The girl was still thinking of his divided body. She said, “If you’re only half, I don’t see how you can walk.”
“I can move the left side a little bit, and we’re not mad at each other. We’re not supposed to be able to come together at all, but we do: down through the legs and at the ends of the fingers and then back up. Only I can’t talk with my other side because he can’t, but he understands.”
“Why did they do it?”
Behind them the monkey, who had been following them, said, “He had uncontrollable seizures.”
“Did you?” the girl asked. She was watching a seabird swooping low over the water and did not seem to care.
Nicholas picked up a shell and shied it at the monkey, who skipped out of the way. After half a minute’s silence he said, “I had visions.”
“Ooh, did you?”
“They didn’t like that. They said I would fall down and jerk around horrible, and sometimes I guess I would hurt myself when I fell, and sometimes I’d bite my tongue and it would bleed. But that wasn’t what it felt like to me; I wouldn’t know about any of those things until afterward. To me it was like I had gone way far ahead, and I had to come back. I didn’t want to.”
The wind swayed Diane’s hair, and she pushed it back from her face. “Did you see things that were going to happen?” she asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Really? Did you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Tell me about it. When you saw what was going to happen.”
“I saw myself dead. I was all black and shrunk up like the dead stuff they cut off in the Pontic gardens, and I was floating and turning, like in water but it wasn’t water—just floating and turning out in space, in nothing. And there were lights on both sides of me, so both sides were bright but black, and I could see my teeth because the stuff”—he pulled at his cheeks—“had fallen off there, and they were really white.”
“That hasn’t happened yet.”
“Not here.”
“Tell me something you saw that happened.”
“You mean, like somebody’s sister was going to get married, don’t you? That’s what the girls where I was mostly wanted to know. Or were they going to go home; mostly it wasn’t like that.”
“But sometimes it was?”
“I guess.”
“Tell me one.”
Nicholas shook his head. “You wouldn’t like it, and anyway it wasn’t like that. Mostly it was lights like I never saw anyplace else, and voices like I never heard any other time, telling me things there aren’t any words for, stuff like that, only now I can’t ever go back. Listen, I wanted to ask you about Ignacio.”
“He isn’t anybody,” the girl said.
“What do you mean, he isn’t anybody? Is there anybody here besides you and me and Ignacio and Dr. Island?”
“Not that we can see or touch.”
The monkey called, “There are other patients, but for the present, Nicholas, for your own well-being as well as theirs, it is best for you to remain by yourselves.” It was a long sentence for a monkey.
“What’s that about?”
“If I tell you, will you tell me about something you saw that really happened?”
“All right.”
“Tell me first.”
“There was this girl where I was—her name was Maya. They had, you know, boys’ and girls’ dorms, but you saw everybody in the rec room and the dining hall and so on, and she was in my psychodrama group.” Her hair had been black, and shiny as the lacquered furniture in Dr. Hong’s rooms, her skin white like the mother-of-pearl, her eyes long and narrow (making him think of cats’ eyes) and darkly blue. She was fifteen, or so Nicholas believed— maybe sixteen. “
Maureen/Maya’s mother said, “Maya, don’t. You’ll run into something and break your teeth, and you know how much they cost.”
“You don’t want me to have any fun.”
“We do, dear, but
Nobody said anything, so Nicholas/Jerry filled in with, “It has a three-bladed prop, and I’m going to tape streamers to them with little weights at the ends, an’ when I go down old thirty-seven B passageway, look out, here comes that old coleslaw grater!”
