There was something innately strange about it, as though there had always been an inner core to
the gym which I had never perceived before, quite different from its generally accepted
appearance. It seemed to alter moment by moment before my eyes, becoming for brief flashes a
totally unknown building with a significance much deeper and far more real than any I had
noticed before. The same was true of the water hole, where unauthorized games of hockey were
played during the winter. The ice was breaking up on it now, with just a few glazed islands of ice
remaining in the center and a fringe of hard surface glinting along the banks. The old trees
surrounding it all were intensely meaningful, with a message that was very pressing and entirely
indecipherable. Here the road turned to the left and became dirt. It proceeded along the lower end
of the playing fields, and under the pale night glow the playing fields swept away from me in
slight frosty undulations which bespoke meanings upon meanings, levels of reality I had never
suspected before, a kind of thronging and epic grandeur which my superficial eyes and cluttered
mind had been blind to before. They unrolled away impervious to me as though I were a roaming
ghost, not only tonight but always, as though I had never played on them a hundred times, as
though my feet had never touched them, as though my whole life at Devon had been a dream, or
rather that everything at Devon, the playing fields, the gym, the water hole, and all the other
buildings and all the people there were intensely real, wildly alive and totally meaningful, and I
alone was a dream, a figment which had never really touched anything. I felt that I was not,
never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply
meaningful world around me.
I reached the bridge which arches over the little Devon River and beyond it the dirt track which
curves toward the stadium. The stadium itself, two white concrete banks of seats, was as
powerful and alien to me as an Aztec ruin, filled with the traces of vanished people and vanished
rites, of supreme emotions and supreme tragedies. The old phrase about “If these walls could
only speak” occurred to me and I felt it more deeply than anyone has ever felt it, I felt that the
stadium could not only speak but that its words could hold me spellbound. In fact the stadium did
speak powerfully and at all times, including this moment. But I could not hear, and that was
because I did not exist.
I awoke the next morning in a dry and fairly sheltered corner of the ramp underneath the
stadium. My neck was stiff from sleeping in an awkward position. The sun was high and the air
freshened.
I walked back to the center of the school and had breakfast and then went to my room to get a
notebook, because this was Wednesday and I had a class at 9:10. But at the door of the room I
found a note from Dr. Stanpole. “Please bring some of Finny’s clothes and his toilet things to the
Infirmary.”
I took his suitcase from the corner where it had been accumulating dust and put what he would
need into it. I didn’t know what I was going to say at the Infirmary. I couldn’t escape a confusing
sense of having lived through all of this before—Phineas in the Infirmary, and myself
responsible. I seemed to be less shocked by it now than I had the first time last August, when it
had broken over our heads like a thunderclap in a flawless sky. There were hints of much worse
things around us now like a faint odor in the air, evoked by words like “plasma” and “psycho”
and “sulfa,” strange words like that with endings like Latin nouns. The newsreels and magazines