As these thoughts ran through his mind, Susie came down from her trip, and on her face--as on Elizabeth's face that morning--there was an incredible expression of joy. The boy could not cope with that either. What kind of happiness were these people trying to buy? What was this new pasture of heaven that lay in the center of the circle?

Other stories came out that night. It was incredible, the boy thought to himself, how quickly a group of people can get to know each other, everything about each other. One of the young women, June, confessed that her husband was sterile and did not lay her nearly enough--and with that a triangle consisting of June, Susie, and Jimmy came into being. Slowly, it seemed, everything was reducing itself to two questions: Who wanted to fuck who? Who would fuck who?

The session broke up about 11:30 p.m. On his way out the door, the boy walked past John.

"Are you high on something?" John asked him.

"On drugs? No."

"Look at yourself in the mirror sometime," John said, and then turned away.

Some of the members of the group went down to the baths. The boy was restless, however, and went back to his room with Paul. He looked at himself in the mirror: his eyes were open very wide; he did look stoned, bewildered, afraid. So he and Paul stayed in their room to witness the final event of that Monday--the boy's second breakdown.

For a long time, he paced back and forth while Paul sat on his bed sipping Armagnac from the bottle they had brought. The boy could feel his flipness slipping away from him. "I just don't like these people," he said. "I honestly don't. I don't like anything about them. They're old, they're tired, they're dead, they've based lives on lies. All they can do is look back on it in despair, because they've lost it. Life's passed them by, and I don't want any part of them."

He stopped. How much of what he was saying was true? He had come to Esalen to look at another side of life. What he saw, he was afraid of. He had been afraid when Susie tripped out, but at the same time spellbound -- his strangely dilated eyes were proof of that. "You have to take the biggest risk," John had said. "The further you reach out, the more you will find." The boy wanted a trip of his own. He knew he would be incomplete without one, that there would be a side of himself that would be always hidden. But was he willing to trip out in front of these sterile, lifeless, prostituted people? Did a man have to die, to become part of this human hell, in order to be reborn?

He talked to Paul for a while and climbed into bed--and it was then, in the darkness, that the fear hit, hit as it never had before. "Jesus!" He leaped from his bed and turned on the light. His whole body had been covered with spiders and snakes and maggots--he had suddenly felt himself part of a swarming, clawing, terrifying bed of slime and dirt. The boy remembered a short story he had read once about a man in a cave filled with spiders. What had there been on the other side of that mountain?

He tried turning off the light again, but this time it seemed the entire jungle had gotten into bed with him. Later, he would laugh about it: spiders and snakes, even a gila monster which he had once seen in a natural history book, accompanied by larger animals--gorrillas and apes.

"How amazing," he said in absolute terror to Paul, trying to create some kind of intellectual distance between himself and these animals that lived in the darkness. So he and Paul, who for a long time sat by him and held him, talked about what was happening. It was a classic Freudian trip, Paul said, that rarely happened any more. Usually, modern hang-ups take on images of abandonment, running away, loss--but not head-on confrontations with the beasts of darkness. They both laughed about that. Then the boy cried for a while--simply out of fear, and at the gradual perception of his own smallness and his needs. He thanked God that Paul was there, for without him there would have been nothing.

Wait until they hear about this in group tomorrow, the boy thought to himself. Imagine if I told them that I didn't get any sleep because I had stayed up all night guarding against the spiders. They could certainly take off with that. Spiders! He laughed, and a while later, fell asleep.

TUESDAY morning's group was very bad, but for the first time the boy was drawn into the action. As they all sat around in the circle, one of the ugly young women named Alice looked at the boy and said, "There's something bugging me about you."

Up to this point the boy had said virtually not a word in the group. He had talked a little to people outside the group, but not in it. So when he felt the full attention of the group upon him, he began to feel his pulse beating. The energy was flowing in his body, he could feel the vibes. But he didn't speak. He simply stared at Alice with an empty, enigmatic stare. He enjoyed that.