He was scheduled to fly the following day and had five or six appointments scheduled in the meantime, appointments that, he decided, he could not afford to keep. He called the concierge and requested a seat on the next plane to New York. He wanted to get out of this room immediately.

Lying on her stomach with her arms spread and her ass slightly aloft, Trina stirred eventually, lifted her head and looked around briefly before collapsing again. "What are you doing? Come back to bed. Ouch."

"I'm packing."

"Come back to bed and fuck me. "

"It's a nice offer, but-"

"Wait a minute." She rolled over onto her back. "I thought you were staying till tomorrow."

"Corrine called."

"Ah. The palpable click of the wedlock."

He went into the bathroom to pack his shaving kit. When he came out she looked defiant. "So what's the big deal? She doesn't know anything."

"She knows."

"Well, so long as you're already convicted, you might just as well relive your crime."

Russell decided not to ask for details, but the fact was, he couldn't remember the actual commission.

Was it just German formality, he wondered, or did he sense a certain chilliness at the desk? Russell left-handed the assistant manager an envelope containing two hundred dollars, a bribe intended to ensure a room for the following year. The assistant manager inclined his head several millimeters in acknowledgment of the gift.

Russell had never blacked out in his life. The lost pieces of the night before were all the more frightening because they seemed to signal a betrayal on the part of his body. Having since college enjoyed an extraordinary tolerance for alcohol, he could not understand this betrayal, nor did he think he had drunk so much more than on other occasions when he'd suffered no more than a hangover.

In the cab to the airport he contemplated the wreckage he'd left behind as he compulsively patted himself down-the instinctive, panicked gesture of the befuddled traveler-and was unable to find his keys in any of his pockets. He feared that Corrine would not be home to let him in. At the airport he tore down all of his luggage and still couldn't find them. Sitting amidst the debris of his luggage he might have cried, but his tear ducts were dried out, his eyes parched.

It was only with some difficulty that he convinced the hotel operator to ring his vacated room, explaining that although Mr. Calloway had checked out, he had left a sleeping body belonging to the alleged Mrs. Calloway behind. After ten rings the operator came back on the line to tell him there was no answer; he asked her to keep trying. Finally Trina picked up. There was scant welcome in her voice.

He explained about the keys.

After several minutes she came back on the line to say she couldn't find them. "Losing everything, aren't we?" she observed. "Our keys, our nerve ..."

"Why did the staff treat me like the Antichrist when I checked out. What did I do?"

"I don't know. You did threaten to buy the hotel when they asked us to leave the Lipizzaner after last call."

It seemed entirely meet and right that business class was overbooked, that the plane sat for three hours on the runway after the passengers had finally boarded, that Russell sat in coach next to a colicky baby.

40.

"Do you think literature can save you?"

These were the first words Jeff had heard Delia utter in weeks. They were at the supper table in Glover House, talking about suicide. Mac, a fat depressive who taught history at the University of Connecticut, was explaining how the rope broke when he tried to hang himself. Delia, however, seemed to be addressing Jeff.

"Me in particular," Jeff asked, speaking softly, afraid that his voice might scare her back into herself. "Are you asking if it can save me?"

"Anyone. Can it help people?"

"It can't save you, but it can kill you. " He saw that his reflexive archness had disappointed her, and was sorry when she retreated back into silence.

Having decided that Delia was no longer dangerous to herself, the authorities had finally dropped her down from Level Three, in which she was attended by special nurses twenty-four hours a day. And on this chilly October evening she was eating, or rather, failing to eat, her first unchaperoned meal.

"What is this foulness," Mickey asked, holding a piece of meat impaled on his fork.

"It's called veal," Jeff snapped. "Milk-fed baby cow."

"I can't eat this. Do you know what they do to these animals? They like suspend them in slings in dark barns..."

"Cruel food," said Delia.

Jeff reached over and held her hand steady as she lit a cigarette. All the campers' hands shook because of the medications they were on, or the ones they were coming off. Mickey then explained that he was going to patent a slingshot-shaped stick designed for use in institutions such as this one. Designed to support the unsteady wrist, the crotch of the Y-shaped stick would be upholstered with fabric in a psychologically neutral color.

"I'll make millions. And I'll fly my private helicopter over my father's terrace and piss on him while he's sunbathing."

Dr. Taylor appeared in the food line, a rare public appearance, reminding Jeff of his absurd session this afternoon.

"You think Caitlin left you because she didn't like your dog?" he'd said. "That seems a little simplistic."

"'Any man that loveth me must also loveth my hound.' Sir Francis Bacon. Not the painter."

"You're speaking metaphorically?"

"Woof woof."

Out in the sitting room amidst the other antiques, blue-haired Babs Osterlick and busty Evelyn Salmon sat at their usual stations observing the exodus from dinner.

"There's that nice tall boy."

"Jeffrey."

"Hello, Jeffrey."

Jeff waved.

"That one comes from a good family," Babs said. "His people have a place next to ours on Mount Desert Island."

"A lot of the drunks are from good people. Is he a drunk or a nut?"

"Drugs, I think."

"I like a tall man."

"Such a pretty girl," said Babs as Delia wandered out a moment later. "Lovely hair."

"But skinny," observed Evelyn. "The boys like more up top."

"Where's everybody going," Babs asked presently. "Is it time for the movie yet?"

"The drunks have to have their meeting first."

"What is the movie?"

"I hope it has that young actor... what's his name?"

"Warren Beatty."

"No, the other one. The naughty one."

"Jack something."

"That's it."

Delia joined Jeffon the porch, where he was smoking a solitary cigarette before the evening AA session.

"Do you hear voices," she asked.

"Now?"

"I've heard that writers hear voices."

"I try to," he said. "Lately I don't hear much of anything."

"I do."

"What do the voices say?"

"They tell me I'm a bad person. They tell me to do things."

"What things?"

"Sometimes they tell me to hurt myself."

"I have a voice like that. The junk monster. Feed me, feed me."

"Is it a boy or a girl voice?"

"It's sort of a growl now, but it started out as this torchy feminine whisper that used to sing outside my window, lure me out into the night. Desire calling."

"I like you," she said, with the unabashed directness of insanity.

"I like you, too."

"I like your friends Russell and Corrine, too. I didn't used to think so but now I do. They have a bright green aura."

Jeff took a long drag from his cigarette, then looked into her eyes. "They're nifty," he said after a while. "Ah, yes."

"There's somebody else inside my body," Delia said.

Jeff nodded, as if to say that this was often the case.

Then it was time for AA.

After supper the depressives received their second meds: particolored pills in a Dixie cup. Delia got lithium, Nardil and Thorazine, plus a multiple vitamin. Hers was one of the heavier meds. The people in substance abuse, who were denied medication, envied her. The doctors were still tinkering with the balance on her meds. The week before, she'd almost gone through the roof of Glover House when the Nardil finally kicked in after eight days. When she failed to respond the first week they kept upping the dosage until finally she woke up at five one morning declaring that she was the handmaiden of the Lord, and she had to be kept under restraint for two days.

The AA meetings were held in Carlyle House. Jeff, Delia and Mickey traditionally occupied the same chairs in the back right corner. It seemed important to observe a routine.

Halfway through the hour Mickey elbowed Jeff's ribs. "Did he actually say his name was Brit Hardy?"

The newcomer looked like a Brit, with his chinos, button-down pink oxford shirt, thick blond hair that looked as if it had been walked through by the athletic, unringed fingers of girls named Sloan and Kelsey.

"There was one night that sort of nutshelled the whole thing," he was saying.

"Nutshelled," Jeff queried.

"I'd just done a huge deal where I brokered the sale of a bauxite mine and I realize I've made like a couple hundred in one day, and so of course I buy an eight ball to celebrate. So I'm sitting around my loft with my girlfriend, who happens to be Miss Brazil 1985..."

Confession as another form of self-assertion, Jeff thought, indistinguishable from bragging. Each time the alcoholics recounted their war stories the bottles multiplied and the mounds of cocaine grew until the entire process seemed an extension of the intemperance and excess that had brought them here in the first place. It was bullshit just like therapy was bullshit just like everything else. We're all drowning in it, Jeff thought, and choking on it.

That night, the day before he left for Frankfurt, Washington took the train up to visit, overcoming, he insisted, a profound fear of self-improvement and the philosophy of abstinence. "Do the visitors got to take a drug test," he asked on the phone. He and Jeff shot pool in the game room, talked about what a pain in the ass Russell had become. Jeff felt at ease for the first time in months. The mutual feeling was that he'd been busted.

Delia took a walk, her first unescorted stroll in weeks. Suspecting that her privileges would be revoked at any moment, she wanted to test her liberty more than savor it. She was not used to being alone, and she was not entirely sure she liked the idea.

Half an hour before curfew she walked from Glover House up to the main house, taking the long way around, past the tennis court and the chapel. The air was cold and sharp, and the moon was nearly full. Little needles of frostiness pricked the insides of her nostrils and her lungs; the black metal posts of the lanterns that marked the footpath were glazed with white. The lanterns were spaced at ten-foot intervals, and when she half closed her eyes they seemed to shoot off rays of light, like picture-book stars in a long curving constellation that marked the bridge into another galaxy. She opened her eyes and continued up the path, passing a lantern in which the glass was broken. She walked by the tennis court and had almost reached the chapel before she turned back, without understanding exactly why, drawn almost against her will, telling herself she wanted just another look and imagining a purely theoretical aspect to her interest-curious that in an institution where such care was taken to banish sharp edges, here in plain sight was a potentially deadly weapon-thinking that she would take a look and make sure of what she had seen and of course if you tell someone they can't have something they will become fascinated by the proscribed object, even obsessed. She could feel a tingle of illicit anticipation as she approached the broken torchere, checking behind herself to make sure she was unobserved, feeling the rhythm of her steps to be inexorable now, as if she no longer had anything to do with her motion or direction. Something was guiding her. She could hear a voice calling her back. It was the sweet, seductive voice. The one that was nice to her.

Still there: framed in black metal, two whiskery slivers of glass flanking a long, flamelike shard. Her breath became labored as she stared ... a hot flush rising to her face. For a moment she was paralyzed, as the attraction to this object was counterbalanced by everything else she could feel. Take it. She stepped forward and pulled the piece of glass out of the metal frame, bending back the wire crosspiece and wiggling it back and forth till it came loose. She held it up to the light of the moon. A beautiful object, the shape organic like a teardrop or a flame. Go ahead. She tested the tip of the flame on her fingertip, drawing a tiny red blossom to the surface. She heard a chorus of voices whispering in her ear, swelling toward a weird crescendo of morbid affirmation. She'd heard them before, the last time. She was supposed to tell Dr. Taylor the next time.

Slipping the glass into the pocket of her parka, she looked into the whispering shadows that surrounded her.

Back in her room, Delia buried the shard deep in the soft soil of the jade plant on her windowsill. While she slept that night, the crystal she had planted in the soil grew into a perfect red rose. The rose shed a tear, which turned to glass and tinkled as it hit the floor. The blossom began to speak to her in a smoky, throaty voice. The rose wanted to be picked. Delia knew it was against the rules, and she shivered with excitement as her hand moved through space toward the trembling petals, but the fat nurse woke her up and it was morning, again.

"We used to have this expression."

"Who?"

"Me, Crash, Wash."