Well none of these people seemed to notice me and I had no money with me to buy a doughnut so I stood next to the door and pressed my forehead against the glass-paned door. The sky grew gray and it started to rain.

I stood with my head pressed against the window for a long time. Sometimes there would be a bit of movement and life when a student volunteer came in, breathless, out of the rain. She would take off her rainhat and shake her hair and her vinyl raincoat would sparkle with raindrops. She would move so gracefully, and so quickly. I wanted so much to talk to her. Although I knew I was like her, a student, a volunteer, I felt so far away from her.

I wanted very much for one of these volunteers to talk to me but they wouldn't; they all went straight for the one patient they knew, the one they felt comfortable with. I hated these volunteers.

EVENTUALLY I left the canteen and walked up to O-2. The caged-in stairwell was like a pressure chamber and I felt as if I were passing into a deeper, deader, and even more remote region.

I went to a chair and sat curled up as usual and realized that I wasn't particularly depressed any more, or even particularly lonely. The only feelings I had were deadness and dullness. Stiff, slow-moving, lethargic. Didn't care. Dead.

In a way, this deadness and withdrawal, this feeling of being insulated from everything in bales and bales of thick cotton is comforting. Things are so ordered and stable and predictable. And the movement of the hospital machinery, the getting up and the going to bed, the meals and the TV are as vast and certain and ineffable as the rising of the sun or snow in winter. It's comforting; one is protected against feelings. Sometimes the insulation grows so thick that not even sound or light or touch gets through. It's almost cozy.

AFTER A while the dinner bell rang and everyone on the ward started shutlling a little, and a few minutes later we were trooped down through the tunnel to the cafeteria.

After dinner the thought of returning to O-2 wasn't especially savory so I decided to go for a walk. I wanted to see what the outside was like after what seemed like months in this other world so I walked across the grounds to Blue Hill Ave. and up to the Dunkin' Donuts shop. As I approached the place I grew very uncomfortable and nervous and scared. I guess I was nervous because I had choices: I could walk whichever way I wished, and with my two nickels at the doughnut place I had to decide what sort of doughnut to buy.

At the Hospital there are no choices whatsoever.

And I was frightened because I was going to have to deal with people again, critical, defensive, suspicious, normal people. When I entered Dunkin' Donuts the first thing that struck me was the tremendous quantities of light and color. Everything was glowing and sparkling with activity and light if not with life. Things seemed to be moving so quickly and hecticly.

I was sort of passively pushed around and ended up on line. Then two cops came in and I thought to myself the jig's up, before I get my doughnut they'll realize where I'm from and put me in a straight jacket and with a blaze of lights and sirens whisk me back to O-2. But miraculously they didn't even speak to me, though I was sure that they and everyone else in the place was staring at me when I wasn't looking: I felt like a fugitive, so tremendously different and apart from everyone else. With great difficulty I managed to get myself together enough to order a jelly dough-nut, paid, and quickly left. I walked back to O-Building fast.

THE NEXT morning when the bell rang I woke up excited because this was the day that I was to resume my life. At breakfast though I actually felt the premonition of nostalgia for the egg yolks swimming in water and the coffee that tasted like tea and the nurses standing sternly with crossed arms under the pillars and my fellow patients dressed in cheap cotton with a half a set of teeth each. And back in O-2 I began expectantly thinking about what it would be like to have lan walk onto the ward and say let's go and as easy as that leave this enormous machine that endlessly cranks out thick swatches of time like huge strings of taffy. It was absurd to be able to simply walk out. Some elaborate rite of passage seemed called for.

Finally lan came with a big smile and we went into Mrs. Snowden's office to say goodby. I talked to her for the first time since I met her, three days ago. I think that all I said was wow. She laughed and said she thought I was a monk because all I did was sit curled up in a chair and never spoke to anyone. Then lan and I walked down the caged-in stairwell and I looked down and said goodby to the civil defense water and then we walked through the O-Building canteen and said goodby to Snoopy and Charlie Brown on the wall, still saying that happiness was the O-Building canteen, and then out into the sunlight.