Pandemonium

staring down at me with frozen faces. For a long moment I couldn’t make sense of their expressions. Shock, that was clear enough. And sadness. But there was something else there—something deeper than sadness.

Grief.

12

O’Connell brought me meals as regular as a jailer, and took away trays almost always as full as they’d come in. It wasn’t that I was on a hunger strike, or that I was trying to prove some point. I just wasn’t interested in food. O’Connell would chat me up, trying to get me to tell her what I was thinking. Meg Waldheim stopped by a couple times too. I found that if I ignored them, they eventually went away. On the morning of the third day O’Connell came to my room, but there was no breakfast tray. She was dressed in full Kabuki priest mode, her pale face floating like a moon over the expanse of black cassock. She leaned against the writing desk, blocking my view of the Waldheims’ laptop. “Enough of this,” she said, and yanked the electric cord from the wall. When the video continued to play on-screen—the laptop had a battery—O’Connell slammed down the lid. “Time to get out of bed.”

“I was watching that,” I said sulkily.

“Really?” she said. This was sarcasm. I’d been watching the loop of four-minute video pretty much nonstop for the past few days. I knew this was pathological behavior, Howard Hughes–quality OCD. However, my interest in sanity had gone the way of my appetite.