As she stood in line for medication, she felt like singing out with joy when she saw the little white cups with the pills inside and the cups of water. No more liquid Thorazine burning her throat hoarse. She bit hard on her cheeks to keep her face immobile. This ward meant less snowing. The line moved so slowly she had time to cover her joy, to crush it into a small corner where she could preserve it intact until she had a chance to examine it in safety. Yes, here her head would be clearer. Not today. She was new on the ward and the nurse watched closely as she took the pill. Afterward she walked slowly through the new ward, slowly as inmates always do. She remembered being horrified by that the first time she had been brought here. The drugs caused it, the heavy doping; but also the lack of anyplace to go and the time, the leaden time, to use up.

Sedately she walked through the sleeping room and into the day room. Here she would get the small exercise of walking, but she must be careful not to make it obvious she was pacing. That was an offense that would go in her record: patient paces ward. Here there was more to do but also here would be informers, spies.

She walked onto the porch. It was chilly, but she did not care. She had caught a glimpse of a coat supply in a closet near the nursing station, which meant at least some patients had grounds privileges. She pressed her face to the rusty screen and stared at the trees just leafing out, the benches, the lawns. She would be real cool, real cooperative. How she wanted to walk on that grass below! Her move down to G‑2 must prove to be a small step closer to getting out altogether–closer to the big free open daylight out there.

FIVE

Connie sat on the porch with a towel around her shoulders for warmth. The chilly drizzly June day smelled like a basement under the low gray sky. She was so glad to be outside, even on the porch whose rusted screens gave a sepia wash to the walks and brick buildings, that she did not care if her behind hurt from the chill of the warped floorboards. She felt a keen enjoyment too of being alone for the first time since isolation. No one else had come out in the damp and the cold.

She gloried in breathing outdoor air, in seeing more than four walls, in smelling trees instead of medicine and diarrhea and disinfectant. The gray of the day soothed her. Strong colors would have burned her eyes. Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for voices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing in the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.

She felt Luciente pressing on her clearly for the first time since they had let her out of seclusion: not those brushes of presence that rose and faded but the solid force of concentration bearing around her. She resisted. To sit on the porch was still new, in a convalescent pleasure like the first time out of bed after a long illness. Still, she felt Luciente pressing on her and it was like, oh, refusing to answer the door to a friend who knew she was at home. How could she think of Luciente as a friend? But she had begun to.

“Me too, in truth,” the voice formed in her mind. “I’ve missed you.”

“Why don’t you take shape? Nobody’s out here but me.”

“Shut your eyes. Let’s go into my space. Today, in my year, the weather is better.”

“Do you control the weather?”

“The sharks did in the 1990s–pass the term. I mean before us. But the results were the usual disasters. It rained for forty days on the Gulf Coast till most of it floated out to sea. Let’s see, the jet stream was forced south from Canada. They close to brought on an ice age. There was five years’ drought in Australia. Plagues of insects … Open your eyes.”

They were standing in Luciente’s hut in sun streaming through the south window, which was open and covered with a fine‑mesh screen. “You must still have mosquitoes!”

“They’re part of the food chain. We bred out the irritant … . About weather, when it gets disastrous, sometimes we adjust a little. But every region must agree. When a region is plagued by drought, grasp, we usually prefer to deliver food than to approve a weather shift. Because of the danger. We’re cautious about gross experiments. ‘In biosystems, all factors are not knowable.’ First rule we learn when we study living beings in relation … . You’re looking thin!” Luciente reproved her, leaning close.

“You say that like it was bad. Isn’t thin beautiful to you? I’ve been dumpy for three years. Not that I don’t look as lousy as I feel in that bughouse.”

“Jackrabbit is thin beautiful. Bee is big beautiful. Dawn is small beautiful. Tilia is creamy orange beautiful.” Luciente nodded at her cat, who stood up expectantly. “Tilia told me you’re stupid, and I explained that people of your time did not talk with cats.”

She remembered the orange cat stalking away. It stared at her boldly now, with malice she felt. “People of my time talk to cats, dogs, hamsters. To parakeets and goldfish. Lonely people talk to the wall. Listen, the bughouse is full of women who started talking to the Blessed Virgin Mary because their old man wouldn’t listen.”

“I mean in sign languages. For instance, Tilia and I talk sign language based on cat signs but modified–because many things must be said between cat and human different from what is said cat to cat.”

“Oh? What do you talk about? The taste of raw mouse?”

“Much is simply expressing affection, anger, disappointment. I want, Tilia wants. Fish, milk, yogurt, to go out, peace and quiet, catch the mouse, don’t touch that bird. Groom me. Let me work. Tilia does have a strong aesthetic sense and comments freely on flimsies and even on costumes. The last coverlet for the bed Tilia loathed and buried so persistently–that shit‑covering gesture–that I had to trade it for another.”

“Could you speak to her now? Ask her if she believes in God or what she thinks about public nudity.”

“You don’t believe me!”

“Either you’re putting me on or you’re crazier than I am.”

“I’ll teach you how to meet a cat. Cats are formal about introductions. I got flack last time. Look Tilia can express feeling puffed. If Tilia takes a flying leap onto my chest at first dawn from the top of the wardrobe, I get a clear notion that cat is dissatisfied with my conduct.” Luciente squinted, held her eyes shut for a few seconds, opened them again, squinted again, repeating the whole sequence, and then looked pointedly away. “This is how you meet a cat if your intentions are friendly. If you mean harm–for instance, you are approaching a cat standing over the body of a local chickadee–then you stare hard, you glare.”

Connie sank on the broad bed, giggling. “You look … ridiculous.”

“To a cat I presume I always look ridiculous. Awkward creatures by comparison, waddling around in clothes. Come!Talking is ridiculous to animals who commune through scents, colors, body language–all our minute posturing with the tongue and lips and teeth.” Luciente made a wide‑eyed pleading face. “Come on, just do it once and we can get on with the day’s exploring. Just do it and get it over with.”

“You want me to make faces at your cat?”

“Just be introduced. Tilia thinks you’re hostile.”

“All my life I been pushed around by my father, by my brother Luis, by schools, by bosses, by cops, by doctors and lawyers and caseworkers and pimps and landlords. By everybody who could push. I am damned if I am going to be hassled by a cat.”

Luciente looked back levelly with her eyes like black beans. “Person must not do what person cannot do. Let’s go. No,” she said to Tilia and reached out Tilia stalked to the door, raised a paw, and slashed at it. Luciente let her out and on the far side of the screen door she paused and buried the house and its inhabitants with that gesture of disdain.