One Saturday morning less than a week before the scheduled surgery — after a night of horrible dreaming when he'd awakened struggling to breathe at three A.M. and had to turn on all the lights in the apartment to calm his fears and was only able to fall back to sleep with the lights still burning — he decided it would do him good to go to New York to see Nancy and the twins and to visit Phoebe again, who was now at home with a nurse. Normally his deliberate independence constituted his bedrock strength; it was why he could take up a new life in a new place unconcerned over leaving friends and family behind. But ever since he'd abandoned any hope of living with Nancy or staying with Howie, he felt himself turning into a childlike creature who was weakening by the day. Was it the imminence of the seventh annual hospitalization that was crushing his confidence? Was it the prospect of coming steadily to be dominated by medical thoughts to the exclusion of everything else? Or was it the realization that with each hospital stay, going back to childhood and proceeding on up to his imminent surgery, the number of presences at his bedside diminished and the army he'd begun with had dwindled to none? Or was it simply the foreboding of helplessness to come?

What he had dreamed was that he was lying naked beside Millicent Kramer, from his art class. He was holding her cold dead body in bed the way he'd held Phoebe the time the migraine had got so bad that the doctor came to give her a morphine shot, which suppressed the pain but produced terrifying hallucinations. When he'd awakened in the night and turned on all the lights, he drank some water and threw open a window and paced the apartment to restore his stability, but despite himself he was thinking about only one thing: how it had been for her to kill herself. Did she do it in a rush, gobbling down the pills before she changed her mind? And after she'd finally taken them, did she scream that she didn't want to die, that she just couldn't face any more crippling pain, that all she wanted was for the pain to stop — scream and cry that all she wanted was for Gerald to be there to help her and to tell her to hang on and to assure her that she could bear it and that they were in it together? Did she die in tears, mumbling his name? Or did she do it all calmly, convinced at ............