I wonder if my captors understand this?

I went back to Ziegler—nodding at Deirdre, who was disappointed to see me, as I vanished behind the bead curtain.

“This doesn’t explain it.” I gave him back You Will Never Die.

“Explain,” Ziegler said guilelessly, “what?”

“The paperbacks I bought from you.”

“I don’t recall.”

“Or these—”

I turned to his bookshelf.

Copies of In Our Time, Our Mutual Friend, Beyond the Mexique Bay.

“I didn’t realize they needed explaining.”

I was the victim of a conjuror’s trick, gulled and embarrassed. I closed my mouth.

“Anomalous experience,” Ziegler said knowingly. “You’re right, Soziere doesn’t explain it. Personally I think there must be a kind of critical limit—a degree of accumulated unlikeliness so great that the illusion of normalcy can no longer be wholly sustained.” He smiled, not pleasantly. “Things leak. I think especially books, books being little islands of mind. They trail their authors across phenomenological borders like lost puppies. That’s why I love them. But you’re awfully young to experience such phenomena. You must have made yourself very unlikely indeed—more and more unlikely, day after day! What have you been doing to yourself, Mr. Keller?”

I left him sucking oxygen from a fogged plastic mask.

Reaching for the bottle of clonazepam.

Drawing back my hand.

But how far must the charade proceed? Does the universe gauge intent? What if I touch the bottle? What if I open it and peer inside?

(These questions, of course, are answered now. I have only myself to blame.)

I had tumbled a handful of the small white tablets into my hand and was regarding them with the cool curiosity of an entomologist when the telephone rang.