ROBIN AURELIAN

JELLY BONES

This is the story of a guy named Morty. Nobody's really sure who he is--not Shilling. not Peterson, not Morty himself. But what about the green Coupe de Ville? 

Sometimes bones are just an inconvenience. I melted mine. This is a handy talent to have when one is trapped in a small space and the only way out is an even smaller opening. This sort of thing happened to me all too frequently. I wasn't sure why people were always so upset with me. They didn't seem to feel this way about most of the other people I saw them interacting with.

In the present small dark space where I was trapped, I couldn't actually find a door, and the space was full almost to the top with liquid. I had swallowed some of the liquid when I was first dumped into it, and I was pretty sure it wasn't water. It didn't taste like anything else I'd tasted since I became aware.

There was no light, so there was nothing to see. I closed my eyes. I took a really big breath -- when one had jelly bones and the rest of one was pretty stretchy one could take a really big breath -- and dove to the bottom of the enclosed pool, feeling along the walls for anything useful. A crack, perhaps, or a drain I could pull the plug from or unscrew or otherwise manipulate. My fingers had the ability to shape and harden or soften as I directed them. Most of my body did. A screwdriver from an index finger was nothing, Phillips or flathead, I didn't care, although turning a screw was a bit more involved, since all of me had to turn.

The inner surface of the pool was smoother than most surfaces I had encountered. It didn't even have any corners, just curves. It reminded me of glazed porcelain, pleasant to feel even though it was cool to the touch. For a while I rolled along the walls, enjoying the smoothness against my skin. But tactile pleasure wouldn't do me much good in this situation if I ran out of air.

I swam back up to what was left of the air pocket. Most of the air was already  inside me. I had been trickling carbon dioxide out through my skin while I swam and searched. There had to be a door in this compartment somewhere. After all, I had been stiff with bones when Shilling dropped me in here; when I had bones, I was pretty big and not a bit oozy. At least, I thought I had been bony; I had also been in a somewhat intoxicated state so I wasn't sure of anything. Even if I had been compressible, he must have pushed me in through some sort of crack or other. Where could it be?

It eluded me for a long time, until I pressed as much of myself against the curved walls, floor, and ceiling as I could and still maintain cohesion. I focused all my awareness on the nerves in my skin and crept from the bottom to the top of my space. After a long silent time I realized that there was the thinnest crack in the porcelain above the air pocket, a crack that formed a circle.

I pressed what I could of myself up into the crack and exerted as much pull as I could. Time and space narrowed down to my efforts to work my way out of this fix. After an indeterminate while, the doorway came open and I oozed up and out, dropping the door into the pool behind me. It sizzled.

I found myself in a corridor, which I realized was dark as soon as I reactivated my eyes. I felt my way along the floor and walls and found that they were not as slick as the pool's inner surface had been; they were something else entirely. I tasted them and concluded that the floor was dressed stone and the walls were very cold and sweating plasterboard. There were other tastes on the floor. A lot of people in a variety of shoes had passed this way, and not too long ago. I tasted someone's spitwad before I realized what it was. I was pretty sure it had come from someone I knew.

"Should be dead by now," said a strange voice not far enough away. "I wouldn't bet on it," said someone more familiar. "Morty has a way of getting out of tough spots." The voices were coming closer.

I considered my options. I could run or ooze or flow down the corridor away from them into the unknown, or I could hide from them as they discovered my disappearance, then follow them away to someplace people preferred to be, or --

I unjellied my bones and pulled myself together, unblobbing until my form was as human as I could make it, though I had a feeling I had messed up a few details here and there. Let alone I had lost my clothes before I escaped the pool. I wasn't sure how or when; I only knew that they hadn't been in my way when I made my explorations. Breathing out the extra air that had me swelled up like a watermelon, I settled around my bones. I sat with my feet dangling down into the hole I had climbed out of, and waited for the voices to bring their forms with them.

They also brought light. I used it to give myself a quick once-over. Oops. Six fingers on one hand. I reabsorbed the extra one. I stalked an eye out and glanced at my face. Mouth should be below the nose -- I fixed that too, then sucked the eye back into its socket.

"Damn," said the first voice. "Hi, Morty," said the second voice. I squinted past the flashlight shining on me and recognized Pete Peterson, one of Shilling's chief thugs. He had been nicer to me than anybody else, and I liked him.

"Hi, Pete," I said. "I get the idea somebody's mad at me, but I don't remember why."

"How could you forget a thing like that?" "Like what?" "No joke, you don't remember?" "Remember what?" "Shilling was having one of those parties where he had a bunch of important customers around the pool, enjoying free alcohol and drugs and trying to out clothes-horse each other, and you showed up yelling and waving three knives in each hand. You threw the knives and hit some people in the clothes, but never actually wounded anybody -- did you do that on purpose? I bet you did. You pushed people into the pool three at a time while yelping like a buckaroo. You don't remember any of that?"

"Nope." It didn't sound like me. Or maybe it did. I still didn't know very much about myself.

"You were screeching something about being Kali or Shiva or one of those many-armed Hindu gods. And swearing you wanted to drink peoples' blood and wear their skulls for a necklace. It was like you got religion. For a minute there I had some hope for your future, but you didn't follow through. You didn't manage to hurt anybody. How could a little thing like that slip your mind?"

"Maybe I left a piece of my mind behind while I was getting out of that septic tank or whatever it was." I pointed between my legs to the hole below.

"You mean the acid bath?" "Acid?" I said. I'd never experimented with acid before. I had been swimming around in acid, and I hadn't noticed it acting any differently from water or chocolate milk. It had tasted different, but there were so many things I hadn't tasted that I hadn't known what it was.

"Most people we put in there dissolve entirely," Peterson said. "Guess Shilling was really mad at me, huh?" "Worst I've ever seen him," said Peterson. "You  gotta stop coming around, Morty. Don't you get it that we don't want you here anymore?"

"Sometimes I get it, but I don't always have all the parts of my mind aligned into understanding," I said. I wondered if I should have said that. I had found it better to keep my inner workings to myself in most situations. The more I talked about them, the more upset people got with me. Maybe Peterson wouldn't understand.

"Some parts of your mind don't talk to some other parts?" he said, dashing another vain hope.

"I guess." "Well, tell all the parts to understand this: you can't come here anymore. You're making the boss lose business. You've worn out your welcome. Find somebody else to love."

I stared into his flashlight for a long long time, trying to imprint myself with the information he'd given me. It hurt.

Shilling was the first person I had met whom I could remember. I had opened my eyes in close darkness and hot silence, and then the trunk lid had popped open and there was Shilling, staring down at me where I was curled up, my wrists tied tight to each other and to my ankles behind my back.

Shilling was tall and old and wrinkled and he had a lot of stiff white hair that the sun startled into silver. I thought he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, but then again, I couldn't remember seeing anyone or anything else in my whole life. A car gave birth to me, I figured out later, and Shilling was my midwife. "Who the hell are you?" he had asked, reaching down to rip the duct tape off my lips. "What is this?" he asked somebody I couldn't see. "I just wanted a mint-green Caddy Coupe de Ville. I didn't want it with somebody in the trunk!"

"Sorry, Boss," said the other voice, which belonged to Peterson, I had eventually learned.

The more I discovered about human dealings, the odder I found it in hindsight that Shilling had actually taken me to his home, released my hands and feet, fed me, talked to me, and even named me. Shilling being Shilling, it would have been more like him to just shoot me and dump me in the desert.

But he hadn't, and I loved him. I loved him for every word he had ever spoken to me, every time he had touched me, every attention he had ever paid me. His was the first face I could remember seeing, and I had imprinted on it. I wanted to serve and protect him and make him proud.

At first we had thought there might be something I could do in his service. He had tried to have me trained to be muscle, since he didn't think I had a chance in hell of being brains. Peterson had done the actual training, and mostly he had said things like, "Can't you hit harder than that? Okay, here's a nightstick, use leverage if you can't use strength -I barely felt that! You have to look to do damage, Morty!" I could hit cantaloupes and watermelons all day and break them into a shower of tiny screaming spattery pieces, or even  artistically shaped shreds that resembled animals or aircraft, but I didn't seem to be able to really whale on people.

Although that hadn't stopped me from threatening people with knives and throwing them in the pool last night, according to Peterson. Maybe it I stayed drunk I could do all kinds of interesting things that I didn't seem capable of while I was sober.

"Are you sure there's nothing I can do for Shilling? Nothing at all?" I asked Peterson. I sounded pathetic even in my own ears.

"Give it up, Morty. The only thing he wants from you now is that you die. I would rather you went away, myself. I can't figure out how to make you die."

I stood up. The other guy who had come down with Peterson stepped back, and I realized that I was taller than I had been -- taller than everybody, even Peterson. How had that happened? I didn't remember acquiring more mass, and where would I have gotten it? Now that Peterson told me I'd been in acid, I realized what had happened to my clothes. Something else had metabolized them before I could.

Peterson sighed. "Come with me, Morty, and I'll find you something to wear," he said.

"Thanks," I said. I shambled down the corridor in his wake, looking around. This was a part of the basement I had never seen before -- must be lower than the usual dungeons and torture chambers, maybe even lower than the vaults. "What else is down here?"

"A bunch of other stuff that wouldn't work on you either," said Peterson.

"But this is the worst stuff, right.?" "Yeah, aside from direct methods like spraying you with a bunch of bullets or putting you through a sawmill blade a  few hundred times and then watching to see if the pieces reconnect."

"And he hasn't tried this one on me before, has he?" "Nope." "He likes me." If he had restrained himself from doing the worst to me until now, he must like me on some level. Otherwise, why not try the most extreme methods first? He still hadn't tried the nasty ones that Peterson had just mentioned. I sensed a certain reluctance on Shilling's part.

"Sure, he likes you, but he can't have you around, Morty. You keep screwing up important things for him. You gotta get out and stay out. You understand? Bullets next time, probably."

"I understand," I said. At least some part of me understood. I wasn't sure how long that would last.

"You got awful big," Peterson said when we reached his quarters in one of the cabanas by the pool. The little man who had come down to the acid bath with him had faded away from us as soon as we left the basement, almost before I saw his face in the light and added it to my memory files of everything to do with Shilling. "I don't know what I got that might fit you."

"I don't know how I got bigger, Pete." "How does anything happen with you? It's all a mystery." He flipped through the clothes in his closet, searched his dresser, came up with a big tie-dyed T-shirt and some baggy navy-blue swim trunks. I tried them on, and they fit -- barely. I could turn my fingers into screwdrivers; it seemed to me I ought to be able to shrink myself, but I thought and thought at myself and couldn't make myself smaller. I tried ooshing some of me out to my arms and legs, and that worked a little bit. My hands and feet got bigger and the parts of myself that were really constricted by the clothes got  somewhat smaller.

Peterson watched my efforts for a little while before turning away. I shrugged and shimmied and surged and finally got the clothes to feel comfortable. I had this urge to stick an eye out and look at myself, but I thought that might be going too far. Of the people I had met since my birth from the back of a Cadillac, Peterson was one of the most tolerant, but I couldn't figure out whether he would understand about eyestalks.

I wandered through his house and found a mirror instead. I wasn't sure about the results of my self-tailoring. I supposed weirder-looking people wandered the streets of L.A. Or perhaps not.

Peterson said, "Here's twenty bucks. Use at least some of it as bus fare to get as far away from here as possible."

"Thanks." "I'm gonna tell the boss we finally got rid of you. Don't make a liar outta me, Morty."

I wanted to promise him I wouldn't, but I never made promises anymore. Something in me made me break them all the time.

He patted my shoulder a couple of times, reaching up to do it, and escorted me down to the secret gate at the far end of the grounds, making it all right with the security guards there to let me out.

I wandered down the winding roads of Beverly Hills, heading toward Sunset and wondering what to do. If only I could talk to my mother, the car. It might have been able to tell me something about who I had been before, and maybe out of that information I would be able to find someplace or something to draw me away from Shilling. Too bad this idea hadn't come to me until I was banned from the estate.

Maybe if I found another mint-green Coupe de Ville... I had never tried talking to cars before. I found a busy intersection with long lights and stood in the crosswalk facing traffic, saying hello to Hondas and Hyundais and Mercedes and  BMWs, Fords and Chryslers and Mercury Bobcats. Most of them ignored me except to honk their horns. It wasn't a language I understood, but I kept trying.

Police stopped to talk to me a couple of times, told me to move along. I finally climbed on a bus the way Peterson had told me to, but the bus driver wouldn't take my twenty. I went into a store and bought a postcard, then jumped on another bus and used correct change.

I ended up in Chinatown a while later, still searching and restless and not having any idea what to do with myself. Escaping seemed to be what I was best at, but I only did that when provoked, and whatever I was doing now wasn't provoking enough for anybody to put me somewhere I could escape from. I wondered if I should try to be more provoking. The police could help me get locked up again, I was pretty sure.

I went into a restaurant and had some dim sum even though I didn't much need to get bigger. I wondered why I had been tied up and locked in the trunk of a car. Seemed ridiculous and useless to me now. I could have oozed out of there in seconds. Why had I lain there, frying in the sweat- and fear-smelling desert darkness, until Shilling popped the lid and let me out? What had my former self been planning? Or, more to the point, what had the people who put my former self in that car trunk been planning?

If only I could talk to that car. I could talk to Peterson or Shilling, I supposed. I got a bunch of change from a gift shop and went to a pay phone, then dialed Shilling's private line. "This is Morty," I said.

He hung up. I dialed again. "Don't hang up."

He hung up. Dialed again. "I just have a question." "That bastard Peterson swore you were dead!" "You sure he didn't say I was gone?" "Huh?" He was quiet for a minute or two, but he didn't hang up. "I'm gone, Boss. I just have a question. Who sold you that car?" "I don't deal with details like that. Ask Peterson. The bastard." "I don't have a number for him."

He swore some more, said, "Try Unemployment!" and cursed a few minutes longer, then told me a number to call.

"I'm sorry I messed up your party, Boss," I said. "I don't know what got into me."

"It better be the last time, Morty! Or the next time will be the last!" "I'm trying to stay away," I said. "One way or another you will," he said. He hung up. I dialed the number he gave me and Peterson answered. When he heard my voice, he groaned.

"Just a question," I said. "How did you get this number?" "I asked Shilling." "Morty! You're supposed to be dead! He has to kill me now!" "I told him I was staying away." "Get off the line. I have to leave!" "Pete, who sold you the Caddy I came in?" "Some chiseler in Vegas named Vinny Furness. Good-bye!" He hung up.

I wondered if he were really in trouble. I thought about Shilling for a little while and decided that a guy who could hand me a drink filled with arsenic, have me shot in the head with a .45, feed me to piranhas until they died of indigestion, buckle me into a chair and put a few million volts through me, and drop me in a vat of acid might do some serious damage to Peterson. I liked Peterson. He had always been nice to me.

So I caught a bus back to Beverly Hills. I asked the guards at the secret gate if Pete had come through there, but they told me, after some persuading, that he hadn't made it that far, that he was now in the basement up at the house. They shot me a few times while I was crossing the grounds toward the house, but I made my back into some really hard kind of rubber that bounced the bullets off.

I got to the basement through one of the escape hatches I had discovered while  exploring one day, and headed for the torture level in hopes that Shilling would deal with Peterson there instead of taking him lower.

Peterson was strapped to the big chair in the first room, the room with the big scary tools like pinchers and branding irons, mostly show for people who would scare easy, Pete had told me himself when he was trying his best to train me. Shilling was sitting in the comfortable observation chair, watching through his  dark glasses as the shadowy little man who had come to the lower levels with Peterson to check on me in the acid vat held a glowing iron rod up to Peterson's face.

Peterson shook his head, sweating a lot. "There's nothing you can do to get rid of Morty, Boss," he said. "You know that and I know that. Getting him to leave under his own steam seemed like the best option."

"You irritate me," said Shilling. He sounded irritated. "I'm sorry, Boss."  "Baldwin, give him a kiss of heat to help him remember how irritated I am," said Shilling. 

"Baldwin, don't," I said, stepping into the room. "Gaw damn, Morty, didn't I tell you to go away and stay away?" Peterson yelled.

"Yeah, but I got you in trouble. Come on." I walked over and grabbed the iron rod by the hot end, wrenching it out of the small guy's grip and tossing it over my shoulder into a corner. Then I unbuckled all of the straps holding Peterson into the chair and picked him up. He was sweaty and limp and trembling. And he had told me the red-hot iron rods were kid stuff. Made me wonder.

"Morty!" said Shilling. "What the hell happened to you?" "What do you mean?" "When did you turn into a giant?" "Last night or this morning, Boss, I'm not sure." Maybe the dim sum had helped. My clothes were too tight again, and I'd eaten a lot of different kinds of dumplings.

"Do you know how stupid you look?" "I have some idea," I said.

"Do you know how good you could look with the right wardrobe?" "No." "Do you know how to drive a car?" "I don't know. I bet I could learn," I said, wondering if this would get me closer to the Coupe de Ville.

"You can't seem to attack people, but you could protect people, couldn't you? I mean, here you are trying to protect that asshole Peterson."

"Could be." "You still loyal to me, Morty?" "Sure, Boss." "Still loyal, still stupid, and even better, a giant," Shilling muttered. "Tell you what, Morty. You can have Peterson as your own personal toy. He takes you down to my tailor, and we get you some really nice duds. He teaches you to drive. You don't ever get  drunk or high again, and you leave my customers alone. You drive me places, and you act as my bodyguard when I ask you to. Whaddya say?" Then he muttered, "If there's any way to mess this up, he'll find it. I wonder how he could possibly mess this up?"

"Bodyguard?" "Guard my body. If you can throw people in the pool, you could keep people off me, couldn't you? You don't have to hurt them, just keep them from hurting me."

"Okay," I said. I could be near him and maybe he wouldn't all the time be trying new methods of torture or murder on me. And I could talk to the Caddy. Not that it was likely to do any good.

"Go get decent-looking," he said, flipping his hand at me and Peterson. Peterson was still shaky, so I carried him out. I set him down when we got to the garage. There were twelve cars inside the garage and more in the other garage. Peterson leaned against a dark green Jaguar while I walked over to the Coupe de Ville.

I sat on the cement in front of it. "Mom?" I said. The car just sat there. "Do you remember me?" It didn't say anything. "Do you remember where I came from?" "The back door of the Kalahari Motel in Las Vegas," said a voice. "Probably."

The voice sounded like Peterson's. I glanced at him. He still looked wobbly.

"What do you mean?" "I mean the guy I got the car from, he worked with people who headquartered in the Kalahari, and when they want to get rid of people they send them out the back door."

"Do you know who I am?" "Nobody knows who you are, Morty. And I mean that.  Nobody." "Not even me," I said. "Not even you." "Come on, Pete. Let's go to Las Vegas," I said, standing up. He was breathing almost normally. He stared at me, his eyes bugging out. "The tailor...the car...driving lessons. . ."

"You can teach me to drive on the way." He shook his head and he kept shaking his head while I piled him into a cherry-red convertible, opened the garage door, hot-wired the car, and drove the car down the driveway to the main gate. Interesting. I seemed to know how to drive. Security called up to the house and Shilling told them they could let me out, because the gate opened.

It took Peterson miles and miles to settle down. He tried to grab the wheel, he tried reasoning with me, he tried screaming at me to stop, he tried to jump out of the car. I stretched out a jelly-boned arm and dragged him back in, then fastened his seatbelt. He sat shivering in the passenger seat and stared at my arm for a while after that.

When he got over it, he tried to make me feel guilty by telling me I was signing his death warrant. That gave me pause. What was I doing? Why? And why was I doing it to Peterson, who had always been nice to me?

Who was I, the one doing these things? If the answer came to me, would I hate it?

I pulled into a truckstop in the mountains as night fell. Peterson looked too shaky to go on without some sort of necessary thing, and food or coffee were the only things I could figure.

I ordered him a couple of hamburgers and me a couple more, even though I didn't feel hungry.

"You can't be doing this, Morty," Peterson said after a while, his voice quiet and reasonable. His face was white, with gray smudges under his eyes. The waitress brought us food and we ate. "You can't be doing things he doesn't tell you to. He'll find us like that." He snapped his fingers. "He knows which car we're in, and he'll have the highway patrol out looking for us. We should go back. Maybe it's not too late."

"We can buy clothes in Las Vegas. Shilling's got a tailor there, doesn't he? And I'm driving pretty good, aren't I?"

"I wish you were in little pieces at the bottom of a bunch of different canyons," he said quietly but as if he meant it.

I ate my hamburgers and started on his second one, which he hadn't touched.

"I'm gonna go phone the boss," he said. When he turned his back on me I felt strange, as if all the sand were running out of me. I had a man's name and the  name of a hotel, and I had no guarantees that even if I found out any more information I would be closer to knowing about myself. I wasn't like anyone I had met since I came awake in that trunk. Maybe there was no one else like me anywhere.

Now Peterson, whom I had thought was my friend, was upset with me and wished I were dead. I couldn't remember him wishing that before, even when he was trying to kill me.

Shilling had offered me a job. I could have stayed in L.A. and had a place to be and work to do, been near someone I loved. But I had probably screwed up that chance too by running away from it.

I bit my plate. It crunched. A lot. "Stop it, Morty," said Peterson, back from the phone booth. "People are staring."

I looked around and realized that truckdrivers and tourists were staring at me.  I bit the plate again. I had lost sand, and this tasted like a decent replacement.

"Shilling says it's all right that we're going to Vegas," Peterson said, sitting down and pretending he didn't know me, or maybe pretending that he didn't know what I was doing. "Based on his tone of voice, I'd say that he's alerting his connections and they'll take us out into the desert and shoot us as soon as we get there. He hates it when people don't do what he tells them to. He just can't stand it."

I finished off the plate and ate my glass. Different consistency and texture from the plate, but still pretty good.

"Let's ditch the car and head for Mexico," Peterson said.

"I added the dishes to your bill," said the waitress, dropping off our check.

"Tasty," I said. My clothes were strangling my mid-portions again. I shifted  lungstuff into my upper arms so I could breathe. The waitress went away.

"Otherwise I'll spend the rest of my life wondering when I'm going to wander into a bullet," said Peterson. 

"Do you ever," I said, trying to push my stomach in but making my back pop out into a hunch instead, "wonder where I came from?"

"You came from hell," he said. "Does that seem likely to you?" "Well, no, actually. But then again, nothing seems likely where you're concerned." 

"I wonder where I came from." "Forget it, Morty. Nobody knows. Vinny doesn't know. I called him after we found you in the Coupe de Ville, and he was just as surprised as we were, or he pretended to be. Said he didn't leave any bodies in the trunk. You won't get anything more out of him. Anyway, I think somebody had him killed a couple months ago."

"You said I came out of the back door of the Kalahari." "Just a guess." He frowned. "An educated guess. A lot of people on the road to hell take their first step from the back door of the Kalahari. It's a regular dumping site. But you won't get anything out of anybody at that hotel, Morty. Nobody will know anything, no matter who you talk to."

No one knew who I was or where I had come from. No one. Except maybe me, in some part of my mind I hadn't connected to recently.

"Will Shilling really have people waiting to shoot us when we get to Las Vegas?"

"Yes," he said. "Or maybe they're on their way toward us now." "You want to go  to Mexico." "South America, maybe. Louisiana. Alabama. Someplace Shilling won't look for us. He's well connected along the West Coast and in Nevada, and he has some good connections in New York, but if we get off his map and go someplace where we won't bother him, maybe he'll leave us alone."

It is cold and wet where we live now, in the north, and I have turned indolent with winter. I crave strange foods like woodchips and rusted metal and dead leaves and used motor oil. I haven't told Pete what I find to eat when I go on my walks. He tries not to notice that I am taking up more and more room in our apartment, but I know he sees it, because he tells me to only go out late at night and to walk in the woods, not in the streets.

I got a job loading freight when we first reached this town. Pete got an office job and moved up to management at a small parts supply business. He still has his job, but I lost mine. I outgrew it.

Before I left my job, the guys there told me I was a freak and belonged in a circus. I asked Pete if maybe this was true. He said it might not be a bad place to hide out, but he liked his job and wanted to stay where we were.

"Do you think I came from a circus?" I asked him. He shook his head. He studied me, really studied me, for the length of three muted commercials. He drank more beer. His show came back on and he watched it for fifteen minutes, then muted the TV when more commercials came on. "You used to be a guy," he said. "I saw you in the back of that car, and you were just a guy. A guy in a really bad Hawaiian shirt and okay blue jeans. I don't know how you turned into whatever it is you are now. Maybe it was something you ate. Maybe you got hit by an alien ray. Maybe it's some kind of disease that starts up late in life. But I don't  think you came from the circus."

Since that conversation his eyes slide over me. He brings me strange things from the supermarket -- bones, tripe, organ meats -- and doesn't seem to mind that I eat them without cooking them. He doesn't seem to think about me much at all. He talks to me. He tells me about his day. He plays cards with me. Every once in a while he'll talk about his life with Shilling. He sits in his recliner in the evening and drinks beer and I sit behind him and near him and we watch TV, and I watch him. He smiles.

I have wondered more than once if it was an unforgivable thing I did, taking him away from his life, forcing him to start over. I don't ask him. I am more glad than I can say that he comes home every evening.

I'm not sure what I'm growing into. Since I spend so much time cooped up in the apartment alone, I've begun mind experiments, seeking through the pieces of my mind for useful information, and occasionally coming up with fragments out of which I am assembling a picture. I also study a book Pete got for me from the library on animals of the world and try out different shapes, but I haven't found one that feels right yet. As long as I have a recognizable face when Pete gets home from work, he can put up with me. 

Yesterday I tried something new. I reached out with a large piece of me, enough of a piece to make a whole being, and shaped it like a boy. I put into it all the things it would need to function on its own, bones, blood, organs, nerves, skin, muscle, brain, and what I could of the intangible in me -- thoughts I have had, feelings I have felt. I thinned my connection to it.

It breathed on its own. It opened and closed its eyes. It reached out with its little hands and grasped the book of animals. It turned pages and stared down at  the pictures. It looked at me, then. It smiled.

It touched me. It stroked its hands along my sides, patted my belly. It leaned against me and closed its eyes.

Almost, I let it go. But I was afraid it would die. When it came and leaned against me, I let it right back inside me, but I did not dissolve its boundaries.

As soon as Pete left this morning I let the little boy out again. We talked with each other. He walked into the other room, trailing the cord that connected us to each other. He looked through the refrigerator. He brought me back some cottage cheese, which I did not remember wanting, but as soon as he gave it to me I knew I had wanted it all along.

This afternoon we talked some more. He reached out and broke the cord between us.

He lives. He pushed back inside me but I would not let him reconnect, even though he cried.

He got over it. I hope Pete likes him. I wonder what his name is. Maybe Pete will figure it out.

Here is what I think: I don't know who I am or where I came from. Whatever I am, I can make more of me, and set my children loose to find their own destinies. Maybe it's not important to find out who and what I am. Maybe it's only important to know that I will go on from here.