And my whisper faded away as I ebbed down into the little death.

I was never the same man after that double-jacketing.  Never again, to this day, no matter what my food, was I properly nurtured.  I suffered internal injuries to an extent I never cared to investigate.  The old pain in my ribs and stomach is with me now as I write these lines.  But the poor, maltreated machinery has served its purpose.  It has enabled me to live thus far, and it will enable me to live the little longer to the day they take me out in the shirt without a collar and stretch my neck with the well-stretched rope.

But the double-jacketing was the last straw.  It broke down Warden Atherton.  He surrendered to the demonstration that I was unkillable.  As I told him once: 

“The only way you can get me, Warden, is to sneak in here some night with a hatchet.”

Jake Oppenheimer was responsible for a good one on the Warden which I must relate: 

“I say, Warden, it must be straight hell for you to have to wake up every morning with yourself on your pillow.”

And Ed Morrell to the Warden: 

“Your mother must have been damn fond of children to have raised you.”

It was really an offence to me when the jacketing ceased.  I sadly missed that dream world of mine.  But not for long.  I found that I could suspend animation by the exercise of my will, aided mechanically by constricting my chest and abdomen with the blanket.  Thus I induced physiological and psychological states similar to those caused by the jacket.  So, at will, and without the old torment, I was free to roam through time.

Ed Morrell believed all my adventures, but Jake Oppenheimer remained sceptical to the last.  It was during my third year in solitary that I paid Oppenheimer a visit.  I was never able to do it but that once, and that one time was wholly unplanned and unexpected.

It was merely after unconsciousness had come to me that I found myself in his cell.  My body, I knew, lay in the jacket back in my own cell.  Although never before had I seen him, I knew that this man was Jake Oppenheimer.  It was summer weather, and he lay without clothes on top his blanket.  I was shocked by his cadaverous face and skeleton-like body.  He was not even the shell of a man.  He was merely the structure of a man, the bones of a man, still cohering, stripped practically of all flesh and covered with a parchment-like skin.

Not until back in my own cell and consciousness was I able to mull the thing over and realize that just as was Jake Oppenheimer, so was Ed Morrell, so was I. And I could not but thrill as I glimpsed the vastitude of spirit that inhabited these frail, perishing carcasses of us—­the three incorrigibles of solitary.  Flesh is a cheap, vain thing.  Grass is flesh, and flesh becomes grass; but the spirit is the thing that abides and survives.  I have no patience with these flesh-worshippers.  A taste of solitary in San Quentin would swiftly convert them to a due appreciation and worship of the spirit.