26

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

We pulled up at the prison and got out of the Tesla and then stood there on the sidewalk looking up at the old towers as adults walked by in costumes. A banner fluttered from the high stone walls. TERROR BEHIND THE WALLS. OPENING NIGHT. The sun was sinking low.

“Why would he drive here?” said Maisie. “Oh my God, this horrible place.”

Tripper grumbled to himself. “You see your car?” he asked.

“Yeah, there it is,” I said, nodding toward the Prius with the Maine plates. We walked over and found the vehicle unlocked and empty. The key fob was in the cup holder, right where I’d left it.

“God, look at you,” Maisie said, taking me in.

“Yeah, well,” I said. “Look at you, Maisie.”

Tripper shook his head. “Un-fucking-believable.”

“It all makes sense now,” said Maisie. Her eyes were shining. “And—you’re happy?”

“Well,” I said, “maybe not at this exact second.”

Tripper rolled his eyes. “Un-fucking-be-liev-able,” he said again.

“You didn’t have to vanish, though,” said Maisie. “That was mean, Quentin. A lot of people cried a lot of tears over you.”

I stood there thinking about how to respond. Maisie wasn’t wrong. “It’s Judith,” I said.

Maisie turned to Tripper. Now he was looking up at the prison. “What do you think, Tripper?”

“Of what?”

“Of her.”

“Let’s just go in and get Benny, okay? Have our big reunion later maybe?” said Tripper. “I want this to be—” He took a step toward the entrance, then he stopped. The car next to mine had a decal in the back window: NETHER PROVIDENCE ANIMAL SHELTER. And a bumper sticker: KEEP THE TAILS WAGGING! SPAY YOUR PET!

“I still don’t see why he’d come here, of all horrible places,” said Maisie.

“It’s like a salmon going upstream to spawn,” Tripper said. “Back to where it was—” He looked at the car with the bumper sticker again. “Aw, no, no, nooo!” He clutched his forehead with one hand. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Tripper. “Oh for fuck’s sake.”

“What?” said Maisie. “Tripper, what’s wrong? Whose car is that?”

For a moment Tripper stood there, gears whirling around in his brain. “It’s all happening,” he said, stunned. “It’s happening again.”

“Wait,” I said. “What’s happening?”

Tripper didn’t explain. He rushed toward the entrance, and Maisie and I followed behind. A moment later we were going down the stairs into the sunken foyer. Where once there had been rubble and the eyes of feral cats there was now a gift shop selling costumes and T-shirts and fashionable tote bags. Tripper ran straight through the gift shop and up the stairs on the other side, out into the prison yard. A moment later Maisie and I were alone in the stone foyer.

“Listen,” said Maisie. We were at the bottom of the stairs. I thought we were going to rush after Tripper, but instead she turned to me.

“What?”

“I’m thinking,” she said. “Maybe it isn’t such a good idea for you to be here.”

“You think I want to be here, Maisie?”

“That’s not what I mean. It’s Tripper. I think he’s—” She looked up the stairs. “I don’t know.”

I followed her gaze. I could just see the far wall from here, out on the other side of the prison yard. A searchlight played against it.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” I said. “You and Tripper.”

Maisie opened her mouth, then shut it. Her eyes shimmered. “I said you should go.”

“But why?” I asked. “Can you tell me that? Wailer never did anything to you.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be Wailer,” Maisie said. “It was supposed to be that asshole, Nathan Krystal.”

I thought about my old teacher. He had seen something in me, a long time ago, when I had seen nothing of value in myself. It was Herr Krystal who had woken me up, made me take myself seriously, even when I lacked a name for the thing I felt.

“He wasn’t an asshole. I owe my life to him. He lifted me up.”

“I thought I saw him do something to Benny, okay?” Maisie explained. “At a party. I wanted to send him a message to leave my brother alone. Tripper was supposed to hire some guy to rough him up. Instead he found this idiot, who…It was an accident. None of it was supposed to happen.”

I took this in. “So we should tell the police,” I said. “We should call them right now. Tell them the truth.”

I wanted to reach out to Maisie, to embrace her for the first time as a sister. It was strange to be talking to her now at the age of fifty-seven, without any walls between us. But then I wondered if this was true. There are plenty of walls between people, and gender, in the end, may turn out to be the least of them.

“Listen to you,” said Maisie.

“Yeah, goddammit,” I said. “Listen to me.”

Maisie nodded grimly. “If telling the truth was so easy, I bet it would be more popular.”

“I didn’t say it was easy. I said you should do it.”

“Oh, Quentin,” said Maisie. “You really shouldn’t have come back.”

She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. Then she turned her back and climbed the stairs into the prison yard, following in Tripper’s footsteps.

“It’s Judith,” I said.

There was a long moment of silence. Then a voice said, “Or Cassandra.”

I turned around slowly, slowly. An overweight man, sweating profusely, stood in the door.

“What?”

“I said Cassandra,” he said. He was out of breath. “Cassandra Horton. You’ve used that one too.”

“I’m sorry?” I said. “Are you here for the thing, the…Terror Behind the Walls?” I pointed into the prison yard. “It’s through there.”

“Terror behind the fuckin’ walls,” he said contemptuously. He handed me a card. Daniel Dudley, Philadelphia Homicide (Ret.).

I stared at him, and the card, and then back at him again. “You’re not in costume,” I said.

The prison yard of Eastern State was full of monsters: Frankensteins, Reagans, Creatures from the Black Lagoon. A group of guys walked by wearing prison stripes. They were all chained together. A guard with a handlebar mustache had his plastic gun trained upon them all.

“Help!” Rachel shouted. “Somebody!”

“Nobody’s helping you now,” said the guard.

“This is real!” Rachel shouted.

“This is real!” the prisoners shouted back.

“You like cats, Maisie?” asked Gurganis. They were walking around the inner perimeter.

“Do I what?”

“Like. Cats.” He sounded irritated with her. “That retard brother of yours always wanted a cat, why didn’t you just let him have one? Could have spared everyone all this bullshit.”

“He’s not my brother,” said Rachel. “Why don’t you believe me?”

“You’d say anything right now to get away. Wouldn’t you?”

“Let me go! Fuck you, let me go!”

Rachel wrenched her arm away from Gurganis’s grip and began to run, but he grabbed her again. He yanked Rachel down along the prison yard as she screamed without pause. A trio of college students looked over at them—there was a Harry and a Hermione, and a Ron. Good times.

“He’s trying to kill me, somebody, help!”

Hermione pointed her wand at Gurganis and said, “Avada Kedavra!”

The spell didn’t work.

“Stop it, Maisie,” said Gurganis. “Enough.”

Rachel kept screaming. Gurganis pressed the gun to her temple. “I said stop it.” Rachel stopped screaming, but she was breathing hard now, and tears were running out of her eyes. “You can get out of this, if you act like a good girl.”

Rachel choked on a sob. “Can I?” she said.

Gurganis didn’t respond. He stared at her for a long beat, then pushed her forward again.

“I didn’t do anything,” said Rachel.

“Exactly,” said Gurganis. He stuffed the gun into his belt. Ahead of them was a small marble statue of a cat, its tail raised, poised by the high wall.

These words were engraved upon a plaque next to it:

IN HONOR OF Dan McCloud, Caretaker of Eastern State Prison during the years the property lay abandoned. He fed the pride of feral cats that lived on these grounds for twenty-one years. This statue is placed here in memory of the man who cared for this historic property, as well as to the animals that he loved.

Gurganis reached into his pocket and got out an Almond Joy bar. “Here, you want half of this?”

“I don’t want a fucking candy bar,” said Rachel.

“No?” said Gurganis, chewing. “What do you want, Maisie?”

“I want you to know who I am,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Gurganis. “Join the fuckin’ club.”

A man wearing a hooded sweatshirt marked MUHLENBERG rushed past them, collided into Gurganis briefly, then kept running. “Help,” Rachel cried out again. “Help me!” The hooded man did not stop.

They continued along the perimeter once more. “You said I could get out of this if I was good?” Rachel said.

“It’s not me who’s doing this,” said Gurganis. They approached a door marked DEATH ROW.

They walked past a half dozen cells, then entered a larger chamber. Gurganis and Rachel moved forward slowly in the dark room, stumbling over pieces of fallen plaster until at last the chair was there before them.

“Okay, pupper,” he said.

Tripper walked around the perimeter of the prison yard, the high stone wall to his right, the constellation of cellblocks to his left. His face was hot. He entered Cellblock 1 and for a moment stood in the entrance, staring down the long hall, remembering the last time. That was when everything went once and forever all to shit. It was amazing that one decision, made in haste thirty-five years ago, had been enough to divert the course of his entire life, had been enough to make him into this instead of the man he was supposed to be.

But nothing had broken the right way, he thought, walking down the cellblock. He should never have gone to Wesleyan, for starters, which even then turned out to be full of pompous freaks and patchouli squirters. The original blueprint had called for Princeton. But it had been a hard year, said Mr. Woodward, his college counselor, and the trouble with Maisie in the fall of his senior year left its toll upon his grades. So instead he followed Quentin and Casey to Wesleyan. And four years later his friends were this ridiculous group of punks and hippies, instead of other young Turks like him. He’d thought of his friends with a kind of detached amusement, as if he were studying them the same way an anthropologist might make notes on a primitive culture.

So he’d learned the strange tongue of Casey, with his marijuana pancakes; and Wailer, with her pink hair and affected brogue; and Rachel, with her boring paintings; and Quentin, the pretentious fuck whom Herr Krystal had always loved more than he’d loved Tripper himself. That long summer in Germany had given Tripper the illusion that Quentin had cared for him, that they were friends. But once they got to Wesleyan, he’d made his contempt clear once more. So many times, he’d wanted to say, remember that night with my Tante Senta, in Locarno? The three of us listening to the Ninth Symphony as that poor old woman wept? Remember what you said to me that night, Alle Menschen werden Brüder? I believed you when you said that. I thought you were my friend.

But you were never anybody’s brother.

Someone cried out from a locked cell to his right. “Hey! Let me outta here!” said a withered old man in tattered rags, an actor. “I didn’t do it! Can’t you help me, please? I’m innocent!”

“Fuck you,” said Tripper.

“You gotta help me!”

“It doesn’t matter whether you did it or not,” he said. “No one cares.” He kept on walking down the hall until he reached the Surveillance Hub. Tripper stood at the center and looked down the long arms of the cellblocks. There were distant shouts, a few moving shadows. He didn’t see Rachel, or Gurganis. Tripper looked at his watch.

“Fuck,” he said out loud. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Maybe Maisie was right. They should have turned themselves in years ago, just explained that things got out of hand. But it infuriated him, the whole idea that he’d have to finally accept being someone other than his true self. He’d have to become this joke—a man who’d paid to have someone beaten up years ago, then tried to pass the blame for everything that had gone wrong onto someone else.

“But I’m not that guy!” he cried out loud, and his voice echoed in the Hub. I’m just someone who was trying to protect a child. So I paid a bully three hundred dollars to punch Nathan Krystal in the nose. It was a good cause, defending poor Benny from Krystal, who should have known better, who should have left that boy alone, who ought to have been paying more attention to which of his students actually had promise, and which ones were just—

There had to be a way of turning it around, even now, he thought. Of being the person he actually was, instead of this fraud, a man who’d been shunted aside from his actual character on account of a single mistake, a mistake not even his own. He thought of Quentin Pheaney, standing in front of their AP German class with Herr Krystal, Quentin using his skills of mimicry to imitate someone so much more sensitive and scholarly than his actual self. And Herr Krystal had fallen for it! Can’t you see, he’d wanted to shout. He’s not really that guy! He’s imitating a perfect student! And you’re falling for it! How can you be so blind? He’s not that guy!

He thought of Quentin and felt the rage seethe up in him again. Of course Quentin had turned out to be a fucking woman. Of course! The man that all the women were in love with because he was so sensitive had never been a man in the first place! It made him want to scream and laugh and cry out with rage all at once. It wasn’t fair that Quentin had had everything that he, Tripper, had ever wanted: looks and charm and the love of others, when they were young—but he had not wanted any of that charm for himself. All along he’d just wanted to be someone else, someone hidden.

“And now he just gets his way!” Tripper shouted. He ran his fingers through his hair. Quentin Pheaney, who had never been here in the first place, got to make his getaway, and live his actual life—while he, Tripper, who had never wanted anything other than to embrace his own greatness, had wound up a clown. And now here I am, he thought, at age fifty-seven, wandering around a fake prison trying to find Clark Gurganis. A man who appeared, after all these years, to have fucking kidnapped the wrong person.

It’s like I’ve got a clown magnet, Tripper thought. Some kind of magnets are attracted to iron. Not mine though! It makes you wonder: what’s the point in even trying to be yourself? The universe doesn’t give a shit who you want to be. You’re very clever, young man, very clever. But it’s clowns, all the way down. He spun and looked down Cellblock 2. He spun one hundred and eighty degrees and stared down Cellblock 9. He spun ninety degrees to the right, and stared down Cellblock 6. Everywhere he looked was another steaming helping of endless stupid.

For a while he just stood there at the center, spinning and thinking. Then he stopped.

“Hey!” shouted the man in the cell down the hall, an actor pretending to be a prisoner. “Is anybody there?”

It was funny how a person got angrier the older they got, Ben thought as he walked through the ruined cafeteria holding the gun. They hadn’t done much by way of restoring this part of the prison. It was almost as awful as it had been back in 1980, as best as he could recall, which wasn’t very well. He didn’t like to think about it.

When he was very small, maybe five years old, he’d gotten frozen outside one time—he’d lost his glasses sledding, and he wandered around in a blur and by the time he got home he couldn’t even talk he was so cold. All he could do was cry: Ahenh, ahenh, ahenh. Maisie had found him on the front doorstep. He’d been full of shame at how cold he was. Ben wasn’t even able to open the door. So he rang the doorbell, and Maisie found him, and said, Oh you poor lost lamb, just like that. Then she picked him up and put him down at the kitchen table and she made him some Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. It was so hot he couldn’t even taste it. She put an ice cube in the bowl to cool it off and he watched the cube shrink and disappear.

There were still bowls and cups here in the old cafeteria. Some of them looked like they’d been put down on the long tables one day in 1971 and left there. He’d read that on Easter Island in Polynesia the hand tools the Rapa Nui people had used to make the giant stone heads were still lying all around the ancient quarry, as if one day the carvers just thought, Fuck this, we’re not making giant heads anymore. There’d been an article about it in Condé Nast Traveler magazine.

He peeked into the kitchen. “Here, kitty kitty,” he said.

Nothing.

She’d sung him “The Whiffenpoof Song” as the ice cubes melted in his chicken noodle soup. It was a long time ago now. We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way. Bah, bah, bah.

He walked back out into the long hallway with the Walther PPK. Once he had thought it was bizarre, the whole idea of one person taking a gun in their hand, and shooting someone else with it. Now it made more sense, the crap he’d had to listen to over the years and pretend to tolerate. Life on Earth was just one insult to the brain after the next one. It was a shame that you couldn’t make everything vanish. Even his magic trick “The Disappearing Egg” didn’t really make an egg disappear.

He walked down the cellblock in the direction of the Surveillance Hub. Fallen plaster crackled against the bottom of his shoes. He could hear his footsteps, just like on the stairs of the Bagatelle that time. Maisie, are you there? He’d made plenty of noise going up the steps. But she and Tripper Pennypacker were deep into it, and his sister was moaning and yelling and he just stood there in the doorway. He imitated the sound. It didn’t sound the same when he made it; it came out like the sound a leopard might make if it got one of its paws caught in a trap. It was okay that she’d chosen Tripper over him, her own brother. That was the way things worked.

But it would have been nice if just once she’d asked him to sing.

He walked down the long, empty expanse of Cellblock 6. This was another one of the ones they hadn’t fixed up yet.

It hadn’t been all that hard to find the caveman. There he was, with Rachel Steinberg, looking at the monument to the man who’d cared for the cats. The caveman had fished a candy bar out of his pocket. It had been simple to sneak up on them. The trick, as always, was to divert the subject’s attention.

Now he held the Walther PPK in his hand. It was surprisingly heavy. “I played a trick on you,” he said.

A voice called out: “Hello? Is someone there?” It was impossible to know if it was from an actual human.

Shannon Savage, a sophomore from the University of Pennsylvania, heard the sound of someone groaning. Oh for Pete’s sake, she thought. How had it gotten so late?

People in costumes staggered down Cellblock 1. It was opening night for Terror Behind the Walls. Shannon had hoped to catch up on everything she’d had to leave undone when the body turned up. But she’d forgotten about the Terror thing. THE WORLD’S LARGEST HAUNTED HOUSE BEHIND THE WALLS OF A REAL PRISON, the posters read. And now she was stuck here, her work still undone, people in stupid costumes on every side. She hoped that Professor Sweney would understand. It was just the latest in a series of obstacles to getting anything done at all.

Not the least of which was the body she’d found last Friday, stuffed into the opening for the old escape tunnel. Among the people who’d originally dug that tunnel was the famous bank robber, Willie Sutton, the man who said he robbed banks because “that’s where the money was.” Sutton and the others had emerged into the streets of Philly, covered with mud. They were only out for an hour or two before the cops rounded them all back up again. Now there was a small exhibit on the 1945 escape. She’d helped write some of the text herself.

She hadn’t known it was a body at first. There were things that looked like sticks and some cloth and an old Swiss Army knife. There were initials on the shaft: J. C. A round thing had rolled across the floor and stopped at Shannon’s feet. She’d looked at the skull. A little hair still clung to it.

Shannon let the skull fall to the floor. “I am inosant,” she said.

“But you heard Maisie,” I said to the detective. “She admitted it. It was her, and Tripper. Didn’t you hear her?”

“I heard her,” said Dudley, not that he seemed all that happy about it.

“So you know I didn’t have anything to do with the murder,” I said. I was sitting in the front seat of his car. “Neither did Casey. It was Tripper, and the guy he hired. It was all an accident.”

“Yeah, you know what wasn’t an accident?” said Dudley, mopping his neck with his handkerchief. “You rolling that car off the cliff in Canada. People crying their eyes out over somebody who wasn’t actually dead.”

On the sidewalk in front of us were the members of the Beatles, the early ones. Behind them, a Lady Gaga. One thing led to another.

“It was so long ago,” I said.

“Doesn’t make it right, Quentin,” he said. The poor bastard, I thought. At last he had the solution to Eastern State. But he couldn’t let go of Nova Scotia.

“You know,” I said gently. “You can use my real name. There’d be no sin in that.”

“And you had that legally changed when?” said Dudley crossly.

I felt heat in my cheeks. “Can I ask you one question,” I said. “What do you care? Why do you give an actual fuck?”

Dudley looked at me, a beaten man. I almost felt bad for him. Whatever it was he’d been expecting, this wasn’t it. He’d arrived on the scene after chasing me, apparently, for years, only to find out at this exact moment that someone else was guilty of the crime he’d had his heart set on arresting me for. After all this time, Dudley was so accustomed to pursuing me that my actual innocence just got on his nerves.

He began to speak to me in a different voice, one tinged with defeat. “You like the Animals?” he asked. “You know, the band? They had a song ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place.’ You ever hear that song?”

“Everybody knows that song,” I said.

“Well, you’re somebody who did,” said Dudley.

“Did what?”

Dudley nodded, as if the world were beginning to make sense to him, although not in the way he had hoped. “Got out,” he said.

“Detective Dudley,” I said. “Are you—like me? Are you trans too?”

“What?” said Dudley. “Me? Ha!”

“It’s funny?”

“I like women, all right?” said Dudley.

“Good on you, Detective Dudley,” I said.

“I’ve always liked women,” he went on. “It’s just—they’ve never liked me. That’s why I, you know.”

“What did you do?” I said to the man. A mummy, trailing gauze, disappeared into the entrance to Terror Behind the Walls, and now the area outside the old prison was deserted again. All at once we were the only people in the world, retired old Detective Dudley and me. “Dear God. What did you do?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “People do all kinds of stupid shit.”

“Whatever you did,” I said. “You should forgive yourself. Whatever this is. It can’t be worth all this grief.”

“You don’t get to forgive yourself!” the detective shouted, suddenly as angry as I’d ever seen anyone. “That’s not your job!”

“What are you talking about, of course you can.”

“You can forgive others,” said Dudley. “Only the Lord can forgive us.”

“Really?” I said. “The Lord. Is that what they taught you?”

“It’s the truth,” said Dudley. “What, you think the world should go like, everybody just does whatever the fuck they want, and then, it’s all fine, because they forgive themselves? That’s not how it works. You can forgive everybody else for what they do, but you don’t get to let yourself off the hook. Everything you’ve done is yours to carry.”

“Detective Dudley,” I said. Everything was very quiet. “You’re forgiven.” I made the sign of the cross, touched my thumb to his forehead. “There. I absolve you.”

Dudley swore at me, and pulled out his gun, and pointed it at me. His hands were shaking. “Don’t make fun of what I believe.”

“I wasn’t,” I said. “I was trying to help.”

“Fuck you. Just because you rose from the dead doesn’t make you Jesus,” he said.

“Well, I’m not him,” I said. I reached toward him and gently lowered the muzzle of his service revolver. “I’m not him.”

“You’re fucking right you’re not him. You’re the opposite of him.”

“Now, now,” I said. “I absolved you. There’s no reason to call people names.”

He heaved a long sigh. “So what am I gonna do? Just let you go?”

“It’d be one solution,” I said.

We sat there in stalemate.

But then he said, “I’m not like you. I could just use a little vacation once in a while. From myself, I mean.”

“Yeah?” I said. I opened the door. “Who else would you be? Instead of you?”

“Oh, I’d still be me, Judith,” said Dudley, in a tone of voice that suggested I was stupid not to know this already. “I just wouldn’t feel so crappy about it.”

The light was on in the library. A girl was dusting the books. This room had been fixed up since 1980. The girl looked over at Ben fearfully. She was standing right where the caveman had stood all those years ago.

“I’m not…you, who are you?” she said.

“What?” said Ben.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not very good at talking.”

“I, uh, I’m not, that either so good.” He looked around nervously. “Henh, heh, henh.” He picked at the cuticles on his fingers.

“I’m Shannon.”

“Ben.”

“You’re not wearing, uh a costume, Ben,” said Shannon.

“No costume except my costume,” said Ben. He held up the gun. “And this.”

“Wow,” said Shannon. “That looks so realistic.”

“It is realistic,” said Ben. “I took it off some caveman guy.”

She smiled gently. “Can I help you with something?” She stood there with books in her arms.

“I, uh,” said Ben. He looked around the library. He remembered that guy standing in the corner, him and his beard. You tell anyone you saw me, I’ll cut you. “I’m so tired.”

“Do you want to sit down?” said Shannon, nodding toward a leather chair in the corner. There was a little table next to it, and on the table a lamp. The room was like something out of Sherlock Holmes. She’d fixed it up. There were books by Calvino and Hobbes. In one corner was a heavy iron safe.

“Yeah, okay,” said Ben, sitting down. He felt the air go out of him. “Ahenh,” he said, convulsing with a sudden sob. “Ahenh, ahenh, ahenh.”

“Wait,” said Shannon. “Are you crying?”

Ben nodded. Shannon got some tissues out of her purse and handed him one. “See, I had a cat one time,” said Ben. “But somebody. This guy.”

“I’m sorry,” said Shannon. She was looking at him carefully.

“People just take things from you,” said Ben, looking at the gun he’d stolen.

Shannon nodded. She looked down at the book in her hand. The Princess Bride. “Have you read this?” she said.

Ben wanted to respond, but now he was crying again. He wiped his eyes with the tissue. Then he said something so softly Shannon could not hear it.

“What?” she asked.

“The Cliffs of Insanity,” he said softly.

“You really are all broken,” said Shannon. “I thought I was broken, but you’re really broken. You must be the all-time champion.”

Ben nodded. “I didn’t have to be,” he said.

“It doesn’t make you the only broken person,” said Shannon. “That’s what I learned. Everybody’s black and blue, somewhere. I never met anybody who wasn’t.”

“Not like me.”

“No,” said Shannon. “Everybody gets broken all their own way.” She smiled bitterly. “That’s what makes you, you: the pieces you’re smashed into aren’t like anybody else’s. They’re all yours.” She blew some air through her cheeks. “I told you I can’t talk,” she said.

I’d taken my leave of Detective Dudley. Ten minutes later, there I was, wandering around the prison yard, surrounded by young men and women whose sole source of joy was irony. I tried not to hate them. There was a time when I too had thought everything was hilarious, and who can say who’s cornered the market on the truth of such things, the young or the old? It might well be that the young, in their monster costumes and their Sexy Nurse fishnets, were closer to the life force at this hour than my own ragged self. So what could I do but pass them by, and keep on looking? It was the thing I knew.

Still, no sign of Rachel, which was just as well, perhaps. I’d had my chance back in the day, hadn’t I, night after night at Wesleyan U in the dark in a Foss Hill dormitory, as she whispered to me, Quentin, I’m yours, and I’d failed to follow through. Following through, such as it was, was hardly even on my radar, to be honest. All I’d wanted—then as now—was to be in love.

So I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t entitled to a mulligan, especially what with the vagina and everything. My experience up until this point had suggested that life allowed for plenty of do-overs, of course, but it was not impossible that I’d never really understood the fundamental indignities of time travel, that I’d failed from the beginning to get my mind around the difference between the first go-round as tragedy and the second go-round as farce.

But then I heard her voice. Help me! Somebody! All at once, she was close at hand. A door before me led into a small cellblock built between the others. There were a few abandoned cells on the right and a big fuse box on the wall from which cables spewed like a collection of aortas.

I drew near. “Who’s there?” she said, and just like that she was in the shadows before me: the girl I had been searching for, in my own blind way, all these years. I am so sorry, I wanted to say to her. I didn’t have the words.

“I’m not Maisie!” she shouted. “You have to believe me!”

“I know who you are,” I said.

There was a long pause. Then she said, “Quentin?” as if to even call me by my deadname was an embarrassment, as if she were admitting that she had given herself over entirely to hallucination.

Now it was my turn to pause. What could I say to her now? “I’m here,” I said at last, but even as I said it, an inner voice inquired, Ya think?

“You’re not—dead?” she asked. She couldn’t quite see me in the dark.

“Dead?” I said. It was a good goddamned question. “No,” I said. “Not anymore.”

“How can you possibly be here?”

“I’m not sure I can explain that,” I said.

“You’re not going to hurt me, are you? Please don’t hurt me.”

Of all the things she could have said, this was perhaps the saddest, the idea that, returning from the dead, I could have brought her anything other than love. “No, Rachel,” I said. “I’m trying to save you.”

I got closer. I reached forward like a blind person and felt her face with my hands. The cheek and nose and eyes. She was strapped into the chair.

“Quentin!” she said. “It is you!” She knew me from my fingers.

I felt around for the buckles on the straps.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know how to do it.”

“Do what?” she said.

I thought about Jake yelling at me. Not her! I wanted to open my heart to her, but experience had taught me better.

A sudden sob convulsed Rachel. I wanted to take her in my arms and say, Yeah, that’s what it’s like exactly. But I had to keep my distance. It wouldn’t help anyone if I took her in my arms.

“I’m confused,” she said. “I can’t see you.”

“I don’t want you to see me,” I said.

“What happened, are you—deformed?”

“Yeah,” I said. “No. I’m sorry. I just—”

I thought about it, but at this point all I could feel was exhaustion with her, with the whole teeming world of people who are not transgender, with their endless questions and interrogations. Enough already. I’m sorry, but I have to ask: What is wrong with you people? Does every human soul really require an explanation before she can be deemed worthy of human kindness? Does compassion for one’s fellow humans really demand a test first?

“I’m sorry I said no,” Rachel said. I was struggling with her straps. “Back then.”

“I’d have wrecked your life,” I noted. She had her right arm free now.

“I’m sure that’s not true,” said Rachel.

“I’m sure it is. You don’t know how lucky you were, winding up with that Backflip Bob.”

“Backflip Bob,” she said, like I’d said Clarabelle the Clown. “He wasn’t the one. It was you. Who was my soul mate.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“Oh. I don’t—”

I undid her final strap. “Look,” I said. “You’re free.”

She reached for me in the dark. Her fingers brushed my cheek.

“Don’t come closer,” I said, pushing her back. “Don’t touch me.”

“Why not?” she said. “Quentin—”

“Remember me like I was, okay?” I said. Somehow, freeing her from her bonds just pissed me off. Maybe I was jealous, that for her it was simply a matter of unbuckling some straps. Nice work if you can get it, I thought. For the rest of us, things weren’t so simple.

“What are you?” she asked. It was a good question.

“Just go,” I said. “Don’t make me explain. Spare me.”

“But I love you—” she said. “I’ve always loved you.”

“If you love me, just go. We had our time. Okay?”

“But—”

“Go!” I was so angry I didn’t know what to do. She heard it in my voice. Rachel wandered out of the chamber and down death row and then out into the prison yard. I watched her leave.

As she emerged into the light, she looked behind her, but I wasn’t there. A young couple walked by, a man and a woman, their arms around each other. A searchlight from the high tower played against the wall. For a moment it paused upon the couple. They stopped to kiss each other, illuminated.