John sat up on the bed, wordless.

“You said her name. I guess you didn’t even know it. Girlfriend? Wife? Well, it doesn’t matter.”

He managed, “I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m flattered. You must love her a lot.”

She left him staring at the door.

Sleeping, he dreamed of his first sexual encounter.

He was sixteen and he had abandoned Benjamin and he was about to abandon the Woodwards; as an experiment, he seduced a female classmate. He selected his target and approached her methodically. She was a fragile bundle of neuroses and exposed nerves, therefore easy to manipulate. Which he did: he flattered and provoked and humiliated her into a motel bedroom, and he fucked her there—there was no other word for it. He obtained her passive submission and he fucked her.

Was it satisfying?

On the most elementary level, yes, it was. As an experiment, it was wholly successful. Fucking this schoolgirl in the dark was a confirmation of everything he had learned about himself, about his superiority. She was a lesser creature, which rendered any ethical objections moot. The sin, if there was a sin here, was not rape but bestiality, surely excusable under the circumstances.

Two things bothered him, however, and made him reluctant to repeat the experiment.

The first was that, while he was with her, while he was hovering at the brink of orgasm, some subterranean and scary impulse caused him to mouth the words “I love you” against her ear. She hadn’t noticed, thank God. But it troubled John immensely. The words weren’t his words! And words were his environment: words were where he lived. If this brick could collapse, how secure was the structure he had made of his life?

The second disturbing thing was the way she looked at him when they were finished. He switched on the bedside lamp and began to dress. He turned and caught her eyes fixed on him, and the expression on her face was one of silent shock:What am I doing here? Christ, what have I done?

He recognized the look.

He hated it.

It was far too familiar.

When he awoke it was five-fifteen of the next evening and the last daylight was bleeding away in a steely grey sky.

He checked out at the desk. There was another woman at the counter, middle-aged, lumpily overweight. She smiled and totaled his bill. “Late to be leaving,” she observed. “Are you one of those night drivers?”

He nodded.

“Yeah,” she said, “we get a few of those. Some people prefer it. Me, I think it’s lonely going down the highway all by yourself in the dark. Oh well … I guess people are different that way.”

He looked at the bill. “What’s this charge?”

“Why, that’s your phone call. Long distance to Toronto about 11 a.m. this morning. You came in the office and asked me how to get a line out, and I—hey, mister, is something wrong? What’s the matter—you don’t remember?”

In the Corvette he swallowed two pills and washed them down with coffee from a thermos, then gunned the engine and sailed west.

He passed the arena on his way out of Atelier. According to the billboard, the Reverend Belweather had canceled for tonight.

There was fresh-fallen snow in the Rockies but the roads were clear. The Corvette labored up and through a world of pine and snow and rock and cold blue sky; he was closing in on his objective now. John especially did not want to sleep—the sleep might revive his twin, if only momentarily, as it had in Atelier—and so he began to rely on the amphetamines when he felt fatigue settling in. This effectively killed his appetite, which in turn eliminated restaurant stops and saved a little time, though he did periodically force himself to stop for food. He was running the physical machine hard and he was conscious of the dangers that imposed.

He was careful; but even so, coming down the slope of the Rockies into coastal British Columbia, he began to hallucinate.

Rockfaces and switchbacks took on a sinister, knife-sharp significance. One looming wall of granite, where the mountain had been blasted to accommodate the road, compressed itself into a sudden likeness of Maxim Kyriakides—the rugged features, fierce brows, flat gray eyes. Max as he had appeared to John as a child. This immense, this unshakable. Well, he thought, as Amelie might say, Fuck you, Max. Get thee behind me.

It was the pills, he thought. They were responsible for this, the eruption of metaphor into his visual field. He shook his head and worked hard at concentrating on the road.

Of course, he thought, it might be the dissolution that Susan Christopher had warned him about. The cortical locus of his ego, the John Shaw part of his brain, misfiring in the dark of the skull … as it had when he almost allowed the Corvette to cartwheel on the highway out of Toronto. But that was not an allowable thought.

Not yet.

He blinked away the mutant landscape and reached for his baggie of pills.

He abandoned the Corvette in the vast parking lot at Tsawassen, where the ferries left the mainland of British Columbia for the Gulf Islands.

It was a bright, clear autumn day. The ferry dock was at the end of a long artificial spit of land; the waiting room windows looked over the placid blue water. John stood in the sunlight watching as the Victoria ferry eased into dock. Peaceful here, but he was wound up with drug energy. Twitchy restlessness and fatigue poisons, strange little seretonin rushes from his overworked neurochemistry. He made his body calm, tried to suppress the raw-nerve tingling in his arms and legs. He thought of Susan Christopher.

The thought was unbidden but very strong. Another eruption out of his past, he thought, this one more recent. Another face. Well, he liked her face. He held it in his mind for a moment, and the influence was soothing. Her face was uncommonly revealing and it was possible to read every flicker of her psyche in it. Her timidity, of course, and her fear of him, and under that something else, a fresh grief … but these things did not define her. There was also an openness, a willfulness. Intelligence. And she liked him; she felt some connection with him.

A dim sexual urge fought through the amphetamine haze. But that was inappropriate … now and maybe forever. Sudden associative memories of old experiments, encounters in the dark. And this cynical, familiar thought: A man may be raised by apes. But does he love the apes?

In the blue Gulf water a ferry sounded its horn. John shouldered his knapsack and shuffled aboard.

The afternoon faded toward evening. Crossing the Gulf, standing alone on the windswept outer deck, he watched the peak of Mount Hood, ancient volcanic cinder cone, fading to red on the horizon.

He had come to Canada fifteen years ago. Memories of that time unreeled behind his eyes.

After he left the Woodwards, after a few years in transient jobs from Detroit to San Francisco, he decided he would be safer in Canada. Safer or, at least, harder to find. John understood certain facts about his past. He knew that his creation had been overseen by the American government in one of its more macabre incarnations—the CIA’s MK-ULTRA or some related institution—and that this agency had lost interest in him shortly before he was delivered to the Woodwards. He was also aware that he was a potential embarrassment to these powerful people and that he would be safer if he could become anonymous. Canada seemed like a good place to do that.