“No, Leland, not you. You, and in fact quite a lot of your generation, have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary. It’s become almost impossible for you to ‘go mad’ in the classical sense. At one time people conveniently ‘went mad’ and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now”—And I think he even went so far as to yawn—“you are too hip to yourself on a psychological level. You all are too intimate with too many of the symptoms of insanity to be caught completely off your guard. Another thing: all of you have a talent for releasing frustration through clever fantasy. And you, you are the worst of the lot on that score. So ...you may be neurotic as hell for the rest of your life, and miserable, maybe even do a short hitch at Bellevue and certainly good for another five years as a paying patient—but I’m afraid never completely out.” He leaned back in his elegant Loungeo-Chair. “Sorry to disappoint you but the best I can offer is plain old schizophrenia with delusional tendencies.” Recalling this, and the wise doctor’s words, I relaxed my grip on the armrests and pulled the lever to recline the seat. Hell, I sighed, exiled even from the sanctuary of insanity. What a drag. Madness might have been a good way to explain terror and excuse anarchy, I mooned, a good whipping boy to blame in the event of mental discomfort, an interesting avocation to while away the long afternoon of life. What a crashing drag . . . But then...on the other hand, I decided, as the bus thundered slowly through town, you never can tell: it might have constituted as bad a drag as sanity. You would probably have to work too hard at it. And at times, almost certainly, a little sneak of memory would slip past your whipping boy and you would be whacked just as hard as ever by that joker’s bladder of reality, of pain and heartache and hassle and death. You might hide in some Freudian jungle most of your miserable life, baying at the moon and shouting curses at God, but at the end, right down there at the damned end when it counts ...you would sure as anything clear up just enough to realize the moon you have spent so many years baying at is nothing but the light globe up there on the ceiling, and God is just something placed in your bureau drawer by the Gideon Society. Yes, I sighed again, in the long run insanity would be the same old cold-hearted drag of too solid flesh, too many slings and arrows, and too much outrageous fortune. I reclined my seat another notch and closed my eyes, trying to resign myself that there was nothing I could do about this runaway anarchy I had hold of but wait for the pharmaceutical pilot to come on and take over the controls and let me sleep. But the pills seemed uncommonly slow in coming on. And in this ten- or fifteen-minute wait—the billowing; the ringing; the bus, empty but for its solitary passenger in the back, huffing and whooshing through the town—before the barbiturates took effect ...I was forced at last to consider those questions I had been skirting so skillfully. Like: “What in the shit you hope to accomplish running back home?” I knew that all that obscure Oedipal pap I had fed Peters about measuring up or pulling down might be approaching some kind of truth...but even if I were able to bring off one of these coups, what did I hope to accomplish? And like: “Why should one want to wake up dead anyway?” If the glorious birth-to-death hassle is the only hassle we are ever to have...if our grand and exhilarating Fight of Life is such a tragically short little scrap anyway, compared to the eons of rounds before and after—then why should one want to relinquish even a few precious seconds of it? And—thirdly—like: “If it’s such a goddamned hassle—why fight it?” The three questions lined up in front of me, just like that: three insistent bullies, hands on their hips and sneers on their faces, challenging me to meet them face to face, once and for all. The first one I made a little headway with, owing to its more pressing nature and the help I had during the trip. The second didn’t receive satisfaction until weeks later when circumstances following that trip happened to occasion another challenge. And the third still waits right now. While I take another trip. Back into the memory of what happened. And the third one is the toughest bully of them all. But that first question I set to work on straightaway. What do I hope to accomplish going home? Well, myself, for one thing . . . my little old self!” “Man,” Peters says over the phone, “you don’t do that by running off someplace. That’s like running from the beach to go swimming.” “There are beaches East and beaches West,” I let him know. “Crap,” he says. Looking back on that trip (and forward on this one), I can calculate and know it took four days (the thing about being removed, thanks to modern technique, is, while it may afford objectivity and perspective—with all events tunneling back from this point like images in opposing mirrors, yet each image changed—it presents a tricky problem of tense) ...but looking back I remember the depot, the gas, the bus trip, the blast, the disjointed narrative to Peters on the phone—all these scenes as one scene, composed of dozens of simultaneously occurring events . . . “Something’s wrong,” Peters says. “No, wait ...something’s happened, dammit Lee; what? You’re in New York to identify what? But man, that’s more than a year ago.” I could now (possibly) go back and restretch those shrunken hours, flake the images separate, arrange them in accurate chronological order, (possibly; with will-power, patience, and the proper chemicals) but being accurate is not necessarily being honest. “Lee!” This time it’s Mother. “Where are you going? Are you ever going anywhere?” Nor is chronological............