2:10 pm
MR James Memorial Hospital

“Tiresias is blind, of course,” said Brittany absently, sketching something in the notebook that lay open on her lap. “Because in classical mythology, all prophets are blind.” Her eyes were still fixed on the clock; her hand moved the pencil across the page as if of its own accord.

Matilda glanced up nervously, trying to summon the courage to take a peek at the notebook. It never did to let Brittany catch you looking at her doodles. And God forbid you ever ask her about them. Sometimes Matilda wondered whether she was even aware of drawing them, or whether it was just another of her unconscious nervous habits, like peeling the labels off of soda bottles, or braiding any tassels that came within her reach, or fiddling with Janis’ lighter until someone finally took it away from her. Some people, Matilda thought, some people just never seem to know what to do with their hands.

“Cassandra wasn’t,” said Stephanie.

“If they’re not born that way,” Brittany continued. “Then they become that way. Eventually.”

Matilda turned her head and peered surreptitiously at the notebook, then caught her breath. Brittany had been drawing wolves.

“Cassandra wasn’t blind,” Stephanie said again.

“It’s virtually an occupational hazard,” Brittany said. “Like lumberjacks, don’t you know. And their missing fingers.” Her hand suddenly convulsed around the pencil and she glanced down. Matilda looked away quickly, her heart pounding. When she dared to look back, Brittany had dropped the pencil and was flexing her fingers stiffly, as if they hurt her. She was gazing up at the clock again.

“Jesus,” she muttered. “Is that clock slow?”

“Nobody ever listened to her,” said Stephanie. “But she wasn’t blind.”

Matilda risked another peek at the notebook.

No, those weren’t wolves. They were dogs. They had to be. Brittany wasn’t a great artist, but she was competent, and no way were those supposed to be wolves. Their tails were all wrong, for one thing, and they weren’t shaggy enough. Apparently Brittany hadn’t been happy with them when they’d caught her eye, though: now she picked up her pencil again and began scribbling over them in tight spiraling loops.

“Is Evelyn still in surgery?” Janis asked, edging her way around Jim on her way into the waiting room. She threw a handful of packets of potato chips onto the table. “The vending machines were out of everything else,” she said. “And there was a line at the payphones.” She sneezed three times.

“Claude and Susan went to find out,” Mark told her. “And to get their blood done. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?”

Janis shook her head. “No,” she croaked, groping for a new tissue. “No. I want to stay here with Jill.”

“Jill?”

“I mean the other one,” she said hoarsely, and blew her nose. “Evelyn.” She coughed and blinked blearily around the room. Brittany was staring at her, clenching a pencil in one hand so tightly that it looked as if she were trying to break it. Oh no, Janis thought. She must know that I just dumped Chris. God knows how, but that must be it.

“What?” she asked. Brittany closed her eyes and slowly shook her head.

“I can’t believe that we’re really going to be stuck here for Thanksgiving,” Mark said again. Janis wished that he’d just shut up about that. He had been obsessed with the subject ever since they had first heard that rumor an hour or so ago.

“I don’t think that can be right,” Matilda said. “Are they even allowed to do that? Wouldn’t that be unconstitutional or something?”

“Hello, hello.” Elgin bustled through the door, beaming vaguely at all of them. He was wearing his own plastic wristband, and he carried a Zabar’s bag. “I have doritos,” he announced pleasantly. “And Mr. Pibb.”

Stephanie cast a despairing look at Mark. He shot back a look that Janis was almost certain was intended, along with the quick irritable shrug, to convey the message: But I didn’t call him! Apparently she believed him this time; she quickly transferred her suspicious scowl to Brittany.

“Has everyone rendered unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s?” Elgin asked the room at large. “Have we all been good?” He smiled fatuously as he began to unload his junk food. “Brittany, my dear,” he said. “Did you know that your favorite poet is here?”

“I knew I smelled something,” Matilda murmured.

Janis stared at her.

My God, she thought. Matilda has wit? That didn’t bode well. Her days as Brittany’s lapdog were numbered. But then she ruined it completely by looking around the room and explaining tentatively:

“You know. Because Brittany’s favorite poets are all, like, really old? And dead?”

“Oh, Matilda, no!” Brittany cried in dismay. “Never explain. My dear!”

“Who’s here?” Janis asked.

“Claudia Teck.”

“Elgin, please,” begged Mark. “Please don’t get her started on Teck. Please.”

“No, do,” Janis urged maliciously. “Tell us, Brittany, just what is it that you don’t like about Claudia Teck again?”

Brittany fixed her with a speculative stare, then slowly smiled.

“Well, for starters, darling,” she said. “Claudia Teck is the most appalling arriviste.”

Janis opened her mouth, looked at Brittany’s raised eyebrow, then smiled and shook her head.

Nope, she thought. Not biting. No way. Sorry.

“I gather,” Elgin explained, seeming inordinately pleased with himself, “that she came to read to Jill.”

“That’s not fair,” Janis objected. “How come she gets in to see Jill? She doesn’t even know Jill.”

“And,” Elgin continued. “She signed one of her books for me.” He pulled a copy of Cats Who Have Known Me... out of his backpack and held it up as evidence.

“Since when do you like poetry?” Mark asked him.

Elgin blinked and frowned. “Well,” he said slowly. “It is a first edition.” He blinked again, then smiled patronizingly at Mark. “It’s a collector’s item, my dear boy.” Mark shook his head and lay down on the couch.

“It’s a collection of poems about cats, Elgin,” Brittany informed him. “Whimsical poems about cats. Whimsical poems that rhyme. About cats.”

“You’ve read it then, have you, Brittany?” Janis said.

“She has a copy of it,” said Stephanie. “I’ve seen it on her bookshelf.”

Brittany glared at her, then turned her attention back to Matilda. “So why don’t you start the first paragraph," she said, "with—”

“Oedipus Rex, eh?” said Elgin, peering at Matilda’s paperback, and then, just as Janis had feared he might, burst immediately into song: “There once was a man named Oedipus Rex, you might have heard about his odd complex...”

Stephanie cast an anguished look around the room.

“Elgin,” Janis said firmly. “Evelyn is in surgery right now. We’re waiting to find out if it went okay. We’re all very worried about her.”

Elgin stopped mid-verse and blinked at them. “Oh,” he said. He sat down. “I brought doritos.”

“Don’t I want to say anything about Oedipus’ pride?” Matilda asked. “His, um, his hubris?”

“Oh, darling, please.” Brittany sighed and rolled her eyes. “Not the dreary old tragic flaw, no. Not only is it quite possibly the dullest reading you could possibly choose for this play, but it’s also nothing but a mistranslation in the first place.”

Janis looked curiously at her. “I didn’t know you read Greek.”

“I don’t,” Brittany told her. “I read people who read Greek. You can’t imagine how much time that saves.”

“Hubris isn’t really pride,” Janis explained to Matilda, who looked confused. “It’s...the word in Greek doesn’t really mean that at all. It’s a complicated concept, and it has a lot more to do with violence than with pride.”

“Violence?”

“Yeah. Hubris is...it’s when you leap to the violent solution first, without recourse to other options. Or when you overwhelm others with behavior that’s...” She struggled to translate the concept into English. “Needlessly aggressive, or forceful, or overbearing. It’s when you just bulldoze right over people without any consideration for them, when doing that isn’t really necessary. That’s what hubris is. It’s acting like a tyrant. It’s not so much pride as it is a particular type of power madness.” She reached for a tissue. “When Aristotle wrote about Oedipus’ hubris,” she told Matilda, sniffling. “He was talking about...well, like that scene with Laius’ shepherd, for example. You know the one I mean?”

“Your translation calls him the herdsman,” Brittany told Matilda.

“That scene towards the end?” Janis blew her nose. “Oedipus calls for the shepherd, or the herdsman, whatever—he calls for him to be brought before him, and he’s talked to the poor guy for maybe three seconds before he’s ordered his guard to seize him and starts threatening him with torture. You remember that? Well, that’s hubris. You see a lot of it in the way he treats Tiresias, too. It’s behaving with a kind of lack of regard for others. It’s more about tyranny, really, than it is about pride.”

She wiped at her nose, then looked up to see Brittany eyeing her with a kind of reluctant and wary and resentful respect.

“Well,” she said apologetically, and shrugged. “I am a classics major, you know. And I like the play too.”

“Yes.” Brittany laughed nervously. “One of Sophocles’ better ones, don’t you think? Such a refreshing lack of deus ex machinam.”

“Machina,” Janis said, without thinking. “Ex takes the ablative.”

Brittany blinked, then flushed a deep pink. Her eyes narrowed behind her glasses.

“But that herdsman,” Matilda said quickly. “I mean, look, about that herdsman?”

Brittany transferred her gaze downwards, then smiled.

“Yes, Matilda?” she said.

Janis exhaled. Thanks Matilda, she thought.

“The herdsman is keeping a secret.”

“Yes, darling. But he’s a herdsman with a secret. Oedipus is a king.”

“The tenor of the threat is completely inappropriate,” Janis agreed. “The poor bastard is practically wetting himself already, just from having to talk to Oedipus. It’s overkill.”

“Ah.” Elgin, who had been listening to the conversation in silence, now held up his pointer finger. “But the question is, now,” he said. “Is it effective?”

“Oh, absolutely, darling,” Brittany told him. “Brutally so. But that’s just the problem, really. It is effective. And while efficiency may be awfully useful in real life, in a Greek tragedy—well!” She laughed. “Once we see him behaving like that, we just know that the herdsman isn’t going to tell him anything that he’s going to enjoy hearing. There’s a logic at work in these plays, you know. And it isn’t a very nice logic.” She smiled faintly then, a dreamy and malicious smile. “Not a very nice logic at all.”

“Divine justice,” Matilda suggested.

“Oh, heavens no.” Brittany looked alarmed at the very thought. “Not justice, Matilda. Not justice at all. Not justice,” she said, “but—”

“Did everyone get their cards?” asked Elgin and then, in response to their blank looks, held his own up for display. It was printed on bright pink cardstock, with a computer-generated sticky label affixed to the front. “They’re in all our mailboxes,” he explained. “Giving appointment times for blood testing at the Student Union.” He chuckled. “Poor Jens. He actually waited on line this morning, along with the rest of the hoi polloi in the gym. The perils of good citizenship.” He shook his head complacently, then blinked at Stephanie, who was shaking her head at him and rolling her eyes meaningfully towards Jim.

“What?” he asked.

“I think what she’s trying to tell you, man,” Jim commented, never once looking up from his horoscope, “is that you don’t need to use an article with ‘hoi polloi.’ ‘Hoi’ is the article. It means ‘the.’” He placed a ruler carefully across the wheel he was generating, and drew a straight line bisecting it. “So when you say ‘the hoi polloi,’" he said, "that’s just, like, totally redundant. You dig?”

Mark snickered, and Janis bit down hard on her lip. Elgin looked around the room, perplexed.

“Well,” he said. “It’s all Greek to me.” He laughed generously at his own joke and reached over to open the bag of doritos.

“Do those cards say anything about how long the blood testing is going to go on, Elgin?” Mark asked from his supine position on the couch. He had thrown one arm over his face to shade his eyes. “We aren’t really going to be stuck here over Thanksgiving, are we?”

“Afraid it is beginning to look that way,” Elgin told him cheerfully. “That’s the word, anyway.” He screwed open the two liter bottle of Mr. Pibb. Brittany looked up at the clock again, shook her head, sighed, and slipped her hands under her glasses to massage her sinuses.

“Oh, no!" Matilda wailed. “But I can’t stay here. My parents are expecting me!”

“A bit of a relief for me, I must say,” said Elgin, munching some doritos. “I loathe Thanksgiving.”

“I love Thanksgiving,” Mark said despairingly. “Love it.”

Brittany removed her hands from her eyes and looked over at him. She smiled thinly.

“Thanksgiving at the Phillips residence,” she mused. “Oh, my goodness, yes. I can just see it! How idyllic. Mother wears pearls in the kitchen, just like June Cleaver, and while the paterfamilias watches football on television, she putters about, fretting about the turkey becoming too dry. She makes those little candied yams, doesn’t she, darling? She must do. The ones with the marshmallows on them?” She squinted thoughtfully at Mark. “And her brother’s family always comes over,” she continued. “The Petersens, or the Andersens, or the Gundersens, or the—”

“Yeah, all right,” Mark said. “They’re Andersens, okay?”

“The Andersens, then. They’re all just as perfectly blond as can be. Pater Andersen is the one who carves the turkey, by long-standing family tradition—a sort of a sop, don’t you know, because his Volvo is just not quite so new as the one in the Phillips driveway…”

“Knock it off, Brittany,” Janis said.

“Yes, very well then,” Brittany sighed. “Let's just forget the Andersens’ Volvo, then, shall we? Certainly they wish they could.” She laughed. “There’s always far too much food to put away afterwards, and no one eats any of the pumpkin pie, which is a source of the greatest trauma to dear Mrs. Phillips, although of course she’s much too...well, too pearl-wearing to say so. And then, after dinner, Mark and his brother, and his little sister Muffy, and all of the blond blond cousins just pile out into the front yard to have a snowball fight in the early Wisconsin winter, while the family dog—who has some human name, I’m sure—Sally, perhaps? or maybe Lucy—the family dog runs about, kicking up snow and barking. She’s a golden retriever, isn’t she, Mark. The dog.”

“She’s a yellow lab,” snapped Mark. “Actually. And my sister’s name is not Muffy.”

“No?” Brittany shrugged. “Oh, well,” she said. “All the same. It does sound nice. What a pity that you’ll be stuck here with us. Turkey roll,” she told him, with relish. “The reconstituted kind, with that almost marbled pattern, you know, where the slurry was pressed into place. Glutinous yellow gravy. Powdered mashed potatoes. Cranberry jelly still bearing the imprint from the seam of the aluminum—”

“What do you care?” Stephanie said harshly. “You won’t be here.”

They all stared at her.

“What?” asked Mark.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Stephanie shook her head wildly. “I don’t know. I just...for a moment I thought... I thought...” She stared helplessly at Brittany. “Brittany,” she said. “Oh my God. Brittany..."

“Good lord, Mark.” Brittany rolled her eyes. “You really should put her to bed. She’s beginning to babble.” She bent down and began speaking softly to Matilda, pointing to something in her paperback.

“Brittany...”

“Guys!” Claude was breathless with excitement as he trotted into the waiting room, cotton ball pinched tightly between his thumb and pointer finger. “Guys. You will never guess who’s here.”

“Claudia Teck,” said Mark.

"Brittany..." Stephanie began again.

“Aw, dude.” Claude turned to Elgin. “You told them? I wanted to tell them.”

“Brittany!”

Brittany let out an exasperated sigh and sat up, throwing a dark look across the room.

“Yes, Stephanie?” she said sweetly. “Was there something that you were trying to say?”

Stephanie stared at her for a moment, then shook her head.

“No,” she said, in an odd, colorless little voice. “Nothing.”

“No. I didn’t really think so.” Brittany bent down to Matilda again.

“We couldn’t find any of the doctors,” said Susan. “It’s totally crazy out there. But the nurse at reception said that Evelyn was still in surgery.”

“That’s not bad,” Mark said quickly. “That’s good. If they’ve kept her in this long, that means that she’s reacting well to everything, and so they’re able to take care of a lot of stuff while they’re, um...you know.” He struggled for a polite wording, finally settled on: “In there.” Stephanie winced.

“She’ll be fine, sweetie,” Susan told her. “Hey, check out my bracelet.” She showed it to Stephanie. “I got a blue one,” she explained. “But Claude got magenta. I wonder what the color coding means.”

“It’s a ruse,” Elgin suggested. “It’s designed to distract your attention, so you don’t notice the embedded microchips.” They all stared at him. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve spent the morning listening to radicals.”

“Yeah? Well, I can believe it.” Jim shook his head and punched a few numbers into his calculator. “I can’t believe you guys are actually falling for that story about the water supply.” He scribbled something down on the horoscope he was working on. “Can’t you see how, like, totally bogus that is?”

“Sure, man.” Claude sat down next to him on the floor. “And when the National Guard guys show up at our door with their guns because you haven’t given blood? I’ll be happy to listen to you explain to them all about how bogus their story was, and how smart you were not to fall for it.” He picked up the paperback that he had left splayed open to mark his page. “Power trumps knowledge, man,” he said. “Always has, always will. You just gotta roll with that sometimes.”

“Whoah,” Jim said suddenly. “This is weird.”

“What’s weird?” Elgin rose to his feet and wandered across the room. “Astrology!” he exclaimed, looking down at the charts. “Oh, come now. You don’t really believe in that, do you?”

“What’s weird,” Jim told Janis, ignoring Elgin completely, “is that you’re right on the cusp, Janis. I mean, like exactly.”

“So?”

"Well, it’s just weird, that’s all. For the sun to be right on the line like that? To a single degree?”

“Is it?” Elgin bent over to look at the chart. Jim pointed to something on it.

“You see? Right there, on zero degrees?”

Elgin examined the chart for a moment, then chuckled.

“Actually,” he said, straightening. “I estimate the chances as precisely one in three hundred and sixty.” He smiled smugly. “Hardly all that unlikely. And the chances of the sun falling there are exactly the same as its chances of falling anywhere else. My dear fellow, it’s simply a circle. You see that, don’t you? And there are twelve degrees that qualify as—what did you call them? Cusps? So actually, the chances of any given variable falling on one of those degrees...”

“Yeah,” said Jim. “But what’s weird about it, I mean, like, really weird, is that I just did one of these with the sun in exactly the same position.” He leafed through his charts. “Brittany.”

Brittany jumped.

“What?” she asked.

“You were also on that exact same cusp. Right between Gemini and Cancer.”

“Really, darling?” She rolled her eyes. “How terribly fascinating.”

Matilda frowned and looked up at her. Brittany had a disdainful smile fixed on her face, but her hands were trembling slightly.

“Oh, yes, I see.” Elgin smiled tolerantly. “It’s much like the chances of two people in the same room having the same birthday. Which statistically speaking, is far more likely than most people realize.”

“For that matter, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?” asked Janis. “Your birthday is June twenty-first, Brittany?”

“The twenty-second,” Brittany said quietly. Matilda glanced down at the notebook in her lap. Brittany had sketched a pair of Doric columns while they had been discussing the play; now she was drawing something else, hovering in the air above them. A face. No, two faces, in profile, facing outwards from the same head. Right, she saw it now. The two columns were like the symbol for Gemini, and now Brittany had added the twins themselves. Clever. As she watched, Brittany began scribbling something at the bottom, at the base of the two columns.

“It’s different days different years,” Jim explained.

“You’re dealing with three hundred and sixty degrees of a circle,” Elgin reminded her. “Rather than the three hundred and sixty-five days of a year. So naturally, that makes the probability of two people in the same room happening to fall on the same point even more likely. So you see,” he concluded triumphantly. “It isn’t really all that peculiar at all.”

“You’re a Virgo, aren’t you?” Jim asked him. “I can always tell Virgos.”

“I’m a Taurus,” Stephanie said. Everyone ignored her.

“Statistically speaking as well,” Elgin pointed out, “more people are born in the summer months than at any other time of the year. After all, if you think about it,” he expounded, gesturing with his pipe, “there is an obvious biological advantage to—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Elgin,” Mark snapped from his couch. “We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore, you know.”

“So what does that mean, anyway?” asked Janis. “Being on the cusp?”

Jim shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess you get to take your pick. Which would you rather be: a Gemini or a Cancer?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well.” Jim took a deep breath. “Would you rather be a Mercurial Gemini—you know, like, clever and inquisitive and expressive and adaptable and highly verbal and good at information gathering...”

“But also,” Susan pointed out. “Superficial and ratiocinating and self-centered and duplicitous and way too easily distracted...”

“Or,” Jim said, with a dark look at Susan. “Would you rather be a Lunar Cancer like Susan here? You know, moody and secretive and insecure and overemotional...”

“But also,” Susan said, kicking him. “Sympathetic and kind and protective and resourceful, and fiercely loyal to family and friends?”

“Which is crunchy and which is smooth again?” asked Claude, not looking up from his book.

“That’s my choice?” Janis shook her head in disgust. “I have no idea. Do I really have to pick between them? I mean, that’s even worse than virgin or whore. Can’t I be both?”

“You want to be self-centered, duplicitous, insecure and over-emotional?” Claude asked.

“Hey.” Janis shrugged. “Sounds like a way to get ahead in life.”

Matilda watched as the scribble at the base of the two columns became quite clearly a pool of water, out of which a crab was crawling. She smiled. It was just like the Moon card in the Rider-Waite tarot deck that she’d bought for herself only two weeks before. Except, of course, that the dog and the wolf were missing. Which was kind of a relief, really, Matilda thought, and glanced nervously upwards, but Brittany didn’t seem to be paying much attention either to her or to the conversation. Her gaze was fixed once more on the clock. As Matilda watched, she began joining the two columns together, making a wall between them, delineating blocks of masonry with basic rectangular shapes.

“You do realize, of course,” Elgin was saying, “that the gravitational pull of the doctor attending the birth would have a stronger influence on the child than the gravitational pull of the sun.”

“Yeah,” Claude said. “Now me? My doctor’s in Aries.”

“Not to mention the gravitational pull of the mother...”

“You are a Virgo, aren’t you?” Jim asked him. “You refused to answer me before. That’s the reason, isn’t it? Because I guessed right. Come on, man. ‘Fess up.”

Elgin smiled patiently and then, apparently finding something about his pipe that required his immediate and absolute attention, turned away to fiddle with it.

“I’m a Taurus,” Stephanie said again. “But I have Cancer rising. And my moon is in...” She glanced down at her horoscope. “Leo. And my Mercury is in...”

“Oh dear,” sighed Brittany. “They did have to discover nine planets, didn’t they? How grateful we all must be for the invention of the telescope. No, no,” she added quickly. “I was interrupting, wasn’t I? I’m terribly sorry, Stephanie. Do tell us more about it, won’t you?”

Matilda watched as Brittany drew a jagged crack down the center of the wall. It was now, she saw, more like a dam. The pool from which the crab crawled was forming at the foot of the crack in the dam, where the water was leaking out, and the two columns served as the dam’s vast pylons.

“Don’t mind her,” Susan told Stephanie, who had fallen abruptly silent. “She’s just cranky because she was born on a cusp. That can happen, you know. It confuses people. They end up not knowing quite what they’re supposed to be.”

“Cusps are kind of weird things,” Jim agreed. “They’re like transitional, you know? Like last night.”

Brittany’s hand stopped moving for a moment.

“Last night?” she repeated.

“Yeah. Last night the sun was getting ready to move from Scorpio into Sagittarius. You can get some pretty weird shit, you know, when things are changing.”

“Last night was kind of a weird night, wasn’t it?” Matilda said hesitantly.

“Was it?” Janis asked.

“Cusps are like that,” said Jim. “It’s like a door opening, you know?”

Brittany shuddered. She looked down at her notebook, stared at it for a moment and then, in a single convulsive gesture, ripped the page out of the book and crumpled it hard in her hand. Matilda, sitting at her feet, started.

“I take it,” Brittany said harshly, rising abruptly to her feet. “That Evelyn has lost the child.”

Everyone looked up.

“What?” Janis asked.

“Evelyn was pregnant?” Claude said.

“Whoah,” said Jim.

“All right.” Stephanie stood up suddenly, her face flushed. “All right,” she said. “I’m sick of this.”

“Stephanie...” Mark began cautiously, but she shook her head.

“No. I’m sick of this. How does she know these things? How does she always know these things? I didn’t tell her. You didn’t tell her. The doctor didn’t tell anyone but us. So how does she know? Evelyn sure wouldn’t have told her. Evelyn isn’t stupid.”

Brittany raised an eyebrow.

“Evelyn,” Stephanie repeated. “Did not tell you. She did not. She couldn’t have. Why would she have told you something like that? She didn’t even...” She trailed off miserably.

“She didn’t even tell me,” Brittany finished for her.

Stephanie said nothing.

“Well? That is what you were about to say, isn’t it? ‘Evelyn couldn’t have told you, because she didn’t even tell me.’ Which does have a certain logic to it, I must admit. Because really, now, why would anyone confide anything in me? Why..." Brittany laughed shrilly. “Why, you’d have to be utterly mad, wouldn’t you, to do a thing like that? Especially when you could instead talk to, say, someone like you?” She smiled warmly across the room at Stephanie. “You’re really a much better person than I am,” she said. "Aren’t you, darling?”

“Hey,” Mark objected weakly. “All right. Why don’t we all just—”

“Shut up, Mark.” Stephanie stared at Brittany. “You know what?” she said. “Yes. Actually? I am. I am a better person than you.”

“Oh, I would never deny it. And yet, it’s funny, isn’t it? Your own best friend couldn’t even bring herself to tell you that she was pregnant. Now why do you think that might be?”

“Brittany,” Janis said.

“She could have told me,” Stephanie whispered. “She could have told me.”

“Oh, she could have,” agreed Brittany. “But she didn’t, now, did she? I wonder why that might have been. Perhaps she thought that you might not have approved. Because you don’t really, do you? Approve, I mean. After all,” she said, and tittered. “Evelyn wasn’t seeing anyone, was she? So it must have been some sordid little fling, don’t you know. And you really don’t approve of that kind of thing. Do you, Stephanie.”

“I don’t—”

“Then, you don’t really approve of very much about Evelyn at all, do you.”

“Brittany,” Janis said. “Shut up.”

“That’s not true,” said Stephanie.

“Isn’t it? You don’t approve of her clothing. You don’t approve of her habits. You don’t approve,” Brittany said, glancing over to Claude, Susan and Jim, who were staring in silence. “Of her friends. You don’t approve of anything about her, Stephanie. You never have.”

“Brittany.” Janis stood up and took an uncertain step towards her. “Stop this.”

“She could have told me,” Stephanie repeated. “I would have understood.”

“Oh, you would have understood. Well. My goodness!” Brittany looked around the room. “Stephanie would have understood. Isn’t that generous of her? So charitable, don’t you think?”

“For God’s sake, Brittany,” Mark objected.

“I wonder, really,” Brittany said, eyeing Stephanie speculatively. “If you have the slightest idea how very powerful the force of your disapproval can be. Do you? Do you realize that? Do you feel that power?”

“All right.” Janis reached over and tapped her on the arm. “We need to talk.”

Brittany spared her a brief, withering glance, then turned back to Stephanie.

“It must have been difficult for her,” she said softly. “Don’t you think? Lonely. Not having anyone to talk to about it. Not feeling that she had anyone in whom she could confide. Very isolating. And I wonder, you know—I mean, it has occurred to me—I do wonder if that might not have been the reason that she—”

Janis drew a sharp intake of breath, and then reached out with both hands and shoved her, hard. Brittany staggered backwards and clutched madly for the back of the couch. She caught herself there and stared, mouth open.

“Whoah,” Jim said, at the same time that Claude murmured: “Hey.” Matilda giggled nervously.

“Janis,” Mark hissed. He had sat up on his couch. “What are you doing?”

“I want to talk to you,” Janis told her. “Outside. Now.”

Brittany glanced quickly around the room. She laughed uncertainly.

“Darling, please,” she said. “This is a hospital.”

Janis stared at her, then raised her hands again. Brittany flinched. “Now, Brittany.” She took her by the upper arm. “Outside.”

“I…” Brittany tried to pull her arm away. Janis gripped tighter. “Ow!” she complained.

“Jesus, Janis,” objected Mark.

“We can discuss this here,” Janis told her quietly. “Or we can do it outside. You pick.”

Brittany's eyes darted around the room, then returned to Janis’ face. She flashed a brief spasmodic parody of a smile.

“Well, all right then, darling.” She picked up her bag and flashed the non-smile to the room at large. “You will please excuse us,” she said. Janis yanked her towards the door, and she stumbled along after, allowing herself to be shepherded out of the room. The sound of their footsteps marching down the corridor was clearly audible, as was Brittany’s complaining: “Ow. Let go of me.” They sat in silence, while the sounds receded into the distance.

Stephanie sniffed, then sat back down in her chair. Claude shook his head and picked his book back up.

“You know,” he said. “You guys really need to mellow. I mean, like, really.”

“Perhaps someone should go after them?” Elgin suggested. “You know, just to make sure that—”

“No,” three people told him at once.

“I should go find the doctor,” Mark said. Then he lay back down on the couch.

“Where were you born again?” Jim asked him.

Matilda leaned over and picked up the crumpled piece of paper that Brittany had let fall. She unfolded it carefully, smoothing the creases out on her lap. Beneath the picture she had drawn of the cracked dam and the two-faced head, Brittany had written in large Roman letters:

Matilda blinked at it, then shrugged and, folding the paper carefully into quarters, stashed it in the pocket of her spiral notebook.

•

 

Janis held onto Brittany’s arm tightly, hauling her along the corridor past the crowds of people milling about, waiting to have their blood tested.

“Ow,” Brittany whined again. “Janis...”

She yanked her around a corner and down the short stretch of hall which ended abruptly in the fire door to the courtyard outside. She contemplated the courtyard briefly, then remembered how cold it was out there and rejected the idea. It was quiet enough here, she guessed.

“Where are we...” Brittany began, and Janis released her with a swing and a shove, propelling her into the wall rather harder than she had actually intended. Brittany cried out, staggering from the impact, then caught her balance and backed away warily, clutching at her arm. She glared.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she hissed.

“What am I doing?” Janis yelled at her. “What am I doing? What the hell are you doing? What was that, back in there? I mean, what was that? You want to make her think that she drove her best friend to suicide? That’s sick, Brittany. I mean it, that is just totally fucked up. What the hell is the matter with you, anyway?"

Brittany blinked, then looked away with a strange almost sulky expression on her face.

“Nothing that isn’t ordinarily the matter with someone who’s just been slammed against a wall,” she muttered. She rubbed her arm and winced. “My goodness, you really do have quite the grip, don’t you? What do you do, darling, walk around squeezing those little rubber balls all day long?”

“You don’t like being bullied? Fine. Neither does Stephanie. So knock it off.”

Brittany stared at her, then let out a single, incredulous laugh.

“Oh, so you’re her champion now? That’s just adorable, Janis, that really is. What—”

“Oh, shut up.” Janis shook her head. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you today, but stop taking it out on Stephanie. For God’s sake, her roommate is in the hospital, don’t you get that? She’s in surgery. Why can’t you just leave her alone?”

“Or what? You’ll beat me up?” Brittany shook her head disbelievingly. “You know," she said. "It’s a funny thing about Stephanie. I wonder if you’ve ever noticed it. She never seems to lack for defenders. Have you ever wondered why that might be?” She rolled her eyes. “Poor, helpless little Stephie.”

Janis looked at her. “I was in Chris’ room last night,” she said quietly. “Looking at some old photos?” She paused, then thought: she knows exactly the ones I mean. She took a deep breath.

“I liked Sister Prudence,” she said.

“Did you now?” Brittany smiled. “I’ve always had a weakness for Prudence myself. That poor, poor creature. So terribly Freudian, don’t you think? Never has that weary old resentful male adage about all that woman needing being one good fuck seemed so remarkably, so tragically apropos.” She tossed off one of her horrible peals of laughter. Janis exhaled hard.

“Jesus, you’re slippery,” she said irritably. “I never know how the hell to talk to you.”

“Well, why bother to learn, darling, when you can always just throw me against a wall?” Brittany threw her an unfriendly look. “It’s ever so much easier that way, isn’t it?”

“Oh, get over it. I didn’t hurt you.” Janis gazed curiously at her. “Did you really go that entire night without anyone seeing who you were? Didn’t anyone recognize you?”

Brittany considered her for a long moment, then shrugged.

“I always thought that Jill might have,” she admitted, then smiled. “That’s why I had to send her into the coma, don’t you know. To protect my secret. My terrible, terrible secret.” She laughed. “Janis,” she said firmly. “You are a terrible extortionist. Please never attempt such a thing again. My dear, in order to be effective, emotional blackmail must be carried out with a certain....well, a certain panache, shall we say? A certain degree of finesse. You can’t just go blurting things like that. It won’t do, darling, really it won’t.” She sighed and shook her head sorrowfully. “I really would stick to violence, you know, if I were you. It suits you far better. And also,” she added, with an unpleasantly knowing smirk. “I think that you enjoy it a great deal more. Don’t you.”

Janis opened her mouth, then closed it. Brittany smiled sweetly at her.

“If you really want to be someone’s champion, darling,” she suggested. “To find an outlet for that ugly little tendency of yours? Then perhaps you might want to consider finding somebody who actually needs to be defended. You can’t honestly believe that Stephanie needs your help, can you? She doesn’t, Janis. She really doesn’t. What on earth do you think that she needs to be defended against? She has everything. She’s young, she’s rich, she’s white, she's attractive. And she’s smart, too. Even if you don’t think she is. She’s going to be the doctor’s wife, haven’t you noticed?” Brittany paused for a moment, then shrugged. “Or the lawyer’s," she said. "Or the business executive’s. Or perhaps she’ll get a nice little business degree of her own. Whatever she ends up deciding that she wants out of life, that is precisely what she will have. She’ll get whatever she wants. The Stephanies of this world always do. I can’t tell you exactly what she is going to be doing ten years from now, but I can tell you one thing that I know for a fact she will absolutely not be doing.

“Ten years from now,” Brittany said. “Ten years from now, Stephanie is not going to be sitting around crying her little eyes out over anything that I will ever have said to her. That I can promise you. If she thinks about me at all—which is unlikely—then it will probably be something more along the lines of: ‘That Brittany. How terrified we all were of her, and how pathetic she was, really. How terribly unhappy she must have been to treat people as badly as she did, and how silly we were to take it all so seriously.’ And then she’ll shrug, and she’ll forget about it, and she’ll go back to her life. To her perfect, perfect life.

“You think that I can hurt Stephanie? I can’t, Janis. I really can’t. Not in any way that matters. She’s going to have it all. She’s going to be just fine. ‘Poor little Stephie’—that really is the way you all think of her, isn’t it? Poor little Stephie. You can’t really imagine that to be kindness, can you, the way that you and Mark and Christian all coddle her? That isn’t kindness. That's not kindness at all. That's not kindness, Janis: it's contempt.”

Janis thought about this for a moment.

“Maybe,” she said slowly. “Yeah, okay. Maybe. But Stephanie doesn’t see it that way.”

“No,” Brittany agreed, after a long pause. “No, I don’t suppose she does.”

“She doesn’t see it that way now, and she won’t see it that way ten years from now either. And you can hurt her, Brittany. In ways that do matter. You can, and you do. Don’t pretend to me that you don’t know that words can hurt. You know perfectly well that they can. You probably know that better than anyone else I’ve ever met. So just don’t.”

She shook her head. “I don’t get it,” she admitted. “Your thing with her? I really just don’t get it. You know that she can’t compete with you. Not on your terms, anyway. So why do you even bother? It’s just...it’s beneath you, Brittany. It really is.”

“Thus speaks Stephanie’s champion,” Brittany murmured.

“Yeah, all right. You’ve made that point already. Give it a rest. Why don’t you tell me instead what you have against her? You give her twice the grief you give anyone else. Why is that? Please tell me it’s not just because she’s so beautiful.”

“Beautiful?” Brittany stared at her in honest surprise. “Do you really think so? My dear, Stephanie is merely pretty. You are beautiful. Didn’t you even know that? No.” She shook her head in disgust. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t, would you. God. How pathetic women all are. It’s just sad.”

“Well, I...I, um, well,” Janis stammered, flustered, then sneezed. “Well, okay, so what is it then?” she asked, sniffling. “She hasn’t slept with Chris yet, so that isn’t...what?”

“Yet?” Brittany was laughing. “I like that. 'Yet.'”

“Well, has she? I guess you would know.”

“No, she hasn’t. Not yet.”

“So what is your problem with her? I mean, I kind of get the idea that you hate everyone, but Stephanie’s the only person you seem to actually despise.” She sniffled again. “So what is it?”

Brittany seemed to give the matter some serious thought.

“Do you know,” she admitted at length, “I’m not entirely sure myself? Perhaps it’s just that she always reminds me so very much of Mr. Kurtz’s betrothed.”

Janis stared blankly at her.

“Oh, of course,” sighed Brittany. “How foolish of me. Conrad is twentieth century, isn’t he? So why on earth would you ever have heard of him? Just never mind, darling.”

“Well, whatever,” snapped Janis, annoyed. “I really don't care. Can’t you just leave her alone for a single day? I mean, come on. If you really need to—”

“Need,” Brittany repeated softly. “Oh, Janis. You have no idea. You have no idea what I need.”

Yeah, Janis thought. Yeah, I do. You need a good kick in the ass. That’s what you need.

“If you really have to pick on someone,” she continued, through gritted teeth. “If you just can’t live without it, then why not choose someone who’s at least somewhat better equipped to deal? Why not someone who can handle it?”

“Mmmmm.” Brittany looked her over. “Someone like you, I suppose?”

“Well, yeah.” Janis shrugged. “Okay. I guess. If you really have to. Why not?”

Brittany shook her head firmly.

“I don’t kick cripples, Caulfield,” she said.

“Yeah?” Janis asked her. “Well, you really have a funny way of—”

And stopped.

Brittany smiled at her.

“We were discussing finesse earlier,” she said softly. “Were we not?”

Janis said nothing.

“You notice what people really look like? As it happens, so do I. And you were absolutely right, you know. I don’t like being bullied.”

Janis continued to say nothing.

Brittany sighed. “You’re supposed to gasp, you know, darling. And turn pale, and stagger backwards, and then stammer out something along the lines of: ‘How...how long have you known?’” She waited for a moment, then snapped: “Oh, do oblige me, won’t you? You really do owe me, you know, after throwing me against a wall.”

“I,” Janis said, then stopped. “Well,” she tried again, and frowned.

“Well, all right, damn it,” she said. “How long have you known? But just don’t,” she added quickly. “Just do not say something cute here, you know, like ‘you just told me,’ or ‘five seconds,’ or anything like that, all right? Just do not. Or I really will hurt you.”

“Janis,” Brittany said earnestly. “I would never say something like that. That would be unkind.”

Janis stared blankly at her, then laughed in spite of herself.

“God, you really are sick,” she spluttered. “You know that?”

“Don’t call me that.” Brittany turned away, a pained expression on her face. “I’m not sick. You’re the one whose nose is running. Go get a kleenex, will you? It really is an unappealing spectacle.”

“Oh, shut up.” Janis shoved her hand deep into her pocket and came up with some shredded tissue paper. She wiped at her nose. Brittany watched her intently, her head tilted to one side.

“Now, who else knows, I wonder?” she mused. “Mark? Perhaps. You might have told Mark. Certainly not Christian—you aren’t a fool. And not Jill either, I don’t think. Jill wasn’t really very good at keeping secrets, and as fond as you may have been of her, I think that you must have recognized that. But Mark?” She stared hard at Janis, then smiled. “Yeeeees,” she said slowly, and nodded. “Yes,” she repeated. “Yes. I think that you have told Mark.”

Janis shivered.

“Jesus, you’re creepy,” she blurted.

Brittany blinked at her. “Am I?” she asked wearily. “Am I really?”

“Yeah, Brittany. Sorry, but you really are. Don’t you mean to be?” Janis shoved the disintegrating tissue back into her pocket. “So what happens now?” she asked. “I mean, you aren’t going to ask me for money or anything like that, are you?”

Brittany turned white.

“You…” she began, and shook her head. “You…” she repeated, and let out a single, mirthless, furious laugh. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, you do make it tempting, don’t you? Just think of what you must be worth! But no, Janis. No. Believe it or not, even I am not quite that vulgar. Not yet, at any rate. No, darling. No. I am not,” she spat. “Going to ask you for money.”

Janis closed her eyes.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said.

“No? Really? How precisely did you mean it?” Brittany glared at her, then blinked in astonishment. “No,” she said numbly. “No. You really didn’t mean to be that insulting, did you? That’s...” She laughed nervously. "That’s really rather impressive, actually. One wonders what you might come up with if you ever actually intended to give grave offense. Why is it,” she sighed. “Why is it that everyone always thinks I’m a blackmailer? That’s the second time this week. What you all must think of me. What you all must think of me.”

“Well,” said Janis apologetically. “You are kind of a blackmailer, Brittany. I mean, you really are.”

“No, I am not,” Brittany snapped. “For God’s sake. I wouldn’t tell anyone. What do you take me for? I do have some sense of proportion, you know. I’ve never mentioned it before today, have I? I’ve never even hinted at it. I wouldn’t have brought it up at all, if only you hadn’t pushed me like that, with that pathetic attempt at your own little piece of extortion. Not to mention the violence.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Janis told her. “That is such bullshit, Brittany. Come on. You would have brought it up the instant you couldn’t win an argument with me any other way, and you know it. In fact, that’s exactly what just happened here, isn’t it? You know that you shouldn’t pick on Stephanie like that. You know that you were completely out of control in there. You know that I’m right. You can’t defend your actions. All that you can do is bludgeon me with what you happen to know about me. But you haven’t made any real point by doing that. It’s just changing the subject. It doesn’t win the argument, any more than my throwing you against the wall again would win the argument. And you know that, too. You...” She shook her head. “You just aren’t honest, Brittany.”

“No,” Brittany agreed, after a long pause. “No, I’m not. Neither are you, for that matter, but I suppose that you have your reasons for that. All right.”

Janis blinked. “What?”

“I said all right, darling. You’re right, I’m wrong. You win, I lose. I shouldn’t have been picking on poor little Stephie like that; you were absolutely right; it was mean and rotten and terrible and unkind; it was utterly despicable behavior; I have no excuse, and I’ll try to stop it. All right?”

“Well, um...” Janis thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, um, okay. Yeah, all right.”

“Yes,” Brittany muttered. “Very gracious, darling.” She winced and slipped her hands under her glasses to press the palms of her hands against her eyes. Janis looked at her trembling fingers and frowned.

“You’re cutting way back on those pills you take,” she commented, and when Brittany didn’t respond, added: “Is that why you’ve been acting so weird today? I mean, are you all right?”

“Some people,” Brittany murmured, pulling her hands away from her eyes and rubbing at her temples. “Some people really never are satisfied with winning an argument. What would you like me to tell you, Janis? That I’m off my form today?”

Janis began to say something, thought better of it, and examined her hands instead. She picked at a cuticle for a while, then took a deep breath.

“You haven’t asked me any of the questions people usually ask me,” she said, not looking up from her hands. “I mean, people who know who I am. I just...um, you know. I want you to know that I really do appreciate that.” She looked up. “Brittany,” she said. “What the hell is going on here?”

“Well, darling. You were annoyed with me for poking at dear little Stephie, and so you—”

“Don’t. You know what I mean. Something weird is going on, and you know something about it. You must. You always do. You always know everything.”

“I what?” Brittany laughed. “I always know everything? No, Janis. No. I think, you know, that you must be confusing me with God. An understandable error, perhaps, but I assure you: in spite of the resemblance, I really am not He. But I promise you. When I do become omniscient? You will be the very first to know about it. Well. Well, after myself, of course. And after God. The third, then, the third to know—”

“Brittany, I went away for a week. An entire week. And nobody even noticed that I was gone. Did you?”

Brittany stared at her. “You were gone for a week?” she repeated blankly. “When?”

“Fuck. I thought that surely you would have... This past week, Brittany. I mean, think about it, will you? Have you seen me around here? Have I been at meals? Have I been at classes? Have I been anywhere? Someone slashed my roommate’s throat, and I wasn’t there. She was found in a coma and taken to the hospital, and I wasn’t here. A dead body was found in my room, and I wasn’t here. I wasn’t even in Minnesota. Didn’t anyone find that a little bit strange? Didn’t anyone ask any questions about me? Wasn’t anyone worried? The police? Mark? Chris? My parents?” She paused, then added: “I mean, you know who I am. Federal agents? Anyone?”

“You were gone for a week?” Brittany repeated. She squinted thoughtfully. “I...no. Or rather, rather...maybe. Maybe, yes, once or twice. But not...not for any length of...” She winced. Then her eyes settled somewhere on the far wall, and her face relaxed. Janis looked at her vague and untroubled expression and sighed.

“Yeah, okay,” she told her. “Never mind.”

Brittany’s gaze returned to her face. “What?” she asked vaguely.

“I said just never mind. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t just that anyway. It’s everything. Things are different here now. Ever since I got back. They’re....off somehow. It’s like there are things moving around under the surface of everything, things that I can’t quite see. It’s scaring me, and I think that you know something about it. So what is it?”

Brittany stared at her, then slowly, slowly shook her head. She turned as if to walk away. Janis grabbed her by the sleeve and tugged.

“What is it?” she repeated, then noticed the way that Brittany was glaring at her hand on her sleeve and dropped it. “Sorry,” she said. “But come on. Help me out here. It’s really scaring me, Brittany. Please?”

Brittany bit her lip.

“What is it?” demanded Janis.

Brittany hesitated, then sighed. “You’re a classics major,” she said. “Or...forget about your major. You’re Jane Caulfield. You’re supposed to have received a classical education. You read Latin, and you read Greek, and you’re just as bright as can be. So tell me something. Out of all of the pseudonyms you could have chosen when you came here, what made you pick the name Janis?”

“I don’t know.” Janis shrugged. “I liked it. What the hell difference does it make?”

Brittany stared at her incredulously, then shook her head.

“What?” asked Janis. “What is it? If there’s something you want to tell me, then just spit it out, okay? Don’t give me riddles. I’m no good at them, and they annoy the fuck out of me.”

“No kidding.” Brittany was still staring at her. “You and Oedipus.”

“What? What the hell is that supposed to mean? You know something about me? Something else about me? Like I murdered my mother and married my father or something? If so, then just tell me, all right? This isn’t fun for me. I’m serious. I don’t like guessing games.”

“What happened to you last night?” Brittany asked her.

“What do you mean?”

“You said ‘last night.’ Before. You told me that that you were in Chris’ room, looking at photos, last night. So that means that you must have been here, weren’t you? In Herschberg. Last night.”

“Yeah.”

Brittany gazed expectantly at her.

“And?” she prompted, after a long silence.

“And? And what? I looked at the photos for a while, and then when Chris never showed up, I went back to my room and went to bed. Why? What was so special about last night?”

“God.” Brittany laughed harshly. “And you’re asking me for help. You want my help. Because you’re scared. That’s just beautiful, Janis. What do you need my help for? You’re perfect, aren’t you? You’re perfect just the way you are. It must be very nice, darling. It must be very nice, being you.”

Janis blinked at the malice in her tone and took a step backward.

“I don’t get you,” she said cautiously. “I never have. I can never tell if you like me or hate me.”

“Like you? Hate you?” Brittany closed her eyes. “Neither,” she whispered. “Neither. I envy you. Don’t you see that? I envy you. And that’s far more dangerous. It’s dangerous for both of us. So just...” She shook her head helplessly. “Just don’t push me. All right? Don’t push me. You have no...you really just have no idea what a bad thing that could be right now. So just don't."

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Janis stared at her. “I don’t believe this. You’re scared to death, aren’t you? What are you so afraid of?”

“I...” Brittany began to back away. “Nothing. I just...I have a headache.”

“No you don’t. And if you do, I don’t care.” Janis grabbed her by the shoulders. “Tell me,” she said.

“Let me go.”

“No.” Janis shook her roughly. “Stop being such a pain in the ass and talk to me.”

“Let go of me! I really have to go.”

“You do not,” Janis told her. “What you have to do,” she said. “Is to tell me something useful, dammit. Now!”

Brittany gasped. Her body went rigid, and then her head rocked back as if she had been slapped. Janis dropped her shoulders quickly.

Oh no, she thought. Oh, no, she’s having some kind of seizure.

“Brittany?” she said in a scared little voice. “Are you okay?”

Brittany slowly raised her head. Her face had gone slack and vacant, but her eyes were moving rapidly.

“Something useful,” she said, in a thick slow voice. “Something useful.”

“Should I get someone?”

"Something useful." Brittany’s hands lifted slowly to her glasses. They weren’t trembling anymore, Janis noticed. They weren’t shaking at all. “Something useful.”

“What can I do? Do you need one of those pills or something?”

“Something useful.” Brittany slid her glasses off of her face and held them out in front of her in both hands, her arms extended awkwardly like a zombie’s. Her tiny bloodshot eyes darted back and forth.

“Um...you want me to take those for you? Is that what you want?” Janis looked wildly up and down the hallway, but there was no one in sight. “Um,” she said, thinking: I should call a doctor. “Um, okay.” She took them gently away from her. Brittany dropped her arms back down to her sides.

“Something useful,” she said. Her eyes stopped moving. They fixed intently on Janis. “Jane,” she said. “Jane.”

“Yeah. That’s okay, Brittany.” Janis looked down the hallway again. “Um, would you be okay, do you think, if I left you here for just a minute to…”

“Something useful for you, Jane.”

Oh, Jesus, Janis thought. Is that a southern accent she has now? What is this?

“In the smallest pocket of your backpack, Jane,” Brittany told her slowly. “You are carrying something. An envelope.”

Janis stared at her.

“An envelope,” Brittany repeated. “It was given to you by...” Her brow furrowed slightly, and her eyes began to move again. Then they stopped, and she smiled faintly. “By the Wizard of Oz,” she said.

“Oh, Jesus, Brittany,” Janis whispered, feeling the hair prickle on her arms. “Please stop this.”

“You must not open it.” Brittany stared blankly at her. “The consequences of that action would be...they will be simply appalling. You must not. Do not open it.”

“Brittany, I don’t like this. Cut it out.”

“Do not,” Brittany said again, a note of urgency creeping into her voice. “Do not. Do not open the gates! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Oh!” she cried suddenly. “Oh, who has brought this plague upon my city? Who has brought this plague upon my city?”

“Brittany, stop it. Please. You’re really beginning to scare me.”

Brittany blinked at her. Her brow furrowed. “Is that clock slow?” she asked, in something almost approximating her normal voice. Then she shook her head and moaned.

“I’m going to go get a doctor,” Janis told her.

“The doctor? The doctor is afraid of you, Jane. He thinks that you’re dangerous.” She smiled strangely. “And he’s right, you know. He’s right. You are. Dangerous.” She made a low humming noise, deep in her throat. “So very dangerous.” She giggled, and her eyes rolled back in her head.

Janis looked down the hallway again, took a deep breath. She raised her hand, then hesitated, wincing.

“I’m sorry,” she told Brittany, and slapped her.

Brittany staggered backwards, blinking rapidly. She raised a hand to her face, then stared at her hand, then stared back up at Janis.

“Sorry,” Janis told her again. “I’m really sorry.”

“You hit me.” Brittany said numbly.

“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t know how else to...I’m really very sorry.”

“No you aren’t. You hit me! First you threw me into a wall, and then you shook me, and now you’re hitting me?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“You hit me, and you...you...” She stared at the glasses in Janis’ hands. “Give me those!” Janis held them out. Brittany snatched them away from her and shoved them back on her face. “What did you do?” she demanded. “What did you just do to me back there?”

“I didn’t mean it!”

“You didn’t mean it?” Brittany backed away from her, shaking her head. “You don’t know what you mean, Janis. You never know what you mean. You just...just stay away from me,” she gasped. “I’m serious. You stay the hell away from me.” She turned and fled down the hallway.

“Brittany!” Janis called after her. “Wait. Just wait!” She started after her, but turning the corner collided with Doctor Waitling, who was cradling an armful of manila folders to his chest. Papers flew into the air as he staggered backwards.

“Oh, geez, I’m sorry,” she said and knelt down to help pick them up. A second pile of folders and papers crashed onto the floor beside her, and she looked up, confused. The doctor was standing motionless, staring at her, both of his hands raised in a curiously defensive gesture.

“Are you okay?” she asked him. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“I..." The doctor swallowed. “No,” he said. He lowered his hands slowly. “No. Thank you. I’m fine. You don’t have to...that’s fine, thanks.” He smiled quickly. “I can get those,” he told her. “But thank you.”

“Okay.” Janis stood up and stared at him. He didn’t meet her eyes.

“You aren’t really afraid of me,” she asked him. “Are you?”

“I...” Waitling ducked his head quickly and kneeled down to busy himself with the papers. “Of course not.” He chuckled nervously. “You just startled me, that’s all.”

“Uh-huh.” Janis backed slowly away from him. “Um, I have to go now,” she said. “Sorry about your papers.” She turned, then, and fled.

•

 

Janis ran down the corridor, weaving and ducking her way around the ever-growing crowds of citizens mobbing the hallways, trying to remember where the nearest exit was. She very nearly pushed her way through another fire door before realizing that it would probably set off an alarm, flailed around another corridor, and then found the doors leading out onto Main Street. There was a line of people there, all waiting to get in, and she had to shove her way past them; she nearly bowled over a woman with a babe in arms and almost trampled a whining toddler underfoot before she found herself free and clear and pelting down the sidewalk, forgetting for the moment even why she was running, simply enjoying as always the feel of speed, the feel of flight.

She ran, and she gasped in the freezing November air, and then she realized for the first time that she had left the hospital without her coat. She slowed, then stopped, then doubled over, coughing helplessly.

“That sounds nasty,” someone told her sympathetically. “You should see a doctor about that.”

“I...” Janis coughed again and listened to the tail end of her breath rattle somewhere down deep in her chest. It did sound pretty nasty, actually. “I’m all right,” she gasped. “Thanks.” She straightened and nodded at the someone, a student in a down jacket, who was carrying a sign on a stick. SILENCE = DEATH, the sign read.

Janis blinked, then looked around her. She had run nearly all the way to DeHaan Square, and there were people here, too, people everywhere, students and townies and faculty, and soldiers as well, soldiers standing somewhat apart from the crowds, soldiers looking watchful and aloof, soldiers carrying guns. Janis stared at them, and then at the signs.

NO BLOOD FOR OIL, the signs read, and US OUT OF HERSCHBERG. But there were also signs reading WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED, and also BIOLOGY IS NOT DESTINY, and also QUEER PRIDE, and also FREEDOM NOW, and also QUESTION AUTHORITY, and also...

“What,” Janis gasped. “What is this protest supposed to be about?”

“Well, you tell me,” the student challenged her. “What is any protest about, really? What is it that, throughout the entire course of human history, has always needed to be protested?”

“What? I don’t—”

“Power,” said the student. “That’s what we’re protesting here. Nothing less than power itself.”

“What? But that’s..." Janis began, then caught sight of a flash of white among the crowds and took off again.

“Brittany!” she called. “Brittany, wait!” She elbowed her way past some guy who looked like Jesus and was carrying a guitar, jumped over a group of students lying on the ground practicing their passive resistance techniques, and collided bodily with Chris, who was backing away from Brittany with what appeared to be borderline hysteria.

“...told me about you!” Chris flailed wildly, and Janis had to duck to avoid one of his windmilling arms. “I know what you are!”

Brittany was clutching at her temples. Her polarized lenses had gone dark in the bright afternoon sun, and the cotton balls she had shoved in her ears forced her hair out in bizarre tufts; the combined effect made her resemble nothing quite so much as a sickly owl.

“An angel,” she said numbly. “Oh, Christian. What did he look like? This angel of yours?”

“Brittany...” Janis began, but Chris grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her back.

“Stay away from her,” he gasped. There were huge dark circles under his eyes, and his cheeks looked unusually hollow over the ruff of his black turtleneck. Chris looks just as bad as Brittany does, Janis thought. And he really shouldn’t wear black. It doesn’t flatter him at all. It makes him look so pale. And old. As if he’s dying. It makes him look just like...just like...

“Stay away from her!” he cried. “Janis, be careful! She’s in league with the forces of Darkness!”

“Chris!” Janis objected. Brittany let out an exasperated noise, somewhere between a sigh and a scream.

“Oh, fine, Christian,” she cried. “Yes. Wonderful. I’m pure evil. Just fine.” She threw her hands up in the air and stormed off through the crowds.

“Brittany!” Janis started after her, but Chris was still holding onto her, and as she lurched forward, he lost his balance and clutched at her, struggling to keep from falling.

“Janis!” He clung madly to her. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere! I need to talk to you. It’s really important.” She tried to pull away, but he was still dangerously off-balance, leaning his weight against her. “Janis,” he told her. “Please. Just listen. It’s important. I think I may have done something so incredibly stupid...”

“Chris.” Janis shook her head and coughed painfully. “I really don’t care, okay? It doesn’t have anything to do with anything that you’ve done. Really. You don’t have to explain anything.”

“What?” He stared at her.

“It’s me, okay? It isn’t you. Look, I just can’t talk about this right now. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”

“What?” he repeated blankly, then shook his head. “Oh. No. Listen, Janis, I think that I may have been duped. By the forces of Darkness. And the angel warned me about that sort of thing, and I should have listened, and I did listen, really I did, but I just can’t seem to remember anything, and—”

“Chris!” she objected, trying to work her way free of him. “What are you talking about? Please get off of me.”

“Brittany’s one of them,” he told her earnestly. “She is, Janis. She really is. And I think that she may have done something to me. Something to my mind.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Stupid,” he whispered. “I have been so very stupid.”

“Oh, God, Chris!” Janis began to struggle, shoving at him. “Get off of me! Please get off of me.” She staggered away from him, half expecting to find that he had been bleeding on her, and turning her head, found herself looking directly into the sunglasses of one of the National Guardsmen.

He was blond, and young, and he looked bored, lounging rifle in hands by the side of the police barricade that had been erected along one side of the Square; and staring into what she supposed might have been his eyes behind those glasses, she was suddenly overcome with dizziness. The world spun madly, and she felt Chris catch her as her knees buckled.

“Are you okay?” he was asking. “Janis! Are you all right?”

“Oh my God,” she said. “Anything could happen, Chris. Anything could happen here. This is...” She shook her head, then realized that she was nearly kneeling on the ground; Chris was trying to support her, but he didn’t seem to have a very good grasp on how to go about it. She struggled to get her legs back under her.

“Dangerous,” she gasped. "This is just so dangerous. All of these people. All of these guns. All of...oh, don’t you see? It doesn’t take much. It doesn’t take anything at all, really. All it takes is someone throwing a rock. Not even that. It could just be someone thinking that someone has thrown a rock. I...” She stared around at the crowd, eyes wide. “So many things can go wrong.”

“Don’t you have a coat?" Chris asked her, looking concerned. "It’s freezing out here.”

“It doesn’t even have to be meant,” she told him. “It doesn’t really matter what people mean. It doesn't matter at all. Things just...things just lead into each other, and it can all get so out of control...”

“You feel hot," he said. "I think you’re feverish. Why don’t we get you inside?”

“Everything gets out of control,” she repeated. “The mills grind faster and faster, and...” She shook her head wildly. “It’s like a strobe light—light, dark, light, dark, light, dark...—and that can cause seizures, can’t it? Like a hall of mirrors.”

“I think you need to get someplace warm.” He was ushering her firmly out of the square and towards the road. “And have some tea or something. And probably some sleep.”

Janis blinked, then began to cough.

“Let go of me,” she told him. “I’m all right.”

“Are you sure?” He frowned at her. “You don’t sound it. You sound—”

“I’m all right. I just...I just saw something. That’s all. Just for a second. I caught a glimpse. All the vectors. I saw them. The things below the surface.” She shivered violently. “It’s random,” she told him. “Or not random. Chaotic. It doesn’t have meaning. It only has...” She struggled for a word. “Correspondence.”

“Well, sure, Janis,” Chris said soothingly. “That’s fundamental. Everything’s connected, you know. Nothing happens by chance.”

“Oh, but it does,” she insisted. “That’s just it, don’t you see? It does happen by chance. That’s precisely what’s so horrible about it. And it doesn’t really mean anything to say that everything’s connected, Chris,” she added irritably. “Anything can be connected. It’s like if you have a whole bunch of dots, you can connect them any way that you like. But that doesn’t mean that they were meant to be connected that way. The lines you draw are just your connections. They’re not the dots’ connections.”

“Now you sound like Elgin.” Chris smiled at her, evidently relieved. “Jeez. You were really scaring me for a while there. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I think so. Chris...” She glanced at his arm around her shoulders and frowned. “You do realize that I broke up with you, don’t you?”

“Oh, I know.” He smiled at her. “But you’re obviously not well, Janis, and besides, I need to tell you all about my destiny.”

“Destiny,” Janis repeated, and shivered again. “Fuck destiny,” she said harshly. “I don’t believe in destiny.”

Chris stared at her. “How can you not believe in destiny?" he asked. "I mean, things do happen to people.”

“Things happening to people isn’t destiny, Chris. Things happening to people is just history. They're not the same thing at all.”

“Miss Joplin?”

Beside her, Chris let out a kind of strangled whimper. Janis looked up into the mirrored sunglasses of the two men in the dark suits and tensed.

“Agent Johnson,” she said, and flashed what she hoped was a friendly smile. “Agent Smith. Hey. Wow. How are you guys doing?”

“You, uh...” Chris stammered. “You, uh, know these—”

“You will please excuse us,” Agent Smith told him. There was no question mark at the end of the sentence. Chris made a series of incoherent noises, then vanished.

“I know,” Janis told them, already hearing herself start to babble as they flanked her. “I know. I probably shouldn’t have known your names, huh? I’m really sorry. That was kind of stupid of me, wasn’t it? I just wasn’t thinking. I mean, I wasn’t really expecting to see you here, and—”

“I think,” Johnson told her quietly. “That we need to have a little talk. Don’t you, Jane?”

“Well, sure.” She smiled sickly as they walked along on either side of her. “I mean, what’s it been now? Two years, right? I...” She sneezed. “I, um,” she said, sniffing. “Um, how long do you think, you know, that this might take?”

Neither of the two men answered her.

“Because, um,” she explained. “I do have class, you know. Classes to go to.”

There was no response.

“On Monday,” she added, in a very small voice.

Smith opened the rear door of the dark late-model sedan and waited patiently.

“It’s really great to see you guys again,” Janis whispered. And got in.

•

The problem with history is that it is always
written in the interrogative case.
—Richard Rosenblatt

In the silence between a question and its answer,
That is where the truth lies.
The Talmud

•

(continued)

•

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