One evening when my feet and hands were just about bearable and I could see the skyline I was sitting on the balcony trying to get things together. I’d found myself wandering in Rome that morning because I’d been looking for Who’s Who in America meaning to get a line on Halliday. I’d discovered the Steps again at last. They were littered with dropouts, hippies, junkies, drabs, punks, nancies and lesies and students, as usual, and all of them were wearing guitars or playing them very badly or trying to sell the tin shapes they’d cut out and spread round on the stairs as necklaces or rings or earrings or noserings, there were carpets of artificial flowers and so on. It was a toil getting up but nobody minded me or tried to sell me anything the way they would have if I’d looked as if I could afford to buy. But looking at them I realized what a mess I must be myself and I went up to my balcony and put my head between my hands and tried to think. I decided I’d use my journal to get things straightened out and understand what the score was. Then of course I remembered that I hadn’t got my journal; and I had an instant picture (reel) of myself here and there in Switzerland and Italy duly writing my journal in telephone books or on walls or the windows of cars or on lavatory paper then wandering on wherever I might be going if anywhere. I also had a glimpse of myself that very morning, looking in Who’s Who in America—why had I not seen the dreadful significance? For the page that should have contained Halliday’s entry was bare, bare, bare, just blank, white paper! Oh then I started up, feet or no feet, and I was looking across at that same church with the lousy glass and my God he was standing on the top. He was, and I fought my way back into the bedroom from the balcony and sat there on the bed, burning and trembling. I started to shake. I reasoned that I had to stay awake because if I fell asleep he would simply step across from the roof and collect me. Also of course, pills and drink, either or both were out because either or both would render me helpless and unable to resist him if he should choose to step across anyway. This last consideration tightened things altogether. I don’t know how long I sat, shaking and staying awake. I know a woman came in to make the bed but I was sitting on it and it wasn’t unmade so she went away again; and another man came but from the hotel and not from the next roof so I wasn’t afraid of him and ignored him. In the war I had a boil, oh one hell of a boil as a result of my wound, and it swelled and it swelled and there was the time—half an hour it may be—when the pressure from my heart pushed the pus so hard against the skin that it was pain enough to make a man faint. I remember I couldn’t believe that the pain would increase but it did. Well the tightening went on, it drew in and in. I suppose I slept or went into some mode of being that wasn’t quite being awake or simply being mad.