pen from disappearing, I scrawled a message across the telegram in large letters:
11:00 NAUSEA
11:50 ILLUSIONS AND DELUSIONS
But while I was writing I lost all control over my surroundings and at any moment I expected the room to collapse. Then the unexpected happened: I noticed something was going on in my immediate vicinity. I realized that the immediate vicinity was my own body. It was stretching; my hands and feet were moving farther away from me. Afraid that I might bang my head against the ceiling, I made a dive for the bed. I lay on my back but had trouble breathing; my chest swelled like the dome of Saint Peter’s; my hands became big enough to scoop up several pieces of furniture, if not the whole room. A nightmare, I told myself. Just ignore it! By then I had stretched so far my extremities were dissolving into darkness. They were so distant from me that I’d lost all sensation in them. Only my interior was left. A vast and labyrinthine region, a gulf lying between my mind and the world, which in fact had ceased to exist. I leaned out breathlessly over my own abyss. Where I once had had a pair of lungs, intestines, and veins, I now saw only thoughts—gigantic thoughts; and in those thoughts, my life, my tangled and splintered life, as it glowed, turned to charcoal and finally into ashes. I watched it disintegrate into a fiery dust, a black Sahara. The black Sahara was my life. The room in which I was lying like a fish on the ocean floor had shrunk to the size of a grain of sand; it, too, was a part of me. The more I kept expanding beyond the limits of my body, the more terrified I became. Little by little I was being consumed by an awesome power, by the power of my expanding mass, which was devouring everything in a greedy surge. I groaned in despair as I found myself sucked into the depths; I tried raising myself up by supporting my elbows on the mattress, now located somewhere in the middle of the earth. I was afraid that with one jerk of my hand I might cave in the walls. It can’t be, I kept telling myself, but I could feel it in every nerve and fiber of my body. In a senseless attempt to escape, I crawled out of bed, got down on my knees, and groped along the wall for the light switch. The room was inundated by a razor-sharp whiteness. I saw the table oozing with an iridescent film; the telephone bleached bone-white; and in the mirror my own face glistening with sweat. I recognized the face, but nothing else had changed. I tried to understand what was happening to me, to get at the force that was bursting to get out. Was I that force? I was and I wasn’t. My swollen hand was still mine. But what if it turned into a mountain of flesh and tried to crush me with its seething, bubbling mass? Could I then still claim it as my own and not the force expanding it? Whenever I tried to resist the metamorphosis, I was too late; by then the change had already taken place. With a mere glance I could remove the ceiling; under my gaze everything buckled, caved in, collapsed—melted like a house of wax on fire. You’re hallucinating! I kept telling myself, and the words would bounce back like an echo from a well. I shoved myself away from the wall, spread out my feet, watched as they kept sinking into the mushy parquet flooring, turned my head like the dome of some lofty cathedral, and spotted my watch lying on the night stand. The dial was the bottom of a luminous crater; the second hand was ticking off the seconds in eerie slow motion, leaving behind it a trail more white than the dial’s enamel finish, while the dial expanded to become a battlefield traversed by military columns. The chalky ground between the marching ranks was ripped apart by explosions, the smoke assumed the shape of faces—malleable masks of mute agony. Swarms of antlike soldiers congealed into a vitreous mass; their blood ran out to form round pools of red mud, but they marched on, dust-covered and bloodied, to the steady accompaniment of a drum roll. The battle gradually diminished in scale as I put down the watch, but never ceased. Suddenly the room became tilted, began rotating in slow motion, and hurled me toward the ceiling. Something broke my fall. I dropped down on my hands and knees and lay by the bed as the room gradually came to a stop and everything settled back into place. Stretched out with my head on the floor like a dog, I glanced up at the watch leaning against the lamp on the night stand; it was a quarter to one.
All was quiet again; the second hand crept along like an ant. I sat up on the floor and was braced by its coolness. In the austere light the room assumed the appearance of a solid crystal filled with a faint ringing and a blinding refulgence. In this atmosphere of extreme clarity the furniture, the folds in the window curtain, the shadows cast by the table stood out with unspeakable perfection. I paid little attention to the beauty of my surroundings; I was like an off-duty fireman who, continually on the lookout for smoke in a theater auditorium, is oblivious of the beauty on stage. I stood up, feeling woozy, and, overcoming the estrangement in my fingers, scribbled a few more notes on the telegram:
12:50 RELIEF
PLIMASINE IN THE MORNING
ORLY—BARBERSHOP
More I didn’t know. While I was bent over the table I felt another change coming on. The reflection on the table top began fluttering like dragonfly wings; then the whole table rose up and flapped its gray-ribbed bat wings in my face till it completely shrouded the milky glow of the night light. The edge of the table turned limp as soon as I grabbed it with my hands. I could neither escape this rush of transformations nor catch up with it—they were becoming more accelerated now, more monstrous, more majestic, more mocking—they passed through me like a breeze—I closed my eyelids—I didn’t need eyes to see them. I recall making a vague but determined effort to expel the foreign element, to puke it out; it was no use. I tried to defend myself as best I could; I was becoming less a spectator and more a part of these teeming visions—their quivering, shuddering flaw.
Some time after one o’clock I managed to surface again. It came in waves now, like the process of peristalsis; at each stage it promised to be over, only to become more intense during the sequel. The visions began to let up between two and three, which proved to be even worse than before because now everything assumed its normal appearance again, only this time on a different level of consciousness. How to describe it? The furniture and walls became petrified in the middle of some horrible transition; time came to a halt, leaving only the surrounding world, which suddenly stopped advancing toward me like an avalanche and became frozen in a prolonged flash of magnesium. The whole room was like a gasp between two successive screams; its intended target was manifested with undisguised malice in the intricacies of the wallpaper design, in the picture of the Loire castle hanging above the bed, and in the castle’s green lawns. This greenery was my sentence; I stared up at it from a kneeling position and realized that I had to lose. Then I began attacking the room—yes, the room; I ripped the cords off the curtains and blinds, yanked the drapes down from their hooks, pulled off the bedcovers, and threw the whole lethal pile into the bathtub. Then I shut the bathroom door and broke the key while trying to jam it into the door’s outerlock. Out of breath, I leaned against the doorframe and surveyed the battlefield. I realized it was all a waste of time: it was impossible to remove the windows and walls. I dumped the contents of my bags out onto the floor and dug my way through to the flat metal rings connected by a short rod; Randy had given them to me back in Naples so I could handcuff the murderer when the time came. Now I had him. A bunch of tiny dark objects spilled out from between my shirts—almonds that had fallen out of the package—but I didn’t have time to record them, I was afraid I wouldn’t make it; so I threw a handful on top of the telegram, pulled an armchair up to the radiator, made myself comfortable in it, and leaned my back against the upholstery; then I pressed my feet down on the floor, handcuffed myself to the radiator pipe, and in a state of unbelievable tension waited for it to happen, as in the moments before a takeoff. I was propelled neither upward nor downward, however, but inward, into a hot and reddish fog, surrounded by whirling walls, shackled and chained. Straining like a dog on a leash, I could reach only as far as one of the bedposts. I pulled the bed toward me, buried my face in the mattress as if trying to smother a fire, chewed my way through to the foam rubber; but it was too porous to suffocate me, so I grabbed my windpipe with my free hand and squeezed it with all my might. Despair: I still couldn’t kill myself. Just before losing consciousness, I remember hearing explosions in my head: I must have banged it against the pipes. I also recall experiencing one final, faint glimmer of hope that this time I would bring it off. Then nothing; I died, and I didn’t even find anything strange about the fact that I was conscious of dying. Later I had the sensation of swimming through black waterfalls of unknown grottoes, where the water’s roar was so loud it was as if only my sense of hearing had survived. I could hear bells chiming. The black color turned pink. I opened my eyes and beheld a large, strange, pale, and incredibly calm face bent over me. The face belonged to Dr. Barth. I recognized him at once and was about to tell him something to that effect when I suddenly fainted in a most jejune manner.
They found me around four in the morning, handcuffed to the radiator, after some Italians next door had alerted the hotel staff. Since it gave the appearance of being an attack of frenzy, I was given a tranquilizing shot before being rushed to the hospital. After learning of the flight cancellation the following day, Barth had telephoned
