doubled it and settled it over his nose, pressing down firmly on the bridge. He tilted his head up, and the slimy taste of blood began to fill his throat. 'I've had worse ones than this.' So he had ... but not for a long time.
They had moved back about ten paces from the edge of the cut and seated themselves on a felled tree. Bobbi was looking at him anxiously.
'Christ, Gard, I didn't know anything like that was going to happen. You believe me, don't you?'
'Yes,' Gardener said. He didn't know precisely what Bobbi had been expecting ... but not that. 'Did you hear the music?'
'I didn't exactly hear it,' Anderson said, 'I got it secondhand from your head. It just about ruptured me.'
'Did it?'
'Yeah.' Bobbi laughed, a little shakily. 'When I'm around a lot of people, I turn 'em off - '
'You can do that?' He took the handkerchief off his nose. It was sopping with blood - Gardener could have twisted it between his fingers and wrung blood out of it in a gory little stream. But the flow was finally slowing down ... thank God. He dropped the handkerchief and tore the tail off his shirt.
'Yes,' Anderson said. 'Well ... not entirely. I can't turn the thoughts completely off, but I can dial them way down, so it's like ... well, like a faint whisper at the bottom of my mind.'
'That's incredible.'
'That's necessary,' Anderson said grimly. 'If I couldn't do it, I don't think I'd ever leave this goddam house again. I was in Augusta on Saturday and I opened my mind up to see what it'd be like.'
'And you found out.'
'Yeah, I found out. It was like having a hurricane in your head. And the scary thing was how hard it was to get the door shut again.'
'This door ... barrier ... whatever ... how do you put it up?'
Anderson shook her head. 'Can't explain, any more than a guy who can wiggle his ears can explain how he does it.' She cleared her throat and looked down at her shoes for a moment - muddy workboots, Gardener saw. They looked as if they hadn't been off her feet much in the last couple of weeks.
Bobbi grinned a little. The grin was embarrassed and painfully humorous at the same time - and in that moment she looked completely like the old Bobbi. The one who had been his friend after nobody else wanted to be. It was Bobbi's aw-shucks look - Gardener had seen it the very first time he met her, when Bobbi was a freshman English student and Gardener a freshman English instructor banging apathetically away at a PhD thesis he probably knew even then he was never going to finish. Hungover and feeling rather bilious, Gardener had asked his bunch of new freshmen what the dative case was. No one offered an answer and Gardener had been about to take great pleasure in blowing them all out of the water when Anderson, Roberta, Row 5, Seat 3, raised her hand and took a shot at it. Her answer was diffident ... but correct. Not surprisingly, she turned out to be the only one of them who'd had Latin in high school. The same aw-shucks grin he was seeing now had been on Bobbi's face then, and Gard felt a wave of affection sweep over him. Shit, Bobbi had been through a tough time ... but this was Bobbi. No question about it.
'I keep the barriers up most of the time anyway,' she was saying. 'Otherwise it's like peeking in windows. You remember me telling you my mailman, Paulson, has got something going on the side?'
Gardener nodded.
'That isn't anything I want to know. Or if some poor slob is a klepto, or if some guy's a secret drinker ... how's your nose?'
'Bleeding's stopped.' Gardener put down the bloody piece of shirting beside Anderson's handkerchief. 'So you keep the blocks up, huh?'
'Yes. For whatever reasons - moral, ethical, or just to keep from going batshit with the noise, I keep them up. With you I let them down because I wasn't getting squat even when I tried. I did try a couple of times, and if that makes you mad I understand, but it was only curiosity, because no one else is ... blank ... like that.'
'No one?'
'Nope. There must be some reason for it, something like having a really rare blood type. Maybe that even is it.'
'Sorry, I'm type O.'
Anderson laughed and got