Death in Tucson (1)

A high school teacher retires in ill health to Tucson Arizona and begins a descent into apparent madness. Obsessed with Adolf Hitler, he writes down what voices within his mind dictate to him. After an aborted attempt to return to teaching, he has an apotheosis and imagines that he is in Gehenna, surrounded by evil demons. He decides to kill himself, but believes that suicide is a sin. Then he hears about a mountain lion sighting in the Sabino Canyon Recreational area and he goes there and spends the night sleeping in the open, hoping that during his sleep the lion will kill and eat him. But he awakens in the morning unharmed. Disappointed, he returns home increasingly distraught, and unexpectedly receives a call to prophecy from his inner voice. He refuses to obey it. Instead he decides to kill himself by exposure. He walks out into the desert in the furious heat of July and begins to hallucinate as he descends the pathway to death. He encounters a rattlesnake which metamorphosizes into an Indian Shaman; then he sees bones buried all over the desert landscape which come to life before his eyes; and finally, before he collapses into the final coma, he watches as the great caravan of humanity passes before him. He loses consciousness, dreams of making his confession, but is saved in a most unexpected way.

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