I was astonished at Oversoul Seven’s announcement of a little book for Tweety. “For God’s sake,” I thought, “the book is writing a book.” Without explaining its origin, though, I intend to send it to Sarah for her child (she delivered a son about the same time Tweety was born) and to read it as well to any possible children of my own. The simplicity of the material is most deceptive, and had I read such prose as a boy, perhaps Will would have found more joy in life, and we would not have needed to stand on the precipice of psychological duplicity, contemplating a double suicide. For it now comes to me clearly that any suicide involves the death of thousands, those born or unborn; the slaying of probable selves who might have sprung otherwise from the points of our lives. And even if we continued to exist, we would have altered our own relationship with ourselves, perhaps … who knows? … becoming probable versions actualized in other worlds than those we know.

Obviously, I had become a stranger to myself before this manuscript began. I isolated my younger questioning self; buried the questions, for that matter; denied the dissatisfaction that was meant to lead to creative solutions. If I had not saved Will, in my past, would I have committed suicide in my present? Or wouldn’t that present have existed to begin with, since, as Will, I would have died years ago? Or because my present did exist, was it a foregone conclusion that Will wouldn’t commit suicide? I don’t believe so. I think that I had gone as far as I could in time without Will, though, and that he was so despondent not only because of the problems that existed in the past, but also because I’d kept him apart in a psychological limbo that lacked all give-and-take or chance for fulfillment. So for him, time had stopped, then. And when I went back to save him, I started time up again, which meant that he had to jump or not jump.

As I read Seven’s Little Book, I could feel Will reading it too, and I felt as if a new memory for both of us were being formed; a memory of having read the same material somewhere as a child; and in the strangest fashion as I read of Seven’s nightly book sessions with Tweety, I saw my own childhood bedroom transposed in my mind over Tweety’s. And Oversoul Seven was reading to me as well. Embarrassing confession!—but as I typed the material of the little book, a part of my mind went open and transparent, childlike; and was refreshed. The Little Book is being included in full, rather as an appendix to this manuscript, as Cyprus suggested to Seven in the last chapter.