When I come to, Thelma is beating up Czar. She has pushed him to the floor and is straddling him. She slaps him in the face with her big, meaty hands. Once, twice, thrice. “What’d you do to him?” she cries. “Tell me, you son of a b*tch!”

Czar flails his arms. “Ouch! Stop! Ouch!” he hollers.

I sit up, groggy, on the settee as Peter Peter runs in, his tie flapping. He hurries over to pull Thelma off Czar.

“You people are all f*cking nuts!” Czar yells as he struggles to get up. His T-shirt is torn at the neck and his hair disheveled. “Why do I try helping you when all I get is bruises and concussions?”

Peter Peter looks dismayed. He brushes the dust off his friend’s back as Thelma straightens her kitten T-shirt, which has ridden up her belly.

“I’m a professional hypnotist!” Czar cries. “I deserve respect, but all I get is f*cking abuse!” He swats at the display of ten Susan B. Anthonys, and the dollar coins go flying and then bounce across the floor in a jingle-jangle. How upset I will be if we lose one!

Thelma comes to sit with me on the settee. “Are you okay, Oliver?” She places her fingertips on my elbow as a gesture of concern.

“I feel very curious,” I say.

“What the hell were you doing to him?” Thelma says, scowling at Czar. “You some kind of maniac?”

“I ain’t the maniac!” Czar snaps, his voice now high-pitched. “You people are the maniacs!”

Peter Peter steps forward. “I’m afraid this is entirely my fault.”

Czar says, “I should have known not to get mixed up in this filthy business.” He turns on his heel and storms off.

“Charles, wait,” Peter Peter calls out. At the corned beef display, Czar turns around and gives Peter Peter the finger.

“No need to be uncivilized,” Peter Peter calls out.

“F*ck off and redie!” Czar yells. Then he stomps out of the exhibition hall.

Once Czar is gone, I tell Thelma we were conducting an experiment. I am still dazed, still partly immersed in my horrible lost memory.

“I was worried, honey. You didn’t come home this evening, so I biked here to see if you was okay and I found that kook standing over you. I thought he was killing you, ’cause all a sudden you started hollerin’.”

“Was I screaming?” It is true my voice sounds hoarse.

“To high heaven,” Thelma says.

Peter Peter explains what Czar was doing. He must trust his new girlfriend, because he discloses everything, even his own fiery plunge from his penthouse apartment. Thelma keeps patting her own cheeks as though to revive her circulation. When Peter Peter is finished, she says, “This is dangerous information.”

Peter Peter replies, “So dangerous I urge you to keep it secret.”

Thelma nods slowly. Then she turns to me. With a mix of dread and excitement, she says, “Tell me what you saw, Oliver.”

I tell them I did not see who shot me. “But I must not have died immediately from my wound,” I say, almost breathless. “I must have passed out and then come to next to Johnny.”

Thelma and Peter Peter give me looks of sympathy. In a way, these two thirteen-year-olds are my foster parents, not Richard and Jane.

“You saw him?” Peter Peter prods. “You saw Johnny?”

“The last thing I saw,” I say, “was the bloody bullet hole in his head.”

“Zig in heaven,” Thelma whispers, and then she glowers at Peter Peter for having arranged this experiment. “Who was screaming?” she asks me. “Was it you? Or was it Johnny?”

I blink a few times, as if the light in the dim room is still too bright. “I believe it was I,” I say. “But I do not believe I was screaming aloud. I believe I was screaming in my head.”

Mother. I want my real mother. I want you. And, Father, where are you? I want you too. I think I may break my rule of never crying. But I do not. I sit silently on the settee and stare at a dollar coin that rolled under our display of dead telephones that will never ring.