with me,” I said, “my execution and disposal.”
“Who is arguing?”
I begged her slowly: “I asked you, please, if you could please turn out the light, please.”
Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy backed away from the bed. “I’m sorry.” Her fingers found the light switch.
Instantly the room went dim. “Thank you.” The murmuring of voices quieted without their electric lifeline, their wires and
diodes, receptors and interceptors.
“Would you like to stay here for a while, Pilot?”
“Am I out of the woods?”
“Are you speaking metaphorically?”
I smiled. I would have to explain this. “Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy, imagine,” I said. “Katherine, please, imagine a tunnel,
a man in the tunnel like an amoeba—”
“Okay.”
“—and the way it moves through the solution to a problem—” Fuck, I thought. I was losing my place.
She nodded. “Yes.”
“—the way it swallows its pride, taking them inside, an intelligence the size of an ocean, and catching—”
“Would you like to stay here, Pilot?” she asked again, smiling. “Stay here at the clinic for a little while, and we’ll make
sure you’re safe, until you feel better?”
I couldn’t breathe. I touched the scratch on my face. My middle finger, wrapped tightly by the shoelace, throbbed painfully.
“I think that would be good.”
Katherine put her hand, her thin, cool, smooth hand—could this be electronic? no—on mine and squeezed it lightly, just lightly.
Like a mother. Or an old girlfriend.
“I think that would be really, really good,” I said.
Like regret.
She smelled like lemons.
When I closed my eyes I saw Fiona’s face like a prairie. My sister’s eyes like twin moons on an alien horizon. Her chin was
a bluff to climb over. My memory of her was a fading map of a terrain I was no longer familiar with. Everything was different
now.
I missed her so much.
Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy was hiding her hands beneath her desk because she had chewed her nails down to nothing—
beyond
nothing—and there was a bright halo of blood around each one of her fingertips. “I’m really glad you could come,” she was
saying. “I know how busy you must be, and—”
“I’ll make time for this,” Eric broke in. “Whenever you need me, just call, and I’ll make myself available.” His hands were
beautiful, Katherine noticed, the nails the perfect shape for a man, clear, with no trace of white, not dull but not shining.
Dramatically, he said, “This is my brother.” She didn’t know that Eric checked his fingernails each morning in his chrome-and-black
bathroom, holding a pair of silver clippers above a polished wastebasket.
Katherine nodded. “So I don’t have to tell you what Pilot is experiencing, what he’s—”
“It’s all too familiar.” Eric’s face was perfectly tanned, shenoticed, with wide cheekbones, and blue, blue eyes. His figure was athletic, finished. His pose, however, was concerned,
even distressed.
“Dr. Lennox’s initial diagnosis,” she began, “is, is that Pilot has some form of schizophrenia, whether it’s schizoaffective
disorder or—” Eric closed his eyes, face upturned. “But naturally we would rather believe,” she rushed to say, “that this
is a response to trauma of some kind, whether real or imagined, rather than”—she cleared her throat—“well, rather than late-onset
adult schizophrenia, which I don’t have to tell you is more—”
“—degenerative,” my brother finished.
“Dr. Lennox said your mother indicated that Pilot has had other episodes?”
Eric leaned forward, his long, perfectly manicured fingers touching each other habitually. Was he aware of this habit? “Pilot
has always been psychologically—I don’t know—
fragile
. He had an episode when he was very young,” he said. “Around eleven. But we had always chalked that up to an event.”
“An event?”
“When we were children our little sister