After it was gone, the street seemed dead. The only motion was the dun-colored cloud of dust settling where the gravel road began.

  Never would have believed it, he thought, if someone had told me I’d be glad I came here.

  But how would he find the lake party? Probably just walk around the shore of the lake, watch for a bonfire.

  Swinging the gin bottle at the end of his arm, humming, he returned to Sandra’s.

  Perry hesitated on the front porch. Someone had broken the screen door; one hinge was ripped from the jamb. He pushed it aside and went in.

  The living room was the aftermath of some sort of human eruption. There was broken glass on the floor—the shattered drinking glasses. The wicker armchair was overturned. One of the pillows of the couch had been ripped—or slashed—open. The coffee table was overturned and one of its legs freshly broken off.

  Aunt June was in door to the kitchen, a sponge in her hand. Her blouse was torn, and there were scratches on her cheeks.

  “It’s okay,” she said, seeing the look on his face. “She’s quieted down now. Sandra’s with her.”

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged. “Tetty got loose.”

  2

  “There are a lot of things I don’t understand,” Perry said, attempting to eat the gooey “insta-filling” blueberry pie Sandra had insisted he take, “but mostly I don’t understand how she could have gotten loose. The way you describe the restraints—I’ve seen leather restraints like that. They look foolproof.” He forced himself to swallow a bite of the glutinous pie, wondering how it qualified as blueberry—there were no detectable berries in it.

  He cleared his throat with a long drink of milk as Sandra said, “Do I detect a note of accusation in your nephew’s voice, June?” More amused than offended.

  Aunt June smiled. Perry noted resentfully that her blueberry pie lay untouched on her plate. “He’s just protective of me.”

  “I don’t like to see my aunt clawed up,” Perry said.

  “It’s all part of the job, I guess,” Aunt June said, glancing at the ceiling. “It seems worse to you than it was, Perry. And I’ve dealt with worse. It wasn’t so bad—she gave in pretty quick, let us put her back in her room again.”

  They were sitting at the Formica-topped kitchen table, finishing dinner. They’d eaten enchilada TV dinners, mealy and suspect, like Post House food. Sandra had eaten two; Perry and Aunt June had made only token forays into theirs.

  The kitchen was long and narrow, with a blue painted wooden floor that sagged near the back porch; an ancient Frigidaire groaned beside a gas range that might have done well at an antiques auction. The walls were orange-speckled yellow tile. Over the stove hung one of the few decorations in the house, a ten-year-old calendar topped by a photo of the Space Needle in Seattle; the heat from the stove had gradually warped the photo so the Space Needle looked shriveled. Flies whipped in eccentric orbits around the dusty, spherical overhead light fixture set in the center of the cracked blue ceiling.

  They sat with their elbows on the table—Sandra gazing out the back window—between the refrigerator and the door to the porch. The back porch, where Perry was to sleep, was a recently built annex made of unpainted two-by-fours; it was a small room itself, with two glassless windows protected by screens, and an army cot. Thinking about the cot, Perry sighed. Well, the porch would be cool.

  So, then, right-ho,” Sandra said abruptly, “our charming lad would like to know how Tetty got loose.”

  It was at that moment, nettled by Sandra’s tone, that Perry decided definitively that he didn’t like her. He smiled coldly at her as she went on, “Well, I’d jolly well like to know how she got loose myself, Perry. It’s not the first time. She won’t say, except to make filthy remarks about Houdini. It’s as if someone helps her. But the windows upstairs are all nailed shut. And I never find anyone hiding in her room—and never see anyone go in or out just before she gets out. Now, I suspect that June is speculating…” She paused and looked with mock suspicion and narrowed eyes at Aunt June. “Speculating about me.”

  June laughed lightly. “Am I that obvious? I was wondering if you might be helping her. Yes—maybe doing it without consciously knowing it. ‘Forgetting’ to lock the restraints.”

  Sandra shook her head firmly. “Not on your life.” She smirked at Perry. “Tetty won’t tell me how she does it. But maybe she’ll tell our handsome young Perry here.”

  June looked at him and nodded. “It’s time he met her.”

  Perry looked from June to Sandra and back to Aunt June. “Me? Now?”

  Aunt June shrugged. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to. But we agreed, I thought, that you were going to help me.”

  “Yes, well, excuse me if it seems cowardly, but that was before you told me she was violent.”

  “She has peaks,” Sandra said, blowing smoke at the ceiling. “Peaks of agitation or something. Finding things to scream about, to hate everyone for, how she’s all put upon and we’re all preying on her and the like. And after she has a big demonstration and made a big fuss, she’s quiet and harmless for a few days. Might seem almost normal. And lucid. And let me tell you something: she’s more clever now than she was, before she started having the fits. She’s—she’s become precocious, marvelously verbal. Articulate. Making little extemporaneous speeches about things. Never used to be able.”

  “Not uncommon in certain disorders,” June murmured. “In some ways schizophrenia hones the mind.”

  “Anyway, Perry my child, she’s harmless now.”

  Perry took a deep breath and then stood; the chair grated too loudly on the floor as he pushed it aside to stand. He glanced at the windows, saw the evening’s darkness had thickened outside. It made the light bulb seem to glare. “I’ll get it over with,” he said softly.

  “Won’t you finish your pie?” Sandra asked, suddenly playing the cheery hostess.

  “No.” That was one good thing to come of this. “I want to go while I’ve got the nerve up.”

  June chuckled. “Oh, it’s not as bad as all that. She doesn’t twist her head around backward or spit up pea soup.”

  Perry shrugged, trying to appear resolved and unafraid. “Should I take a pen and notebook?”

  “No,” Aunt June said, “not this time. That would make her self conscious. And—if you mention what happened tonight, what she did… well, don’t make a big deal about it. Be casual. Don’t try to figure her out. Just be yourself getting to know a stranger. As if you were sitting by her on a train.”

  “Okay.”

  He turned and left the kitchen, walked through the living room, and climbed the shadowy stairs. “Hi!” he called, reaching the second floor. He wanted to give her warning. Best not to startle her.

  “Come in!” A high, affectedly lilting voice. Artificial sweetness, but nothing sinister. He relaxed a little. He pushed open the door to her bedroom and looked around. The room was an almost perfect square. At the front side were the two high green-curtained windows. It was almost sauna hot, but the windows were indeed nailed shut.

  Her bed was on the left. Next to it was a low robin’s egg-blue bureau with matching mirror frame, from which the mirror was missing. Atop the bureau were two yellowed doilies and a china doll old enough to be a relic from Sandra’s childhood. The walls were covered in light green wallpaper, a fading pattern of a boy and a girl climbing a hill together, carrying a pail and holding hands; in the alternating pattern they were tumbling down the hill, laughing. Jack and Jill. Here and there, long irregular swatches of Jack and Jill had been ripped away. Overhead was a rose-glass light fixture shaped like an inverted blossom.

  “Do you like my room?” Tetty asked. There was something unnervingly similar in the artificial sweetness of her tone and Sandra’s sarcastic hostess’s cheeriness.

  He nodded, smiling. She was, to his relief, not at all “mad” looking, or even mussed. It was a round, soft face, without makeup. Pale, dark eyelashes, dark eyebrows, sulky pink lips, the suggestion of a double chin.

  Her forehead was unlined. The look on her face was complacent, with a touch of I-know-a-secret in it. Her hair was brown, and very long, wavy, curling around her full breasts. She wore a pale blue, modestly cut nightgown; in her small ears dangled blue turquoise earrings. He was sure she’d just put the earrings on, hearing him come up the stairs. She reclined, halfway sitting in the bed, under a sheet, pillows bunched behind her neck and shoulders. She had her legs tucked under the blue sheet—and her wrists. So he wouldn’t see the leather restraints at her wrists and ankles. Probably a loop about the wrist too, all of it connected to the metal bed frame that was bolted to the gray wooden floor.

  “I guess you like blue, huh?” he said, sitting in the creaking, straight-backed wooden chair just out of reach of her hands (out of reach, if she should sit up rigidly, and make a grab for him….)

  “You noticed! Absolutely! And you’ve got blue eyes.”

  He squirmed in his chair a little. He waited for her to say something crazy, but she didn’t.

  “Oh, I’ve embarrassed you!” she said, as if saddened. “I’m sorry, truly I am.”

  “Hey, no problem. More girls should notice my eyes.”

  “Right!” She beamed at him. “Your name’s Perry?”

  “Uh-huh.” He was staring at a small bruise on her right cheek. It looked fresh. Had Sandra walloped her? Probably had to. “And you’re Tetty.”

  “Some call me that. Mom claims it’s a British variation of Elizabeth, but I don’t see how. Anyway, I don’t like to be called Elizabeth. It’s too formal sounding.”

  He noticed other things, now. Her bed was under the roof slant; the wall slanted toward him at a forty-five degree angle. It made him nervous: it was as if she were in a sort of cave looking out at him. And in the stifling heat, the claustrophobic closeness of the room, he almost choked on the room’s scents: perspiration, the sour of a sheet not changed often enough, a hint of menstruation, all wrapped up in the cloying odor of an aerosol room deodorizer. And the chains at the corners of the bed, and the way she kept her hands very, very still so the shackles wouldn’t make a clanking sound when she moved, made his own brow bead with a sudden oily sweat.

  “You need a fan or something up here.” Perry said. It seemed cruel to leave her in this pocket of heat. “An air conditioner.”

  “Oh, no. I don’t want a fan. I don’t like drafts and…” She watched her fingers tugging a thread from the sheet, and then shot him a sidelong smile. “You came to help your aunt?” To help your aunt psychoanalyze me.

  “I came to be, um, kind of a secretary. But mostly I’m a musician. This is a temporary job.”

  “Really? Did you bring an instrument?”

  “A mandolin. Easy to carry on a long trip. Usually I play guitar.”

  “Will you play the mandolin for me sometime soon? Tonight? I get awfully bored and lonely. I broke my CD player.”

  “Sure, absolutely. I’d like that”

  “I’ll bet you’re wondering about me.”

  She fixed her pale green eyes on him, unblinking, waiting for his answer.

  “Um—” It would be useless to lie. “Oh, naturally. Maybe—” He swallowed. “Maybe you oughta, you know, tell me your side of it before they tell me theirs. They haven’t really told me anything. Except that you—well, the downstairs is, um—”

  “I don’t think I’ll tell you, really, my version. You wouldn’t believe me.” She smiled thinly. “And if you tell me that you might believe me, I wouldn’t believe you.”

  She was right. He probably wouldn’t believe anything she said. He shrugged.

  “They’re going to tell you,” she went on, twisting a lock of hair with a finger, looking more abstractedly at him now, “that I tried to kill a boy because he snubbed me. And some stories about my playing with a knife, and some other things. Lots of other little things.” She, said it dismissively, sounding utterly sane. “And it’s peculiar: but the truth is in between. They’re right and then they’re not.”

  “Things are like that a lot.”

  “They’ll pretend it started with Dr. Rofocale. My mom thinks I don’t know she’s getting up a big lawsuit against him. She’s hoping she’ll clean up on that one. But it didn’t start with Dr. Rofocale. It started two years before and that’s why he picked me out. Because he had another patient who knew me before and told him something about me that made him interested. Something that told him I was just born with the Genetic Sub-B3 in me. Maybe he let it go free, though. But that’s his job, really.”

  “Let what go free?”

  She didn’t reply immediately. She seemed to sag back in the bed, and Perry had the uneasy impression that the slanted wall, an attic ceiling actually, was somehow taking on greater weight and presence, threatening to fall in on them. He shook himself, and the feeling passed, only to be replaced by another strange feeling: something buzzing, flying past his head—though there was clearly nothing there at all. Like remembering a fly.

  “What’s the matter?” she said. “You look funny.”

  “Oh—felt a little weird for a moment. It’s gone.”

  She nodded, slowly. And then made a soft snorting sound. “Okay, you asked me about Dr. Rofocale. He had a best-selling book. It was to, you know, teach you to resist intimidation, to assert yourself, find your true feelings and act them out. Sort of like est or Lifespring but more… more intelligent, I think. And a little more specialized. A lot of people were turned off by the follow-up book. It opened up a whole new frontier. It’s called Ego Truth. Took Ayn Rand five steps farther. Really gutsy stuff, you know. He had guts to publish that last chapter. I don’t know if you—”

  “Haven’t read it.”

  “You sure you didn’t see a review, even? They tended to harp on the bits about ‘genetic destiny’ and the, um, ‘Inner Superman’?”

  “Not even a review, sorry. I read, but not book reviews.”

  “Yeah, the book reviewers picked those phrases out, and made it sound as if he was racist.” She laughed softly. “Racist! Rofocale has exactly the same attitude toward all people, regardless of their race, creed, or religion: they all belong to him.”

  Startled, Perry said, “Oh… yeah?”

  “I don’t mean he believes in ruling the world or something—he simply believes in Guidance… a kind of benign domination—dominating as many people as possible, as thoroughly as possible, in order to establish a Growth-oriented Social Context. And he believes that there is an Inner Superman in everyone, see, and some people are genetically destined to realize that Inner Superman. Regardless of race—that’s very important. It’s transracial. Or super-racial. He’s found black people and Spanish people with active Sub-B3s in them. The external race doesn’t matter.” She reeled all this off with a kind of patronizing boredom. No fanatic’s excitement. “Basically, you can draw out that inner person with a kind of meditation on the ego. You can liberate it, see. And it will do more than change your personality and make you stronger and smarter. It makes other changes too.”

  On an impulse, Perry asked abruptly, “It makes changes—like making you violent? So that you break things and claw my aunt?”

  He expected her to react angrily, to become shrill. But she only shook her head sadly. “That’s just what happens when you interfere with the Pilot’s development. If they didn’t try to stop her, there’d be no violent reaction. She has her own infancy and it takes her awhile to learn how to push the right buttons in the world.” She laughed softly at herself, shaking her head. “I know, some of what I said sounds like delirium.” She looked at him earnestly. “But it’s only because I’m using jargon you don’t know. Rofocale’s. When I say her, I’m not speaking of a split personality, even if I’m talking about another part of myself. I’m thinking about my true self. The ego truth.”

  Perry stood up, stretched, trying to look receptive. Trying to look like he wasn’t unnerved. “Well, frankly, it sounds like the usual cultism to me. Like the Moonies or Dianetics but with different terms. And Rofocale sounds like a megalomaniac.”

  “He doesn’t seem that way when you meet him. He’s charming and genteel.” She shrugged. “Well, you’ll meet him, soon.”

  “Yeah? Maybe he’ll give me a different, uh, perspective on it. Anyway, I’ve got to go.”

  “Hey.”

  A subtle tension in her voice made him turn back to her. “Something … something I can get you?”

  “Yeah. You can come back a little later and play for me.”

  “It’s pretty late. But tomorrow, for sure.”

  “Oh, if you play for me tomorrow, I won’t hear you. See, I’ll be dead.” She looked at him blankly; she’d said it like I’ll be on a plane out of town.

  “What?”

  She toyed with an earring, her expression bland. “I’ll be dead, tomorrow.”

  He smiled, and then couldn’t keep the smile up any longer. “Look, if you’re afraid you might want to—”

  She fluttered a hand dismissively. “I don’t mean suicide. I’ll just—I’ll be dead. That’s all. Nothing tragic. But you can play for the Pilot. For her. She’ll make you play for her.”

  Well, there it is, he thought. Just when you’re convinced she’s not crazy after all. And she hits you with that.

  He wanted to go downstairs, and she was playing games with him. He couldn’t completely keep the anger down. “Look, hey—you’re not going to be dead. And this ‘she’ll make you play for her’ stuff …” He shrugged. “I think you’re trying freak me out. Forget it. Won’t work. I don’t believe in possession.”

  “Possession? It’s not possession. I’m not possessed. I’m not real, is what it is. She’s real. What you see now, what you’re talking to, that’s all a lot of… a kind of … What do they call those mechanical arms they put on people who—”

  “Prosthesis. I think.”