“Yeah. Personality is a prosthesis for the crippled true self. But people who have the Sub-B3 aren’t crippled. Not when it comes out, asserts itself. Not possession. Emergence.”

  He forced a smile. “Okay. Well, I can’t absorb all this at once. I got to go. But I will play for you, tomorrow. Promise.”

  “Anything you say.” She stared at him with eyes like green stones, and went on quickly, before he could leave. “You notice there’s no decorations downstairs?”

  “Yeah. I saw a picture—of you, a couple of little statuettes of some kind.”

  “But they’re not up on the wall. I won’t stand for things up on the wall, see. Images on the wall I mean. It imposes on my identity field.”

  “Uh-huh.” Out of here.

  “You think that’s selfish? It is. You think it’s compulsive? It’s not.”

  “No?” Out of here!

  “But listen: once I was sitting, meditating on some things that Dr. Rofocale gave me to meditate on. Not East Indian meditation, you know—more like just deep thinking about a thing, and picturing it. And then, at the end of the exercise, I made my mind clear, and empty, and receptive. That’s what he wants you to do—like you make your mind into a blank blackboard waiting for someone to write. Or make it like a sky, waiting for something to fly through it. That’s closer. And after that, the Sub-B3 woke. You should try it, see if you have it too.”

  He nodded, just as if he understood. He looked at the window, then forced himself to look back at her. Sandra’s tacky kitchen downstairs was a paradise. He yearned for it. He was suddenly aware that it was now very, very dark outside, and that beyond the buildings around the house were the pine woods and the desert. The desert and the artificial lake. A stark, rocky desert of broken black stone from ancient volcanos, sere but itchy with coldblooded life. And he wondered how he’d come to this hot, musty room, caught in a social eddy with this broken girl … and trying to ignore the something he could never quite see, buzzing—subsonically, never completely audible—around his head, like one of those big, impudent summer flies. Probably it was dizziness from fatigue, from heat … .

  “You make your mind like an empty sky,” she went on, her eyes closed, “like there’s no limits to you, no skin or bone to define where you are and where the things around me are, but you’re not trying to merge into the world, like a Buddhist—you’re trying to make it merge into you.” Her eyes snapped open, flicked toward him. She seemed uncertain, for a moment. “Only, you, uh …” Her voice trailed off. She stared into the middle distance, her eyes going out of focus.

  “I’ll play for you tomorrow,” he said, to break the awful silence.

  Blinking, she came back to him. “You said that before,” she said teasingly, once more smiling and casual. “I hope it’s true.”

  “See you later.” He hurried through the door and clown the stairs; hurrying, but careful not to run.

  “Even when she said those things at the end,” Perry said quietly, almost whispering, “she didn’t sound really—well, anyway her tone wasn’t crazy.”

  “What she said about her death,” Aunt June said, “is not part of the pattern I projected. I don’t understand where it fits.”

  “Suicide, I guess.”

  “I doubt it. More like some kind of hysterical bid for sympathy from you. She’s smart enough to make it more real seeming by being very cool about it. All the same, I’ll keep an eye on her. Check up on her now and then.”

  They were sitting on the cot, on the back porch. A breeze so gentle it was hardly there ghosted in through the screened windows, bringing the perfume of pine and roses from the backyard. Moths ticked at the naked light bulb burning in the slanted ceiling overhead. The light spilled yellow from the house onto the withered back lawn, and made it look like beach grass.

  “Looks like Sandra doesn’t water the lawn much,” Perry remarked.

  Aunt June said, “Umm. She’s, let the whole place fall apart. And the food she eats—she used to cook. She really ought to make some kind of effort. Sandra’s changed. Maybe it’s what happened to her daughter. But it’s more fundamental than that. She seems to have no faith at all. Except in money and men. And only the most cynical sort of faith in those things.”

  “Do psychiatrists usually talk about faith as if it’s a good thing?” Perry asked.

  “Oh, don’t be so damned smart for your age.”

  “Hey, you going to tell me what happened to Tetty?” Perry asked, a burr of impatience in his voice. “Or not?”

  Aunt June exhaled long and windily through her nose. She stretched her arms out in front of her, fingers laced together, cracked her knuckles, and shrugged. “I don’t know yet exactly what happened. It seems to have been triggered by this Ego Truth therapy; she was quite normal except she was painfully shy, and someone gave her Rofocale’s first book, and then she met one of his—his patients. Or whatever he calls them.” Her voice was dry with irony. She rubbed her eyes, looking suddenly bent and weary. “And, uh, the ‘patient’ took her to meet Rofocale and in a remarkably short time after she started the therapy—he’s got some kind of clinic out in the desert, near here—her personality changed. Or, rather, she seemed to have turned it inside out. Everything that was on the inside bubbled up to the outside. She started saying anything that came to her mind at all. And I mean anything. If anyone annoyed her in the slightest, she hit them with a barrage of obscene language like you wouldn’t believe. But it wasn’t like an uncontrolled outburst, Sandra claims. And it wasn’t like she was testing people. Sandra says it was sheer arrogance. What it really was, I don’t know yet. Then Tetty seduced one of the teachers at the high school, and blackmailed him for two months before it came out. She was expelled from school and he was fired. There was also some teenage boy she tried to seduce—apparently with no subtlety at all. She developed an obsession with him. Had to have him or it was the end of everything. He rejected her, and she poisoned him. He lived through it, and talked his parents out of prosecuting.”

  “Poisoned him? And she gets out all the time? Hey, I’m eating at the cafe after this.”

  “It might be wise to do just that. Especially after”—she lowered her voice—“sampling Sandra’s cooking. Tetty couldn’t make it much worse even with coyote poison.”

  “Coyote poison?”

  “Coyotes are a real problem for the ranchers around here. That’s what she used on the kid: coyote poison. Anyway, the boy’s little sister found out it was Tetty who poisoned her brother, and she confronted Tetty … and Tetty cut her a little with a knife, trying to scare her so she wouldn’t tell. But that terrified the girl so much she had to tell everything. The sheriff came around, and Tetty shot him in the leg, and shot out his car windows, with Sandra’s handgun. Sandra got the gun away from her and they committed Tetty to the state hospital, for a while. But Sandra thought they were just sedating her and not doing anything else for her, ‘turning her into a Thorazine vegetable,’ so …” She took an exaggeratedly deep breath. “So Sandra managed to get Tetty remanded to her custody. Anyway the sheriff didn’t see any point in prosecuting either, because it was clear that Tetty was ‘crazy’ and she was already in an asylum at the time. And the court would just make it official. Also I don’t think he wanted the details made public.” She smiled. “How he hid under his car after the shooting started and shouted for help. It was a minor wound and the gun was only a twenty-two, you see.”

  “And when was all this?”

  “A few months back. She got out of the hospital about six weeks ago. She’s been in restraints ever since. Sandra had a nurse for awhile, helping take care of her part-time, but she quit. She didn’t say why, she just walked out, called in to say she was resigning, and hung up.”

  “Jesus.” He shook his head in amazement. “That babyfaced girl upstairs did all that? But then, after we talked awhile … she didn’t get violent, but the way she talked was … even her voice actually changed. Not a whole lot, not like a ‘Sybil.’ But it was there.”

  “Uh-huh. I should warn you that Sandra wants to sue Rofocale, and she may want you to testify about what Tetty said to you today.”

  “Tell you the truth, I don’t think I mind. I have the definite impression this guy Rofocale is responsible for what happened to Tetty.”

  To his surprise, Aunt June shook her head. “1 don’t think so, except that he may have triggered it. It would have come anyway, I think. She’s got it naturally.”

  “Got what? Sub-B3?”

  She blinked. “What’s Sub-B3?”

  “I don’t know. Something she said was part of her. Was always part of her … What’s she got naturally?”

  “Tell you”—she stood, yawning—“tomorrow. It’s too much to go into now. I’m going to go and hit my couch. No jokes about psychiatrists and couches.”

  “Okay. Uh, Aunt June … Suppose Tetty decides to go roaming again tonight—”

  “No way. I locked her in myself this time. I still think Sandra was ‘forgetting’ to really lock her restraints.”

  “Oh. Good. Great. Well hey—good night.”

  “’Night.”

  Perry stretched out on the cot, and just lay there, as if he’d decided to sleep in his clothes. He lay impatiently, listening until—not quite twenty minutes later—he heard the regular susurration of Aunt June sleeping in the living room. He swung off the cot, grabbed his mandolin by the neck, turned out the back porch light, and went out the rear screen door, wincing at its creak. The darkness had shed its Halloween masks; now, it was simply the silky mantle of a warm summer night. Somewhere, wrapped in that mantle, was a girl all of gold.

  Crickets sang and dogs barked in the distance; the highway hummed with the occasional car. He strode confidently out between the houses and along Second Street to Pine. Just before Sandra had gone to bed he’d quizzed her with studied nonchalance about the route to the artificial lake and the little housing project on its shores. Pretending he was going to go there on some dull afternoon.

  Why, he wondered now, had he been so secretive about going to the lake party?

  Sandra. She would have made some acid comment about it.

  “The hell with her,” he muttered. And then, louder, shouting it to the trees and the silent, darkened houses. “The hell with her!” He smiled, listening to the echo.

  He turned onto a dirt road that wound between two stone posts and through a stand of Joshua trees and mounds of volcanic rock. The only light, now, came from the waxy half-moon and the fiercely white stars. And a few lost flickers of light from one of Jasper’s taverns lingered red between houses and tree trunks.

  He walked on, listening to the rasp of his tennis shoes, enjoying the solitude and the coolness … and feeling only a fraction uneasy, when the last of the light from Jasper was completely swallowed by the trees and the boulders crowding more and more thickly about the road.

  Gradually he became aware that there were rustlings in the clumps of yucca and sage and that something in a bristling group of cacti was making a low funereal clicking sound. It occurred to him that he might have misunderstood the directions. He might be getting himself lost. Spend the night in the desert, with the rattlers and scorpions. Stumble around the next day dehydrating.

  He was carrying his mandolin by the neck, holding it like a towncrier’s bell. He switched hands with it and began to pluck out a tune. It was a tune made from pieces of the night around him, weaving all the mystery and uneasiness in the desert darkness into an orderly, harmonious pattern. Out of uncertainty, the certainty of musical structure. Reassurance.

  He stopped playing when he came to a fork in the road He looked from one branch of the fork to the other, chewing his lower lip, trying to remember. “She said bear left, didn’t she?” he muttered.

  “Play again,”came a soft voice from the trees. Soft, but somehow infinitely piercing, that voice. A voice that travels up the spine before reaching the ears. It sounded almost like—

  “Tetty?” he called tentatively, peering through the darkness into the trees.

  He saw no one, heard nothing more.

  He decided that he had misheard some night-calling bird … and then he saw the bird.

  It was, maybe, a horned owl, gray, but a trick of the light made it seem translucent as it flew from one pine tree to the next, high up in the branches, losing itself in the shadow. He’d had just a glimpse against the stars: a flurry of gray, an impression of a small pallid face. Maybe one of those owls with the white faces …

  He heard, then, the buzzing noise, that unseen fly dive bombing his head. There, and—gone. Mosquitoes.

  He hurried on, taking the left-hand path, and was relieved to see, two minutes later, a light flickering between the evergreen boughs. The road narrowed, then switched off to the right, and abruptly he had broken from the trees onto the bank of the reservoir.

  The lake was oval, a mile long and a quarter mile wide at the middle. It was glassily motionless tonight, reflecting the stars and the half-moon; the trees along the shore looked like smoke in the night-shuttered reflection. To the left, about a hundred yards along the shore, just around the high arc of the oval, was the yellow-red flutter of a bonfire. Across the lake, opposite, were the geometrical lights of the housing project, rows of streetlights, muted glows in rectangular picture windows and floodlights on front doors.

  Perry took a deep breath and walked toward the bonfire.

  Suppose Lois was sitting with a group of her friends, deep in conversation? Should he interrupt them and sit beside her? No, he couldn’t. He pictured her looking up at him and smiling politely, a little regret in her face telling him she had invited him impulsively and was sorry he had come.

  This sort of anxiety making his fingers tight on the mandolin so the strings nearly cut into his skin, he walked into the circle of light around the fire.

  Dammit, he thought, I should have brought some beer or something.

  There were eight teenagers, and one woman in her middle twenties cradling a sleeping infant in her arms. Four boys, including one of the boys from the Land Rover. A Styrofoam cooler held ice water and a few cans of Olympia and Bud Lite. The group sat in a circle around the bonfire yawning, talking quietly, nudging, laughing softly when the logs spat sparks at someone, making him lurch back.

  A couple of them looked Perry over carefully, then shrugged and murmured a noncommittal “Howdy.” Perry said, “Hi.”

  He was surprised at hearing no music, until he noticed girl scowling over a boom box, fumbling with the batteries. Two girls sitting beside Lois passed her a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and after waving at Perry, she took a long swig. She gasped and winced; she wasn’t used to hard liquor after all. The two younger girls wore jeans and sweat shirts. They pretended not to see him but kept watch on him with sidelong glances, chiefly looking to see if he were looking back at them. Both were about fifteen, bleached blond, heavily made up; they smoked long thin Virginia Slims ostentatiously, holding them high between trembling fingers. Probably they were even less used to smoking than Lois was to drinking. Perry felt himself put at ease by their naiveté.

  Lois stood, just a little shakily, and walked over to him. He plucked absently at his mandolin, pretending to gaze thoughtfully into the leaping yellow bonfire. The fire was built on a concrete rim that—for reasons to do with the reservoir, he supposed—completely enclosed the lake’s bank for some quarter of its circumference.

  “Mis-ter Perry Strand,” Lois said, standing near him, fighting for balance. “I’m glad you’ve brought your mandolin. Our boom box’s busted.” She offered him the Jack Daniel’s.

  Pleased that she’d recollected three-fourths of his name, at least, Perry took the Jack Daniel’s and downed what must have been at least three neat shots. His stomach wanted to howl in outrage. But the night shifted subtly around him, and he was a man of wax melting in the heat the bonfire. “Whoa,” he said, in a comically high voice. He handed the bottle back to her as she laughed.

  He smiled, trying to think of something to say. But the firelight was dancing on her hair. Her smile quivered like a moth on a blossom.

  She said, “You got a funny look on your face. That stuff make you feel sick?” ,

  “No, uh-uh. Just thinking I’m glad I met you.” And then he winced, thinking, Real Smart, you’re going way too fast for her.

  But her smile widened. “Boy, you don’t waste any time—but that’s okay with me. I had a feeling about you.” She flushed herself—he saw it distinctly—and looked at his mandolin, to change the subject. “I wish you’d play that thing.”

  “You may wish I hadn’t, pretty soon. But here goes.” He shifted the mandolin in his grip, began to trip out a tune. The old Stones’ song “Lady Jane.” He’d found that girls responded to it. And Lois hummed along with it, swaying slightly. He watched her as he played. She looked more golden than ever in the firelight. He could see its uppermost flames reflected in her deep amber eyes. And beyond her it made a bright leaping like a shamanistic dancer in the dark mirror of the lake water. He played other tunes, sixties things she knew the choruses to, and she sang clumsily but unself-consciously along, and there was something sexy about that, about singing badly without caring.

  The music and the golden girl beside him and the sparks burning out in the air over the crackling pine logs and the perfumes of wood sap and sage and even the scent of the bourbon … all of it turning ponderously to create a hurricane’s eye between them, a partial vacuum, so that he had to follow the path of least resistance, had to move closer to her … until he brought “Pretty Woman” from art to life: he bent and kissed her, just as the last notes of the tune faded.

  She kissed him back.

  After that—he was never afterward sure how the transition came about—they were sitting on her sleeping bag, on the bank a little ways off from the fire, lazily slapping at mosquitoes and talking in alternating bursts, first he and then she, about their lives. She wanted to study anthropology, maybe teach one day. She was interested in Indian culture.