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out of this place,' he said.

'It'll be sooner than you think,' she said, wishing it weren't so harshly true. She had begun to hate herself for lying, but she had no better thing to tell him. 'Please don't let it depress you. I want you to get well.'

A poignant sadness rose in her, as if the words 'I want you to get well' had been a splash of cold water on the hot stones of her emotions. But the sadness didn't seem attached to his dying. It seemed instead a product of the way the light slanted down, the temperature, the shadows and sounds: a kind of general sadness attaching to every human involvement, one you only felt when the conditions were just right but was there all the time. She thought the feeling must be showing on her face, and to hide it she pretended to cough.

'God,' he said, 'I wish I was well now.' He looked over at her, eyes wide, mouth downturned, the same expression he had worn during the drive from Tulane. 'Ah, Hell. I guess there's some virtue to having died...' He trailed off.

She knew he had been about to refer to her as that virtue, to make a joke of it, to address lightly his attraction for her, but he left the punchline unsaid and the last words he had said hung in the air between them, taking on the coloration of all the fear and sickness in the room. Shortly afterward she excused herself and went into the bathroom. She sat on the edge of the sink for almost fifteen minutes, expecting to cry, on the verge of crying, tears brimming, but the sob never built to critical in her chest, just hung there and decayed.

Chapter 6

From Conjure Men: My Work With Ezawa at Tulane by Anthony Edman, MD, PhD.

... It was as close as I have ever come to striking a colleague, but Brauer - in his capacity of ambitious underling, thirsting for authority - seemed determined to make a case for my bungling the interaction, allowing the patients too much leeway, and my temper frayed. I forced myself to calm, however, and reminded him that we had achieved exactly the desired result: despite Magnusson's unexpected outburst, or because of it, we had brought the patients' fear of one another into the open where it could be treated with and analyzed.

'Within a week they'll be forming associations,' I told him. 'Monroe and French are obvious, Harrison and Richmond... Now that Richmond's found someone who'll face up to him, someone more or less his own age, he's bound to make friendly overtures. It's inevitable. Perhaps we've suffered a few flesh wounds, but now they'll have to accept their fear as a side effect of the process and deal with it.'

My show of unruffled confidence bolstered staff morale, and, in effect, dismasted Brauer who continued his outraged sputterings, but to no avail. I explained to staff that our loss of control only added authenticity to the proceedings. Had we not, I asked them, reacted in the manner of concerned medical personnel, of doctors responsible for the welfare of patients making a difficult mental adjustment? We had shown them our humanity, our imperfect compassion. I admitted my own loss of control was, like theirs, a response to the possibility that the patients might understand their true natures; still, I felt that any damage caused by our actions or by Magnus-son's could be turned to our advantage if we did not attempt a cover-up, if we allowed Magnusson to remain at Shadows, and not - as Brauer suggested - hide him from the world in a cell at Tulane. Let him say what he will, I advised, and we will simply put on a sad face and express pity over his senility, his general deterioration. We will be believed.

Of course, it did not prove necessary to debunk Magnusson; just as Ramsburgh had defended herself, so the patients - in defense of their threatened identities -arrived at this conclusion on their own, separate and unanimously.

We had taken a vast step forward as a result of the group interaction. The patients began to speak openly of their fearful reaction to one another, and we analyzed their reports, gaining further insights into the extent of their perceptual abnormalities. For example, it was during the period immediately following the interaction that Harrison revealed the fact he was seeing bioenergy: '... Raw mists of a single color sheathing the upper