The day was broken into bright fragments of consciousness projecting out of a woolly fuzz in which I was often neither fully awake nor asleep. The barrier between consciousness and the oblivion of unconsciousness seemed to have disintegrated. At one point—I thought it was in the morning, but the time of day was not important, time itself had ceased to exist—the phone rang incessantly and I wanted desperately to answer it, but I was chained to the bed. And there was a moment when the girl next door was beating upon the window, her mouth twisted in grief. She saw me watching her and she fled. I called after her but there was no sound. At some point in the late afternoon I stood at the window. The sun was a blazing ball in the hard steel plate of sky. It seemed to have not only light and heat but sound, clashing and grinding until my head seemed sure to shatter from the vibrations.
Always in those sharp, isolated moments of crystal clarity, I saw everything with extraordinary vividness. Colors held an intensity I had never seen before—the shimmering green of a patch of grass, the brown of a tree trunk projecting from the yellow hills, the hot red of a plastic chair, the glittering white of a trailer, the shiny yellow-and-black of a police helicopter stuck against the intense blue of the sky. I saw in the most commonplace plant an unimaginable beauty, an exquisite natural architecture of life.
My perspective was faulty. Distances deceived me. Walls that should have met seemed to be in different planes. Space was an illusion. I reached for a glass on a table and missed it completely. Once I tried to sit on a chair and tumbled to the floor. Crawling, I seemed to inch forward over an interminable distance, taking hours to cover the few feet from one side of my living room to another, and this was not at all surprising or disturbing to me. At one time I was sitting on the floor of the kitchen looking up in wonder at the immense cliff of the sink high above me. And again I was walking down the narrow hall between my bedroom and the front of the trailer. The floor wobbled and waved and the hall stretched on endlessly, a bewildering corridor of doors that I kept reaching for and missing, until at last I burst out of the corridor into the bedroom, and then I was falling toward the bed, falling, floating through the cold black infinity of space.
While the hot mid-day sun beat down upon the trailer, I stood indifferently watching the still, white face of my mother, what had been my mother, lying rigid in the meaningless calm of death. I felt a total numbness, an absence of feeling, as if my whole body and brain had been shot with novocain.
But later, much, much later, I stared out at a gray city under a gray sky, relieved only by the streaks of orange and red and purple left by the sun at the horizon, and tears rolled down my face. I cried without knowing why I grieved.
I slept and dreamed of waves washing over me, of voices pounding with the fury of waves, lifting and tossing me at will, thundering and growling. And in the chaos of semi-consciousness, I tasted the delicious sweetness of red lips, felt the incredible softness of breasts crushed against my chest, touched with my fingers the silken mass of red hair—and found it inexplicably turned to gold, to the yellow of a field of grain under a hot August sun.
And in the evening, when darkness crouched like a living thing in the corners of the small bedroom, I woke suddenly to a moment of ordinary reality in which I saw the room exactly as it had always been, saw the open bottle of pills on the built-in chest within arm's reach, smelled the odor of my sweat-drenched body. Bewilderment flooded through me. I had the fleeting thought that this was wrong, that the pills had failed, that the snake pit into which I had plunged had been only an illusion. I groped toward understanding, but sleep descended upon me like a thick black fog. I tried to escape the darkness, grasping at the flickering light of reason, but it fled into the distance like the vanishing light in the center of a television screen turned off, the dot of light swiftly receding into a pinprick of brightness, winking, winking out....
The floor creaked. I woke trembling with an immediate and frightening impression that someone was in the trailer. I was not sure what had awakened me and for a moment I had no memory of the long, lost day. Then the floor creaked again.
And still I didn't understand. In a tumbling confusion of pictures I remembered the pills and the distortions they had produced. As quickly as this memory jelled, I knew that the pills had not worked. They had failed to induce the symptomatic exaggeration of my illness. My reaction had been violent, but it was no more than a normal mind's response to a heavy dosage. Moreover, the effects had worn off too fast.