Chapter Two
“Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?”

All day long on November the thirteenth, strange portents had been seen in the small college town of Herschberg, Minnesota. A rain of dead sparrows had fallen on the trailer park on the outskirts of town, so many sparrows that no one could possibly have noted where each of them fell. In the farmland to the east, a calf had been born with three heads. Just as dusk was falling, some later claimed to have seen the head of the statue of University founder Harry Herschberg spinning around three times before weeping tears of blood.

And as if all this were not bad enough, college junior Mark Phillips was headed up the stairs of O'Henry dormitory, to pick up his girlfriend Stephanie for dinner and a movie with a group of their closest friends.

•

The second Mark stepped into the second-floor hallway, he realized that something was amiss. It was Thursday night, and the dorm was eerily deserted. Only the persistent thumping of the Third Floor Band's unvarying bass line, reverberating sullenly through the ceiling, broke the preternatural silence which seemed to have suffused the second floor. As he turned the corner, a pimply freshman in a black t-shirt edged to one side to allow him passage through the corridor. The freshman was scrawling a message on the door of the corner single in purple marker; he glared at Mark, annoyed at the interruption of his literary masterpiece. Mark passed the corner single; the lounge wherein the Poetess attempted suicide, like clock-work, once a week; the too-small double the Poetess shared with the lesbian field-hockey star; the larger double the editor of the utterly pretentious literary arts magazine shared with the pyromaniac; the Narc's single—now, as always, in darkness—and came to Stephanie's room. Across the hall, a few muted whispers filtered through the door of Bill 'n' Don's Excellent Dorm Room.

Mark abruptly realized why the hall was so silent and felt like a fool. He slapped Bill 'n' Don's door with his open palm and yelled:

"The Narc's gone out, guys!"

A deafening blast of Inna Godda Da Vita exploded from within, pierced by a series of primal screams.

"Thanks, man!" either Bill or Don—Mark could never remember which was which—called.

"No problem." Feeling strangely comforted by this return to the status quo, he reached to knock on Stephanie's door, but Stephanie's roommate Evelyn threw it open before his knuckles had even grazed the wood.

"Shut the FUCK up!" she screamed. Mark recoiled instinctively, but she shoved him aside and hurled a black leather miniboot at Bill 'n' Don's door.

"Maniacs! Degenerates! Perverts! Don't you know what time it is?" She turned to Mark. "What time is it, anyway?"

"It's, uh, a little after seven." Evelyn's latest dye job seemed to have gone hideously awry. What little hair she had not shaved off lay limp and tangled over her eyes, a repulsive shade of puce. The heavy black eyeliner she habitually wore had smudged so thoroughly in her sleep that she resembled a deranged raccoon.

"It's seven in the goddamned EVENING!" Evelyn shrieked at the door. "It's the crack of DUSK, you assholes! SOME of us are TRYING to get some SLEEP! BASTARDS!" This said, she shoved back past him and slammed the door. Within, an alarm clock went off. There was a splintering crash, then silence.

Mark took a deep breath and knocked again. This time, he was given the chance to make one rap before the door flew open.

"You want Stephanie? She's in the bathroom, painting her face to make herself look like a trollop to satisfy your chauvinistic sensibilities."

"Thanks, Ev." Mark liked to believe that Stephanie's roommate was really quite fond of him, in her own way. Evelyn had certainly never done anything to indicate that this might be the case, but Mark persisted in believing it anyway. If he were to stop believing in Evelyn's affection for him, he would have to start being afraid of her. When he and Stephanie had first started going out, Evelyn had caught him alone in his room and delivered a long, ranting monologue outlining, in vivid detail, all of the things she would do to him should he ever hurt Stephanie in any way. Of course, Mark had no intention of ever hurting Stephanie in any way, but he also realized that relationships, like all mortal things, must some day come to an end, while he was not quite sure that Evelyn had yet internalized this unfortunate truth.

Stephanie was staring disconsolately into the mirror when Mark poked his head through the bathroom door. Far from trollop-like, her face looked pale and severe, almost Victorian. Her makeup lay untouched on the sink beside her. She had been crying.

Mark didn't have to ask what was wrong. Stephanie Seymour was young, white, attractive, intelligent, upper-middle class and female. Hence, it was inevitable that she consider herself to be ugly, fat, stupid and unloved. Mark had long ago stopped trying to understand this peculiar phenomenon; he merely accepted it as a fact of life.

Forty-five minutes later, the perennial conversation was finally drawing to its conclusion.

"It's your friends, I guess. I always start feeling insecure whenever we go out with your friends."

"Come on, Steph. They're not just my friends. They're your friends too."

"Not really."

As always, Mark refrained from pointing out that Stephanie had no friends other than their mutual ones. It would not have been in keeping with his position in this recurring debate—the "Stephanie is beautiful, thin and loveable" stance. Mark had done forensics in high school, and he understood such things.

"They think I'm stupid."

"They don't. Who thinks so?"

"Chris."

"Chris does not. He thinks you're great."

"Brittany."

"Oh, Jesus. Brittany. Brittany thinks everyone's stupid. Brittany thinks Albert Einstein was stupid. Fuck Brittany."

"Would you?" Stephanie asked him.

"Would I what?"

"Fuck Brittany."

"Shit, no!" Mark exclaimed. It was such an immediate and instinctively vehement response that Stephanie burst into laughter.

"I know," she said. "I'm being an idiot. I'm sorry. Let's go."

But as they left the bathroom together, Mark thought: funny. Why Brittany? Usually Stephanie wanted reassurance about—

"—Janis?"

Mark started guiltily.

"What?"

"I said, the other day I was talking to Janis?"

"Oh, yeah?" For a moment, Mark felt a strange sense of unease, but he quickly quelled it. Why shouldn't Stephanie and Janis talk to each other, after all? Wasn't that what he had wanted all along, for the two of them—four of them, he meant—to all be friends? But still...

"What about?" he asked, a bit too casually.

"Oh, you know. Nothing much. You know, she asked me who John Belushi was?"

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Isn't that weird? And she's always asking stuff like that, you know? Like who's Mohammed Ali, or what's OPEC, or when did John Lennon die. I mean, where was she raised, anyway? On a commune?"

"Yeah, I know what you mean."

Stephanie threw him a swift, irritated glance. "Well, where was she raised? You went out with her, you must know something about it." They pushed past the pimply freshman, still writing his manifesto on the door. A line of what he wrote caught Mark's eye: Nor iron bars a cage…

"Hey!" Mark said suddenly. "Isn't that whatshisname's room? Jill's creepy new boyfriend?"

"Albert's, yeah. You know, Janis told me that Jill was talking about Albert the other day, and she said..."

They clattered down the steps and out into the November chill. Leaving the dorm was like leaving a space capsule; they were lost in the void. Stephanie continued her story, breath frosting in the air, but Mark was no longer listening.

•

"I know nothing about you, really," he had said to Janis that first time. "I mean, you never tell me anything about your childhood, or where you went to school..." He had rattled on, hands behind his head, staring at the skylight that passed for a window in his attic room, barely listening to his own words.

Tonight, he and Janis were going to make love for the first time. He knew it, and Janis knew it, and Janis' roommate Jill had known it when they had seen her earlier, and Brittany knew it—for Brittany always knew such things—and even poor, oblivious Elgin probably knew it. Or perhaps he was now being paranoid. Still, Mark was in love, and whenever he was in love, he fancied that he became transparent, or strangely telepathic, broadcasting his thoughts to everyone he knew. He wondered if his mother might not be sitting up in bed smiling at this very moment, receiving telepathic news of his amorous intent all the way in Wisconsin.

"I don't even know where you grew up..." Janis was wonderful. Their first meeting had been like a scene in a movie, an exchange of witty badinage of the sort that never happened in real life.

"Is your name really Janis Joplin?" he had asked her, and she, hands thrust in jeans pockets, balancing step by step along the wooden fence outside of O'Henry Hall, had grinned, glanced at him from under her dark hair, and said:

"Yeah. Is your name really Mark Phillips?"

Well, all right. So maybe it hadn't been so very witty. But it had seemed it at the time. And everything had gone that way: they had even liked the same toppings (pepperoni, sausage, and peppers) on their pizza.

"...or anything about your parents..." And that had been when she had leaned over and kissed him.

Mark's astonishment when she had told him that she was a virgin was identical to the astonishment he had felt when she had first told him that she was a freshman. Janis had a certain self-confidence, a way of bearing herself, that Mark always associated with both collegiate and sexual experience, although upon reflection he would have been the first to condemn such an attitude had it come from anyone else. Janis' timing was, once again, impeccable. Like she had her freshman status, she had revealed her virginity precisely when it was just a bit too late for him to care.

"Look," he had begun, feebly. "I mean, are you sure..."

"I'm sure. I want to," she had insisted. But afterwards, Janis had squinted at the skylight and frowned slightly in concentration, as if trying to evaluate an unusual and vaguely unpleasant new flavor of ice cream.

"I've heard tell," she said at length. "That it gets better with practice."

"Um...yeah...I guess..."

"Well." She smiled resignedly at him. "It looks like we'll have to get in a lot of practice."

And even that had seemed witty and wonderful at the time. God, he must really have been in love.

But practice hadn't helped. Nothing had helped. And as the weeks went by, Mark found that Janis' steadfast refusal to discuss her past, ever, at any time, was beginning to get on his nerves, as was her truly monumental ignorance.

"Jesus, Janis, you really don't know who Woody Allen is?"

"Nope. So tell me. Who is he?"

"I don't understand how you can not have heard of Woody Allen."

"There's a lot of people I've never heard of. So you can tell me who they are, and then I'll know." She smiled at him, that infuriatingly self-assured Janis smile. "It really bothers you, doesn't it? My not knowing all these things?"

"Doesn't it bother you?"

"Why should it? I'm not stupid, just ignorant."

"But..."

But it was hopeless, because it all led back to the same thing: her past. What had once been intriguing had now become simple frustration, much like the challenge of the sex. Mark tried not to link the two issues in this sordid way, but it was rapidly becoming impossible not to do so.

It was after the twelfth disastrous bout of sexual experimentation that Janis had finally snapped.

"God damn it!" she had yelled. "Look, Mark, are you usually good at this thing?"

"What?" Mark was still unsure as to whether it had been the question itself or the sound of Janis yelling that had so appalled him. Janis never yelled.

"Right. That's a rude question, isn't it. See? I don't know that. I don't know anything!" She hurled his swim team jacket across the room. "Shit!"

"Janis..."

"I'm frigid! Oh, I just knew it. I knew something like this was bound to come up sooner or later. It just figures it would have to be this." She clawed her hair out of her eyes and fumbled with a cigarette, hands shaking. "Oh, damn it," she choked, and Mark was suddenly struck by the terrifying conviction that if she started to cry, he would go utterly and irrevocably mad.

"No," he babbled meaninglessly. "No...come on...it's okay...don't. It's okay."

"You want to know where I grew up?" Janis asked him then, and Mark had wanted to scream NO DON'T TELL ME I DON'T WANT TO KNOW, and so of course what he actually said was:

"Sure."

"So would I. Funny, isn't it?" She managed to light her cigarette, took a deep drag, and hugged her arms to her chest. "My name isn't really Janis Joplin, you know."

"No?"

"No, of course not. I chose that name because I figured no one would suspect it was a pseudonym. Only parents are twisted enough to name people things like that, right?"

Mark considered mentioning Jello Biafra, but held his tongue. Janis wouldn't know who Jello Biafra was anyway, or for that matter, where Biafra was, or possibly even what Jell-O was, so what would be the point?

"Can you keep a secret?" she asked him then. Mark had always hated that kind of question.

"That's not fair," he snapped. "Whether I can keep a secret or not, now that you've said that, you have to tell it to me anyway, so out with it."

Janis stared at him, then smiled and nodded.

"Fair enough. I'm Jane Caulfield."

At first Mark had thought that she had been speaking metaphorically. Jane Caulfield, dubbed "Baby Jane" by the press (primarily because two thousand reporters had simultaneously considered themselves devastatingly clever by coming up with 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?' as a headline) was only a kid, after all. Mark remembered her picture staring up out of his father's newspaper years ago, and she had been a child, a baby. And then, later, when she had reappeared, she had been a teenager—again, just a kid. But then, he realized, he was two years older than Janis, an unimportant age difference now, but more than enough back then. To a seven-year-old, a five-year-old was an unimaginably young creature, he supposed, and to an eighteen-year-old....well, everyone was superior when they were eighteen.

"Uh-huh," he had said dubiously. "You mean, like, you're really Jane Caulfield? Or..."

Baby Jane would just have been another milk-carton photo, had she not happened also to be the heiress to the Caulfield fortune. And she would have been just another Lindbergh baby had it not been for the films. The first of the films had been delivered to the police shortly after the child's abduction, and they were to dominate the network news shows for the next three years. They were not only good news. They were good drama.

"Hello Mom, Dad, people of the world," the seven-year-old Jane Caulfield had chirped from Mark's parents' television set in the earliest such broadcast he could clearly remember. "It's my birthday today, and I've been thinking about a poem I just read: Now We Are Six. But don't worry." Her eyes darted from the camera to her unseen and unidentified captors, and then back to the living rooms of millions. "I've reached seven. So I'm safe. About your recent appeal." Again the eye shift. "We don't want your money, or any political concessions. We told you that the last time." A pause. "I've got to go. I have cake. And presents! Love you Mommy, Daddy. Bye!"

The broadcasts were always the same. The precocious child would deliver a birthday message, refuse all offers, and then disappear once more. There was never any clue as to her whereabouts or the identities of her captors. It was a political embarrassment. Ronald Reagan had gained much political momentum in the 1980 election by promising to find Baby Jane and bring her kidnappers to justice, but he had never been given the chance. In 1979, Jane Caulfield's expected birthday message was not delivered. None were to follow.

On her sixteenth birthday, Jane had appeared before the front door of her parents' mansion. No one was ever able to determine how she had evaded the security guards. She was immediately taken into custody by federal agents. No reporters were permitted anywhere near her; no photographs of her appeared anywhere. Conspiracy buffs claimed that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax. According to the press releases occasionally distributed by the government, Jane Caulfield was in excellent health and fine spirits. She spoke clear American English. She could play the piano. She had apparently received a first-rate, if somewhat outmoded, education: the curriculum seemed to have been based on that of nineteenth-century Andover. She claimed not to remember a single thing that had happened to her. The last time that Mark could remember Jane Caulfield being in the news had been a third-page squib announcing that she had established a formal correspondence with Patricia Hearst.

"I mean I'm really Jane Caulfield," Janis had said.

Mark nodded.

"All right. So tell me what really happened to you."

"I don't know. I don't remember any of it. They showed me those film clips, and it was just creepy, like it was someone else. You don't believe me either, do you?"

"Janis." Mark took a deep breath. "Everyone knows that Jane Caulfield must have been lying. It is impossible to retain a first-rate education and yet not remember anything else. It can't be done. Brain-washing doesn't work that way, and neither does amnesia, and neither does selective memory. Not for nine years, not like that..."

Janis was looking at him. Not staring, not glaring, just looking, speculatively, as if at something under a microscope.

"I know these things!" he yelled. "I'm a neurology major!"

"Why are you yelling?" she asked, quietly.

"I'm not yelling!" But he was, of course, because suddenly, inexplicably, in that one moment when he had seen her looking at him, Mark had known, utterly and without question, that she had been telling him the absolute truth.

•

The Pizza Place was loud, smoky and hot. Brittany and Chris were deeply embroiled in an animated debate over a book that no one else had read when Mark and Stephanie arrived, so there was nothing to do but take a seat and prepare for a long haul.

Brittany was smiling a lot this evening, which was not a good sign. As a general rule, the happier Brittany seemed to be, the more likely it was that everyone else present was miserable. This was because Brittany hated all of her friends and delighted only in seeing them suffer. She was no ordinary sadist; the pain and anguish of strangers held no attraction to her. Nor was there any arbitrariness in her malice: bigotry was to Brittany a concept unknown. No, her hatred was personal. She was highly selective, carefully cultivating the acquaintance of those individuals whose character flaws most appealed to her, and then permitting herself the luxury of reveling in their every defeat. Brittany had many friends, most of whom deluded themselves into believing that this was her way of showing affection. Mark knew better. Nonetheless, he was honored to be among her closest friends because, in a world which seemed intent on degrading and dismissing the individual at every turn, he found it comforting to know that there was at least one person who would always hate him for himself and himself alone.

Across the table, Chris was arguing his point so vehemently that tears were springing to his eyes. Tears frequently sprang to Chris' eyes whenever he became vehement; it was one of his charms. He was resplendent this evening in a white dinner jacket which had miraculously made it through the meal unstained by pizza droppings. Chris was always resplendent—this was another of his charms—although Brittany would always insist that no one who wore white after Labor Day could properly be described as anything but sartorially hopeless. But then, Brittany was unlike Mark in that she was immune to charm.

Janis was sitting next to Chris, resting a hand on his arm. She smiled wryly at Mark as he sat down and rolled her eyes at him. Mark smiled back. Chris and Brittany's exclusionary conversations were becoming notorious. The Narc and Elgin, all the way on the other side of the table, were apparently conducting a quiet conversation of their own. Mark strained to eavesdrop, if only to get some idea of what the Narc's voice sounded like, but Chris and Brittany were too loud. Stephanie, in mute response to his wordless exchange with Janis, put her arm around his waist.

•

"You remember when I wondered if maybe I were gay?" Janis had asked him. It was early October, and they were collecting leaves.

"How could I forget?" The conversation to which she referred had engendered an all-night debate over whether or not it was possible for an amnesiac to possess internalized homophobia.

"Well, I don't think I am." She glanced at him. "I think I'm attracted to men. I just think I'm not attracted to you."

"Oh."

"Don't be offended."

"I'm not," he had said, and the funny thing was that he hadn't been. Janis had a talent for not offending him with her tactless comments. Once, she had said, "I'm glad my first time was with you, even if it was really awful," and he had felt flattered.

Shortly thereafter, Chris and Janis had become lovers. Mark hadn't minded that at all; what deeply disturbed him was that Janis had no intention of telling Chris who she was.

"What, you think this is just some little thing I'm going to tell every man I sleep with for the rest of my life?" she had demanded. "Idiot. I told you because I wanted to tell you. I don't want anyone else to know."

"Why me?"

"You're my best friend. Chris is only my third-best friend."

"Your third-best friend? What do you do, rate them?"

"Doesn't everyone?"

"Doesn't Chris ask you all those questions I used to ask you?"

"Of course."

"Doesn't it drive him crazy when you won't answer them?"

"No. Chris cannot be driven crazy. Chris is already crazy."

•

This was true. Chris was certifiable. For the past two weeks, for example, he had been convinced that some horrible calamity was going to befall the world on the Ides of November. Remembering this now, and bored with sitting mute while Brittany and Chris argued, Mark decided that it was high time to change the direction of the conversation.

"Only a couple more days to Armageddon, right Chris?" he said, the next time Brittany took a breath.

"What?"

"The Ides of November."

"Oh, dear." Brittany's dramatic eyes rolled in her fish-bowl glasses. "The Ides of November. They've come, Christian."

"Aye," Chris agreed grimly. "But not yet gone." Yet another of Chris' charms was his inability to resist such opportunities.

"Shakespeare notwithstanding, darling, your calamity only has a few more hours to put in an app—"

"No, that's not right," Stephanie suddenly objected. "It isn't the Ides of November yet."

Mark tensed under her arm as Brittany swiveled towards her and beamed, flashing a smile of such good will that Mark went cold all over. Brittany did not like being interrupted.

"Why, my dear Stephanie!" she exclaimed, as if she had not previously noticed her. "You look...different today. What have you done? No, no, don't tell me. Is it your hair?"

"I'm, um...I'm not wearing any make-up," Stephanie stammered, and smiled uncertainly around the table. "I guess this is, like, the new me or something."

"Something like a new Stephanie!" Brittany exclaimed, and laughed. Her laugh never failed to make Mark shudder. It was both delicate and brutal, like a fragile antique vase being dropped seven stories onto concrete. "How delightful! Was there something wrong with the old one?"

"Well…"

"No, no, do forgive me. You were saying something?"

"I said it's not the Ides of November yet."

"Christian!" The magnified eyes swiveled reproachfully across the table. "Is this so? Have you been leading me astray? This thing which somewhat resembles a New Stephanie is a classical scholar, I see. Tell me, dear, just when are the Ides of November?" She turned towards Stephanie with an expression of affection bordering on maternal love.

"They're the fifteenth," Stephanie said. Her face was beginning to take on a mulish, petulant expression, like that of a young child refusing to acknowledge that she has done wrong. Across the table, Janis was slowly shaking her head.

"Chris," Brittany announced sadly. "We have been laboring under a terrible misapprehension. The Ides of November, we are told, fall on the fifteenth of the month, not the thirteenth, as we had been led to believe. For nothing have we studied the vagaries of the Roman calendar! Just think of the ramifications! Could it be that our entire understanding of ancient history has been irrevocably skewed by this revolutionary development?"

"I've never understood why girls want to wear makeup in the first place," Elgin suddenly commented. "It's hardly attractive. At least not to me." Brittany shot him a disbelieving look, then sighed expansively. "I read an essay by Desmond Morris," he continued. "In which he hypothesized…"

Elgin was a genius, and he bored nearly everyone to tears. He could always be counted upon not only to miss the subtleties of any given conversation, but also to enter into it far too late. He now beamed jocularly over his fat cheeks as he explained Morris' theory, pushing his smeary glasses up his nose frequently and gesticulating with the unlit pipe which accompanied him everywhere. Brittany adored Elgin because he was a pompous ass. Mark agreed that Elgin was a pompous ass, but unlike Brittany, he did not consider this a particularly endearing characteristic. Stephanie stared tearfully into her pizza, while Elgin pontificated.

•

"What the hell is wrong with Brittany tonight?" Mark asked Janis on the way to the Student Union. Stephanie and Chris had gone on ahead, claiming that they needed to "talk." Chris had always been much better at calming Stephanie than Mark was, and he resented it greatly, although to be fair, it was probably just another aspect of his omnipresent charm. “She's been acting really weird. I haven't seen her act like that since that time her mother came to visit."

"I see her act like that a lot." Janis shrugged. "You just never notice unless she's picking on either you or Stephanie."

"It's not the hostility I'm talking about, it's the weirdness. She was not acting normal tonight. For one thing, she was off her form. She couldn't even manage to get Stephanie to burst into tears." Mark regretted this the instant it had left his mouth. He glanced nervously at Janis, but she seemed unperturbed.

"She's scared. Everyone's scared tonight. Haven't you noticed? You're the only person who hasn't been acting abnormal tonight. Even Elgin was a bit more oblivious than usual."

"The Narc was the same as always."

"True." They walked in silence. The wind had picked up, and it was becoming quite cold.

"All right," Mark sighed. "I'll take the bait. What haven't I been told?"

Janis stared at him. "You really don't feel it at all, do you?"

"Feel what?"

"Feel...I don't know. It. Everything. Something not right in the world."

"Now you're beginning to sound like Chris."

"I'm serious. Chris may be insane, but that doesn’t mean he’s never right. Something really does feel very wrong tonight."

Mark tried to feel something notrightintheworld and failed miserably.

"It feels like it's going to pour rain," he said.

"I envy you. Stephanie's nearly out of her mind with it. She's pumping Chris right now to try to get some idea of what's going on. I'd do the same if I believed for a minute that Chris had any real insight. And do you know why Jill decided to stay in Albert's room tonight, instead of dragging him along to the movie with us?"

"Because he's her new boyfriend, and she likes him, and she knows that he can't stand us?"

"Because she's afraid to go outdoors until tomorrow morning."

"Oh, that is absurd!" Mark shouted in disgust.

"Well. That's Jill."

"So," Janis said, when they'd reached the Student Union. "What's this movie like? It's by this Hitchcock. He's supposed to be good, isn't he?"

•

Norman Bates was just exhibiting his collection of stuffed birds when the lightning flashed. In the brief moment before the lights went out, Mark suffered what he could only describe as a minor hallucination. The pleasant face of Anthony Perkins on the screen, nearly invisible in that sudden flash of light which shone through the venetian blinds, slashing the audience with sharp shadows, was subtly altered, as if a second image were being projected on top of it. Mark only caught a brief glimpse of the double-image, but the superimposed face was oddly familiar to him. Later, he was to think that if he had only been given one more second, he could have identified it. But he was not thinking along those lines at the time. For in that second, when the room was illuminated in blue striped with black, Janis, sitting next to him, leaped from her seat and screamed.

The projector sputtered and died, thunder crashed, and the auditorium was plunged into darkness. Mark heard Janis stumble against knees and chairs on her way down the aisle; he rose to follow her. The EXIT signs glowing red in the blackness confused him; for a moment he forgot he was in the Herschberg Student Union and tried to follow the familiar seating patterns of his hometown movie theatre. By the time he found Janis in the stairwell, the lights had come back on. Chris was already there.

"Are you all right?" he was asking, repeatedly. "Janis? Are you all right?"

Janis was gasping for air desperately—hyperventilating, Mark supposed, although he had never seen anyone hyperventilate before.

"I'm all right," she panted. "'S'okay."

"What happened?" Chris asked.

"Nothing. It's not important. I just... remembered something."

"Oh," Chris said blankly.

Mark froze. "You…remembered something," he repeated.

"Yeah."

"You want me to take you back home?" Chris asked her.

Janis looked at him, and then at Mark.

"No,” she said. “I'll be all right in a minute. Go sit down and watch the rest of the movie. I'll be there soon."

"You sure?"

"Yes."

Chris shrugged, shifted from foot to foot. "Well, okay," he said, at length. He walked back towards the auditorium slowly, perplexity reflected in his gait. Janis watched him go, patted her pockets for a cigarette, turned to Mark.

"Get me the hell out of here," she said.

•

•

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