He sat feeling the bedspread, running his hands over and over it.

Was that true, or only wishful thinking brought on by one sudden and unprovable hunch? The hunch itself might have been as false as the smoke he’d thought he smelled, brought on by simple anxiety. There was no way to check the hunch, and there was certainly no one here to push.

He drank his ginger ale.

Suppose the push had come back. That was no universal cure-all; he of all people knew that. He could give a lot of little pushes or three or four wallopers before he tipped himself over. He might get to Charlie, but he didn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell of getting them out of here. All he would succeed in doing was pushing himself into the grave via a brain hemorrhage (and as he thought of this, his fingers went automatically to his face, where the numb spots had been).

Then there was the matter of the Thorazine they had been feeding him. The lack of it-the lateness of the dose due when the lights had gone out-had played a large part in his panic, he knew. Even now, feeling more in control of himself, he wanted that Thorazine and the tranquil, coasting feeling it brought. At the beginning, they had kept him off the Thorazine for as long as two days before testing him. The result had been constant nervousness and a low depression like thick clouds that never seemed to “let up… and back then he hadn’t built up a heavy thing, as he had now.

“Face it, you’re a junky,” he whispered.

He didn’t know if that was true or not. He knew that there were physical addictions like the one to nicotine, and to heroin, which caused physical changes in the central nervous system. And then there were psychological addictions. He had taught with a fellow named Bill Wallace who got very, very nervous without his three or four Cokes a day, and his old college buddy Quincey had been a potato-chip freak-but he had to have an obscure New England brand, Humpty Dumpty; he claimed no other kind satisfied. Andy supposed those qualified as psychological addictions. He didn’t know if his craving for his pill was physical or psychological; he only knew that he needed it, he really needed it. Just sitting here and thinking about the blue pill in the white dish had him cotton mouthed all over again. They no longer kept him without the drug for forty-eight hours before testing him, although whether that was because they felt he couldn’t go that long without getting the screaming meemies or because they were just going through the motions of testing, he didn’t know.

The result was a cruelly neat, insoluble problem; he couldn’t push if he was full of Thorazine, and yet he simply didn’t have the will to refuse it (and, of course, if they caught him refusing it, that would open a whole new can of worms for them, wouldn’t it?-real night-crawlers). When they brought him the blue pill in the white dish after this was over, he would take it. And little by little, he would work his way back to the calmly apathetic steady state he had been in when the power went off: All of this was just a spooky little side-trip. He would be back to watching PTL Club and Clint Eastwood on Home Box Office soon enough, and snacking too much out of the always-well-stocked fridge. Back to putting on weight.

(charlie, charlie’s in danger, charlie’s in all sorts of trouble, she’s in a world of hurt)

If so, there was nothing he could do about it.

And even if there was, even if he could somehow conquer the monkey on his back and get them out of here-pigs will whistle and beggars will ride, why the hell not? any ultimate solution concerning Charlie’s future would be as far away as ever.

He lay back on his bed, spread-eagled. The small department of his mind that now dealt exclusively with Thorazine continued to clamor restlessly. There were no solutions in the present, and so he drifted into the past. He saw himself and Charlie fleeing up Third Avenue in a kind of slow-motion nightmare, a big man in a scuffed cord jacket and a little girl in red and green. He saw Charlie, her face strained and pale, tears running down her cheeks after she had got all the change from the pay phones at the airport… she got the change and set some serviceman’s shoes on fire.

His mind drifted back even further to the storefront in Port City, Pennsylvania, and Mrs. Gurney. Sad, fat Mrs. Gurney, who had come into the Weight-Off office in a green pantsuit, clutching at the carefully lettered slogan that had actually been Charlie’s idea. You Will Lose Weight or We Will Buy Your Groceries for the Next Six Months.

Mrs. Gurney, who had borne her truck-dispatcher husband four children between 1950 and 1957, and now the children were grown and they were disgusted with her, and her husband was disgusted with her, and he was seeing another woman, and she could understand that because Stan Gurney was still a good-looking, vital, virile man at fiftyfive, and she had slowly gained one hundred and sixty pounds over the years since the second-to-last child had left for college, going from the one-forty she had weighed at marriage to an even three hundred pounds. She had come in, smooth and monstrous and desperate in her green pantsuit, and her ass was nearly as wide as a bank president’s desk. When she looked down into her purse to find her checkbook, her three chins became six.

He had put her in a class with three other fat women. There were exercises and a mild diet, both of which Andy had researched at the Public Library; there were mild pep talks, which he billed as “counseling”-and every now and then there was a medium-hard push.

Mrs. Gurney had gone from three hundred to two-eighty to two-seventy, confessing with mixed fear and delight that she didn’t seem to want second helpings anymore. The second helping just didn’t seem to taste good. Before, she had always kept bowls and bowls of snacks in the refrigerator (and doughnuts in the breadbox, and two or three Sara Lee cheesecakes in the freezer) for watching TV at night, but now she somehow… well, it sounded almost crazy, but… she kept forgetting they were there. And she had always heard that when you were dieting, snacks were all you could think of. It certainly hadn’t been this way, she said, when she tried Weight Watchers.

The other three women in the group had responded eagerly in kind. Andy merely stood back and watched them, feeling absurdly paternal. All four of them were astounded and delighted by the commonality of their experience. The toning-up exercises, which had always seemed so boring and painful before, now seemed almost pleasant. And then there was this weird compulsion to walk. They all agreed that if they hadn’t walked a good bit by the end of the day, they felt somehow ill at ease and restless. Mrs. Gurney confessed that she had got into the habit of walking downtown and back every day, even though the round trip was more than two miles. Before, she had always taken the bus, which was surely the sensible thing to do, since the stop was right in front of her house.

But one day she had taken it-because her thigh muscles did ache that much-she had got to feeling so uneasy and restless that she had got off” at the second stop. The others agreed. And they all blessed Andy McGee for it, sore muscles and all.

Mrs. Gurney had dropped to two-fifty at her third weigh-in, and when her six-week course ended, she was down to two hundred and twentyfive pounds. She said her husband was stunned at what had happened, especially after her failure with countless dieting programs and fads. He wanted her to go see a doctor; he was afraid she might have cancer. He didn’t believe it was possible to lose seventy-five pounds in six weeks by natural means. She showed him her fingers, which were red and callused from taking in her clothes with needle and thread. And then she threw her arms around him (nearly breaking his back) and wept against his neck.