Head Nurse Flamm sent this report to myself, Dr. Varier, Dr. Mann, Chief Supervisor Hennings, State Mental Hospital Director Alfred Coles, Mayor John Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller. - I had seen Eric only three times since my Jesus session with him and he had been extremely tense each time and done very little talking, but when he walked into my office that afternoon he came as quietly as a lamb into a grassy meadow.

He moved to the window and stared out. He was wearing blue jeans, a rather soiled T-shirt, sneakers and a gray hospital shirt, unbuttoned. His hair was quiet long, but his skin was paler than it had been in September. After about a minute -he turned and lay down on the short couch to the left of the desk.

`Mr. Flamm,' I said, `reports that he believes that you are stirring up the patients to - improper behavior.'

To my surprise he answered right away.

'Yeah, improper. Bad. Lousy. That's me,' he said, staring at he green ceiling. `It took me a long time to realize what the bastards are up to, to realize that the good-game is their most effective method of keeping their fucking system going. When I did, it made me rage against the way I'd been fooled. All my kindness and forgiveness and meekness just let the system step on everybody all the more comfortably. Love is groovy if it's for good guys but to love the fuzz, love the army; love Nixon, love the church, whoa man, that is one lost trip.'

While he was speaking I took out my pipe and began filling it with marijuana. When he finally paused I said: `Dr. Mann indicates that if Flamm continues to complain you'll have to be transferred to Ward W.'

`Oh, boohoohoo,' he said, not looking at me. `It's all the same. It's a system, you see. A machine. You work hard to keep the machine going, you're a good guy; you goof off or try to stop the machine and you're a commie or a loony. The machine may be blowing blacks under like weeds, or scattering ten-ton bombs over Vietnam like firecrackers or overthrowing reform governments in Latin America every other month, but the old machine must be kept working. Oh man, when I saw this I vomited for a week. Locked myself in my room for six months.'

He paused and we both listened to the birds singing away among the maple trees outside the building. I lit the pipe and took a deep toke. I exhaled, the smoke drifting idly in his direction.

`And all that time I began slowly to feel that something important was going to happen to me, that I was chosen for some special mission. I had only to fast and to wait. When I bopped my father in the face and was sent here I knew even more certainly that something was going to happen. Knew it.' He stopped talking and sniffed twice. I took another drag on my pipe.

`Has anything happened yet?' I asked.

He watched me take another lungful and then settled back onto the couch. He reached into kiss hair and brought out a home made joint.

`Got a match?' he said.

'If you're going to smoke, share mine,' I said.

He leaned over to take the pipe, but it was out, so I handed him the matches too. He lit up and for the next three minutes we passed the pipe back and forth in silence: He was staring at the ceiling as if its green cracks contained like the back of a turtle's shell, portents of the future. By the time the pipe ovens out a second time, I was pleasantly high. I felt happy, as if I were embarking on a new voyage that for the first time, even in my dice man life, represented real, rather than superficial change.

My eyes were focused on his face, which, under the influence of his high perhaps, was glowing. He smiled with a peacefulness well within my understanding. His hands were folded across his belly, and he lay like a dead man, but glowing, glowing. His voice when he spoke was slow, thick and gentle, as if it came from way off in the clouds.

`About three weeks ago I got up in the middle of the night when all the attendants were asleep to take a piss, but I didn't have to take a piss. I was drawn into the day room as if by a magnet and there I stared out through the window at the Manhattan skyline. Manhattan: the central cog of the machine, or maybe just the sewage system. I knelt and I prayed. Yeah, I prayed. To the Spirit, which had lifted Christ above the mass of men to bring His Spirit to me, to give to me the light that could light the world. To let me become the way, the truth and the light. Yeah.'

He paused and I emptied the ashes out into an ashtray and began refilling the pipe.

`How long I prayed, I can't tell. Suddenly, wham! I was flooded by a light that made an acid trip seem like sniffing

glue. I couldn't see. My body seemed to swell, my spirit swelled, I seemed to expand until I filled the whole universe.

The world was me.'

He paused briefly, the sound of the Jefferson Airplane coming from someplace up, the hall.

'I hadn't smoked a thing for three days. I wasn't loony. I filled the whole universe.'

He paused again.

`I was crying. I was weeping for joy. I was on my feet I guess, and the whole world was all light and was all me and it

was good. I stood with my arms outstretched to embrace everything and then I was conscious of this terrific mad grin I had on my face and the vision kind of faded and I shrunk back to me. But I felt that, I knew that I had been given a job … a role, a mission … yeah. This gray-green hellhouse couldn't be left standing. The gray factories, the gray offices, the gray buildings, the gray people .. . everything without light. .. has to go. I saw it. I see it. What I'd been waiting for had happened. The Spirit I'd been looking for, I . . . had . . . I know, I'm not for all men. The mass of men will always see and live in the gray world. But a few will follow me, a few, and we'll change the world.'

I passed him the relit pipe when he'd finished talking and he took it and inhaled and passed it back to me. He didn't

look at me.

`And you, what's your game?' he said. `You're not smoking pot, with me just because you feel like smoking pot.'

`No' I said.

`Then why?'

`Just chance.'

He stared at the green ceiling until I passed him back the pipe. When he finally exhaled he said again as if from very

far away: `If you want to follow me you must give up everything.'

`I know.'

`Pot-smoking doctors who get stoned with mental patients don't stay doctors long.'

`I know.'

I felt like giggling.

`Wives and brothers and fathers and mothers don't usually like my way.'

`So I gather.'

`Someday you will help me.'

We were both staring at the ceiling now, the hot bowl of the pipe resting unused in the palm of my hand.

`Yes,' I said.

`It's a marvelous game we'll play - the best,' he said.

`For some reason I feel I'm yours,' I said. `Whatever you want me to do, I'll want to do.'

`Everything will happen.'

`Yes.'

`The blind bastards [his voice was quiet and serene and remote] will panic and kill, panic and kill, trying to control the

uncontrollable, trying to kill what can only live.'

`We will panic and kill.'

`And I'll,' he interrupted himself with a chuckle, `I'll try to save the whole fucking world'

`Yes.'

`I'm Divine, you know,' he said.

`Yes,' I said, believing it.

`I've come to wake the world to evil, to goose mankind to good.'

'We'll hate you-'

`To slash the mash-potato minds until their sirs is seen.

'We'll be blind-'

`Try to make the blind see, the lame walk, the dead live again.'

He laughed.

`And we'll try to make the seeing blind, the walking lame, the living dead.'

I smiled.

`I'll be the insane Savior of the world, and you'll kill me.'

`Whatever you want will be done.'

I eased out a slow motion bubbling of mirth.