Was

'Where's home?' Bill Davison asked. His face looked very serious.

'Canada, I guess.'

'Okay, Canada. Were you happy there?'

In school? As a little boy tearing up sheets? 'How is this going to help the AIDS?' Jonathan asked.

'Maybe it won't help the AIDS, but it could help you.'

Bill Davison had a direct approach. There was no time in the business of sports for psychoanalysis. In sports, with contracts worth thousands of dollars at stake, you had to intervene. Jonathan had read articles about Bill Davison. Bill would say to black tennis players who felt themselves adrift in a white man's world, 'This is your game. This court here is your neighborhood. Think of it as your own street.'

To football players who had suddenly grown angry at the ball, he would say, 'Think of it as a woman. Imagine that it's the sweetest, kindest woman you ever met. Think of someone you knew. If it ended badly, then make it up to her this time. Catch the ball gently.'

It worked. He had been criticized for merely treating symptoms.

'I can read The Power of Positive Thinking myself without Dr. Davison'; help,' one psychiatrist had said. It turned out that Bill Davison was using visualization techniques fifteen years before anyone else. When the chemical pathway between conscious thought and the triggering of immune response was traced, it became, as they say, a whole different ball game.

Jonathan looked at Bill Davison and thought: You've been happy everywhere. What do you know?

'I don't know, on stage maybe, when I'm performing.' Jonathan thought of the last play he had been in. 'Oz,' he said. 'I was happy in Oz.'

'Go there a lot?' Bill Davison asked, beginning to smile.

Jonathan remembered. 'I used to. When I was a kid. Used to take my summer holidays there.'

'Okay. I want you to pretend to yourself that you're in Oz.'

'You're kidding,' said Jonathan.

'No, I'm not kidding. I want you to think of yourself in Oz, all the time. You step out of here, and you're in Oz.'

Jonathan closed his eyes and gave a weak little laugh. Jonathan and Bill had a contract: to do whatever Bill asked.

'We're fighting, remember?' Bill said.

'Yeah,' said Jonathan. He had thrown up breakfast. He had thrown up lunch. 'What's the point of doing this, Bill?'

'I think it could help you feel more at home,' said Bill, shrugging as if it were obvious. 'You're not. At home.'

'I'm in Los Angeles,' said Jonathan.

It was time to go. Bill would have another client waiting. Jonathan stood up. His good behavior ran on automatic pilot.

Bill shook his hand. Bill always did that to show Jonathan he didn't think of him as being different from anyone else. It was like the visualizations: Jonathan was aware of everything that Bill Davison was doing. He was still surprised when it worked. He was still surprised by the softness of Bill Davison's hands.

He was surprised by the face; swollen by age, with hatchet marks around the eyes. The teeth grinned out at Jonathan, part of the skull peeking out. Hi, there, the skull seemed to say from underneath its temporary flesh. I won't go away.

'Anyway, see you later tonight,' Bill was saying, still alive.

Jonathan's mind went blank. He still saw the skull.

'You're coming to our place for dinner, remember?' It was yet another way in which Bill Davison was unconventional. He was a psychiatrist who invited his clients home.

Jonathan stepped out into the hot white vastness of Wilshire Boulevard. He felt exposed and alone. The traffic roared past, impersonal, as if the cars carried no people in them. There was no one else on the sidewalk, all the way down from Barrington to Bundy. The lights changed; Jonathan began to cross and the traffic still advanced toward him, crawling to a stop, like bulls with their heads down. Jonathan found himself scurrying to get out of their way, even though the lights were still with him.

Jonathan sat down on a bench to wait for a big blue bus. The backrest was covered in a painted advertisement for a funeral home. Gleeful, thought Jonathan, but at least my back is toward it. He looked at the shadows cast by the giant buildings. They marched in rows like morons and gleamed like glaciers. Poor old silver- coated Barrington Plaza looked ancient now beside them. When Jonathan had first come to Los Angeles in the early seventies, the Plaza had been the biggest building all the way from the ocean to the Veterans' Hospital. Jonathan could see the ocean, four miles away at the end of the wide straight road. The sea sparkled in sunlight. Everything was blue with fumes.

Jonathan remembered his contract.

Okay, he told himself, I'm waiting for a big blue bus in Oz. The sidewalks are perfectly laid, because if someone is dumb enough to trip on the edge of a paving slab, they can sue the city. Because the paving is perfect, people roller-skate to work. They wear shorts and shades and a Walkman.

Can I imagine Munchkins here, little people flooding out of shopping malls and insurance offices the size of mountains? Do Munchkins wear mirror shades now? If this is the Emerald City, then the towers are tall because of the value of the land underneath them. And all the windows and doors are sealed because the air inside them is temperature-controlled. If Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man went tripping by, no one would notice. They'd think they were high.