In the hospital Amos awoke on a mattress on the floor. The room was empty, dark except for the light streaking through a small window in the door. He felt relieved, his muscles relaxed, as though he had slept a thousand years and now awakened, yawning. He stared up at the ceiling, not trying to move. He remembered now that he had been in the mountain, been in the womb of the mountain, been born from the mountain. Elated, he sat up in bed, then felt a tinge of fright.

Why then was he still flying? He glanced about the room, at the tiled floor, the green foam slippers beside the mattress. This must be the interstellar vessel, and of course he was part of the crew. He began to regain his confidence. The ship is powered by friction, he decided, putting on the slippers. He began to slide slowly around the room, carefully rubbing the soles of his foam boots against the tile to provide the maximum amount of friction, so vital to this mission of navigating to the moon.

* * *

After about a week Amos was allowed visitors, and he was ready for them. He had quickly tired of the company of his fellow inmates. Among them were three named Fred, and this coincidence was an endless source of hilarity to one of them, but Amos and the rest no longer found it funny. Another of the Freds was a tall, thin, lugubrious man in his forties who explained that sometimes he just needed to get away from his wife and children to concentrate on his writing, and the hospital was as good a place as any. Another was a bearded giant who, during square dance time, would stomp and swing like a dervish, performing intricate moves to invisible music.

There was an elderly woman who could, and did, recite the whole Megilla by memory, in Hebrew and in English. There was a teenager who had jumped out a window and broken both ankles, who would hobble up to Amos and demand with great intensity whether Amos believed in group mind, and whether it was possible to think and grow rich. It turned out that the latter question derived from the title of a book the boy was reading, but in Amos's mind it took on the fearsome proportions of a Zen koan.

Aihwa was the first visitor to arrive, and she brought him a purple iris in a tall slender vase.

"Poor baby, poor baby," she murmured, hugging him. Amos felt stiff and distant. Part of it was the thorazine. What could he say to this woman?

"It's very exotic here. My doctor is Rumanian and half the nurses are Filipinas."

Aihwa had tears in her eyes. "You know I love you just the way you are."

What did she mean by that? It sounded maudlin. Amos was embarrassed. He wished she would leave. Now she was crying.

* * *

That night it was difficult for him to sleep. He awoke in the semi-darkness and sat up in bed. They had moved him out of isolation to a double room down the hall. Through the window he could see the full moon, a dazzling white, with wisps of cloud blowing past. The movement of the clouds made it seem as if the moon were hurtling through the sky.

On the second day they had asked him "Do you know where you are?" Amos, partly because it seemed to mollify his psychiatrist, had tentatively produced the appropriate response - "in St. Luke's Hospital" - at least as a working hypothesis.

Beside the hospital was the cathedral. St. Luke was a healer.

What was St. John? A visionary? Chiseled into the cathedral's stone façade were four saints depicted as monstrous winged creatures with bestial faces. Which one was St. John?

The questions were making Amos restless and anxious. He stood up and walked to the window. There, to the right, was the shadowy bulk of the cathedral. Below him, in the moonlight, stood Gabriel with wings outstretched, blowing a long narrow trumpet out over Harlem.

Amos stood entranced, the hospital window framing in fearful juxtaposition the full moon and the angel. Amos saw the moon in its perpetual and infinite cosmic cycle, being born, devoured by nothingness, being born again, empty in its fullness, void in its splendor. And he saw, fixed and immovable, the Angel, heralding hope and destruction, liberation and judgment, trumpeting into the abyss the truth that time must have a stop.