“Shit.” Even now he couldn’t forget himself, he thought, or stop watching himself. He almost felt as if he were two selves, neither very likable, one watching the other, one thinking, “How tragic, yet how handsome and young I look,” and the other thinking, “How dumb and cosmically stupid to have such feelings at a time like this.” But both of him looked down again.

This is Jeffery, interrupting dictation of the book. Never have I used so much raw willpower, but as I completed that last sentence, “But both of him looked down again,” I knew I had to stop writing. To go on could bring disaster. I knew that even as my fingers hovered over the typewriter keys, quite ready for the next sentence. Reason would have to come later; I knew that, too, as I reacted to a sharp, sudden, undeniable sense of personal danger. The next line, or the next, could destroy me.

Sweat ran down my armpits. I took one hand and with it pulled the other off the typewriter, feeling as if at any moment my hands would pounce upon the keys with their own will and type out—what? My own death sentence? The pun didn’t escape me even as I lit up a cigarette and moved as far away from the accursed typewriter as possible.

I’d been nervous, beginning this section on Will. For one thing, it’s the first on the book that I’ve received in two weeks to the day, for after the chapter on Seven’s return to the ground of his being, there was nothing. Did that return, in our time, take two weeks? Then beginning this chapter, I found that there was a time lapse in the book also, for Tweety was no longer an infant. She was also becoming more of an individual, so did my two-week period somehow correlate with Seven’s journey and Tweety’s growing self-consciousness? And what about Will? As soon as he appeared in this chapter, I felt alarm signals, until, finally, with that last sentence, I could stand it no longer. I refused to write another line.

Will was only a book character and a poorly developed one at that. I said this over and over as I stood, growing more and more upset, staring out the window at the balcony, and oh, God, at the geranium pot on the railing, the same one that fell over during that first dream encounter related in my early notes. Feeling, yes, possessed, I walked slowly out to the balcony (where my first out-of-body experience had occurred). Almost hypnotized, I looked out at the new staggered cement apartment buildings, jutting out indeed like cliffs; and downward at the garbage cans, unfinished lawn, and parking lots.

What on earth was I doing? I knew I was trembling; I felt as if I were tottering at the edge of some chasm between worlds, trying to leap from one to the other.