• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I could think up lots of poetic explanations for why I went nuts: the state of the world, childhood experiences, my parents breaking up, my kinky relationship with Virginia. Any one of a dozen or more explanations made perfect sense, but my relationship with Virginia was the only one within my sphere of influence, and even there understanding why I had gone nuts, if that was indeed it, didn’t give me many clues about what I should do next. Merely understanding these things obviously wouldn’t help. I had understood them all very clearly for years.

That there were so many reasonable poetic explanations for my cracking up weakened them all. While I was still several months away from a truly reasonable helpful explanation, I began having serious doubts that explanations like the above had much to do with my sanity.

Whatever part Virginia had or hadn’t played in driving me crazy, there was no denying that I needed her desperately then. She could have crushed me like a flea. I hated myself for needing the things I needed but there was no way around it. It was all unspoken but she knew that I knew that she knew and so on that we were both walking on eggs.

Please, Virge. I don’t want to be this way. I’d rather it was heroin, I swear. What I need I have no right to ask for. I don’t love you now. I’m too scared to love anything. Maybe I’ve never loved anything, but for a while—maybe just a few days will do the trick, I’ll try to keep it small—I need your love completely and utterly.

Maybe it’s not even love. Maybe it’s a lie I need, like how I’ve lied to you. I know you never asked me to and it was a fucked-up thing to do and it was bad for both of us, but I made you very sure of me and gave you my unconditional commitment. It wasn’t for romantic reasons. It was more just a dumb experiment, but it’s that sort of half-lie I need now.

Please, Virge, I need a moratorium on reality. Play Doris Day to my Rock Hudson. Maybe we can work out some real love later, but for now the work has got to be curing my addiction. It’s the only hope for either of us to get out of this mess at all intact. I need your blessing, Virge. Without it I can neither love you nor let you go. We’ll be stuck with my hellish needing forever.

After I had been back at the farm a few days, my resolve to just forget about the whole thing, never terribly strong, crumbled completely. I wanted to fit all the pieces together. It started as a very reasonable attempt to figure out what had happened so that I could avoid its happening again. As I began to fit things together it became more and more apparent to me that there was very little, if anything, delusional about the things I had thought or inappropriate about my behavior. My focus might have been a little off here and there, but basically I had been right on. There was too much confirmation from too many different sources that something very momentous had happened and that I had responded at least appropriately and very possibly heroically.

The more I thought about it, the more transparent it became. I was slightly embarrassed that they had managed to fool me as well as they had. What a bunch of transparent, blundering incompetents.

Hollywood Hospital, Fifth Avenue, New Westminster, Dale and McNice—now really.

I was convinced that the crisis was over and the good guys had won, but I wished they had done a better job of fooling me. I was resolved to live my long, peaceful, healthy, normal life at the farm no matter what.

I quickly lost all sense of embarrassment about having been locked up in a nut house. In fact I was rather proud of it. Even when I stuck to what I and everyone else knew for sure had happened, the unwritten codes of myself, my friends, all good radicals and liberals everywhere, gave the bare facts a certain amount of built-in grandiosity as standard equipment. That I had somehow saved the world was optional frill.

The humiliations and restrictions I had suffered