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number of interpretations, he would lose halfhis reason for continuing to cling to life despite the pain from his liver that constantly troubled his subconscious. Conversely, since he was determined to recreate his
Happy Days
as exactly as possible, he did not hesitate, if the achievement of that exactness required it, to distort the present. Now nothing can have been clearer than this attitude, derived from principle, which he maintained all day and even at night while he was awake, but when he fell asleep he sobbed aloud. To the acting executor of the will it sounded as if he were repeating the word “band,” and this she reported to him. Still the nightmares which seemed to carry him back to a specific moment in the past continued, and, as he invariably sobbed the same words, their meaning was eventually ascertained more precisely. To be sure, since he was able to remember nothing of the content of the dream, it was the acting executor of the will who finally discovered what he was sobbing:
Ah, ah, abandoned the man abandoned by the band, ah, ah, abandoned the man the band abandoned!
II
    The words he sobbed in his sleep had been elucidated, but, perhaps because someone else had made the discovery, the sobbing itself was not overcome. There were still times when he sobbed violently, or so another of those in the vicinity of his bed
    [[Let’s say “nurse” from here on, call it a necessary compromise to lighten the burden “he” places on the scribe. When I know you’re talking about the nurse the desire to put down “nurse” tugs at me even though you use some vague phrase instead. This interruption of his account by the “acting executor of the will’ was when thetrouble began. I should think you might control that selfish need of yours to put down what you believe no matter what I say, especially when I’m going out of my way to use the third person to make your job easier. “He” expressed his dissatisfaction mildly enough, yet the “acting executor of the will” said nothing in reply. This made it more than ever inevitable that “he” go to the considerable trouble in his green-cellophane-covered underwater goggles of reading over that portion of his account already on paper. How could “he” be sure that a single one of the points “he” had asserted with such exactness had not been dissolved in the flux of ambiguity? But what are you so eager to say yourself that makes you want to change the account of somebody else’s past? I don’t revise one syllable of what is said to me, I’m only asking that you do try to use common nouns, for example, that you say “nurse” when you mean nurse, to make my work easier; if you don’t make an effort I’m afraid common nouns will eventually disappear from your speech, and since you almost never reveal even a single proper noun either! said the “acting executor of the will.” Whereupon it was agreed that a specific, common noun would be used when referring to]]
    the nurse reported. But even after the longest night of sobbing, however brokenly, he was unable to recall what must have been his painful, lonely dream. While he slept, his pulse and blood pressure certainly decreased and his vital organs, including his brain, discontinued a wide variety of their operations. Cancer, however, independently of his conscious-subconscious, continued its cell-by-cell proliferation day and night. If, then, there really was a positive vitality inside him capable of lifting his voice in a scream while he slept, was it not likely to be thevitality of robust, ever-fattening cancer itself? But why should cancer cells sob? One morning at dawn the nurse shook him awake because his sobs were being heard in the next room. Once he was awake he could hear that not only the patient next door but the two hundred dogs kept in the hospital courtyard for use in the laboratory had also been threatened by his sobbing and clearly were howling still; nonetheless, he thought to