“I thought that thing was going to kill her,” Lois said. “In fact, I thought it had killed her.”

“Me too,” Ralph said.

“Ralph, did all that really happen? It did, didn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“The balloon-strings… do you think they’re lifelines?”

He nodded slowly. “Yes. Like umbilical cords. And Rosalie.

He thought back to his first real experience with the auras, of how he’d stood outside the Rite Aid with his back to the blue mailbox and his jaw hanging down almost to his breastbone. Of the sixty or seventy people he had observed before the auras faded again, only a few had been walking inside the dark envelopes he now thought of as deathbags, and the one Rosalie had knitted around herself just now had been blacker by far than any he had seen that day. Still, those people in the parking lot whose auras had been dingy-dark had invariably looked unwell… like Rosalie, whose aura had been the color of old sweat-socks even before Baldy #3 started messing with her.

Maybe he Just hurried up what may otherwise be a perfectly natural process, he thought.

“Ralph?” Lois asked. “What about Rosalie?”

“I think my old friend Rosalie is living on borrowed time now,” Ralph said.

Lois considered this, looking down the hill and into the sun-dusty grove where Rosalie had disappeared. At last she turned to Ralph ’ “That midget with the scalpel was one of the men you saw again coming out of May Locher’s house, wasn’t he?”

“No. Those were two other ones.”

“Have you seen more?”

“No.”

“Do you think there are more?”

“I don’t know.”

He had an idea that next she’d ask if Ralph had noticed that the creature had been wearing Bill’s Panama, but she didn’t. Ralph supposed it was possible she hadn’t recognized it. Too much weirdness swirling around, and besides, there hadn’t been a chunk bitten out of the brim the last time she’d seen Bill wearing it. Retired history teachers just aren’t the hat-biting type, he reflected, and grinned.

“This has been quite a morning, Ralph.” Lois met his gaze frankly,?

eye to eye. “I think we need to talk about this, don’t you I really need to know what’s going on.”

Ralph remembered this morning-a thousand years ago, now-walking back down the street from the picnic area, running over his short list of acquaintances, trying to decide whom he should talk to.

He had crossed Lois off that mental list on the grounds that she might gossip to her girlfriends, and he was now embarrassed by that facile judgement, which had been based more on McGovern’s picture of Lois than on his own. It turned out that the only person Lois had spoken to about the auras before today was the one person she should have been able to trust to keep her secret.

He nodded at her. “You’re right. We need to talk.”

“Would you like to come back to my house for a little late lunch?

I make a pretty mean stir-fry for an old gal who can’t keep track of her earrings,”

“I’d love to. I’ll tell you what I know, but it’s going to take awhile.

When I talked to Bill this morning, I gave him the Reader’s Digest version.

“So,” Lois said. “The fight was about chess, was it?”

“Well, maybe not,” Ralph said, smiling down at his hands.

“Maybe it was actually more like the fight you had with your son and your daughter-in-law. And I didn’t even tell him the craziest parts.”

“But you’ll tell me?”

“Yes,” he said, and started to get up. “I’ll bet you’re a hell of a good cook, too, In fact-” He stopped suddenly and clapped one hand to his chest. He sat back down on the bench, heavily, his eyes wide and his mouth ajar.

“Ralph? Are you all right?”

Her alarmed voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. In his mind’s eye he was seeing Baldy #3 again, standing between the Burry-Burry and the apartment house next door. Baldy #3 trying to get Rosalie to cross Harris Avenue so he could cut her balloon-string.

He’d failed then, but he’d gotten the job done (I was gonna play with her before the morning was out.

Maybe the fact that Bill McGovern isn’t the hat-biting type wasn’t the only reason Lot’s didn’t notice whose hat Baldy #3 was wearing, Ralph old buddy. Maybe she didn’t notice because she didn’t want to notice. Maybe there are a couple of pieces here that fit together, and if you’re right about that, the implications are wide-ranging. You see that, don’t you.)

“Ralph? What’s wrong?”

He saw the dwarf snatching a bite from the brim of the Panama and then clapping it back on his head. Heard him saying he guessed he would have to play with Ralph instead.

But not just me. Me and my friends, he said. Me and my asshole friends.

Now, thinking back on it, he saw something else, as well. He saw the sun striking splinters of fire from the lobes of Doc #3’s ears as he-or it-chomped into the brim of McGovern’s hat. The memory was too clear to deny, and so were those implications.

Those wide-ranging implications.

Take it easy-you don’t know a thing for sure, and the funny-farm is just over the horizon, my friend. I think you need to remember that, maybe use it as an anchor. I don’t care if Lois is also seeing all this stuff or not. The other men in the white coats, not the pint-sized baldies but the muscular guys with the butterfly nets and the Thorazine shots, can show up at any time. Any old time at all.

But still.

Still.

“Ralph! Jesus Christ, talk to me!” Lois was shaking him now and shaking hard, like a wife trying to rouse a husband who is going to be late for work.

He looked around at her and tried to manufacture a smile. It felt false from the inside but must have looked all right to Lois, because she relaxed. A little, anyway. “Sorry,” he said. “For a few seconds there it all just sort of… you know, ganged up on me.”

“Don’t you scare me like that! The way you grabbed your chest, my God!”

“I’m fine,” Ralph said, and forced his false smile even wider. He felt like a kid pulling a wad of Silly Putty, seeing how far he could stretch it before it thinned enough to tear. “And if you’re still cookin, I’m still eatin.”

Three-six-nine, bon, the goose drank wine.

Lois took a close look at him and then relaxed. “Good. That would be fun. I haven’t cooked for anyone but Simone and Minathey’re my girlfriends, you know-in a long time.” Then she laughed. “Except that isn’t what I mean, That isn’t why it would t)e, you know, fun.”

“What do you mean?”

“That I haven’t cooked for a man in a long time. I hope I haven’t forgotten how.”

“Well, there was the day Bill and I came in to watch the DeNx,s with you-we had macaroni and cheese. It was good, too.”

She made a dismissive gesture. “Reheated. Not the same.”

The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line. The line broke.

Smiling wider than ever. Waiting for the rips to start. “I’M sure you haven’t forgotten how, Lois.”

“Mr. Chasse had a very hearty appetite, All sorts of hearty appetites, in fact. But then he started having his liver trouble, and…”

She sighed, then reached for Ralph’s arm and took it with a mixture of timidity and resolution he found completely endearing, “Now is the mind. I’m tired of snivelling and moaning about the past. I’ll leave that to Bill. Let’s go.”

He stood up, linked his arm through hers, and walked her down the hill and toward the lower entrance to the park. Lois beamed blindingly at the young mothers in the playground as she and Ralph passed them.

Ralph was glad for the distraction. He could tell himself to withhold judgement, he could remind himself over and over again that he didn’t know enough about what was happening to him and Lois to even kid himself that he could think logically about it, but he kept jumping at that conclusion anyway. The conclusion felt right to his heart, and he had already come a long way toward believing that, in the world of ose to identical.