But I had seen enough, apparently through Will’s eyes, to trigger a most regrettable response on my part. I saw the poster of Buddha hanging above Will’s bed; and following his gaze, a kitchen sink stacked with dirty dishes; a plastic geranium crudded with grease plopped in a coffee cup. That was all, but it was enough. I knew that Will started retching, even though when I cried out, I stood in my own living room.

The scene disappeared, but Will’s mood, his memory of the insane-god sequence, or his unaccustomed revulsion at the poster of the Buddha, added up to an emotional turmoil that struck me with full force. I told myself time and time again that Will was simply a character in a book, yet I knew that my own response was far stronger than the kind of identification given to fictional heroes or antiheroes. Memories that I’d purposely suppressed for years rushed almost revengefully into my mind, and with them came all of the attitudes about life that I’d had at the time the events occurred—the time of my own undergraduate studies.

Certainly I didn’t live as Will does, or does in this damnable book, but I wished then that I had. How romantic communal living seemed, until at least, I imagined the intimacy from which there would be no escape. But I recalled with dismay my own brief but intense intellectual journey into Buddhism and various Eastern religions, an episode that until today I had almost completely forgotten. Worse, my own attitudes toward life at that time now returned to assail me, until I realized that I had never forsaken them but only hidden them from conscious awareness.

I barely consider life worth living. How long have I really felt this way?

I would not give my seed back to the earth because I did not agree with the conditions of life.

More, I realize now that I see the universe and everything in it as the accidental chemical creation of mindless elements, with life itself springing from the semen of some insane cosmic Frankenstein—chemicals gone mad, forming a world without reason, and certainly devoid of purpose. So to that degree, Will’s insane god and mine were the same, though his was an offshoot of religion, and mine of science.