'Thanks for the game.' She sighed, replacing all the anger on her face with resignation. 'We'll work on our footwork a little more later.'
The three opponents all looked significantly relieved, and wandered off to distant corners of the room.
The dayroom was crowded as usual, with a bizarre mixture of activities. It was an open, well-lit room, with a bank of steel barred windows on one wall that let in the sunshine, and an occasional mild breeze. The glistening white painted walls seemed to reflect the light and energy in the space. Patients in various forms of dress, ranging from the ubiquitous loose-fitting robes and slippers to jeans and overcoats, milled about the room. There were cheap red and green leather couches and well-worn armchairs spread about the space, and these were occupied by men or women who sat quietly reading, despite the hum of noise that filled the room. At least, they appeared to be reading, but pages turned only infrequently. There were out-of-date magazines and tattered paperback novels on sturdy wooden coffee tables. In two of the corners there were television sets, which each had a passel of regulars gathered around, absorbing the soap operas. The pair of television sets were in dialogue conflict, tuned to different stations, as if the characters on each show were squaring off against the other network. This was a concession to the near daily fights that had sprung up between devotees of one show, versus those favoring a competing show.
Francis continued to look around and saw there were some patients playing board games, like Monopoly or Risk, a couple of chess and checkers games and some patients that played cards. Hearts was the dayroom favorite. Poker had been banned by Gulp-a-pill when cigarettes were used as chips a little too often, and some patients began hoarding them. These were the less crazy ones, or, Francis thought, the people who hadn't checked all connections to the outside world at the door, when they were shipped off to the hospital. He would have put himself in the same category, a distinction all the voices he heard within him agreed with. And then, of course, there were the Catos, just wandering about the space, speaking to no one and everyone, all at once. Some danced. Some shuffled. Some walked briskly back and forth. But all had their own pace, driven by visions so distant that Francis could only guess what they contained. They made him sad, and they frightened him a little, because he feared becoming like them. Sometimes, he thought, on the balance beam of his own life he was closer to them than he was to normal. He considered them doomed.
A thin haze of blue cigarette smoke hovered over everyone. Francis hated the room, and tried as much as possible to avoid it.
It was a place where everyone's out of control thoughts had free rein.
Cleo, of course, ruled the Ping-Pong table and its immediate surroundings.
Her blustery manner and fearsome appearance cowed most of the other patients, including, to some degree, Francis. But, at the same time, he believed she had a liveliness that most of the others lacked, which he enjoyed, and he knew she could be funny, and frequently managed to make others laugh, a valuable and rare quality in the hospital. She spotted him hovering on the edge of the area, and grinned wildly.
'C-Bird! Come to give me some competition?' she asked.
'Only if forced,' Francis said.
'Then I insist. Forcing you. Please…'
He walked over and picked up a paddle. 'I need to speak with you about what you saw the other night.'
'The night of the murder? Did the woman prosecutor send you to ask me?'
He nodded.
'It has something to do with the traitor she is searching for?'
'Correct.'
Cleo seemed to think for a moment, then she held up the small white Ping-Pong ball, eyeing it closely. 'Tell you what,' she said. 'You can ask your questions while we play. As long as you keep returning the ball, I'll keep answering your questions. We'll make it into a game within a game.'
'I don't know…' Francis started, but Cleo dismissed his protest with a nonchalant wave.
'It will be a challenge,' she said.
With that, she flipped the ball into the air and served it toward him. Francis reached across the green table, and punched the ball back. Cleo returned it to him easily, and suddenly a rhythmic clicking filled the space, as the ball went back and forth.
'Have you thought about what you saw that night?' Francis asked, as he stretched forward for his shot.
'Of course,' Cleo replied, easily flicking the ball back toward him. 'And the more I think about it, the more intrigued I get. There is much afoot here in Egypt. Rome, too, has its interests, no?'
'How so?' Francis said, grunting this time, but keeping the ball in play.
'What I saw only took a few seconds,' Cleo said, 'but I think it said a lot.'
'Go on,' Francis said.
Cleo returned the next shot with a little more pace and a little more angle, so that he had to reach to his backhand to get it back, which he did, surprising himself. He saw Cleo grin as she gathered his return and parried it easily.
'Entering the room, and surveying it, after he'd done all that he'd done,' Cleo said, 'indicated to me that he's not really afraid of very much, is he?'
'I don't follow,' Francis said.
'Sure you do,' Cleo replied, this time giving him an easy slow shot down the middle of the table. 'We're all afraid of something, here, aren't we C-Bird? Either afraid of what's inside us, or afraid of what's inside each other, or afraid of what's outside. We're afraid of change. We're afraid of staying the same. We're petrified by anything out of the ordinary, terrified of a change in the routine. Everyone wants to be different, but that's the biggest threat of all. And so, what are we? We live in a world so dangerous that it defies us. Do you follow?'
Everything Cleo said, Francis thought was true. 'What you're saying is we're all captives?'
'Prisoners. Absolutely,' Cleo said. 'Confined by everything. Walls. Medications. Our own thoughts.' This time she hit the ball a little harder, but she kept it within his reach. 'But the man I saw, well, he wasn't was he? Or, if he was, then what he's thinking isn't at all like everyone else, is it?'
Francis knocked the ball into the net. It dribbled back toward him.
'My point,' Cleo said. 'Serve it up.'
Francis plunked the ball across the table, and once again the clicking noise of the ball traveling back and forth filled the room. 'He wasn't afraid,' Francis said, 'when he opened that door to your dormitory…'
Cleo caught the ball in midair, stopping the rally. She leaned across the table. 'He has keys,' she said quietly. 'He has keys that can unlock what? The doors in the Amherst Building? Or beyond? Keys that can unlock the other dormitories. Storage areas? How about the offices in the administration building? How about the staff housing, will his keys work on those doors? Can he unlock the front gate, Francis? Can he unlock the front gate and simply walk out of here whenever he wants?'
She put the ball back in play.
He thought for a moment, then said, 'The keys are power, aren't they?'
Click, click went the ball against the table surface. 'Access is always power,' Cleo said, with a sense of finality in her voice. 'The keys say much,' she added. 'I wonder how he obtained them.'
'Why did he come into your room, risking being seen?'
Cleo did not answer for several passes of the ball back and forth above the net, before she said, 'Perhaps because he could.'
Again, Francis considered this, then he asked, 'Are you sure you couldn't recognize him if you saw him again? Have you thought about how tall he was, what his build was like. Anything that might distinguish him. Something to look for…'
Cleo shook her head, but then stopped. She took a deep breath, and seemed to
