“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t make copies of anything. No one will believe me. So you can let me go.”

He didn’t bother answering me.

“My legs are going numb. Can you loosen the straps?”

“You have a note from your doctor?”

“Please.”

“Practicing medicine without a license is a crime.”

My dentist once went a little overboard with the gas. Not that pleasant floating sensation-more like I was floating right out of the stratosphere, where the air’s too thin to breathe. It felt like that. The plumber would say something, but it took a while for the words to actually appear. They needed to travel all the way to Mars.

They’d pumped Benjy with the same stuff.

All that mumbling around the psych ward. Maybe he’d mumbled about explosions and floods and doctors wielding scalpels. About his real last name being Washington and him never setting foot in Vietnam. It didn’t matter. It was all sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot.

Get used to it.

When I tried to ask the plumber what was going to happen now-would I live or die or maybe live a kind of walking death like Benjy-I couldn’t form the words. They came out garbled. I felt like giggling.

I was in the same room I’d been in before. I noticed that now.

There was a place on the wall reserved for me. I could post my own letter from Kara Bolka. I am MIA from the world. Call God collect.

This was the worst part of the psych ward.

The place they put the hopeless ones, the ones who don’t even get plastic spoons.

Don’t listen to anything he says-that’s what they’d tell the orderlies. He lies. He’ll say anything. He’ll tell you he’s a reporter; he’ll babble about nuclear reactors and eight hundred dead and horrible coverups and Kara Bolka. What’s Kara Bolka, you say? Who knows? The ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic with homicidal tendencies. They say he killed a gas-station clerk. That he shot a 19-year-old kid in Littleton, California. He cut out poor Dennis’s tongue.

It sounded like a good story. If someone told me a story like that, I would pitch it to Hinch. I’d write it up.

I would.

FORTY-NINE

An isolation cell.

That’s where I was.

No comingling. At least, not yet.

They came in twice a day to give me shots. To dumb me down, send me floating back up to Mars where little blue men can strap you down and put weird thoughts into your head.

There was no window. I stared at the wall a lot. The ceiling had water stains on it that began to resemble things if I looked at them long enough. Like clouds in a dishwater sky. One stain looked like a barber pole with those funny alternating swirls. There was a profile of George Washington up there. Scout’s honor. A ’58 Chevy with cool back fins.

This is what you do when you are locked up and shut away.

When your brain is being slow-cooked.

They were using first-rate narcotics, too; psychotropics must’ve come a long way over the years. Every day, they performed a frontal lobotomy on me. No ice pick needed.

Still.

I learned to concentrate, even though it was like peering through fog. I learned to squint, mentally speaking. To herd those little neurons together and say come on guys, one, two, three.…

I chiseled things into the wall to see if it was actual English. If it was remotely intelligible.

If it made sense, then I did. If it was crazy, then I was. It was a test.

I wrote down names. A kind of mental exercise.

My bowling team. My coworkers. Sam, Seth, Marv, Nate, and Hinch. A folk band, a law firm of disreputable ambulance-chasers.

I spelled them backward and forward and inside out.

I connected them like train cars and took them out for a spin.

I made Belinda and Benjamin the passengers.

I took the train apart, added the names of everyone I knew, mixed the cars up, sent it back down the line. I smashed it to smithereens.

I alphabetized the wreckage.

A before B, which precedes C, which rhymes with D, which sounds suspiciously like E.

I started with Anna.

Okay, you’re probably way ahead of me.

You figured it all out when she first told me her name in the bowling alley parking lot. When she leaned over the fuselage and showed me what a real chassis looks like.

You’ve been trying to scream it at me ever since.

You’ve been wondering when it would penetrate this thick skull, dawn on me with one big resounding duh.

Maybe I just needed a Haldol cocktail and four soft walls to write on.

And time on my hands.

I needed to be relieved of reporting on the latest mall opening and the price of two-headed alpacas. I needed time to muse.

I scratched her name into the plaster, number one on Tom’s Alphabetized List of People who didn’t know I was here and wouldn’t have cared less anyway.

Anna Graham.

I had to stare at it long enough for the letters to blur, for two words to merge and become one.

AnnaGraham.

I had to sound it out like that.

AnnaGraham… AnnaGraham… AnnaGraham… whispering it out loud before I finally understand that I was whispering something else.

Anagram.

Anagram.

Anagram.

I stopped whispering.

I was struck dumb by what I’d refused to see.

Anagrams.

I knew all about anagrams, didn’t I?

My bomb-throwing anti-abortion pediatrician-or was it obstetrician, I forget-had fed me plenty of anagrams in his pathetic attempt to throw me off the scent.

They weren’t any match for this intrepid reporter.

I’d cracked them all.

Except, oh yeah, he wasn’t actually real.

After certain inconsistencies were discovered in a recent story this paper ran about a pediatrician and anti-abortion terrorist, we conducted an exhaustive investigation. We must regretfully inform our readers that Mr. Valle, the author of this story and a reporter for this newspaper for a period of more than five years, was found to have fabricated significant particulars of this article. In addition, he is now suspected to have fabricated all or parts of fifty-five other stories. When this became known to us, Mr. Valle was immediately terminated, subject to future penalties and possible prosecution. We have also announced the resignation of our long-time senior editor, and have instituted some significant changes within our system that we hope will prevent this kind of journalistic fraud from ever happening again. We apologize to all of our readers who put so much faith in our integrity.

Fifty-six stories.

Including one about a group of struggling actors in L.A. who rented themselves out for con jobs.

And one about a crazy fad called Auto Tag.

And one about a doctor I met in the ruins of a destroyed town.

Where the doctor fed me anagrams.

Okay, Anna.

I’ll go where you want me to go.

Anna Graham.

Hamnaagran.

Gramahanna.

Man. Gram. Ana. H.

I furiously worked at it. It consumed the entire afternoon-or was it the morning? It was hard to tell without a window.

I couldn’t unravel it. The letters stuck together, clammed up, and refused to speak to me.

Then.

Anna had two names.

Of course.

It took me less than ten minutes to take that second name apart and put it back together again. In psychotropic time, the blink of an eye.

AOL: Kkraab.

The anagram that Anna had wanted me to see.

Rearrange the letters of AOL: Kkraab and you suddenly have it right there in front of you.

I’d already gotten there first. When I’d found Benjy’s primer. It was in case I didn’t get there first.