I came to in hospital and didn’t even have to begin remembering. I came to with the memory. I lay, watched by a nun who told her beads just the way the old lady had spun. I don’t know if it’s normal to have a nun watch you. It may be that since I’d been struck down in the cathedral they thought they had a special responsibility for me or something. I don’t know and of course it doesn’t matter. I don’t think the hospital was very good.

I lay for—oh, for a long, long time. I saw so many things with great clarity as if the light of the previous day, if it was the previous day, had filled me with its dreadful luminescence. I could not think anything or see anything but the truth. I saw that I had been planned from the beginning. I had my place in things. It didn’t matter what I had done or would do. I had been created by that ghastly intolerance in its own image. You may possibly recognize what I am talking about though it would be better for you if you did not. I saw I was one of the, or perhaps the only, predestinate damned. I saw this hotly and clearly. In hell there are no eyelids.

A priest came and mumbled and I laughed which annoyed him and set the nun crossing herself as if steam-driven. The joke that I saw so clearly was this. The priest wasn’t a priest at all because all the real priests of the intolerance had been dead for thousands of years and he was like someone in a stage set. He went away, perhaps to take off his make-up. The doctor came after the priest and he was a bit better. He held both my hands and squeezed them, nodding. I understood that he wanted me to squeeze back, which I did. He went all over me and he said a word, frowning. When he saw I couldn’t understand he used another.

“Colpo. Colpo?”

Mea maxima culpa. Ha et cetera. I thought I knew what he meant and tried to speak, “Si, massima colpa,” but I couldn’t get it out, there was an ox on my tongue. He did a whole lot of smiling and nodding and patting, then went away. When he came back in the evening he had some new words.

“Estrook. Piccolo. Leedle estrook.”

That made me laugh again, thinking of the universal flail, but the doctor only went on nodding and smiling and testing my reflexes, the result of which tests, he persuaded me, added up to a tiny stroke though I could have told him drunks like me don’t have strokes, they get the horrors of one sort or another and now and then come across a real beauty, first prize, predestined and damned, the divine justice without mercy. In vino veritas, my other tag.

The memory of it all still makes me hot. At half-past three in the morning it has made me a contemplative, stone-cold sober. I mean contemplative in the technical sense, contemplating a universal reality. They say some strokes—well, there’s no “they say” about it, I know from experience that some leedle estrooks make you speak one word when you mean another. They say too that there’s no rime or reason about the relationship between the two words, no connection except the nature of the physical brain but I know better. Wilfred Barclay, the great consultant. There is every connection as for example saying “dead” when you mean “dad” and “mare” when you mean “mum”. It—apart from the steel hard factuality of the intolerance—is what makes me know it wasn’t a leedle estrook at all, or if it was, the event was no more than coincidental.