“Also, frankly, it bored me. I mean the astral projection itself, if one can even think of boredom in connection with an enterprise filled with such dread and such terror, immaculate as the edge of a knife. I am afraid I am afraid of the dark.
“The trip from Michigan to Vermont is almost a thousand miles and is accomplished in time. No dimension is finessed, and even if my body is incorporeal, the Great Lakes are wet and deep, the cold night air piled with isobar, pressure, front, moisture and electrical charge. There are birds that could snap up my soul in one peck. There is gravity and the hard, wide black landscape beneath it like a net. There are rough trees and treacherous limbs and sharp-edged leaves like a dangerous vegetable cutlery. There are small animals in the grasses with their honed, predatory temperaments. There are vicious puddles of oil on the highways, noxious, cloying as quicksand. There are tile and slate roofs like strips of sulfur below my astral friction. There is the air mail. There is everywhere beneath me and all along the route of my medium impediment like land-mined space or badly laid track. There are the poisoned, awful molecules of the supernatural, and the blinded atoms of the dark.
“And once, streaming through space, I felt the presence of some ignus fatuus and could just make it out, a phosphorescent, not point, grease of light that maneuvered with me, kept pace with me, swerving to the left when I did, soaring when I soared, swooping when I swooped. I thought it might be a bird but no bird could fly at such speeds. I tried to evade it, losing my course but not my companion. I did barrel rolls, loop-the-loops, plunges, spins, stalls, slips and slides, all the dives and glides of Chagall acrobacy, but it kept up with me, I couldn’t shake it. Terrified, I climbed — I could have made it over the Rockies then — higher than I had ever climbed and, at the apogee of my endurance, suddenly leveled off, thinking to outrun it. I could still hear it, its pierce through space, but behind me now and not so loud as before.
“At the last it called out. ‘Please. Please,’ it called, ‘I’m lost. Please. Let me come with you! Please,’ it cried. ‘Something’s wrong. I can’t get back. Won’t you help me? Please,’ it wailed, ‘please!’
“It was another astral projectionist. If it hadn’t been exhausted, if it hadn’t been on its return trip, it would have caught me. It would have followed me back. It would have burrowed into the vacant body on my bed like a worm hiding in fruit.
“So of course it was love which took me there, not curiosity. If I needed to know what my uncle was feeling it was so I could console him. But he would not dream, he was dreamless. I would have to make the trip in daylight.
“Forget that I would have to face in light the thousand terrors I had merely glossed in dark, that each stone would now not only be palpable but visible, and all rough terrain writ large, the confused blur of geography, the rooftops, kids, dogs and all sharp spikes of the world present to me as temperature. Or maybe it was that height, height itself (and distance too) would become a landmark, a physical, ponderable corporeity solid as the calculable per second per second acceleration of falling bodies. Forget all my misgivings. There was still left the physics of the thing, the fixed givens of technique like the constitutional stipulations governing a presidency. The spirit may separate itself from the material plane only when the physical body is sleeping. There is that same guard-prisoner relationship one runs across in melodrama — jealousy, suspicion and the followed heart.
“I am not one of those fortunates who can nod off anywhere. I haven’t the gift of napping. Sleep is a ceremony with me. There must be weariness, yes, but also beds, night, pajamas and turned-down blankets. The clocks must be wound, the house locked and the cat put out. There must be bedtime. Even when I’m ill, I’ve noticed, I find it hard to doze in the daytime. Healthy, the task is almost impossible.
“But I made the effort. I undressed as I would at night, carefully folding my shirt, still fresh — I’d put it on that morning — and hanging my suit neatly in the closet. I lined up my shoes, the toes just sticking out from beneath the bed but hiding the part where the laces begin. I put my bathrobe on over my pajamas and brought my socks, handkerchief and underwear to the laundry hamper. I emptied my bladder and brushed my teeth. I got into bed. I sighed and yawned, attempting to trick myself with the noises of ease. I was quite wakeful of course. I knew I would be. I decided to read for a bit, selecting for my reading matter not only the dullest book I could find but one I had already read. I turned on the reading lamp beside the bed, though there was light enough to read even with the shades drawn and the curtains pulled tight across the window. Wakeful as ever, it seemed to me that I was becoming hungry. I nibbled fruit, drank warm milk, grazed cold chicken. At three that afternoon I dressed, went to my office and put in three hours’ work before starting home. I repeated my efforts the next day and the next after that, and though I slept soundly at night, my insomnia disappearing at my normal hour for retiring, I was unable to sleep at all during the day.
“On the fourth day it occurred to me to try to lull myself with the habits of my childhood. I had no toys now of course, but I brought the cat into the room and encouraged it to stay beside me on the bed, a privilege it is at all other times refused. The cat was terrified and I let it go. I said my prayers. I prayed for sleep. I counted sheep. What didn’t I do? I even obtained a rather powerful sleeping draught from a pharmacist friend and took it late one morning with a cup of warm honey. The potion worked and I was soon asleep, but I had not realized that inside my drugged physical body my astral one would be narcotized too. We are a curious mix of curious psychology, Doctor, a patchwork of whim and fixed idea. I don’t know if you will understand this, or if the boy you show this letter to will, but I was more bitter about the seven wasted hours of drug-induced sleep than I was about all thirty of the wakeful, working, tossing and turning ones I had put in trying to lose consciousness.
“The solution to the problem when it came in the middle of the second week — the seventh week after I had first learned of my uncle’s difficulties — was absurdly simple. Or perhaps not simple, merely correct, merely honorable. It was never just family feeling that had drawn me on those night flights to Vermont. It was never, though it should have been, that avalanche loss of prized cousins, that cumulative, rolled-snow cataract of exacerbate, bumped-up death. It wasn’t even my sense of my uncle’s awful losses, the terrible casualties he was taking that year. It was my uncle himself, his being, legend, whatever it was in the man that had captured first the imaginations of Susan and Oliver, Redford and Ben, and then their souls, whatever it was that had made them do actual physical violence to each other, even delayed murder, just for the right not to live with him since they already had that right but to stay in the same room with him while he worked, even, for appearances, decorum, taking on that work themselves, the watchmaker, the woodsman, the young man with tenure in love, the young woman who lifted anvils not just to see if a girl who weighed perhaps one hundred thirty pounds could raise and hold off the ground an object two and a half times her own weight but just to be ready to do so if the time ever came when she might be required to. It was Joe, it was my uncle, whatever he had been — was, is — that had caused his children to repudiate whatever potential they may have had for individual distinction — none even wished to attend the state university at Burlington — and collectively subsume all future, even after the pattern was established and they saw it was certain to be a doomed one, under his. Not apprenticed to the blacksmith, apostled.