The screen clears.

Ready.

In the lower right-hand corner of the blue screen, white letters and numbers tell him that he is in document one, on page one, at line one, in the tenth position.

Ready. He is ready to write a novel. His work.

He stares at the blank monitor, trying to start. Beginning is more difficult than he had expected.

He has brought a bottle of Corona from the kitchen, suspecting he might need to lubricate his thoughts. He takes a long swallow.

The beer is cold, refreshing, and he knows that it is just the thing to get him going.

After finishing half the bottle, confidence renewed, he begins to type.

He bangs out two words, then stops, The man The man what?

He stares at the screen for a minute, then types "entered the room."

But what room? In a house? An office building? What does the room look like? Who else is in it? What is this man doing in this room, why is he here? Does it have to be a room? Could he be entering a train, a plane, a graveyard?

He deletes "entered the room" and replaces it with "was tall."

So the man is tall. Does it matter that he is tall? Will tallness be important to the story? How old is he? What color are his eyes, his hair? Is he Caucasian, black, Asian? What is he wearing? As far as that goes, does it have to be a man at all? Couldn't it be a woman?

Or a child?

With these questions in mind, he clears the screen and starts the story from the beginning, He stares at the screen. It is terrifyingly blank.

Infinitely blanker than it was before, not just three letters blanker with the deletion of "man."

The choices to follow that simple article, "the," are limitless, which makes the selection of the second word a great deal more daunting than he would have supposed before he sat in the black leather chair and switched on the machine.

He deletes "The."

The screen is clear.

Ready.

He finishes the bottle of Corona. It is cold and refreshing, but it does not lubricate his thoughts.

He goes to the bookshelves and pulls off eight of the novels bearing his name, Martin Stillwater. He carries them to the desk, and for a while he sits and reads first pages, second pages, trying to kick-start his brain.

His destiny is to be Martin Stillwater. That much is perfectly clear.

He will be a good father to Charlotte and Emily.

He will be a good husband and lover to the beautiful Paige.

And he will write novels. Mystery novels.

Evidently, he has written them before, at least a dozen, so he can write them again. He simply has to re-acquire the feeling for how it is done, relearn the habit.

The screen is blank.

He puts his fingers on the keys, ready to type.

The screen is so blank. Blank, blank, blank. Mocking him.

Suspecting that he is merely inhibited by the soft persistent hum of the monitor fan and the demanding electronic-blue field of document one, page one, he switches off the computer. The resultant silence is a blessing, but the flat gray glass of the monitor is even more mocking than the blue screen, turning the machine off seems like an admission of defeat.

He needs to be Martin Stillwater, which means he needs to write.

The man. The man was. The man was tall with blue eyes and blond hair, wearing a blue suit and white shirt and red tie, about thirty-years old, and he didn't know what he was doing in the room that he entered.

Damn. No good. The man. The man. The man*

He needs to write, but every attempt to do so leads quickly to frustration. Frustration soon spawns anger. The familiar pattern.

Anger generates a specific hatred for the computer, a loathing of it, and also a less focused hatred of his unsatisfactory position in the world, of the world itself and every one of its inhabitants. He needs so little, so pathetically little, just to belong, to be like other people, to have a home and a family, to have a purpose that he understands.

Is that so much? Is it? He does not want to rub elbows with the high and mighty, dine with socialites. He is not asking for fame.

After much struggle, confusion, and loneliness, he now has a home and wife and two children, a sense of direction, a destiny, but he feels it slipping away from him, through his fingers. He needs to be Martin Stillwater, but in order to be Martin Stillwater, he needs to be able to write, and he can't write, can't write, damn it all, can't write.

He knows the street layout of Kansas City, other cities, and he knows all about weaponry, about picking locks, because they seeded that knowledge in him-whoever "they" are-but they haven't seen fit also to implant the knowledge of how to write mystery novels, which he needs, oh so desperately needs, if he is ever to be Martin Stillwater, if he is to keep his lovely wife, Paige, and his daughters and his new destiny, which is slipping, slipping, slipping through his fingers, his one chance at happiness swiftly evaporating, because they are against him, all of them, the whole world, set against him, determined to keep him alone and confused. And why? Why? He hates them and their schemes and their faceless power, despises them and their machines with such bitter intensity that- -with a shriek of rage, he slams his fist through the dark screen of the computer, striking out at his own fierce reflection almost as much as at the machine and all that it represents.

The sound of shattering glass is loud in the silent house, and the vacuum inside the monitor pops simultaneously with a brief hiss of invading air.

He withdraws his hand from the ruins even as fragments of glass are still clinking onto the keyboard, and he stares at his bright blood.

Sharp slivers bristle from the webs between his fingers and from a couple of knuckles. An elliptical shard is embedded in the meat of his palm.

Although he is still angry, he is gradually regaining control of himself. Violence sometimes soothes.

He swivels the chair away from the computer to face the opposite side of the U-shaped work area, where he leans forward to examine his wounds in the light of the stained-glass lamp. The glass thorns in his flesh sparkle like jewels.

He is experiencing only mild pain, and he knows it will soon pass. He is tough and resilient, he enjoys splendid recuperative powers.

Some of the fragments of the screen have not pierced his hand deeply, and he is able to pry them out with his fingernails. But others are firmly wedged in the flesh.

He pushes the chair away from the desk, gets to his feet, and heads for the master bathroom. He will need tweezers to extract the more stubborn splinters.

Although he bled freely at first, already the flow is subsiding.

Nevertheless he holds his arm in the air, his hand straight up, so the blood will trickle down his wrist and under the sleeve of his shirt rather than drip on the carpet.

After he has plucked out the glass, perhaps he will telephone Paige at work again.

He was so excited when he found her office number on the Rolodex in his study, and he was thrilled to speak with her. She sounded intelligent, self-assured, gentle. Her voice had a slightly throaty timbre that he found sexy.

It will be a wonderful bonus if she is sexy. Tonight, they will share a bed. He will take her more than once. Recalling the face in the photograph and the husky voice on the phone, he is confident that she will satisfy his needs as they have never been satisfied before, that she will not leave him unfulfilled and frustrated as have so many other women.

He hopes she matches or exceeds his expectations. He hopes there will be no reason to hurt her.

In the master bathroom, he locates a pair of tweezers in the drawer where Paige keeps her makeup, cuticle scissors, nail files, emery boards, and other grooming aids.

At the sink, he holds his hand over the basin. Although he has already stopped bleeding, the flow starts again at each point from which he works loose a piece of glass. He turns on the hot water so the dripping blood will be sluiced down the drain.

Maybe tonight, after sex, he will talk with Paige about his writer's block. If he has been blocked before, she might remember what steps he took on other occasions to break the creative impasse. Indeed, he is sure she will know the solution.

Pleasantly surprised and with a sense of relief, he realizes that he no longer has to deal with his problems alone. As a married man, he has a devoted partner with whom to share the many troubles of the day.

Raising his head, looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the sink, he grins and says, "I have a wife now."

He notices a spot of blood on his right cheek, another on the side of his nose.

Laughing softly, he says, "You're such a slob, Marty. You've got to clean up your act. You have a wife now. Wives like their husbands to be neat."

He returns his attention to his hand and, with the tweezers, picks at the last of the prickling glass.

In an increasingly good mood, he laughs again and says, "Gonna have to go out and buy a new computer monitor first thing tomorrow."

He shakes his head, amazed by his own childish behavior.

"You're something else, Marty," he says. "But I guess writers are supposed to be temperamental, huh?"

After easing the final splinter of glass from the web between two fingers, he puts down the tweezers and holds his wounded hand under the hot water.

"Can't carry on like this any more. Not any more. You'll scare the be-jesus out of little Emily and Charlotte."

He looks in the mirror again, shakes his head, grinning. "You nut," he says to himself, as if speaking with affection to a friend whose foibles he finds charming. "What a nut."

Life is good.

.. , The leaden sky settled lower under its own weight. According to a radio report, rain would fall by dusk, ensuring rush-hour commuter jam-ups that would make Hell preferable to the San Diego Freeway.

Marty should have gone directly home from Guthridge's office.

He was close to finishing his current novel, and in the final throes of a story, he usually spent as much time as possible at work because distractions were ruinous to the narrative momentum.

Besides, he was uncharacteristically apprehensive about driving. When he thought back, he could account for the time minute by minute since he'd left the doctor and was sure he hadn't called Paige while in a fugue behind the wheel of the Ford. Of course, a fugue victim had no memory of being afflicted, so even a meticulous reconstruction of the past hour might not reveal the truth.

Researching On hundreds of miles and interacted with dozens of people while in a disassociative condition yet later could recall nothing they'd done.

The danger wasn't as grave as drunken driving* though operating a ton and a half of steel at high speed in an altered state of consciousness wasn't smart.

Nevertheless, instead of going home, he went to the Mission Viejo Mall.

Much of the workday was already shot. And he was too restless to read or watch TV until Paige and the girls got home.

When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping, so he browsed for books and records, buying a novel by Ed McBain and a CD by Alan Jackson, hoping that such mundane activities would help him forget his troubles.

He strolled past the cookie shop twice, coveting the big ones with chocolate chips and pecans but finding the will power to resist their allure.

The world is a better place, he thought, if you're ignorant of good nutrition.

When he left the mall, sprinkles of cold rain were painting camouflage patterns on the concrete sidewalk. Lightning flashed as he ran for the Ford, caissons of thunder rolled across the embattled sky, and the sprinkles became heavy volleys just as he pulled the door shut and settled behind the steering wheel.

Driving home, Marty took considerable pleasure in the glimmer of rain-silvered streets, the burbling splash of the tires churning through deep puddles-and the sight of swaying palm fronds, which seemed to be combing the gray tresses of the stormy sky and which reminded him of certain Somerset Maugham stories and an old Bogart film. Because rain was an infrequent visitor to drought-stricken California, the benefit and novelty outweighed the inconvenience.

He parked in the garage and entered the house by the connecting door to the kitchen, enjoying the damp heaviness of the air and the scent of ozone that always accompanied the start of a storm.

In the shadowy kitchen, the luminous green display of the electronic clock on the stove read 4,10. Paige and the girls might be home in twenty minutes.

He switched on lamps and sconces as he moved from room to room. The house never felt homier than when it was warm and well lighted while rain drummed on the roof and the gray pall of a storm veiled the world beyond every window. He decided to start the gas-log fire in the family-room fireplace and to lay out all of the fixings for hot chocolate so it could be made immediately after Paige and the girls arrived.

First, he went upstairs to check the fax and answering machines in his office. By now Paul Guthridge's secretary should have called with a schedule of test appointments at the hospital.

He also had a wild hunch his literary agent had left a message about a sale of rights in one foreign territory or another, or maybe news of an offer for a film option, a reason to celebrate.

Curiously, the storm had improved his mood instead of darkening it, probably because inclement weather tended to focus the mind on the pleasures of home, though it was always his nature to find reasons to be upbeat even when common sense suggested pessimism was a more realistic reaction. He was never able to stew in gloom for long, and since Saturday he'd had enough negative thoughts to last a couple of years.

Entering his office, he reached for the wall switch to flick on the overhead light but left it untouched, surprised that the stained-glass lamp and a work lamp were aglow. He always extinguished lights when leaving the house. Before he'd gone to the doctor's office, however, he'd been inexplicably oppressed by the bizarre feeling of being in the path of an unknown Juggernaut, and evidently he'd not had sufficient presence of mind to switch off the lamps.

Remembering the panic attack at its worst, in the garage, when he'd been nearly incapacitated by terror, Marty felt some of the air bleeding out of his balloon of optimism.

The fax and answering machines were on the back corner of the U-shaped work area. The red message light was blinking on the latter, and a couple of flimsy sheets of thermal paper were in the tray of the former.

Before he reached either machine, Marty saw the shattered video display, glass teeth bristling from the frame. A black maw gaped in the center.

A piece of glass crunched under his shoe as he pushed his office chair aside and stared down at the computer in disbelief.

Jagged pieces of the screen littered the keyboard.

A twist of nausea knotted his stomach. Had he done this, too, in a fugue? Picked up some blunt object, hammered the screen to pieces?

His life was disintegrating like the ruined monitor.

Then he noticed something else on the keyboard in addition to the glass.

In the dim light he thought he was looking at drops of melted chocolate.

Frowning, Marty touched one of the splotches with the tip of his index finger. It was still slightly tacky. Some of it stuck to his skin.

He moved his hand under the work lamp. The sticky substance on his fingertip was dark red, almost maroon. Not chocolate.

He raised his stained finger to his nose, seeking a defining scent.