Dead Sleep

25

Consciousness returns before vision. I know I’m alive, because I’m cold, dreadfully cold and wet. Shivering. I try to touch my face, but my arms won’t move properly. My legs either. With great effort I shift my hips, and pain shoots up my legs. The agony of circulation returning. I focus all my energy on opening my eyes, but they don’t open. My sense of smell is working, though. Urine, pungent and ammoniac, floats all around me. Terror squirms in my chest like a rat trying to fight its way out of a bag.

Stop, says a voice in my mind, and I cling desperately to its echo. My father’s voice. Don’t panic, he says.

But I’m so afraid -

You’re alive. Where there’s life, there’s hope.

Stay with me, Daddy.

Think of happy things, he says. The light will come soon.

My mind is a fog of confusion, but through the mist I see patches of light. I see a little girl, sitting at a desk in a room filled with desks. Beside her sits another girl, identical to her to the last detail. One of the little girls is me. I feel more like a boy than a girl. My favorite book is The Mysterious Island. I order my books from a flimsy catalog the teacher hands out to every student in the class. Emil and the Detectives. White Fang. Like that. Money is tight for us, but when it comes to books my mother is a spendthrift; I can order as many as I like. I sit here day after day, waiting for my books to arrive. My books. It takes a month or more, but when they finally do, when the teacher opens the big box and passes out the orders to the kids, checking the books against a form taken from her desk, I glow with happiness. I’ve never had the newest dress, or the prettiest, but I always have the tallest stack of books. Little paperbacks that smell of wet ink. I lay my cheek against their cool covers, anticipating the stories inside, knowing all the other girls wonder what I could possibly want with those books.

That’s how I discovered The Mysterious Island. It’s about four men who try to escape from a Civil War prison camp in a hot-air balloon. A storm blows them out to sea, and they crash near an uninhabited island. Their task is survival, and they succeed mightily. One prisoner finds a kernel of corn in his pocket, and from this comes their first crop. A former engineer brings irrigation to their fields. The story is a fable of self-reliance, which makes it perfect for me. I have my mother and my twin sister, but my father is gone. Not dead, but away. Shooting pictures for the magazines.

There is a map in The Mysterious Island. A hand-drawn topographic sort of thing, showing the island as it would appear from the air. The beach. The cove. The volcano with its hidden caves. A forest of palms, streams running through it. I could almost see the men down there, doing their best to get by, using their common sense, their natural gifts. I began to draw maps of my own. In the margins of my textbooks, on the backs of the mimeographed drawings they handed out at Thanksgiving: the Pilgrim or the Indian, which we colored with crayons only after hungrily sniffing the solvent on the purple mimeograph paper, still wet from the machine. When we finished coloring, the teacher would collect the pictures and tape them above the chalkboard in a long line. Mine never got the star for being the best. There was always someone who stayed completely within the lines, or had some fancy shading, or outlined their picture in heavy black crayon that they scraped flat with their fingernail. But I knew – even if the teacher didn’t notice – that on the back of my Pilgrim was a whole world, an island drawn with the finest detail a big red Eagle pencil could produce, a world I’d spent the last thirty minutes living in before hastily coloring in the lonely-looking Puritan with my Crayolas.

Without warning, my eyelids begin fluttering and my hands clench into fists. Something’s happening to my muscles. A voice tells me to keep my eyes closed until I know more about my situation, but the hunger for light is too strong.

Vision returns as swirling clouds, wisps of white on gray. Slowly, the clouds part to reveal the face of Thalia Laveau. The beautiful Sabine artist is sitting across from me, immersed to her breasts in a pool of yellowish water. Her head lolls against a rim of white enamel. Her eyes are closed, her skin pale to the point of blueness, and she is naked. I am naked too. Between us just an old-fashioned faucet. We’re in a bathtub.

I try to turn my head, but my neck muscles refuse to obey my brain. I must be content with what I can see from this position. The wall opposite me is made of glass. The roof above is also glass, long shining triangles of it, fanning out from a brace bolted to a redbrick wall above and to my left. Through the glass I see the sky, fading down to dusk. To my left, above the narrow ends of the fanning panes, the sky is blue; to my right, violet. I am facing north.

Moving only my eyes, I follow the glass down to within four feet of the ground, where it meets a brick wall. I’m in a conservatory of some type. A conservatory with a bathtub in it. Beyond the glass wall stand trees and tropical plants, beyond these a high brick wall. I’m almost convinced I’m dreaming when I hear the pad of feet.

“Welcome back,” says a male voice. “Add some hot water if you’re cold.”

The voice sounds familiar, but I can’t quite place it. It has the refinement of Frank Smith’s voice, but it’s pitched lower. With superhuman effort I turn my head to the left and find a scene so bizarre I am rendered speechless.

Roger Wheaton stands partly behind an artist’s easel, a paintbrush in his white-gloved hand, working feverishly on a large canvas that I cannot see. He is naked but for a white cloth tied around his waist and between his legs, like those that Renaissance artists used to cover the genitals of Jesus in crucifixion paintings. Wheaton’s body is surprisingly well muscled, but his torso is lined with bruises and hemorrhages, the kind I saw in Africa on pneumonia patients coughing themselves to death.

My first attempt to speak is only a rasp. But then saliva comes, and I get the words out. “Where am I?”

In one sense this is a rhetorical question. I’m in the place eleven other women occupied before me – twelve, including Thalia. I’m in the killing house. I am one of the Sleeping Women.

“You can’t move, can you?”

When I don’t answer, Wheaton walks over and turns the tap marked “H.” At first I shiver more, but then blessed heat begins to roll against my hip and stomach. He walks back to the painting, leaving me to push myself away from the steaming rush of water.

“Where am I?” I repeat.

“Where do you think you are?” Wheaton’s gaze moves from the canvas to me, then back again.

“The killing house,” I reply, using John Kaiser’s term.

He seems not to hear.

“Is Thalia dead?”

“Not clinically.”

I fight to keep my fear in check. “What does that mean? Is she sedated?”

“Permanently.”

“What?”

“Look at her.”

The surreal sense of horror that suffused me when I saw Wheaton is ratcheting down to pure animal fear, but I force myself to look at Thalia. The bathwater comes halfway up her breasts, which because they float seem more alive than their owner. I see no obvious wounds on her body. One arm hangs limp in the water, the hand wrinkled like the skin of a prune. Her other arm hangs outside the tub. Peering over the rim, I discover that my fear has barely begun to ascend the scale of terror. A white venous catheter enters her arm at the wrist, held in place by medical tape. From the catheter, a clear IV tube runs in a serpentine loop around the base of an aluminum stand and up to a bag hanging from an IV tree. The bag is empty, drained flat.

“What was in the bag?” I ask, trying to control my voice.

Wheaton holds the brush poised motionless in the air, then strikes the canvas quickly and repeatedly.

“Insulin.”

I shut my eyes, recalling Frank Smith’s description of Wheaton’s suicide plan: Insulin is painless, but sometimes it doesn’t bring death, just brain damage and coma…

“She’s in no pain,” he says, as though this mitigates the situation.

I try in vain to lift my right hand to turn off the faucet. “What’s wrong with my arms?”

Wheaton ignores me, flicking the brush over the canvas with remarkable speed. A belated impulse makes me turn over my own hand. The left one. It seems to take an eternity, but finally, on the outside of my wrist, I see a plastic tube running into one of my own veins. I try to yank it out but haven’t enough muscular control.

Wheaton admonishes me with an upraised finger. “Your bag is Valium. And a muscle relaxant. But that can easily change. So please, don’t bother the equipment.”

Valium? My second-favorite drug…

“I expected you to be unconscious for at least another hour.”

Wheaton suddenly straightens, then turns as though looking at himself in a mirror. Which is exactly what he is doing. To my right, propped between the bathtub and the wall, is a huge mirror like the ones used in ballet studios. Wheaton is not only painting Thalia and me – he’s painting himself.

“What are you painting?”

“My masterpiece. I call it Apotheosis.”

“I thought the circular painting back at the Newcomb gallery was your masterpiece.”

He laughs softly, as though at a private joke. “That was his masterpiece.”

My mind flashes back to the primitive, childlike images finger-painted on the floor beneath the drop cloth at the gallery. Then Wheaton carrying me, stepping over the stunned FBI man’s body. I’m not the man who painted that…

“This is my last,” he says.

“Last what?”

He gives me a sly look I could not have imagined on the Roger Wheaton I met a few days ago. “You know,” he says in a singsong voice.

“Thelast Sleeping Woman?”

“Yes. But this one’s different.”

“Because you’re in it?”

“Among other reasons.”

“You’re not wearing your bifocals,” I think aloud.

“Those weren’t mine.”

“Whose were they?”

He gives me a look I translate as Duh. Then he says, “They belonged to Roger. The weakling. The fag.”

My stomach turns a slow somersault. Jesus Christ. Two FBI profilers and a psychiatrist sit brainstorming around a table, and the photographer turns out to be right.

MPD, Dr. Lenz called it. Multiple-personality disorder. Fragments of the psychiatrist’s patronizing lecture come back to me. That’s not how MPD works… that’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Welcome to my nightmare, Dr. Lenz. What else did Lenz say? Always caused by extreme sexual or physical abuse…

“If you’re not Roger Wheaton,” I say carefully, “who are you?”

“I have no name.”

“You must go by something.”

An odd smile. “When I was a boy, I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I loved Captain Nemo. Nemo means ‘no one.’ Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Sailing beneath the oceans of the world, trying to cure man of his self-destructive obsessions. I’ve wandered some of those same oceans. But I learned the truth much earlier than Nemo did. Man can’t be cured. He doesn’t want to be cured. Only a child can express the purity in human nature, and already the world is bearing down on him with all its weight, its corruption and filth, its violence.” Wheaton bites his lip, the gesture strangely childlike.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Don’t you? Remember when you were a little girl? Remember when you believed in fairy tales? And the shock you felt as each one crumbled in the face of reality? No Cinderella. No Santa Claus. Your father wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t even good. He wanted things for himself alone. He wanted your mother behind a locked door. He wanted… other things. And it hurt you.”

Always caused by severe childhood sexual abuse. Always…

“There was no perfect prince waiting to carry you off to his castle, was there?” Wheaton’s smoldering eyes never leave the canvas now. “All the little pretenders wanted the same thing, didn’t they? They didn’t care about you. Not the soft little you that lived in your secret heart. They wanted to spend themselves inside you, anything for that, to use you and then ignore you, throw you away like trash.”

Wheaton’s getting wound up, and I don’t want him any more unstable than he already is. Time to change the subject. “I’m really hot now.”

He frowns in exasperation, but after a moment, he walks over and turns off the faucet.

“How did I get here?” I ask as he walks back to the canvas. In the deep valley between his back muscles, the bones of his spine show through his skin like a ladder.

“You don’t remember?” he asks, lifting his brush again. “You were conscious. Think back, while I finish your eye. And try not to move.”

I do remember some things. Flashes of light, waves of vertigo. A gray sky, bubbles of glass, a bridge of white tubes, and a long fall. “The roof. You took me out on the roof.”

Wheaton chuckles.

“But there were FBI agents up there.”

“Not after Leon was shot. They all wanted to see the trophy. There’s a catwalk of pipes running from the art center to the physical plant. It only runs over a narrow alley, but crawling over it with a woman on your back sure gets the heart pumping.”

“But how did you manage that? You’re ill.”

Wheaton’s lips curl in disdain. “That diagnosis is currently under review. Roger was weak. I am strong.”

What is he telling me? He’s not sick anymore? What did Lenz say about MPD? There’s a documented case of one personality needing heart medication to survive, and the other not…

“Why am I not like Thalia?”

Wheaton keeps painting. “Because I want to ask you something.”

“What?”

“You’re a twin. An identical twin.”

“Yes.”

“I painted your sister.”

Oh, God. “I saw that painting,” I say aloud.

“I’ve done some reading on twins. It’s an interest of mine. And I find a consistent theme in their stories of childhood. Many twins share a closeness that borders on telepathy. They tell remarkable tales: precognitions of disaster, intimations of death, silent conversations when in the same room. Did you and your sister experience any of that as children?”

“Yes,” I reply, since the answer he wants is so clear. “Some.”

“You want to know if your sister is alive or dead, don’t you?”

I close my eyes against tears, but they come anyway.

“Don’t you already know?”

Through the tears I see Wheaton’s eyes locked upon mine. This is a test. He wants to know if I know Jane’s fate. He’s testing my assertion of paranormal ability.

“Which is it?” he asks. “Alive or dead?”

Trying to read him, I’m suddenly thrown back to the street in Sarajevo, to the instant the world blacked out and I felt a part of me die. Despite all my subsequent hopes, despite the phone call from Thailand, I knew then that Jane was dead.

“Dead,” I whisper.

Wheaton purses his lips and goes back to his painting.

“Am I right?”

He cocks his head as if to say, Maybe yes, maybe no.

“Why are you so interested in twins?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Two personalities from the same genetic code? Twins are exactly like me in that way.”

I don’t know how to respond. He has clearly traveled far down this road, and I can only look for clues to what he needs to hear.

“When you first came into the gallery,” he says. “With Kaiser. I knew it was a sign. Sent by whom, I have no idea. But a sign nevertheless.”

“A sign of what?”

“That one half can survive without the other.”

His words hit me like a stake through the heart. Even though I knew it to be true, this confirmation dissolves some essential fraction of my spirit. “She’s dead?” I whisper.

“Yes,” Wheaton says. “But you shouldn’t be upset. She’s far better off the way she is now.”

“What?”

“You’ve seen my paintings. The Sleeping Women. Surely you understand?”

“Understand what?”

“The point. The purpose of the paintings.”

“But I don’t. I never have.”

Wheaton lowers his brush and stares at me with incredulity. “The release. I’ve been painting the release.”

“The release?” I echo. “From what?”

“From the plight.” His face is like that of a monk trying to explain the Holy Trinity to a savage.

“The plight?”

“Femininity. The plight of being a woman.”

A moment ago I felt only grief. Now something harder quickens my blood. A desire to know, to understand.

“I don’t understand what you’re telling me.”

“Yes, you do. You’ve tried so hard to live as a man. You work relentlessly, obsessively. You haven’t married, you’ve borne no children. But that’s no escape. Not in the end. And you’re learning that, aren’t you? Every month, the little seed inside you cries out to be fertilized. Louder all the time. Your womb aches to be filled. You’ve let Kaiser use your body, haven’t you? I saw it the morning you came back with him, to the house on Audubon Place.”

So I’m not at Audubon Place. Of course I’m not. If I were, I would have heard the St. Charles streetcar bell by now.

“Do you mean that killing women somehow releases them from pain?”

“Of course. The life of woman is the life of a slave. Lennon said it: Woman is the nigger of the world. From childhood to the grave, she’s used and used again, until she’s but an exhausted shell, broken by childbirth and marriage and housekeeping and-” Wheaton shakes his head as if too angry to further explain the obvious, then dips his brush in paint and goes back to the canvas.

Different voices are speaking in my head. Marcel de Becque, telling me that westerners fight against death while the people of the East accept it: This posture of acceptance is portrayed in the Sleeping Women. John’s voice: All serial murder is sexual murder; that’s axiomatic. Dr. Lenz, saying Wheaton’s mother left home when he was thirteen or fourteen, details unclear. Lenz badgering Wheaton about it at the second interview, Wheaton evading the question. That’s what all this is about – the paintings, the murders, everything – Wheaton’s mother. But I’m not going to question him about her until I’m fairly sure I can survive the asking.

“I do understand that,” I tell him, my eyes settling on Thalia’s inert body. “That’s why I’ve lived the life I have.” How can this man possibly see the ruin Thalia is now as a release? “But the painting you’re doing now must have a different theme.”

He nods, flicking his hand right, then left, his eye leading the strokes with lightning precision.

“It’s my emergence,” he says. “My freedom from the prison of duality.”

“From Roger, you mean?”

“Yes.” Again the strange smile. “Roger’s dead now.”

Roger’s dead? “How did he die?”

“I shed him, like a snake sheds its skin. It took a surprising amount of effort, but it had to be done. He was trying to kill me.”

Now Frank Smith speaks from my memory, confiding that Roger Wheaton wanted his help with suicide. “Roger went to Frank Smith for help, didn’t he?”

Wheaton’s eyes are on me now, trying to gauge the depth of my knowledge. “That’s right.”

“Why go to him? Why not to Conrad Hoffman? Your helper? Hoffman set this place up for you, didn’t he?”

Wheaton looks at me like I’m three years old. “Roger didn’t know Conrad. Except from that first show, which he quickly forgot. Don’t you see?”

I can’t digest the information fast enough. “Does – did-Roger, I mean – did he know about you?”

“Of course not.”

“But how do you hide from him? How have you done all this work without him knowing?”

“It’s not difficult. Conrad and I set up this special place, and this is where I do my work.”

“Is that what you did in New York, too?”

Wheaton cuts his eyes at me, a wolfish look in them. “You know about New York?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“A computer program enhanced the faces in your earlier paintings, and an FBI man recognized one of the victims.”

“Kaiser, I’ll bet.”

“Yes.”

“He’s a sly one, isn’t he?”

I hope so. As Wheaton paints on, I ponder the chances of the FBI finding me here. They know what happened by now, of course. John and Baxter. Lenz. The NOPD. They know Gaines was not the killer. They’ve seen Wheaton’s finger painting, found Agent Aldridge. But what could possibly lead John to this place? The infrared photos? FBI planes shot total coverage of the French Quarter and the Garden District; they have a definite number of houses with courtyards by now. Dozens of agents are probably at the New Orleans courthouse right now, wading through the deeds to those places, searching for any connection to Roger Wheaton or Conrad Frederick Hoffman. Will they include houses with conservatories? Yes. John will be thorough. We talked about houses with skylights; anything that lets in lots of light will be on the list.

How long have they been looking for me? Is this the evening of the day Gaines was shot? Or the next day? Or the next? I suddenly realize that I’m terribly hungry. Thirsty, too.

“I’m starving. Do you have any food?”

Wheaton sighs and looks up at the glass roof, checking the diminishing light. Then he sets down his brush and walks to my left, out of my field of vision. Straining to turn my neck, I see him reach down into a brown grocery bag and bring out a flat narrow package about eight inches long. Beef jerky. Suddenly I’m standing in Mrs. Pitre’s driveway, outside the garage apartment Conrad Hoffman rented, where John found Hoffman’s stash of junk food. Beef jerky was part of it.

Beside the grocery bag stands something else that must have been Hoffman’s. An Igloo ice chest. The standard three-foot-wide plastic model, big enough for two cases of beer. Or IV bags filled with saline and narcotics. It depends on the customer, I suppose.

Wheaton’s gloved hands give him difficulty tearing open the yellow plastic wrapper of the jerky, but he knows I can’t manage it in my present state. At last he pulls it apart and walks over to the tub. With tremendous effort, I raise my hand and take the brown strip from him.

“Very good,” he says.

Ugh, I think as I slide the tacky stuff into my mouth. But when I grind the flat strip between my back teeth, my tongue savors the grease expressed from the meat like creme brulee. If only I had some water to go with it. I could cup some bathwater and drink, but I don’t fancy a mouthful of urine. If I regain my muscular control, I’ll drink from the tap.

“How do you know Roger is dead?” I ask. If I have a potential ally in this room, his name is Roger Wheaton.

The artist laughs softly. “You remember the finger painting on the floor at the gallery?”

“Yes.”

“That was his last gasp. His death throes. An infantile attempt at some sort of confession. Pathetic.”

“And now you don’t need your – his – eyeglasses anymore?”

“You see me painting without them, don’t you?”

Yes, but you’re still wearing your gloves. “What about your other symptoms?”

Wheaton glances at me, and his eyes flicker with confidence. “You’re very close to it now. You see, Roger’s efforts to kill me aren’t anything new. He’s been trying to kill me for a long time now. More than two years. Only I didn’t know it.”

“How?”

Wheaton pauses with his brush, then adds a few judicious strokes. “Autoimmune diseases are poorly understood. Multiple sclerosis. Scleroderma. Lupus. Oh, doctors understand the mechanics of how they kill you well enough. But the etiology? The cause? You might as well consult a witch doctor. Do you know what an autoimmune disease is? A phenomenon in which the body’s immune system – which evolved to protect the body from outside invaders – actually malfunctions and attacks the body itself.” Wheaton gives me a triumphant look. “Isn’t that food for thought? How did the weakling come upon it? Perhaps his guilt and self-disgust were so consuming, his desire to kill me so powerful, that they manifested themselves physically. My disease waxes and wanes in severity as it progresses, and I noticed that the waxing phases occurred when Roger had control. Then he began actively trying to murder me, with Frank Smith’s help. With insulin. You know what that told me? There were chinks in the wall that separated us. He was beginning to see into my mind. That’s when you walked into my life. A mirror of a woman I’d already painted. A woman who was dead. Yet here was her double – her other half- perfectly healthy. I knew then. A new vision had come to me, and this painting was part of it. I had to save myself.”

I stare speechless from the steaming tub. The complexity of his delusion is staggering. Born in the mind of an abused child, it blossomed and flowered in the crucible of a dying artist’s fear of extinction.

“Are you – I mean, has it worked? Are you cured?”

“It’s happening. I can feel it. I’m breathing more easily. My joints are less stiff.”

“But you’re still wearing your gloves.”

A tight smile. “My hands are too delicate to take chances. And there’s systemic damage. That will take time to heal.” He glances up at the darkening sky. “I want you to be quiet now. My light’s almost gone.”

“I will. But there’s one thing I don’t understand.”

He frowns, but I push on. “You say you killed the women you painted to release them from their plight. To spare them a life of pain and exploitation. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Yet each Sleeping Woman was raped before she died. How can you stand there and tell me you’re sparing them pain, when you’re putting them through the worst thing a woman can experience short of death?”

Wheaton has stopped painting. His eyes glower with anger and confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“Conrad Hoffman. Before he died, he had a gun to my head. He told me he was going to rape me. He said that even if he had to shoot me in the spine, it would still be nice and warm between my legs.”

Wheaton’s eyes narrow to slits. “You’re lying.”

“No.”

“Then he was trying to intimidate you, to get you into the car.”

I shake my head. “I saw his eyes. Felt the way he touched me. I’ve been raped before. I know how rapists’ eyes look.”

A strange cast of compassion comes over the long face. “You were raped?”

“Yes. But that’s not the point. The last woman taken before Thalia – the one taken from Dorignac’s and dumped in the drainage canal – the pathologist found semen inside her.”

His head jerks as if avoiding a blow.

“Was it yours?” I ask softly.

Wheaton throws down his brush and takes two steps toward me. “You’re lying.”

The prudent thing would be to stop, but my salvation may lie in the root of this paradox. “The FBI is sure you killed the Dorignac’s woman. They worked out the timing of Wingate’s death, and they know when Hoffman flew back from New York. Hoffman couldn’t have taken her.”

Wheaton is wheezing now, like a child with asthma. “I took her, but-” He stands with his mouth open, unable to continue.

He really does believe that by killing those women he was sparing them. But I can’t spare him. Somewhere, buried behind those deranged eyes, is the gentle mind of the artist I met earlier in the week.

“Help me understand,” I plead. “A man who saves a twelve-year-old girl from being raped in Vietnam turns around and helps some pervert rape the women he claims he’s saving?”

Wheaton’s chin is quivering.

“I guess it was Roger who saved that girl in Vietnam-”

“No!” A single, explosive syllable. “I did that!”

I say nothing. The fault line running through Wheaton’s mind is torturing him more painfully than I possibly could. His face twitches, and his hands shiver at his sides. With a jerk of his head he looks up at the nearly dark sky. Then he walks to a table behind his easel, lifts a hypodermic syringe from it, and walks back toward me, his face devoid of emotion.

My newfound confidence vaporizes, leaving pure terror in its wake. If Wheaton wants to stick me with that needle, there’s nothing I can do about it. That reality sends me hurtling back to Honduras, to the night my innocence died forever, when I learned the most terrible of life’s lessons: you can shriek and fight and beg for someone to stop hurting you, but it won’t make them stop; you can plead to God and your mother and father, and they will not hear you; your cries will not move to pity those who rend you.

When Wheaton steps behind my head, the skin of my neck crawls, awaiting the prick of the needle. Summoning all my strength, I twist my neck to look up and back. He is standing by my IV tree, injecting the contents of his syringe into my IV bag. I scream now, with all my power, but he tosses the empty syringe on the floor and walks back to his easel. My left arm begins to burn at the wrist, and tears of anger and helplessness flow from my eyes. Sucking in great gulps of air, I try to fight the unknown poison, but in a matter of seconds my eyelids fall as surely as shutters being pulled down by a man with a hook.