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.And in another sense, I want to tell them all not to think they're any different.Around here, everybody's arrested.Chapter 45THE MINUTE BEFORE I LEFT ST.ANTHONY'S for the last time, the minute before I was out the door and running, Paige tried to explain.Yes, she was a doctor.Talking in a rush, her words crowded together.Yes, she was a patient committed here.Clicking and unclicking her ballpoint pen, fast.She was really a doctor of genetics, and she was only a patient here because she'd told the truth.She wasn't trying to hurt me.Pudding still smeared around her mouth.She was just trying to do her job.In the hallway, during our last moment together, Paige pulled my sleeve so I'd have to look at her, and she said, "You have to believe this."Her eyes were bulging so the whites showed all around the iris, and the little black brain of her hair was coming loose.She was a doctor, she said, a specialist in genetics.From the year 2556.And she'd traveled back in time to become impregnated by a typical male of this period in history.So she could preserve and document a genetic sampling, she said.They needed the sample to help cure a plague.In the year 2556.This wasn't a cheap and easy trip.Traveling in time was the equivalent of what space travel is for humans now, she said.It was a chancy, expensive gamble, and unless she came back impregnated with an intact fetus, any future missions would be canceled.Here in my 1734 costume, bent double with my impacted bowels, I'm still stuck on her idea of a typical male."I'm only locked in here because I told people the truth about myself," she says."You were the only available reproductive male."Oh, I say, that makes this all lots better.Now everything makes perfect sense.She just wanted me to know that, tonight, she was to be recalled to the year 2556.This would be the last time we'd ever see each other, and she just wanted me to know that she was grateful."I'm profoundly grateful," she said."And I do love you."And standing there in the hallway, in the strong light from the sun rising outside the windows, I took a black felt-tipped pen from the chest pocket of her lab coat.The way she stood with her shadow falling on the wall behind her for the last time, I started to trace her outline.And Paige Marshall said, "What's that for?"It's how art was invented.And I said, "Just in case.It's just in case you're not crazy."Chapter 46IN MOST TWELVE-STEP RECOVERY PROGRAMS, the fourth step makes you write a complete and relentless story of your life as an addict.Every lame, suck-ass moment of your life, you have to get a notebook and write it down.A complete inventory of your crimes.That way it's always in your head.Then you have to fix it all.This goes for alcoholics, drug abusers, and overeaters as well as sex addicts.This way you can go back and review the worst of your life anytime you want.Still, those who remember the past aren't necessarily any better off.My yellow notebook, in here is everything about me, seized with a search warrant.About Paige and Denny and Beth.Nico and Leeza and Tanya.The detectives read through it, sitting across a big wood table from me in a locked soundproof room.One wall is a mirror, for sure with a video camera behind it.And the detectives ask me, what was I hoping to accomplish by admitting to other peoples crimes?They ask me, what was I trying to do?To complete the past, I tell them.All night, they read my inventory and ask me, what does all this mean?Nurse Flamingo.Dr.Blaze."The Blue Danube Waltz."What we say when we can't tell the truth.What anything means anymore, I don't know.The police detectives ask if I know the whereabouts of a patient named Paige Marshall.She's wanted for questioning about the apparent smothering death of a patient named Ida Mancini.My apparent mother.Miss Marshall disappeared last night from a locked ward.There's no visible signs of forced escape.No witnesses.Nothing.She's just vanished.The staff at St [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]