He stood up as if to go. “Listen,” Andy said, unable to keep the desperation entirely out of his voice, “I’d like one of those pills.”

“Would you?” Pynchot said. “Well, it might interest you to know that I’m lightening your dosage… just in case it’s the Thorazine that’s interfering with your ability.” His grin bloomed anew. “Of course, if your ability suddenly came back…”

“There are a couple of things you should know,” Andy told him. “First, the guy was nervous, expecting something. Second, he wasn’t all that bright. It’s a lot harder to push old people and people with low or low-normal IQs. Bright people go easier.”

“Is that so?” Pynchot said.

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you push me into giving you a pill right now? My tested IQ is one-fifty-five.”

Andy had tried-with no results at all.

Eventually he had got his walk outside, and eventually they had increased the dosage of his medication again as well-after they became convinced that he really wasn’t faking, that he was, in fact, trying desperately hard to use the push, with no success at all. Quite independently of each other, both Andy and Dr. Pynchot began to wonder if he hadn’t tipped himself over permanently in the run that had taken him and Charlie from New York to Albany County Airport to Hastings Glen, if he hadn’t simply used the talent up. And both of them wondered if it wasn’t some kind of psychological block. Andy himself came to believe that either the talent was really gone or it was simply a defense mechanism: his mind refusing to use the talent because it knew it might kill him to do so. He hadn’t forgotten the numb places on his cheek and neck, and the bloodshot eye.

Either way, it amounted to the same thing-a big goose-egg. Pynchot, his dreams of covering himself with glory as the first man to get provable, empirical data on psychic mental domination now flying away, came around less and less often.

The tests had continued through May and June first more volunteers and then totally unsuspecting test subjects. Using the latter was not precisely ethical, as Pynchot was the first to admit, but some of the first tests with LSD hadn’t been precisely ethical, either. Andy marveled that by equating these two wrongs in his mind, Pynchot seemed to come out the other side feeling that everything was okay. It didn’t matter, because Andy had no success pushing any of them.

A month ago, just after the Fourth of July, they had begun testing him with animals. Andy protested that pushing an animal was even more impossible than trying to push a stupid person, but his protests cut zero ice with Pynchot and his team, who were really only going through the motions of a scientific investigation at this point. And so once a week Andy found himself sitting in a room with a dog or a cat or a monkey, feeling like a character from an absurdist novel. He remembered the cab driver who had looked at a dollar bill and had seen a five hundred. He remembered the timid executives he had managed to tip gently in the direction of more confidence and assertiveness. Before them, in Port City, Pennsylvania, there had been the Weight-Off program, the classes attended mostly by lonely fat housewifes with an addiction to Snackin” Cakes, Pepsi-Cola, and anything between two slices of bread. These were things that filled up the emptiness of their lives a little. That had simply been a matter of pushing a little bit, because most of them had really wanted to lose weight. He had helped them do that. He thought also of what had happened to the two Shop ramrods who had taken Charlie.

He had been able to do it, but no more. It was hard even to remember exactly what it had felt like. So “he sat in the room with dogs that lapped his hand and cats that purred and monkeys that moodily scratched their asses and sometimes showed their teeth in apocalyptic, fang-filled grins that were obscenely like Pynchot’s grins, and of course none of the animals did anything unusual at all. And later on he would be taken back to his apartment with no doorknobs on the doors and there would be a blue pill in a white dish on the counter in the kitchenette and in a little while he would stop feeling nervous and depressed. He would start feeling pretty much okay again. And he would watch one of the Home Box Office movies-something with Clint Eastwood, if he could get it-or perhaps The PTL Club. It didn’t bother him so much that he had lost his talent and become a superfluous person.

5

On the afternoon of the big storm, he sat watching The PTL Club. A woman with a beehive hairdo was telling the host how the power of God had cured her of Bright’s disease. Andy was quite fascinated with her. Her hair gleamed under the studio lighting like a varnished table-leg. She looked like a time traveler from the year 1963. That was one of the fascinations The PTL Club held for him, along with the shameless carny pitches for money in the name of God. Andy would listen to these pitches delivered by hard-faced young men in expensive suits and think, bemused, of how Christ had driven the money-changers from the temple. And all the people on PTL looked like time travelers from 1963.

The woman finished her story of how God had saved her from shaking herself to pieces. Earlier in the program an actor who had been famous in the early 1950s had told how God had saved him from the bottle. Now the woman with the beehive hairdo began to cry and the once-famous actor embraced her. The camera dollied in for a close-up. In the background, the PTL Singers began to hum. Andy shifted in his seat a little. It was almost time for his pill.

In a dim sort of way he realized that the medication was only partially responsible for the peculiar changes that had come over him in the last five months, changes of which his soft weight gain was only an outward sign. When the Shop had taken Charlie away from him, they had knocked the one solid remaining prop out from under his life. With Charlie gone-oh, she was undoubtedly somewhere near, but she might as well have been on the moon-there seemed to be no reason for holding himself together.

On top of that, all the running had induced a nervous kind of shellshock. He had lived on the tightrope for so long that when he had finally fallen off, total lethargy had been the result. In fact, he believed he had suffered a very quiet sort of nervous breakdown. If he did see Charlie, he wasn’t even sure she would recognize him as the same person, and that made him sad.

He had never made any effort to deceive Pynchot or cheat on the tests. He did not really think that doing so would rebound on Charlie, but he would not have taken even the most remote chance of that happening. And it was easier to do what they wanted. He had become passive. He had screamed the last of his rage on Granther’s porch, as he cradled his daughter with the dart sticking out of her neck. There was no more rage left in him. He had shot his wad.

That was Andy McGee’s mental state as he sat watching TV that August 19 while the storm walked the hills outside. The PTL host made a donations pitch and then introduced a gospel trio. The trio began to sing, and suddenly the lights went out.

The TV also went, the picture dwindling down to a bright speck. Andy sat in his chair, unmoving, not sure just what had happened. His mind had just enough time to register the scary totality of the dark, and then the lights went on again. The gospel trio reappeard, singing “I Got a Telephone Call from Heaven and Jesus Was on the Line.” Andy heaved a sigh of relief, and then the lights went out again.

He sat there, gripping the arms of the chair as if he would fly away if he let go. He kept his eyes desperately fixed on the bright speck of light from the TV even after he knew it was gone and he was only seeing a lingering after-image… or wishful thinking.