Jenny has a dog which is not very intelligent. Sometimes when I call the dog it will come a few steps, then get distracted by some sunny spot or rotten smell, and I'll have to call it again. That was how I was on this day. Jenny would call me and I would follow her; sometimes she would take my hand or even push me, and I'd know that she was there and react to her, but in the fifteen-second intervals between her calls or touches she would cease to exist for me. It was not that I ever forgot her; her reappearances never surprised me; nor did I stop walking, but she was no more or less important than everything else. This is true and not true. In some way she was very important to me, but without being in my mind except when she called to me. I did not want to hurt her or make her anxious. This in turn increased my own anxiety, because I wanted to do whatever she wanted me to do; and at the same time I knew that her sense of direction was very bad and that she might very well get us lost in the forest, but I was unable to explain to her why she should not be leading me further into the mountains — or perhaps she understood well enough that I did not feel right about going with her, but Jenny can be very obstinate and anyway she was my guardian; I could not reason, so it did not matter what I thought.
I felt terribly alone. Even though she was not far ahead of me on the trail, continually calling to me from just out of sight, I felt that she had let me go. (Paul I could not see.) There was no blame attached to this. I did not feel that she had deliberately rejected me; it was simply that we were drifting farther and farther apart. Often I would look around me and see only trees and rocks and lake and sky, all alien and borderless and vivid like those paintings of dense dark forests in old Canada; and I would feel so alone and believe that I might possibly be there alone forever. So I was freed from the cage of rationality, and imprisoned in the cage of brutishness. Then Jenny would call my name again, and I'd understand that I was not alone after all and that I was still walking. Then I could not understand what the trail was anymore. I heard her calling my name over and over from not very far away, and after an immense struggle I succeeded in saying that between every two trees was a trail. I stood staring at those hundreds or thousands of trails in front of me, and finally Jenny had to come to lead me by the hand. Then she was gone again, and I passed through the forest, which I experienced in a low wide way like a four-legged beast. I was alone, and I always would be alone — and not just always, but also forever and infinitely. I had already been alone forever — so alone! — and this grieved and exhausted me beyond description but I understood that I could do nothing about it but struggle to endure. My soul was maimed and suffering. God was all around me but I felt no less alone. The twisted silvery trees were all growing toward and inside God, conscious of Him as He was of them and me, but they could not reach me as I could not express myself to them because only the relationship with God was real and I could not get at God or come to grips with Him because He was everywhere and I was only toiling through Him, just as a person can walk all day and never put the sun behind him. And I strained to speak with God. It was no easier to express myself to Him than it had been to Jenny, but no more difficult. I was burdened with sadness and also with pain from the mushroom poison which resembled a steel spider with scorpion claws crouched inside my rib cage, pinching from my heart all the way to my belly; and the pain was the same as the sadness. I was crying for my dead friends, and I asked God whether what I was now suffering, which seemed more intense than any other agony I'd ever felt, was worth having been spared in Bosnia. And God was in the trees and between them; I was speaking with God and walking with Him, asking only this question, and only once; it echoed like a note on the piano when the reverberator pedal is pressed; and then I asked Him why He created people only to shatter them. I was so sad and I had no answer but I knew that He heard me and I was going on; I would go on until He smashed me to bits, and I accepted that. There was a moment when I was able to pray for my friends and also for Jenny and Paul and for myself. Hours later, when the drug let me go with a snap of its claws, I was surprised to find that I felt calm and at peace. I think it was because I'd been heard, had asked and accepted the fact that there would never be any answer, that I must go on in my solitude just as I'd had to do in the car when my friends slumped dead and bleeding and I waited for the next shot.
