“I guess I imagined I was out, and then I was,” Susan said.
Max’s head throbbed again. So much of this place looked the same as home: same trees, same sky . . . No, not the same sky, exactly. But close. Maybe the sameness had misled him. This wasn’t home. The rules were different here. . . .
“Do you think you can just imagine something and it happens?” he asked.
The word imagine sounded flimsy as daydreams. It had no relation to that awful tiled room. At least it didn’t feel like it should. But then, he hadn’t been the one who’d done it. Susan had.
“What were you thinking right when it happened?” he asked her. “Just that second? Do you know that? Can you remember that?”
She grimaced and wrapped both arms around her legs, hunching over to rest her chin on her knees.
“I was thinking the exact same thing you were! I wanted to get out of there. Who wouldn’t?”
A cloud crossed the moon, and the wood darkened.
“But you yourself told us you did it,” Max said. “So how? What did it feel like?”
He could see only the shape of her shoulders now, where they stood out from the silhouette of the tree. But he could see when she shrugged.
“The strangest pumping through my arms and legs, like something had to get out. Like I was going to burst into flame.”
“And you couldn’t have touched anything. . . .”
“No.”
He shook his head. “We’re going to have to go over it again, step-by-step. I know we can figure it out.”
Nell rolled onto her stomach to face Susan. “Maybe you’re more afraid of needles than the rest of us. Could that be it?”
Susan’s voice was frosty. “She came at me with a knife, Nell!”
“I know, I know! I’m just saying . . .”
Susan sighed. “You just keep saying, I know. And now Kate and Jean are looking at me like I can just blow us home from here! Don’t you think I would if I could? It’s something that happened to me, Nell. I didn’t do anything! I’m starting to wish I’d never said it was me. Maybe it wasn’t.”
Max knew that wasn’t true. Susan had been out of her chair first.
“Just because something happened to you doesn’t mean you can’t figure it out,” he told her. “You know what it felt like!”
For a moment, there was only silence. Then the moon drifted back into sight, and in the sudden illumination, he could see Susan shaking her head.
“Don’t you hear how crazy you sound? That’s like saying if someone gets sick, he ought to cure himself. That’s what doctors are for!”
Nell huffed softly in annoyance. “And this place is so full of doctors,” she said. “Besides that Frankenstein lady, I mean.”
“Don’t be so literal, Nell,” Susan snapped.
“Don’t be so stupid, then.”
They were off after that, and when the sniping was over, Susan lay down and refused to say another word. Max felt like yelling at both of them, but especially at Susan. Why did she have to be so stubborn? She was so smart, except when it came to believing she could figure things out. Then it was all too big, too impossible, illogical, unrealistic. She reminded him of one of those roly-poly bugs back home that crawled along at a clip until somebody poked it. Then it would curl up into a little gray ball of nothing.
When Susan got like this, she didn’t think anyone could figure anything out. As far as she was concerned, they were all little gray balls of nothing.
The next morning, she was no better. Jean made the mistake of wondering if Susan, who had made the wind blow, could make it rain, too.
“Of course not!” Susan snapped. “Can you?”
She blamed that on Max.
“You’ve got everybody thinking I can fix this,” she complained. “I can’t!” She kicked at the dirt in disgust. “Even the ground hates me here. I can feel it.”
Were there stages in losing it? Stage one, denial; stage two, anger; stage three, paranoia so bad you suspected the dirt.
“Maybe you’re getting delirious,” he said.
“Criminations! I’m not delirious!” she yelled. “I’m hungry! My head hurts! And I want to get out of here as much as anybody. I just don’t think pretending we can figure this out is going to get us anywhere. We’ve got to find somebody who can help us!”
Back to anger, then. When Susan started hurling unusual curses, Max knew things were bad.
He sighed and watched her march up the mountain fuming. Jean, following her, turned and shot him a pleading look. But for that, too, he had no answer. He thought of the tiled room, and of Susan standing there, and the wind blowing from nowhere. Susan had done it; she’d said so herself. If he’d been the one, he would have figured it out by now. He wouldn’t waste a second being mad. He would be thinking. But not Susan.
She preferred to turn gray and roll into a little ball.
The price of banishment was madness. So it had been, now, for years. If the exile’s penalty had long been delayed, it had come due at last, for now the night swarmed with half glimpses of children — a nearly grown boy lost in shadow, a small dark-haired girl running beneath old trees. Perhaps madness approached this way, slowly, out of dreams that reawakened old yearnings. Flaunted each night was the future that might have been, the loss that had come with disobedience. With it came torment that clouded the mind and threatened to swamp it. For in dreams lived hope. And each morning came the dawn, to crush it anew.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, mathematician, philosopher, moralist, and possible inventor of calculus, was, according to Max, solid proof that you didn’t have to be old to know things. Leibniz had
