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“Wally? Wally? My roommate in prep school was called Wally. His last name was Walters. His father fell six stories onto a sidewalk but came out OK except for one leg being shorter than the other which gave him a limp.”

Wally seemed to know all this and a lot more. I didn’t get a chance to find out how he knew all these things. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. But he was answering so many questions there didn’t seem to be much reason to get a word in edgewise anyway.

Most of what he said wouldn’t have made much sense to anyone but me. It would have been just another poor crazy person raving his brains out. What it boiled down to was that I was being divested of my power.

“You’re not the conductor any more. Someone else is in charge of the train.” He seemed to be congratulating me for having done my part well and saying that now I could relax. He filled me in on lots of the places, people, and things I had been worried about. Told me that for the most part I had caught on beautifully, far better than anyone expected.

He must have been listening to my ravings for the past few days. Maybe he just wanted me to shut up so he could get some sleep. He knew all the key words, all the themes, key players, etc., and how to put them together. It worked like a charm. I don’t think I did any raving after that. I felt great relief. My prayers had been answered. I had no more power. I could not be just one of the fellas.

Meals started coming more regularly. Orderlies and nurses stopped beating me up and sticking needles in my ass. They let me out of the little room more and more. And then my mother showed up and then Virginia.

Wally was gone the day after our visit. I tried to find out more about him but no one seemed to know much. According to the nurses he was just another patient.

Easter morning I was sitting just outside the little room rolling a cigarette, still trying to put together some of the things Wally had said and who the hell he was.

A breeze came through the ward. It smelled like spring. It was the first smell I had noticed in months that hadn’t been death.

Something was saying good-by to me.

“You’re still smoking cigarettes.” It wasn’t the voices exactly.

It wanted me to notice more than the fact that I still smoked cigarettes. It wanted me to recognize myself.

“Cigarettes? Sportsman? Export? Tobacco? Papers?” It was chuck-ling, almost laughing, feigning amazed disbelief, making sure there were no hard feelings. I almost felt an arm around my shoulder.

“Good-by, sport. Who would ever guess?” And it was gone.

Tears started streaming down my face. They tasted sweet I sat there smoking through the tears, tasting them both, and how good they were.

Two nurses came up and asked if I was all right.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, yes. Everything is going to be OK from now on.”

They seemed to believe me. They seemed as relieved as was and on the verge of tears themselves. They offered some tea and hot cross buns. I accepted.

BIOCHEMISTRY. At first my friends and I were doubtful that there was any medical problem. It was all politics and philosophy. The hospital bit was just grasping at straws when else failed.

It took quite a bit to convince us that anything as pedestrian as biochemistry was relevant to something as profound and poetic as what I was going through. For me to admit the possibility that I might not have gone nuts again had they given me pills when I left was a tremendous concession.

It’s such a poetic affliction from inside and out, it’s not hard to see how people have assumed that schizophrenia must have poetic causes and that any therapy would have to be poetic as well. A lot of my despair of ever getting well was based on the improbability of finding a poet good enough to deal with all that had happened to me. It’s hard to say when I accepted the notion that the problem was biochemical, it went so hard against everything I had been taught about mental illness. At the farm we were coming more and more to seeing physical illness as psychological. A cold or slipping with a hammer