Pandemonium

a fetish website. The steel loops were big enough for a shower curtain rod to be threaded through them—I’d seen the pictures—and more than wide enough for the bike chain. My shoulders were stiff, but I felt a hundred times better than yesterday. The cuts in my fingers barely hurt. “What if I’d died in my sleep?” I said. “These chains are pretty strong—I’d be attached to your bed for weeks.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t cut through the chains.”

She gave no indication she was joking.

I scooted down to the edge of the bed and started reeling in the chain so I could get at the lock. “Do you know what time it is? My mother’s got to be at the hospital by now. She’ll be frantic.”

She didn’t answer, and I looked at her.

“They arrived this morning,” she said. “I called Lew and told him you had to get out of the hospital because you were losing control of the Hellion.” She tossed a length of chain onto the bed. “Hardly an exaggeration. I said you’d be back in touch after we returned from the city.”

“Wait—what city? New York City?”

“Get dressed,” she said. “We have an appointment at Red Book.”

I didn’t think she meant the magazine.

As soon as she left the room, I pulled open the duffel bag and started sifting through the clothes, running my hands through the folds. Nothing. I started pulling out the clothes, shaking them one by one.

“Oh, one more thing,” O’Connell called back. “I threw out the Nembutal too.”

The three-story brownstone was buried somewhere in the heart of the city—I had no idea where, and I didn’t think O’Connell did either. Once we’d squeezed through the George Washington Bridge, slow as toothpaste, she began taking unpredictable rights and lefts, shouldering across lanes, dodging down side streets, and merging onto fourlane avenues. Nearly midnight and the traffic was still dense. O’Connell was the worst driver I’d ever ridden with—worse than Lew, worse than even me, and I’d driven through guardrails. Several times I found myself inches from sheet metal or the scowling face of a taxi driver. She seemed oblivious to the other cars, and even to the road in front of her, one hand on the steering wheel, the other pinching a cigarette, navigating by temperature, or road texture, or smell—anything but street signs.

“You know,” I said casually, “there’s this thing called MapQuest.”

But O’Connell had stopped talking to me. She hummed and muttered to herself. Maybe she was praying. An hour and a half after crossing the river, and seven hours after leaving Harmonia Lake, O’Connell braked to a stop in the center of a dark street double-lined with parked cars. Without saying anything she got out of the truck, leaving it running. I opened my door and stepped out, as much to get air as to see where she was going; O’Connell had smoked the entire way, and my eyeballs felt like gritty ball bearings. O’Connell walked up the steps of one of the brick apartment buildings we’d passed and pressed a doorbell. Above the door, a circular window of stained glass glowed like an eye surveying the street: red and blue and purple panes outlined in dark-leaded curves, swirling out from the center like petals dragged through water. I looked away from the window, feeling queasy. The apartment door opened, and an older woman with short white hair stepped out, hugged O’Connell. The women exchanged a few words, and then O’Connell strode back to me. “We can park around back,” she said.

“Was that one of the shrinks?” I asked. She’d told me that the people we were visiting were psychiatrists, “absolutely brilliant.” They’d become her therapists when she was eleven, after the first string of possessions. “They saved my life,” she said. She’d been vague on how exactly they’d helped her, or what she expected me to get out of meeting them. “Just be honest with them,” she said. “They’ll be able to straighten this out.”

She steered the truck into an alley. An iron gate swung open automatically and closed behind us. She parked diagonally on a small brick-paved patio, and we pulled our bags from the bed of the truck.