Her head felt wrong as they put it in. Everything felt wrong. Maybe it would feel right again. They were closing with cement. A temporary measure. They said they wanted to monitor the reading for a month or two, they might want to change the chemical she was being fed from that dialysis bag. They kept their options open with a cement plug.

Afterward she had a massive headache. Even her teeth seemed all to ache. She did not want to move. She did not care about anything. She lay in her bed and through half‑closed eyes she ignored the patients and nurses passing on the neurology ward.

After they moved her back to her own ward, for a week she lay numb and uncaring. Acker came and talked to her. He tried to get her to perform tests and answer questions, he brought his charts and what she always thought of as his children’s games. Why should she answer? They were waiting for her to heal before they played with her, she felt.

Skip, who was being a good patient, brought her food on a tray. Politely, he did not look at her, more nude than if her clothes had been taken away.

Tina read her the newspaper, tried to start conversations. Sybil came in and sat patiently, let her alone and then returned, hoping. Tina’s voice, rising like an indignant wasp, buzzed at her. She could not want to talk. She could not care. She was a spoiled orange rotting green. The only person she cared to watch was Skip as he came and went, sweeping the ward and running errands for the attendants and the other patients. He was dressed in his street clothes and his hair had grown short and patchy. He looked younger and older than he had: younger in his angularity, his new awkwardness; older in the wary lack of expression on his face. She felt his will all the time like a knife he was carrying concealed, and she envied him for retaining his will. She wondered, when she could bring herself to think at all, how he preserved the power of his will hidden inside.

They had decided to operate next week on Alice. They felt they knew just what tissue in her brain to coagulate now, where to burn a hole in what was called Alice. Then she would have her electrodes removed, they promised, just like Skip. They were tired of playing with Alice, who had become sullen and passive. At times she giggled a lot, she seemed drunk and slaphappy, sitting on the edge of her bed. Then she slumped into a blank depression.

Skip now had grounds privileges. He went to the canteen and brought back doughnuts, danishes, candy bars, cigarettes for any of the patients who had the money. The doctors had their own coffeemaker near the meeting room, and even the patients were sometimes allowed to make coffee in the afternoon in the small kitchen the lower staff used. Dolly had come by to visit her right after her operation, but had not been allowed in. Dolly had deposited some more money for Connie. Connie pretended to order sweets from the canteen with the others. Remembering Luciente’s urging, she withdrew change for an order but then quietly told Skip not to bring her anything. Seventy‑five cents at a time, she was accumulating capital for escape. That much energy remained to her.

Wednesday Dr. Redding announced to Skip loudly, so that all the other patients could hear, that Skip was being granted a weekend furlough. He could go home to his parents from Friday night through Sunday afternoon. Dr. Redding rolled out the pronouncement with conscious drama, saying that if Skip proved he could handle himself, this was the first of many furloughs, the first step back into society. They were all to envy Skip; they all did. The doctors were almost done with Skip, unless further surgery should prove necessary, a little phrase they added.

Skip said he was grateful and he’d show them he could handle a visit home. He drooped there, no longer graceful under his shorn hair that spoke of the barracks, of the army, and looking Redding in the eyes, he told him how good he was going to be, how he was their cured and grateful little boy.

She felt a strange pang, like something plucked in her.

Friday, as Skip was organizing himself to go home and waiting for his parents to come to collect him, she got up for the first time since her operation, except for walking to the bathroom and back, and put on her robe. Shaking, she tied the loose cord and stumbled off to the men’s side. She sat down on Skip’s bed and waited for the dizziness to clear. She wasn’t allowed to do that, but the attendants hadn’t appeared yet.

Skip looked at her with bloodshot weary cautious eyes. “Hello, monster,” he said softly.

“Hello, monster,” she said back, and smiled for the first time since before her operation. “There’s too little of you and too much of me.”

“Can you feel it inside?”

“I feel rotten. Snowed.”

“I admire you for trying to get away, you know? I wish you’d made it.”

“If I get a chance, I’ll try it again,” she mouthed softly.

“But … with that thing in your head, you might die.”

“Maybe it’ll just wear out its batteries or whatever it runs on and give up. Use up the drug. I know a guy, Otis, who has a metal peg in his knee from Vietnam.”

“I think maybe something in the brain’s more dangerous … . But why not go down trying?”

“You’re going outside today.”

Skip grimaced. “Home with my loving parents. Back from the factory where they sent me for repairs, on a trial basis. Like if it’s broken, get it fixed. If it’s crooked, get it straightened out. If it’s kinky, iron it.”

“But you still got a will to fight them, I can feel it.”

“They won something. I don’t feel like fucking anybody. Or loving anybody. I don’t feel any love at all. I feel like a big block of ice.”

Tony walked by whistling, saw her sitting on the bed, and came in. To avoid his touch, she rose. “Take care, Skip.”

“I mean to take care.” He gave her a mirthless grin. Then he kissed her lightly on the mouth. “You keep trying.” His lips were cool and hard. Shyly she kissed him back.

Tony made obscene smacking noises. “Come on, break it up. No PC. They fixed you okay from being a faggot, but you’re crazy anyhow!”

As quickly as she could move on her heavy waterlogged legs, her dizzy body riding its private stormy weather, she lumbered back through the ward to her own bed.

Sunday night Skip did not return. By Monday the rumor crept through the ward as fast as patient could whisper to patient. Sunday morning early, Skip had slit his throat with an electric knife in the kitchen of his parents’ home. They had hidden the razor blades, the sleeping pills, the aspirin, but they had not thought of the electric carving knife.

Sybil murmured to Connie that she had heard that his father had been angry at Dr. Redding and called him a quack. They felt it was unacceptable for the hospital to send Skip home to kill himself in their kitchen.

She got up from her bed and moved wearily around the ward, with Sybil at her side. Drs. Redding and Morgan were right thinking they had cured Skip, she thought, fighting the tilting aisle. Before he had only been able to attempt suicide, cries for help carved on his body. They had cured him of fumbling, of indecision. They had taught him to act, they had taught him the value of a quick clean death.

FIFTEEN

“Sha! You’re the sharpest piper I ever gaped!” The woman was propped on the bed surrounded by mirrors–mirrors on the ceiling, the back of the bed, and one side.

Connie stood flatfooted in the center of the windowless room, staring. She had tried and tried to make contact with Luciente, but she had been unable to feel her presence all day. Finally, in a stubborn fury she had cast herself forward, demanding that Luciente receive her.

The woman’s hair, stippled mauve and platinum, was arranged in an intricate tower of curls and small gewgaws, dripping pearls like a wedding headdress. She wore a long dress of slippery substance that changed color as she moved and emitted a tinkling sound; it was slit away up the side and cut out here and there so that her breasts occasionally peeked out or her navel appeared and reappeared. When Connie had materialized, the woman had been lying back on a mound of ball‑shaped pillows smoking a pipe and chewing what looked like orange marshmallows from a small bowl on the hairy coverlet. The room was air conditioned cool.