“Stop it!”

There was a silence. Susan blushed deeply.

John said, more gently, “I don’t want you to forget what I am.”

“As if I c-could!” She thought about leaving. She wasn’t sure her legs would hold her. “How can you know all that about me?”

“Because you’re a book. Not just you, Susan. Everyone. A book of gestures and twitches and blinks and grimaces.”

“Do you want me to be frightened of you?”

“Only … appropriately frightened.” He added, “I’m sorry.”

Gradually, she relaxed back into her chair. “Do you still want to talk?”

“Do you still want me to?”

She took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“To you, or to Max?”

“Talk to me if you want. But only Dr. Kyriakides can help you.”

“If in fact he can.”

“If.” She didn’t want to risk lying—assuming it was possible to lie to him.

“It’s a game of chance, then, isn’t it? Roulette.”

“I’m not the doctor.”

“You’re the doctoral candidate.”

“It’s not exactly my field. I never worked directly with Dr. Kyriakides on this, except for a few tissue studies.”

He shook his head. “I’m not ready to talk to Max.”

“Then me. Talk to me.”

He gave her another long, speculative look. Susan could not help wincing. My God, she thought, those eyes! Not the windows of the soul … more like knives. Like scalpels.

“Maybe it would be good to talk,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I talked to anyone.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Susan said.

She asked whether he had been having symptoms.

“Episodes of fever, sometimes dangerously high. Transient muscular weakness and some pain. Fugue states—if you want to call them that.”

“Is that what was happening yesterday?”

He nodded.

“I don’t know what you mean by a ‘fugue state.’ ”

He sipped his cappucino. “May I tell you a story?”

The formal research project had ended when John was five years old. He was adopted by a childless couple, the Woodwards, a middle-income family living in a bleak Chicago suburb. The Woodwards renamed him Benjamin, though he continued to think of himself as John. From the beginning, his adoptive parents were disturbed by his uniqueness. He didn’t do especially well in school—he was contemptuous of his teachers and sometimes a discipline problem—but he read beyond his years and he made conversation like an adult; which, the Woodwards told him, was very disrespectful.

“Jim Woodward was a lathe operator at an aerospace plant and he resented my intelligence. Obviously, a child doesn’t know this, or doesn’t want to admit it. I labored for almost eight years under the impression that I was doing something terribly wrong—that he hated me for some fundamental, legitimate reason. And so I worked hard to please him. To impress him. For example, I learned to play the flute. I borrowed a school instrument and some books; I taught myself. He loved Vivaldi: he had this old Heathkit stereo he had cobbled together out of a kit and he would play Vivaldi for hours—it was the only time I ever saw anything like rapture on his face. And so I taught myself the Concerto in G, the passages for flute. And when I had it down, I played it for him. Not just the notes. I went beyond that. I interpreted it. He sat there listening, and at first I thought he was in shock—he had that dumbfounded expression. I mistook it for pleasure. I played harder. And he just sat there until I was finished. I thought I’d done it, you see, that I’d communicated with him, that he would approve of me now. And then I put the flute back in the case and looked at him. And he blinked a couple of times, and then he said, ‘I bet you think you’re pretty fucking good, don’t you?’ ”

“That’s terrible,” Susan said.

“But I wasn’t convinced. I told myself it just wasn’t good enough, that’s all. So I thought, well, what else is there that matters to him?

“He had a woodworking shop in the basement. We were that kind of family, the Formica counters in the kitchen, Sunday at the Presbyterian church every once in a while, the neighbors coming over to play bridge, the woodwork shop downstairs. But he had quality tools, Dremel and Black and Decker and so on, and he took a tremendous amount of pride in the work he did. He built a guitar once, some cousin paid him a hundred dollars for it, and he must have put in three times that in raw materials, and when it was finished it was a work of art, bookmatched hardwood, polished and veneered—it took him months. When I saw it, I wanted it. But it had been bought and paid for, and he had to send it away. I wanted him to make another one, but he was already involved in some other project, and that was when I saw my opportunity—I said, ‘I’ll build it.’

“I was nearly thirteen years old. I had never so much as touched his woodworking tools. ‘Show me,’ I said. He said, ‘You’ll never manage it. It’s not a beginner’s project.’ I said, ‘Let me try.’ And I think now he saw it as his big opportunity … maybe this would teach me a lesson. So he agreed. He showed me how to work the tools and he gave me some books on luthiery. He even took me to lumberyards, helped me pick out decent woods.”

John paused to sip his cappucino. “I worked on the guitar that summer whenever he was out of the house. Because it was an experiment—you understand? This would be the communication, he would see this and love me for doing it, and if he didn’t—all bets were off. So I took it very seriously. I cut and sanded, I routed the neck, I installed the fretwire and the tuning machinery. I was possessed by that guitar. There was not a weekday afternoon through July or August I was out of the house. I was dizzy with lacquer fumes half the time. And when he came home I would hide the project … I didn’t want him to see it until it was ready. I cleaned the tools and the workshop every day; I was meticulous. I think he forgot about it. Thought I’d given up. Until I showed it to him.”

Susan said, “Oh, no.”

“It was perfect, of course. Max probably told you what his research had suggested, long before it was fashionable science—that the neocortical functions aren’t just ‘intelligence.’ It’s also dexterity, timing, the attention span, the sense of pitch, eye-hand coordination—things as pertinent to music or luthiery as they are to, say, mathematics. Jim Woodward thought he’d found a task that was beyond me. In fact, he could hardly have picked one I was better suited to. Maybe that guitar wasn’t flawless, but it was close. It was a work of art.”

Susan said, “He hated it.”

John smiled his humorless, raw smile. “He took it personally. I showed him the guitar. The last varnish was barely dry. I strummed a G chord. I handed it to him … the final evidence that I was worthy of him. To him it must have been, I don’t know, a slap in the face, a gesture of contempt. He took the guitar, checked it out. He sighted down the neck. He inspected the frets. Then he broke it over his knee.”

Susan looked at her hands.

John said, “I don’t want sympathy. You asked about symptoms. This is relevant. For years I had thought of myself as ‘John’ while the Woodwards were calling me ‘Benjamin.’ After that day … for them, I was Benjamin. I became what they wanted. Normal, adequate, pliant, and wholly unimpressive. You understand, it was an act. They noticed it, this change, but they never questioned it. They didn’t want to. They welcomed it. I worked my body the way a puppeteer works a marionette. I made up Benjamin. He was my invention. In a way, he was as meticulous a piece of work as that guitar. I made him out of people I knew, out of what the Woodwards seemed to want. He was their natural child—maybe the child they deserved. I played Benjamin for almost three years, one thousand and eighty-five days. And when I turned sixteen I took my birth certificate and a hundred-dollar bill James Woodward kept in his sock drawer, and I left. Didn’t look back, didn’t leave a forwarding address … and I dropped Benjamin like a stone.” He took a sip of cappucino. “At least I thought I did.”