The Banana Peel Project

Then the pointer hits Sandy and he picks up a task, a slip of paper.  It is in Gretch’s handwriting, and it says: “Go out and build a fire.”  He reads it out loud and just keeps staring at it.  Then they all stare at him, waiting for him to get up and go out and build a fire, and he feels them staring and then he knows–it is a very clever plot to get him out of the house, get him outside in the dark, and then pull the Monstrous Prank–

And he starts blurting it all out.  I can’t do it.  Can’t you see how it is?  It’s getting awful–I can’t sleep and everything is like this:

He lays the fingers of one hand over the fingers of the other, forming a trellis pattern, and peers through the spaces in between to show how everything keeps breaking up, fragmenting, his whole field of vision, ever since the DMT trip at Millbrook, and the sea of flames and the paranoia, the everlasting paranoia, he blurts it all out, everything that is hanging him up and rocketing him toward–what?

And suddenly it is very quiet in the log house.  Every Prankster eye is upon him, absorbed, giving him total…Attention, He has come all the way out front.  The furious motion stops, and he suddenly feels :::: peace.

[Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test]