unharmed. Hatch was not worried about her, for somehow he knew that
none of them would suffer unduly for having been caught up in…
whatever they had been caught up in.
Lindsey was unconscious and bleeding. He examined her wound and felt It
was not too serious.
Voices arose two floors above. They were calling his name. The
authorities had arrived. Late as always. Well, not always.
Sometimes. .. one of them was there just when you needed him.
3
The story of the three blind men examining the elephant is widely known.
The first blind man feels only the elephant’s trunk and thereafter
confidently describes the beast as a great snakelike creature, similar
to a python. The second blind man feels only the elephant’s ears and
announces that it is a bird that can soar to great heights. The third
blind man examines only the elephant’s fringe-tipped, fly-shading tail
and “sees” an animal that is curiously like a bottle brush.
So it is with any experience that human beings share. Each participant
perceives it in a different way and takes from it a different lesson
than do his or her compatriots.
In the years following the events at the abandoned amusement park, Jonas
Nyebern lost interest in resuscitation medicine. Other men took over
his work and did it well.
He sold at auction every piece of religious art in the two collections
that he had not yet completed, and he put the money in savings
instruments that would return the highest possible rate of interest.
Though he continued to practice cardiovascular surgery for a while, he
no longer found any satisfaction in it. Eventually he retired young and
looked for a new career in which to finish out the last decades of his
life.
He stopped attending Mass. He no longer believed that evil was a force
in itself, a real presence that walked the world. He had found that
humanity itself was a source of evil sufficient to explain everything
that was wrong with the world. conversely, he decided humanity was its
own and only-salvation.
He became a veterinarian. Every patient seemed deserving.
He never married again.
He was neither happy nor unhappy, and that suited him fine.
Regina remained within her inner room for a couple of days, and when she
came out she was never quite the same. But then no one ever is quite
the same for any length of time. Change is the only constant.
It’s called growing up.
She addressed them as Dad and Mom, because she wanted to, and because
she meant it. Day by day, she gave them as much happiness as they gave
her.
She never set off a chain reaction of destruction among their antiques.
She never embarrassed them by getting inappropriately sentimental,
bursting into tears, and thereby activating the old snot faucet: she
unfailingly produced tears and snot only when they were called for.
She never mortified them by accidentally flipping an entire plate of
food into the air at a restaurant and over the head of the President of
the United States at the next table. She never accidentally set the
house on fire, never farted in polite company, and never scared the
be-jesus out of smaller neighborhood children with her leg brace and
curious right hand. Better still, she stopped worrying about doing all
those things (and more), and in time she did not even use the tremendous
energies that she once had wasted upon such unlikely concerns.
She kept writing. She got better at it. When she was just 14, she won
a national writing competition for teenagers. The prize was a rather
nice watch and a check for five hundred dollars. She used some of the
money for a subscription to Publishers Weekly and a complete set of the
novels of William Makepeace Thackeray. She no longer had an interest in
writing about intelligent pigs from outer space, largely because she was
learning that more curious characters could be found all around her,
many of them native Californians.
She no longer talked to God. It seemed childish to chatter at Him.
Besides, she no longer needed His constant attention. For a while she
had thought He had gone away or had never existed, but she had decided