Even the air had a deserted cast. There were no cars in the parking lot beyond the courtyard. The absence of noise was almost annoying; no footsteps to the garbage cans; nothing to distract me, so that as I wrote the words, it seemed as if the written dialogue had its own sound and thundered distantly in my mind. That would have alarmed me in any case, but unfortunately, this was only the beginning.

The sounds grew louder, and as if they were real, they echoed through the nearly empty building. Everything in this place is metal or concrete, it seems, and sounds are always intensified. But these had to be imagined sounds! The chattering of Queen Alice and Ram-Ram’s damn chuckles, and even the shouts of the audience at the televised ballgame—all of these rose, and echoed through the entire building. Yet they couldn’t have, of course, since the sounds belonged at the mental institution I had visited the day before. So I told myself.

As the sounds grew louder, however, another more bizarre intensification took place, one I’m quite embarrassed to describe. Certainly the entire affair will cast doubts upon my own sanity if and when this manuscript is ever read.

But, just as described in the previous chapter of the book itself, the air seemed to thicken into pseudo-shapes until, as I typed, the scenes were before my eyes that I had actually witnessed the day before at the institution! That is, as the scenes were described, I saw them. The entire common room, with all of the patients, was somehow transposed here, over the contents of my normal living room, so that in a manner of speaking, the book came alive. Nor did the effect end when the description of the affair was done, or with my own exit from the scene. Instead, the insane-god nightmare, or whatever it was, also came alive for me. The feelings of desolation were quite shattering; and I was also involved in the Virgin Mary fiasco and the Buddha scene as well.

When Will was told to waken in his physical body, the dictation ended for the day. I left the typewriter with a sense of great relief, and closed my eyes. But I swear that when I closed them, I looked out of Will’s eyes for just a moment and saw the communal room that had been described earlier in the book. I cried out in true alarm, and at once everything returned to normal.