I spend the rest of the day preparing myself for the rigors of the escape this evening. Lodged tightly just underneath my consciousness is the apprehension that any moment may bring another “inspection tour” or a series of institutional personnel on even meaner tasks; they will want to know why I tried to attack my therapist and will take stiff action with me. But no one comes. Perhaps it is as my therapist promised; the relationship between us is completely confidential and can be respected. I do not know. The escape to a certain extent seems taken out of my hands now; even though I have originated the plot, very little depends upon my presence. Things have been set in motion; Nala herself avoids me. I think about the escape and wonder if I were right in hatching the plan at this particular time; life in the enclosure was not always that unpleasant and it is possible that the therapists were not lying to us. Perhaps we would be scheduled for release soon and the escape will merely assure our entrapment. Easy, cowardly speculations like this work themselves through me like tendrils, tightening further and further on my consciousness; I busy myself with cryptograms and copies of theMorningTelegraph so that I will stay off the subject. According to the information contained in theTelegraph I am able to pick the winner of every horserace conducted on the northeast coast of the United States on June 7, 1983, including a one hundred and forty dollar winner and several horses that pay odds of over twenty to one. I would have suspected no less of myself but it is some small confirmation of my abilities to prove what I always knew: that their riddles and puzzles pose no challenge to us. We are, at least intellectually, far superior and can knife through those problems which beset their lives; our superiority to them is so enormous that they must keep us in the enclosure for the sake of fear. Near the end of the morning two institutional personnel come into my room summarily without knocking and head purposefully toward that cabinet containing my personal possessions; only when I grunt and sit up on the bed do they notice my presence and then their faces cyanose with embarrassment. Obviously they are the team which has been carefully ransacking my quarters for the last few days.

“Excuse us,” one of them says. “We’re on the cleaning detail. We’re just trying to put your rooms in order; usually you’re out when we come.”

“Forget it,” the other one says harshly. “Don’t make apologies or excuses to them; we don’t have to. It’s not in the orders. Let’s get out of here.”

“I’m not in therapy this morning,” I say mildly. “I was dismissed. I’m sorry that I surprised you.”

“We’ll just be on our way,” the first one says. He casts several glances over the room, right to left to center and then backs away cautiously. “Just cleaning,” he says. “That’s all.”

“Never mind,” the second says rather vaguely. “They’re all monsters anyway. Besides, I can’t take them seriously. Nothing here is serious.”

“Excuse me,” I say, wanting to intervene in the discussion, “what do you mean, nothing here is serious?”

“Forget it,” the discourteous one mumbles and seizes his partner by the shoulder. The two of them retreat, mumbling to one another, leaving the door open. I get up and close it, another minor intrusion in my life, surely no harassment when compared to the overall quality of our life in the enclosure but I cannot quite get the remark from my mind. Nothing serious about the enclosure! It is an entirely new way of looking at the matter.

I go to the eating room as per schedule and as always find a table by myself; I return to my rooms where there is no evidence of further search. I remain on the bed and play with theTelegraph and this journal. Nothing much happens during the afternoon. I do not hear from my therapist. None of my conspirators drop by. Nala does not come. I receive no “inspection tours.” It is an inauspicious way in which to spend what I hope will be the last of all my afternoons in the enclosure. I realize that I am ready for catastrophe; that my body is bent to it, that I want to receive calamity as one would a lover and that somehow I am disappointed. Perhaps I want them to get word of the plans and arrest us all. Perhaps I want Nala to come and tell me that her strangeness comes from the fact that she has told her therapist everything. Perhaps I am waiting for the two scavengers to return and demand my notes. Nothing, however, happens. Nothing at all. It is like almost every afternoon in the enclosure.

Life in the enclosure is terribly dull. This is the secret which these notes have avoided. It is boredom and neurasthenia interrupted now and then by small jolts of terror like armaments going off in the night. Every now and then the terror connects to the boredom and then one has an “experience.” This, however, rarely happens.

We have been stultified to death here. That is their secret. Their timing, their tortures, and their threats are merely packaging; the base fact of the enclosure is that it is unspeakably dull. After two and a half years here the will melts, the reflexes freeze. It is hard to believe that this evening I will try to escape. Everything has been purged from us except the knowledge we give them and that knowledge, of course, is hardly within our control. We do not know what we are speaking.