Текст книги "Woman on the Edge of Time"

Автор книги: Marge Piercy

Соавторы: Marge Piercy
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Hawk was making the floater climb abruptly. They were over the sea, gray waves far below like scales of an enormous fish. The sky was overcast; the puffy bellies of clouds hung over them. They skimmed along just beneath, dodging through fog banks. The floater bobbed corklike in the tides of the air, and she felt a little ill. Hawk looked happy at the controls, singing something Connie remembered hearing before, yes, the night of the feast. She had been walking with Bee, his arm around her. Abruptly her flesh recalled his big warm hand, the thumb gently brushing her breast naked under the flimsy. “How can anybody sing about fighting on such a night?” He had answered her that on such a night people died fighting, as on any other.

“How good to fight beside you

friend of our long table,

mother of my child.”

Hawk warbled in her high thin voice and the floater banked, dipped, leaped while Connie’s stomach quavered and fell. Sea gulls crossed under them. Fog closed in the horizon. Nothing could be seen but clouds and once in a while another floater bobbing in and out of clouds, as if on an upside‑down sea of thick gray air.

“An army of lovers cannot lose,

an army of lovers cannot lose!”

Hawk warbled in her squeaky soprano, cheerful in the closed cabin, and banked the floater right into a cloud that melted around them, shutting off the world till everything was gray cotton fluff and she could not tell up from down. Connie felt dizzy and gripped hard the levers that controlled her sleek weapon.

Luciente grinned over her shoulder. “Don’t start shooting clouds, sweetness! Relax. Just enjoy the ride! Whee!”

“Enjoy? My stomach sticks in my teeth! Do we have to scoot along upside down?”

“We’re like the sea gulls, winging along,” Hawk cried. “How can you not like to fly?”

“You moved this week, Hawk?” Luciente interrupted tactfully.

“I turned over my old place to Poppy. It’s kid‑sized, the bed and chairs are little. Poppy’s been waiting for space for twomonth. Was planning to go to council for building supplies if something didn’t break soon. But I’m taking Jackrabbit’s old space, and Poppy can take mine.” She swung the floater at a ninety‑degree turn and scudded across clear space–a ravine dropping to the sea–into another mass of soft nothing. “My old space is great for a kid. Poppy’s ten. Near enough to the children’s house so you can run over when you want, if you don’t like spending the night alone sometimes. But the floater pad’s handier to where I’m moving. I love the sound of the waters–I’m sorry! You know what it’s like. I’m so sorry,” she sputtered to Luciente.

“Today we carry on Jackrabbit’s fight.” Luciente made herself busy with her weapon. Luciente was operating the jizer and Connie, in the tail, the scanner.

“If we survive,” Luciente said conversationally five minutes later, “have you redded what you’ll do now you’re adult? Bee said you’re dreaming on traveling. Will you apprentice yourself?”

“I’d rather work with floaters than anything. But I want to travel awhile. Never hopped farther than the top of the bay. Thunderbolt and I’ve chewed on taking off for some wandering–after the current phase of the war is over, of course.”

“How do you know it’ll be over?” Connie asked. “Do you expect to win soon?”

“Win? It comes in spurts.” Luciente made a face over her shoulder. “Like sun spots.”

“We thought we’d go south. We figure we have a few useful skills to trade and we can always stiff it on any passing work. Bolt is a skilled pollinator. I’m a good beginning mechanic. I don’t mean to wander forever, like those puffs. No family, no base. I’d never get to fly. But I want to look around first.”

“Forty degrees north of east,” Luciente’s voice whipped out. “Two hundred feet lower than present elevation. Dogfight. I count eight objects.”

Hawk canted about, then lurched off through the gray flab in a direction Connie trusted was north of east Their speed increased till she felt dizzy and scared once again. During the talking she had forgotten to be anxious. None of them spoke now. Hawk was maneuvering sharply. Luciente was checking her own weapon. Then she unbuckled herself, reached over the seat to make a couple of adjustments on the scammer. Then she buckled in again and quickly read their position on the instruments.

“Almost on them,” she said softly, although of course no one outside could hear them through the cabin walls. “Safeties off. Let’s get them!”

Their floater lurched free of the clouds and straight into the melee. Four of the floaters were decorated like all the machinery at Mattapoisett The other five (nine, not eight, she counted) were khaki‑colored and leaner in construction. Their motors were loud and they left a trail of dark exhaust whenever they climbed.

Hawk carried them right into the midst of the fracas. The noise deafened her, clutching the scammer. When she saw one of the khaki floaters making at them, she shot the weapon and hoped for the best A bolt of light ribboned out. Hawk kept them twisting, climbing, dipping, she turned upside down and flipped over and came about again till Connie had no idea what was up and what was down. A floater fell in flames into the sea, but she could not tell whose it was. They were fast, supremely maneuverable. It felt like a contest of hummingbirds. It felt like a scrap of dragonflies glinting and humming, turning over and round with their terrible teeth and claws. The floaters were beautiful even in mortal combat. The soft furry bellies of the clouds hung into the fight The cold gray scales of the flank of the sea tipped and angled. Sometimes Hawk brought them so low that Connie could see the foam on the crests of the waves, see the spreading stain where the floater had gone down.

Piloted into death by a twelve‑year‑old, she thought. Between the clouds and the vast sea sweeping off into a fog bank, she felt tiny. They were shrunken to the size of insects, of midges and gnats turning in the air. Then she stared at Luciente and her sense of size and proportion returned.

With a red scarf tied around her head to keep her unruly hair from her eyes, Luciente was calm, cheerful at the jizer. She rode out the twists and turns, the plummetings and the shuddering escalations of the floater with apparent pleaure, as if she were riding a spirited horse. Her body moved easily, not freezing in panic as Connie’s did in a futile effort to maintain some reference point of up and down. Luciente swayed and rolled, constantly adjusting her aim.

Hawk carried them down through the center of the fight again. Another floater fell past, broken, burning. This time she could see it was a khaki machine. She tried to count the floaters as they bore in. Perhaps there was one less of each.

Then they were careening in and out among the floaters, spouting forked lightning. She aimed and fired and tried not to lose her way in the twists and turns. Suddenly a khaki floater ran dead at them from five o’clock, straight as if it meant to ram. Just as it came as close as the distance across a ward, the enemy turned abruptly and hung there like a huge mosquito, the jizer preparing to fire on her as she took aim herself and fired. She caught a clear glimpse of the enemy through the bubble glass: the thick glasses, the aquiline nose, the satisfied twinkly blue gaze of Dr. Redding as briskly, efficiently, he shot off the jizer.

As the blasts met in the air, the air itself seemed to buckle and time to pause, humped up in a wave that could not yet fall. She saw that the pilot of the enemy floater was pasty Dr. Morgan, clutching the controls with white knuckles and secretively wetting his lips. Dodging about in the back seat, trying futilely to bring the scammer into action, meticulous Dr. Argent glowered, tossing his silvery hair and dressed in a morning coat, elegant down to the red carnation in his lapel.

She glanced around and saw all the enemy floaters zeroing in on them as if summoned to this attack. As she stared to left and right she saw that they were piloted and manned by Judge Kerrigan, who had taken her daughter, by the social worker Miss Kronenberg, by Mrs. Polcari, by Acker and Miss Moynihan, by all the caseworkers and doctors and landlords and cops, the psychiatrists and judges and child guidance counselors, the informants and attendants and orderlies, the legal aid lawyers copping pleas, the matrons and EEG technicians, and all the other flacks of power who had pushed her back and turned her off and locked her up and medicated her and tranquilized her and punished her and condemned her. They were all closing in, guns blazing. Then the air burst into golden‑red flames and she heard Dr. Redding crow, “Right on the button. That does it. Okay, into the ambulance with her.”

She was rushed south to the university hospital again and injected for the operation. They shaved her head clean of its bristling mat and once again she was bald as an onion.

The operation took less than half the time of the one before. They removed the dialytrode entirely and closed the wound with dentist’s cement. They were going to leave her alone for a while. But they were not done with her, she sensed that.

Two days later she was back on the ward, her bald head bandaged but the evil machine gone from her body and her soul. She beamed thanks to Luciente if she was still alive. Could Luciente have died in the burning floater? But the scene made no sense. Her head still ached and she had trouble remembering exactly.

But she did know something new. The war raged outside her body now, outside her skull, but the enemy would press on and violate her frontiers again as soon as they chose their next advance. She was at war.

She strove to display good patient behavior. She cooperated, she smiled and played up to the staff. She played the nice polite eager humble patient game for all she was worth, because she wanted that damned machine to stay out of her head.

“I do think it helped me,” she lied earnestly to Acker. “I feel much calmer. Those blackouts scared me.”

“Well, that won’t happen again. We try one course of treatment, but we stand ready to switch to a better one if the first has unexpected side effects,” Acker said importantly, playing doctor for Miss Moynihan, who was standing behind him. “Sometimes a patient may express an allergy to penicillin. We have to use another antibiotic. Similarly, you proved to be, let’s say, allergic to the dialytrode … .” He trailed off as he saw Dr. Redding standing in the doorway with his eyebrows raised.

“Allergic, mm?” he said. “How’s our problem this morning?”

“I feel fine,” Connie said desperately. “Ever so much better!”

Redding put down the mug of steaming coffee he had been carrying and peered into her eyes and poked her. “There’s evidence repeated stimulation of foci in the amygdala can produce results,” he muttered. “Still … probably temporary.”

Connie got up as soon as they left and sat in the lounge, ready to start conversations with one and all. She combed her wig and tidied her clothes. She ate her food, she took an interest, she spoke to the staff politely and with deference. She sat with Tina, whose head hurt and hurt and hurt. She held Tina’s limp small brown hand, scarred and calloused from who knew how many jobs and battles, the tip of a finger missing. Tina roused herself to say soggily that it had been caught in a machine in a box factory. She had been only temporary, so she hadn’t got anything for it. Instead she was fired. “Oh, how my head hurts. Make them give me something! Go to them and ask!”

Staff were relieved to see Connie on her feet again. She had been more work in withdrawal. Now she was not only caring for herself, but volunteering constantly. They finally gave Tina morphine or something like it, letting her drift over into doper’s heaven, that still, high place she had entered too many times before when she had been hurt and defeated. Then Tina was as gone from the room as if she had died.

“You’re doing much better,” Nurse Roditis said approvingly to Connie, and actually smiled. “Now you want to get better.”

“Oh, yes.” She forced a stiff smile. “I want to get well now.” War, she thought, I’m at war. No more fantasies, no more hopes. War.

EIGHTEEN

“If it isn’t Ms. Model Patient, knocking herself out for a kind word from Nurse,” Sybil hissed as she came upon Connie sweeping the day room.

She winced and held her tongue, but the injustice fretted her. How could Sybil lack faith? She wanted to turn and shout after Sybil’s back that when she, Connie, had tried to escape, Sybil had been scared to go with her. But Sybil had been put in isolation for helping her. Sybil was still untouched. The staff was watching Captain Cream and Tina carefully to see how their implantations worked out before they proceeded with more, even though it set back their schedule. Still, all stages were present on the ward, before, during and after: the casualties, the experiments, and the fresh material. Five thousand chimpanzees in their cages.

“I don’t dream no more,” Captain Cream complained. “How come I can’t dream? Something missing.”

Tina was high on pain killers and complained only when the magic pills were delayed.

Taking a shrewd and wary interest, volunteering for every task defined as women’s work, cleaning, sweeping, helping with the other patients, picking up clothes, fetching and carrying for the nurses, Connie tried to gauge her chance for escape. This was a fancy teaching hospital, less grim, less grimy and overcrowded than Bellevue or Rockover. Most of the patients were short‑term and all the other wards were unlocked. If the hospital could not process the patients in a couple of months, they were shipped off to state or private hospitals, depending on means. Most of them seemed to be middle‑class white people with marriage or job problems. All wore their own clothes and had doctors assigned.

This was the only mental hospital she’d ever been in where doctors actually saw patients. She had no idea what went on. The first time she’d been committed, when she belived herself truly sick, she had expected treatment. A kindly gray doctor, a sort of Marcus Welby of the mind, would sit behind a desk asking her questions in a learned but soothing voice, explaining to her exactly how she had gone wrong. She would weep and understand. Confessional. Priests that healed. But all the doctor asked in the five minutes granted her had been the name of the President, the date, why she thought she was there. Then he had told her to count backward from one hundred by sevens.

That counting backward gave her trouble. Somehow, in changing schools from Texas to Chicago, she had missed some arithmetic. Never could she figure a tip or catch the cashier at the superette cheating her, even though she would count over her change, squinting at her palm to con the cashier into thinking she knew what was going on. Let’s see–one hundred, ninety‑three, eighty‑six, seventy‑nine, seventy‑two … A pang of fear tweaked her. Shouldn’t it have been seventy? She’d done it wrong again. Seven tens were seventy; she knew that. She had gone wrong again … .

If she could get through the locked ward door, she was convinced she could escape the hospital. A guard stood on duty in the lobby, but he hardly ever stopped people. Many outpatients came and went, and furloughs for inpatients were common. She knew she could make it, once past that ward door. But because she had run away, they watched her even more closely than the others. Whenever she loitered near the door, the attendants or the nurse would ask what she thought she was doing. She ran out of excuses. Sometimes she would hang around the nursing station making conversation with staff in order to keep an eye on the door, trying to shape a plan for getting through it, but if she looked at the door too much they got suspicious. Then she would try to redeem herself by offering to make coffee for them. The doctors had their own fancy automatic coffee machine in an alcove outside the conference room. Redding drank ten to fourteen cups a day, and the secretary Patty or one of the aides or attendants made it fresh every couple of hours. The lower staff sometimes drank the doctors’ coffee, but mostly used an electric percolator in the little kitchen. Sometimes patients were allowed to used the percolator or to drink an occasional cup of coffee in the afternoon. For Connie that made a big difference, keeping her awake enough to plot and think.

“I’m sorry you didn’t make it out,” she said to Tina as they got ready for bed.

Tina did not answer for a while. Then she said in a soft, remote voice, “My man, the only man I ever loved all the way through and through. Down to the pit of my stomach. They sent him up for thirty years. It might as well be life. Twice a year I get up to see him. Fifteen minutes through a grille. He’s getting old fast there. His hair’s coming out and his teeth … It might as well be for life!”

At bedtime, as Connie was sloshing in the murk of drugged sleep, Skip walked lightly through the rooms of the ward and paused at the foot of her bed. In death his hair had grown out and he had regained his loose‑limbed grace. “Come along,” he called to her over the sleeping Tina. “Aren’t you coming? Shuffle off with me, my dearie‑o! Don’t let them steal the best of you.”

What was it, her Catholic upbringing that kept her from thinking about suicide? Just as contraception had always felt more of a sin than falling into bed. Somehow it was not in her. “I have my own way,” she told Skip, muttering on the drafty back porch of sleep in the wind that blew through the sepia screens from the cold world’s end where they piled the corpses. In the bleak moonlight she whispered to Skip. “I’m fighting too. Even now, when like you I bow, I lick their feet, I crawl and beg, I am biding my time. Wait and see what I do.”

At lunch of macaroni and a little cheese she said to Sybil, “No trust? After all this time you don’t know me?”

“How can I know my friend when I see her kowtowing to the Inquisition?” Sybil sipped her milk as if it were wine, looking down her arched and bony nose.

“We’re at war, Sybil, don’t you see that?”

“Some war! More like a massacre.” Sybil snorted. “Soon to be burned at the stake–the small stake. More cost‑effective, as the grand master says.”

“It’s a war,Sybil … . If I could get out on furlough, I know I could run for it. The city’s so close here. Once off this ward, we’d have it made! People come in and out of this building all day, outpatients, volunteers. If only I could make it to the elevators!”

“There’s a lot more coming and going, yes,” Sybil said thoughtfully, “but also more personnel. I have not yet seen the nursing station empty.”

“You’ve been watching too.”

Sybil smiled. “The volunteers, some are college girls. The hippie one who comes in Thursdays, Mary Ellen? Nurse Roditis told her that, quote, I thinkI’m a witch and go around hexing people, unquote. Mary Ellen came and asked me, quote, if I was into herbs.”

“So what did you say?” She felt close to her friend.

“I said I was into this ward, although unwillingly. But I’m interested in herbs and have done some healing with them.”

“Was she making fun of you?”

Sybil shook her head. “She told me lots of college students are interested in herbs. We discussed valerian, thyme, rosemary, comfrey. Finally she asked if I really was a witch, and when I assured her, she seemed quite pleased. She said several of her friends are ‘into’ witchcraft. She said she’s trying to secure permission for one of her friends to meet me.”

“You don’t think she was … laughing inside the way they do?”

“No, Consuelo. She’d read an herbal and cured a leg infection with lovage compresses. We had the most civilized conversation I’ve had in ages. Except for yourself, of course. I was worried about you when they had that device in your head.”

“Ah, I don’t know herbs from weeds.” She thought of Luciente feeding her that wild greenery and her mouth opened to tell Sybil. She shut it, then after a moment said, “My grandmother knew weeds to heal with. But even my parents made fun of that. It wasn’t modern and scientific–like going in the hospital and dying of an infection!”

“Imagine, college girls studying witchcraft. She said there was a class in a women’s school. I never heard of such a thing. If only I could have attended college, Consuelo … I am self‑educated. I wanted to go to school, wanted it a great deal.”

“Me too. I went for almost two years.”

“I started part time. In night school. But it was expensive. I’d have to come home quite late at night, and then get up early to go to work … . I should have continued, Consuelo. I should have had the discipline!”

“It takes more than discipline. It takes money. It takes good public transportation.”

“I wonder who teaches them witchcraft. Imagine”–Sybil’s voice caressed her ear, tickling like a warm tongue–“a secret network of covens all over New York! Imagine the bars crumbling on the windows. Imagine the doctors fainting in the halls! The locks melting and running like thin soup to the floor!”

“Don’t dawdle over your lunch, girls. Come on, make it snappy.” The orderly Tony urged them along, swinging the keys in time to his transistor. He wrapped himself in music all day to insulate himself from the hospital, the patients, the boredom. “Turn ditum, you just march it along.”

“We can imagine all we like. But we got to do something real,” Connie said plaintively. “I’m just trying to create some space by kissing up to them.”

Sybil shook her head at the expression. “If we can figure out a way, I’m willing.”

Dolly buzzed in, all in yellow. “Hi, Connie doll. Listen, I talked to Daddy. He says maybe he’ll let you visit. How about that?” She kissed Connie, wrapping her in a cloud of perfume. “He says for sure him and Adele are going to visit you here.”

“What, they need him to sign another permission?”

“He says he wants to see you. The hospital told him you’re better. Look, I brought you a real chic wig. Black, the way you said you wanted. Pues, Tнa? Give me a smile.”

Valente and Sybil and Miss Green and even Tina, nodding out a little on the bed’s edge, gathered around Dolly and her. Most of Dolly’s precious visit got wasted on the wig. The wig was put on and she was commanded, among oohing and ahing, to stare at herself. Her bleary bloodshot eyes, her chapped and bitten lips, her hospital ashiness looked out from under sleek hair curled and combed just so, black and elegant. The wig felt heavy and she sat bearing it up on her short neck like a crown.

“Dolly, please!” She clutched her niece’s arm. “Get me out of here. Let me come home to visit you. I don’t want to spend Thanksgiving here. Please talk to them about letting me come home to you for Thanksgiving. I’ll cook for you, hermana mнa. Remember how I used to? We’ll get Nita and have a real Thanksgiving!”

“Maybe, Connie. I got a convention coming up. I need the green stuff.”

“On Thanksgiving itself? I wouldn’t get in your way. I could sit in the library. I could take Nita to the movies. Or the zoo. I could take Nita to Central Park Zoo and we could give the monkeys peanuts.”

“Not to worry, Connie. Daddy says maybe you can visit him. You talk to Daddy. I wish I didn’t have to work the holidays, but that’s business. But now you look ten years younger!”

When Tina was taken off for testing, Sybil sat on her bed and sighed. “Good try with your niece. But it’s true, that wig has some use. It covers the funny hole. You wouldn’t get far without someone noticing that.”

“What good does it do if I can’t get out of here?”

She was standing in line at the nursing station the next night. “Nurse, please can I call my brother? I got the change right here.”

“Where do you want to call?”

“Bound Brook, New Jersey.”

“Calling out of state, you can’t do that.”

“But I got the change. Just to my brother. Look, see, please, he’s on my visiting list.”

“Has he been around?”

“No, but he promised.”

“Why do you want to call him?”

Your life was everybody’s business to rummage through. “I just want to talk about how his family is. To tell him I’m better. Maybe to talk about if they won’t come and see me at Thanksgiving.”

“Okay. But no trouble. I don’t want you pestering your family from here.”

There was a terrible line by the phone, nine people ahead of her. Talking to Luis was no pleasure anytime, but she had to work on him about Thanksgiving. They had to let her out for the holiday, they just had to. She didn’t give a wink for a stuffed bird; they could stuff it with dollar bills and eat it with a sauce of Arpege. But she had to grasp the chance to run, before they operated on her. That one chance skinnier than a hair, than one of her own lost black hairs.

For an hour and twenty minutes she stood on one foot and then the other, waiting for the telephone. She was sweating with fear it would be time to line up for evening meds before she ever got her hands on the telephone. Finally she dialed. Don’t let it be busy, she begged. Santa Marнa, please let them be home and don’t let it be busy and make Luis answer in a good mood, I beg of you, please!

“Hello?”

Carefully she pronounced the name the Anglo way, the way he liked it. “Loo‑is? Hello, is this Lewis?”

“Yeah, who’s this? Who am I talking to?”

“It’s Connie. Your sister.”

“Yeah?” A nice heavy silence like an avalanche of mud slid through the phone.

Desperately she forged on. “I’m calling from the hospital. They say I’m much better. Lewis, they say I’m much better and I feel really good.”

“That’s nice. You got in a good hospital now, you know that? It’s a first‑rate hospital. If they were making you pay for it, you couldn’t walk in the front door, you know that?”

“Sure, Lewis. How’s the family? How’s Adele? How’s Mike and Susan?” For an awful minute she thought she had the name of the new baby wrong. She had only been to Luis’s home once since the baby was born. Maybe it wasn’t Susan at all?

“Mike’s fine, he’s talking all the time now, give me this, give me that! He’s his mother’s kid, all right. Susan’s teething, so she squawks all the time, but she’s pretty as a picture. She’s a real blond, yellow hair straight as a ruler. She’s going to be a winner, this one.”

“That’s good, Lewis, that’s wonderful. I wish I could see Susan. I wish I could see you. How’s Adele?”

“She’s fine. She got a new foxtail coat. Good‑looking. She wanted mink but she’s going to want that for a long time, if business doesn’t pick up. It’s a bad time for the nursery business, all over. People aren’t spending money the way they did two, three years ago, construction is way down. Except for fruit trees. Lot of people are putting fruit trees in their yards in the suburbs. We’ve tripled our business in fruit trees. But that’s like a one‑time thing. People don’t buy a new apple tree every year.”

“Dolly came in to see me, she said maybe you might come?”

“Sure, Connie. Just it’s hard to get the time. Weekends are the only time and the traffic is miserable.”

“Maybe I could come to you, then … Lewis.” She almost slipped and said Luis in her excitement. “Maybe for Thanksgiving I could visit you? I wouldn’t be any work. I could help Adele. I’d love to see the babies.”

“Yeah?” He didn’t add anything, till the operator interrupted. She stuck in more coins. She had saved a good supply.

“At least maybe for a day, Lewis, for Thanksgiving, just overnight? It’s so lonely in the hospital at holiday time. A real family holiday. Everybody goes home. The doctor says I’m much better. You could talk to him, Dr. Redding. Please, Lewis?”

“We’ll see. You’d have to go back Saturday morning because Saturday night we’re giving a party. But you could help around some. We’ll have enough food to feed an army, we always do … .”

“I could help Adele cook and clean. You know I can cook real well, Lewis, remember? I can help you get ready for the party. It’s a lot of work for Adele.”

“Oh, she has a woman in once a week.”

“But for the holidays, it’s a lot of work. I can help and I wouldn’t mind going back Saturday. I wouldn’t mind at all. That would just be so lovely, to come and see you all Thanksgiving.”

“Well, we might do that. I’ll talk to the doctor.”

“Dr. Redding, Dr. Redding, please?” She was trotting alongside to get his attention. “I talked to my brother, and him and his wife, they’d take me for Thanksgiving. I could have Thanksgiving dinner with them? It would be so nice. You said I’m better.”

“Does your brother want you there?”

“He said yes. He said he did. He said I could help his wife.” She trotted alongside. “He said he’ll call you about it.”

“He hasn’t. We’ll see.” He dismissed her with a brusque nod. “Morgan, has Moynihan taken a reading on her this week? I want to keep her monitored.”

As Dr. Morgan took her off to Miss Moynihan’s EEG machine, he commented on the cologne. “Is that for me?” he said, laughing at her as if she were an idiot. “How nice!” He made fun of her all the time because he wasn’t afraid of her; she was too small to scare him the way Sybil did and Alice had.

For the EEG testing, she was taken off ward and up two floors. Always in the elevator her heart beat quickly and she imagined the opportunity of going down instead of going up, and out into the streets, whose gutters were full of the torrents of cold November rain. Miss Moynihan had made her leave her wig and purse behind, but she could still bolt if given a moment, a door.

Miss Moynihan was going to use the second room, with the ten‑track machine on her today. Connie was so used to the routine by now she sat docile as at a beauty parlor while Miss Moynihan combed apart what little hair she had and marked her targets, used the jelly and the tape to glue the electrodes on, then slapped a gauze pad over. The wires led off to the chart on a machine near her head as she lay down and Miss Moynihan slid a rolled‑up towel under her neck. Then Miss Moynihan turned the lights very dim. She had a patter she used that was supposed to relax the patients. “Now, here we go today. You’re an old hand at this by now. Just relax. But don’t you go to sleep on me. Just relax and get a little beauty rest … .”