“No. There wasn’t any butterfly.”

Why you liar, I thought.

Lightly, I touched my left eyelid. I don’t know why; maybe it itched a bit. Suddenly there was a flash of golden lightning through the radiant pink and silent emptiness of Death Valley. A flash of lightning under a cloudless sky. I waited for the sound of thunder. Waited and waited, and after a while, forgot about it. I was having other problems.

I kept shifting my position on the cool sand, trying to get comfortable. But it’s hard to get comfortable when you’re sitting on a glass ass and your joints clank at every move with a metallic snapping noise like the bending of a beer can.

The solemn slowness of the time. I never knew a sundown so lingering. The fire burned steadily but did not consume the wood. I never saw such clear, such leisurely, such passionate flames.

The ground is breathing.

Let’s pretend we don’t notice that. Let’s read this here newspaper lying on the sand. I could read all right, though the print tended to swim before my eyes and the words to leak out and run down the margins of the page. After a minute—thirty minutes?—I gave it up. Nothing could have seemed more trivial, less interesting, than the “news.”

The ground is breathing.

The ground, the sandy desert earth between my legs, was palpitating slowly up and down, up and down, like the lungs of a sleeping animal.

Well, all right. I can accept that. And the writhing dance of the mesquite trees, I’ll accept that too, though I don’t like it, though plainly there is not the faintest breath of a breeze moving through the hot evening air.

The mountains across the valley, glowing in the sunset light, looked glorious, vividly palpable and tangible—as indeed they are—but don’t always appear. Called the Funeral Range, as a matter of fact. The Fun-for-All Mountains. They, too, were breathing. And they no longer looked like mountains; they looked like raw lungs, a mile-high mass of pink lungs, alive and well, breathing at me for chrissake.

My sense of time and duration fell apart. There was no duration. I was trapped in limbo between two worlds—a place too queasy and queer to be the waking world, too bright and definite and three-dimensional to be the world of dreams. I didn’t know where I was, except that I didn’t much like it. Jelled in this static medium, where nothing happened but the clatter of my tin joints when I essayed to move, I felt paralyzed. An infantile paralysis.

I played old songs on my harmonica. “Red River Valley.” “Down in the Valley.” “Lonesome Valley.” The secondary theme from the third movement of Beethoven’s Fourteenth String Quartet. Oh, I’ve never heard such sweet and poignant tunes, such vibrant tones. I wanted to weep for the tragic beauty, the lovely sorrow of our lonely, floating, lonesome world. And I did.

Looking down at my legs I was amused to see how absurdly long, misshapen and remote they appeared. The legs of a deformed giant, seen from the shelter of a two-holed cave, far away.