EASTER PASSED. I NEGLECTED TO CALL LORNA, AND I WAS relieved that Melissa was away. I wanted to be alone, to enjoy my pork roast in quiet solitary peace.

There was a feeling of being in limbo. I drifted not only to and from sleep, but through my days and nights as well. I was aware of undergoing a metamorphosis of sorts, but I knew not from what to what this change was taking me.

Slowly I began to feel that I was being brought from a new dimension of being to yet a newer, higher dimension. I was wary of it at first, but ultimately I knew I could do nothing but surrender to it.

For a few days I did not write. This was usual for me. Whenever I succeeded in driving down the first stake of a new book, I took a break. In the past, I drank. But now I did not. It was with a degree of disappointment that I did not attribute this to the baclofen, for I did not experience any of the attendant changes that baclofen was supposed to have effected in me. There was no quelling of the nerves, no banishing of anxiety, no newfound calm. Not from the baclofen anyway. Maybe my own answer had lain elsewhere, and I had already found it there: in the same broached source of other wonders.

Or maybe I was not drinking simply because this felt like no other book on which I had ever set course. I thought of the book that lay ahead as a ghost-book, as something beyond a book, though I could not explain this to myself or to anyone else. And there was no need to. Aura and resonance transcend meaning and saying. Some things can not be captured and conveyed.

In a few days’ time, when I resumed writing, first in the mornings, then in the mornings and again in the evenings, increasingly into the late hours of the night or early hours of the next day, it was with a feeling, again and again, of going to meet the ghost. And soon the ghost became to me the Holy Ghost. Not the Holy Ghost of Saint Paul, not the Holy Ghost of any other; but my own Holy Ghost. And I felt as if I were entering a church. Not a sanctified place, but a sacred place. Sacred to gods or demons or both, I did not know. Sometimes it felt that this church was within me. Sometimes it felt far from me, in the dark woods of my soul’s traveling. Always it felt that I belonged there.

There were no cravings. I took this to be good. A sign of freedom. On May Eve, Walpurgisnacht, I lit a candle, a nice beeswax taper glommed from the emporium of high-born junk food and ecologically friendly toilet paper. On the first morning of May, I opened a bottle of good Margaux and drank two glasses with a big plate of soft-scrambled eggs and blood sausage.

I wanted to be alone. But I began to wonder why I hadn’t heard from Melissa or Lorna. Had they forgotten about me? I wanted to be alone, not forgotten. I began to feel a jealous anger well up in me. I imagined the worst things, and I flung the worst curses against them. These outbursts of senseless wrath incited by imagined wrongs were not like me. Of course, I had in my younger years experienced the insecurities and angers of jealousy, just as I had occasionally heard the hissings of ethnic intolerance; but I had known these follies only in the way that they are endemic to the species, and had for the most part seen through them and outgrown them. Even in my younger and more foolish years, I had never felt the likes of the sudden fast-rising wrath I lately had been subject to. It was as if, in my new life, the last remnants of old failings had been sloughed off only to be replaced by new failings. It was as if some seething vengeance or fury were trying to force its escape from me through any means, any fissure possible. In fact, these were not fits of temper that I felt. They were more like the spontaneous turmoilings of an unfamiliar presence seeking vent. I wondered if what I had done in the doorway was but a lashing forth by this presence as well. It must have been, for it was not I. It could not have been I.