I see the cross, it’s silent, it stays a long time, my heart goes out to it, my whole body fades away to it, I hold out my arms to be taken away to it, by God I am being taken away my body starts dying and swooning out to the Cross standing in a luminous area of the darkness, I start to scream because I know I’m dying but I dont want to scare Billie or anybody with my death scream so I swallow the scream and just let myself go into death and the Cross: as soon as that happens I slowly sink back to life—Therefore the devils are back, commissioners are sending out orders in my ear to think anew, babbling secrets are hissed, suddenly I see the Cross again, this time smaller and far away but just as clear and I say through all the noise of the voices “I’m with you, Jesus, for always, thank you”—I lie there in cold sweat wondering what’s come over me for years my Buddhist studies and pipesmoking assured meditations on emptiness and all of a sudden the Cross is manifested to me—My eyes fill with tears—“We’ll all be saved—I wont even tell Dave Wain about it, I wont go wake him up down there and scare him, he’ll know soon enough—now I can sleep.”
I turn over but it’s only begun—It’s only one o’clock in the morning and the night wears on to the wheeling moon worse and worse till dawn by which time I’ve seen the Cross again and again but there’s a battle somewhere and the devils keep coming back—I know if I could only sleep for an hour the whole complex of noisy brains would settle down, some control would come back somewhere inside there, some
