"Yes, I do," I said directly.

"Well, I could tell ya," he replied in a slow, laconic tone. "But then I'd also have to hit the big red switch here that opens up the cargo doors… and that would purely drop the pod right out the bottom of the airplane again. And y'know, those things hit the ground a lot harder when there are no chutes attached. Tell ya what-why don't we just say you were picked up by the Blue Fairy… ?"

"I get the picture," I said. "Thanks."

"Yer welcome, I'm sure. Over and out."

Siegel looked at me, eyes wide. So did the others. I returned their curious stares with a noncommittal shrug and a grim shake of my head. "I dunno. Your guess is as good as mine-"

"Boy!" said Siegel, with exaggerated respect. "Those fairies can be mean!"

-actually, my guess was a whole lot better than theirs. I just wasn't going to voice my suspicions aloud.

We fell silent then, each of us lost in our own private thoughts.

Mostly, we thought about Reilly and Willig and Locke. Valada began weeping softly, Lopez put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close; she comforted Valada the best she could, even though she still looked pissed as hell herself. Siegel just curled up inside the shell of his own frustration and sulked: I thought about other things. I'd handle my grieving later. In private.

There was a thing I'd learned in the Mode Training. What you resist, persists. If you don't let yourself experience something, you stay stuck in it. You drag it around with you. It's incomplete. If you let yourself experience it-truly experience it, not just take it out and process it and play with it and tell the story one more time, but truly experience it-then all the energy you've invested in it is discharged, and the whole thing is finally over and done with. It stops chewing at your consciousness and just disappears into the past.

I didn't understand what Foreman was talking about for the longest time, but when I asked him to explain it, he just said not to worry. "In life, understanding is the booby prize. Just sit with it-" he said. "You'll get it."

So I sat. Later we did an exercise, a process, an exorcism, call it what you want. Whatever. There wasn't any wrong way to do it. All you had to do was be in the room and listen to the instructions. The instructions were to think about all the terrible things that everybody had ever done to you. Think about all the betrayals, all the frustrations, all the rejections, all the manipulations and con games, all the times you'd been dominated and controlled and abused-all the times you'd been beaten up and beaten down.

Foreman and his assistants had prowled up and down the aisles, whispering, cajoling, stroking, murmuring, suggesting, prodding. "Who hurt you?

"Who struck you? Who injured you? Who knocked you down and held you down and made you cry? Remember the moment? Remember what it felt like?

"Think about the employer who made all those promises to you, the one who always knew all the right things to say, the one who turned out to be a hypocrite and a bully and a vindictive coward-wasn't he just the same as the school-yard bully who used to harass you every day, picking on you and teasing you until you didn't even want to get up in the morning and go to school? Remember what your crime was? You were funny-looking or stupid or wearing the wrong clothes or just not one of the in-crowd

"Oh, here's one. Think about your lover. The one who hurt you so badly. The one who left you for someone else because he or she liked fucking someone else more than he or she liked fucking you. Think about all the people who have left you. Think about all the times you never got a chance to say good-bye-or get even.

"And what about your mother and father? Don't you have some feelings about them? Some unfinished business perhaps? Some anger or grief? Something you still can't forgive?

"Think about all the crimes that have been committed against you-and all the crimes you've committed in response. You've been holding all that anger in for how many years now? And when it does come out, doesn't it explode in your face? Doesn't it come out at the wrong time? Isn't it always aimed at the wrong person? You know why? Because you've been suppressing it all your life-all the anger, all the fear, all the grief

"Do you know how much energy it takes to hold it in? It takes all the energy you've got. It takes your whole life. Well, right now, I'm telling you to let it out. That's right. Let the tears flow. Let them come. Let it all come up. Just let it flow and flow and flow. Now's your chance to express everything you've been resisting all your life-"

And we did. I did. I surprised myself. I didn't think I had that much pain in my life. I thought I had handled it all. I thought I was handling everything well. Only here and now, in the middle of the of the Mode Training, the incredible emotional whirlpool of tears and rage, it all came flooding up like the dark oily blood of the shambler nest. Everything was soaked, drenched, submerged, and ultimately drowned in the all-pervasive goop. The noise of all that energy releasing, all that pain and sorrow and madness-it was what Dachau must have sounded like.

There was more to the exercise, a lot more. One by one, as we reached the peak of our emotions, we were led forward to a great empty place-I was handed a club and given a chance to bash away at a huge towering mannequin. At first I felt silly and embarrassed, but then the mannequin started speaking to me. It was crudely animated, and its lip movements didn't even match the voice that came bellowing out of it. But then it started saying those terrible things, all those terrible words. It spoke with both a man's voice and a woman's voice, it was all the voices at once of all the people in the world, and it was saying all the hurtful things that had ever been said. "You're not good enough. You're not big enough. You're not strong enough. You're not good-looking enough. You're not talented enough. You're not smart enough." And I took the club and bashed and smashed and thrashed, I went at it like something possessed, obsessed, so furious with rage, I didn't know what I was doing, my mind was gone somewhere else, and all that was left was pure, the physical elemental spark of being, expressing the one thing it truly felt-the urge to kill-and I beat upon the mannequin until it collapsed weeping on the floor, and I collapsed weeping too, spent and drained and sprawling. helplessly across it, then the next thing I remember, I was being helped to my feet by the nurturing team and sent gently into the next part of the process, a mindless circling walk, a herdlike emptiness, all of us together, as each of us finished the violent part of the process, exercise, exorcism, call it what you will, we were sent here to circle and walk it off, sent to come down on our own, parachuting into pink mindless bliss, circling like vacant madmen and madwomen shambling through bedlam. Circling until we recovered our verbal selves enough to smile helplessly, tears still streaming down our cheeks, eventually, somehow, recoveringbut feeling different, changed, transformed.

Later, much later, after this part of it was over-after we were feeling clean and whole and deliciously new and empty, I asked Foreman, "What happens now?"

"Now?" he asked. "Now you start filling yourself up again with new problems. Only now, because you've enlarged yourself, they're going to be much larger problems-and you'll handle them and grow to handle the next set of problems, which will be even larger."

"It never ends, does it?" I protested feebly.

"Yes, it does," he said.

"Oh, good-when do I get to that state?"

"When you die." He laughed. We all did. Even I laughed. The joke wasn't just on me, it was on everybody. But he was right. It never ends, it just goes on and on and on, until you die. And that's the most frustrating and angering thing of all-that it doesn't matter how many goals you score, the game of life is still called on account of darkness. His phrasing, not mine.