I came back to one of the chairs near her, and sat down in it. I looked down at my hands, clasped in front of me. “I didn’t really pass out, but all of a sudden I couldn’t stand up, and the next thing I knew, Stuart and — I don’t really remember, but a lot of people were around me, shielding me from Wrigley and his friends, or so it seemed to me, and Wrigley and one of the women were yelling and John was yelling back and Lydia and Mark and Stuart — Stuart, of all people! He never yells at anyone. Stuart was yelling. And the woman was saying, ‘I want her fired!’ as if she were anybody at the paper. It was close to a damned riot.”
She poured me a glass of water.
“Thanks,” I said, accepting it. “I still can’t . . .”
“Can’t what?”
“I often feel thirsty,” I muttered, and drank before she could ask anything more.
“Pretty crazy, huh?” I said. She refilled the water for me.
“Being thirsty?”
“No, you know, smashing things at work. Launching expensive electronic equipment through glass walls in rooms where people are seated.”
“Do you think you’re crazy?”
“No — yes — I don’t know.”
“A, B, C, or all of the above?” she asked.
“I feel,” I said, my voice shaking, “out of control. It scares me.”
She waited a moment before asking, “Aside from this incident at work, what’s making you conclude that you’re out of control?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s that . . . I can’t concentrate. I don’t sleep much. Maybe that’s what causes the lack of concentration.”
“Did you have trouble concentrating before you went to the mountains?”
“Not really.”
“Trouble sleeping?”
I hesitated. “Sometimes. Not often.”
She waited.
“When I’m under a lot of stress, I sometimes have nightmares.” In a few words, I told her about my time of being held captive in a small, dark room in a cabin, of the fear and injuries I suffered there, of the occasional bouts with nightmares and claustrophobia I have suffered since. Only a few people know the details of that time. I don’t usually talk about it very freely, but I found myself thinking that maybe if I could interest her in that, she would not ask about more recent events.
She asked a few questions about my life in general. Again, I considered this safer ground, and was fairly relaxed, even when describing situations that had been traumatic at the time they occurred.
“You’ve been through a lot lately,” she said.
I shrugged. “Other people have been through worse.”
“But you survived. All of that, and what happened in May in the—”
“I don’t want to talk about the mountains,” I said quickly. “I’m tired of talking about what happened there.”
“Okay,” she said. “I won’t ask you to talk about those events just now.”
I felt a vast sense of relief.
“In the time since you’ve been back in Las Piernas, and except for Ben, have you spoken to any of the other people who were in the group?”
“I thought you weren’t going to ask—”
“Since you’ve been back,” she said calmly.
“They died,” I said, unable to keep the edginess out of my voice. “All except Ben and Bingle.”
“Everyone?”
“Yes. Unless you mean — the original group that hiked in?”
“That’s who I mean.”
“J.C. came by to see Ben several times. And so did Andy.”
“To see Ben,” she repeated. “Did you talk to them?”
I lifted a shoulder. “They were there to cheer him up.”
“So. . . ?”
“So I didn’t talk to them.”
After a moment, she said, “There were two others, weren’t there?”
I thought, then said, “There was a cop, Houghton. He was Thompson’s assistant, you might say. Frank told me he resigned on May nineteenth.”
“The day you returned from the mountains. When everyone learned what had happened there.”
