any time in this world of perpetual instability.
After a shower, he ordered his lunch and dinner delivered from two different restaurants. His lunch was moo goo gai pan, and when he ate it at his desk, he could neither see nor smell, nor taste, anything about it that suggested it was Soylent Green.
As the day progressed, his guilt grew. He had awakened with the conviction that he should donate 90 percent of his three-hundred-million-dollar inheritance to Dr. Kirby Ignis, for that good man’s most important work. It was the One thing he could do to make amends for being born to wealth that he had not earned. It was the One possibility that he had for redemption, yet he procrastinated. By four o’clock in the afternoon, he was so tormented by this strange new bout of guilt that he left his apartment and reluctantly set out for Apartment 2-F. In the hallway, he encountered his neighbor, Shelly Reeves, and was greatly relieved to hear that Mickey Dime had killed Ignis during the night.
He returned to his apartment and poured a fresh glass of his homemade cola.
Oak View Sanatorium proved to be delightful.
The meals were tasty, and everything was pre-cut into bite-size pieces, which saved time at dinner. A spoon worked well in place of a fork because all the dishes had sides against which Mickey could scoop the food.
He could not have hoped for a more cozy room. His armchair was wonderfully comfortable, his bed a dream. They changed the linens every day, just like in a fine hotel.
His private bath featured a polished-steel panel instead of a mirror because mirrors could be broken, the pieces used as weapons. The door to the shower stall was safety glass, which if shattered would dissolve into a gummy mass of tiny fragments useless to either an amateur or a professional killer.
Care had been taken throughout his room and bath to be sure that all nails and screws in the walls, the floors, and the furniture had been countersunk and capped with glued-in plugs to make them inaccessible.
Anyway, Mickey had no intention of harming anyone. Even if he had not been on antipsychotic drugs, he would have behaved himself. He had been happy and content since he had acknowledged his insanity. All the tension had gone out of him, all the worry.
The court had barred him from using the money he earned as a hired killer. Likewise, he could not benefit from the portion of his mother’s estate that had been left to dead Jerry, his brother. But Renata had left only 15 percent to Jerry, 85 percent to Mickey, and she had been richer than anyone imagined.
Charlie Criswell, Renata’s attorney and Mickey’s court-appointed conservator, visited once a month to make sure his ward was receiving good care. Mickey liked Charlie. Charlie was diligent and kind; he was also gay; he had never felt romantically attracted to Renata.
One warm day in the early spring, another man visited Mickey Dime while he was sitting on the veranda and watching squirrels caper across the lawn, in the shadows of the enormous oaks. At all times, Mickey wore a transponder on one ankle, so that he could be tracked by satellite if he escaped. When sitting on the porch, he also wore a vest of Kevlar straps securing him to the back of his wheelchair. The wheels of the chair were locked. Only staff members had keys to unlock them. All of these precautions made Mickey feel not like a prisoner but instead safe, safe from himself. The burly male nurse, supervising the veranda from a stool near the front steps, provided a chair for the visitor, placing it close to Mickey but out of arm’s reach.
The visitor was tall, lanky, with sharply arched eyebrows as bushy as caterpillars predicting a bitter winter. His hands were pale, his fingers unnaturally long. He said he was Dr. Von Norquist, and Mickey had no reason to doubt him.
A month earlier, Mickey had sent a note to Norquist, by way of Charlie Criswell:
Norquist said, “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“Yes, you do,” Mickey said.
The scientist’s eyes were the color of ripe plums, but there wasn’t anything sweet about his intense stare. “You killed Kirby.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Mickey shrugged. “I’m insane.”
“You killed those elderly sisters, a security guard, that helpless blind man.…”
“That’s correct.”
“And dropped their bodies down a lava pipe, for God’s sake.”
“I guess I did. I’m not as clear about that. It’s what I intended to do, so I guess I did it.”
“Why?”
“Insane,” Mickey said, and smiled affably.
The scientist stared at him for a long time. Finally he said, “You don’t seem insane to me.”
“Well, I am. Totally. I’m okay with it.”
After another silence, Norquist said, “How did you know I’m concerned about the need for ‘a greatly reduced and sustainable population’? I’ve never shared those thoughts so explicitly with anyone, not even with Kirby.”
In a low voice that sometimes sounded like that of Kirby Ignis and sometimes like that of Witness, at other times like other people he didn’t know but that Norquist apparently did, Mickey began by recounting the waking dream that he’d experienced in Kirby Ignis’s kitchen. The Pogrom. The destruction of the cities. The swift rise of the One. The resultant, profoundly simple ecology of that world of craggy black trees, luminous grass, and a single consciousness. His words were not his own. He repeated the more eloquent narrative of the One.
