Along Came a Spider

before me. The brilliant mimic and actor. The Ninety-ninth Percentile. The Son of Lindbergh. All of those things and probably more.
    “You okay?” he asked. He was mimicking my earlier concern for him. “You feeling all right, Doctor?”
    “I’m just great. No problem at all,” I said.
    “Really? You don’t seem okay to me. Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Alex?” Now, he seemed deeply concerned.
    “Hey, listen!” I finally raised my voice. “Fuck off,
Soneji
. How’s that for reality testing?”
    “Wait a minute.” He shook his head back and forth. The wolfish grin had disappeared just as suddenly as it had appeared a moment before. “Why are you calling me Soneji? What is this, Doctor? What’s going on?”
    I watched his face, and I
could not believe
what I was seeing.
    He’d changed again. Snap. Gary Soneji was gone. He’d changed personas two, maybe three times in a matter of minutes.
    “Gary Murphy?” I tested.
    He nodded. “Who else? Seriously, Doctor, what’s the matter? What is going on? You go away for weeks. Now you’re back.”.
    “Tell me what just happened,” I said. I continued to stare at him. “Just now. Tell me what
you
think just happened.”
    He looked confused. Totally baffled by my question. If all of this was an act, it was the most brilliantly awesome and convincing performance I had ever seen in my years as a shrink.
    “I don’t understand. You come here to my cell. You seem a little tense. Maybe you were embarrassed because you haven’t been around lately. Then you call me Soneji. Completely out of the blue. That’s not supposed to be funny, is it?”
    Was he serious now? Was it possible he didn’t know what had happened less than sixty seconds ago?
    Or was this Gary Soneji, still play-acting with me? Could he be slipping in and out of his fugue state so easily, and so seamlessly? It
could
be, but it was rare. In this case, it could create an unbelievable mockery of a courtroom trial.
    It could even get Soneji/Murphy off
.
    Was that his plan? Had it been his escape valve right from the beginning?

CHAPTER 56

    WHEN SHE WORKED with the others, picking fruits and vegetables on the side of the mountain, Maggie Rose tried to remember how it had been back home. At first, her “list,” the things she remembered, was basic and very general.
    Most of all, she missed her mother and father so much. She missed them every minute of every day.
    She also missed her friends at school, especially Shrimpie.
    She missed Dukado, her “fresh” little boy kitten.
    And Angel, her “sweet” little boy kitten.
    And Nintendo games and her clothes closet.
    Having parties after school was so great.
    So was taking a bath in the third-floor room over the gardens.
    The more she thought about home, though, the more she remembered, the more Maggie Rose improved her memory list.
    She missed the way she sometimes would get between her mother and father when they hugged or kissed. “We three,” she called it.
    She missed characters her father had enacted for her, mostly when she was little. There was Hank, a big Southern-drawling father, who loved to exclaim “Whooooo’s talkin’ to you?” There was “Susie Wooderman.” Susie was the star of anything Maggie wanted to be in her father’s stories.
    There was the primal ritual whenever they had to get into the car in cold weather. They would all holler at the top of their voices, “Yuck chuck-chuck, chuck-a, chuck-a, yuck chuck-chuck.”
    Her mother would make up songs and sing them to her. Her mother had sung to her ever since she could remember.
    She sang, “I love you so much, Maggie, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. Nothing in the whole wide world.” Maggie would sing, “Will you take me to Disneyland?” Her mom would answer, “I would do that, Maggie Rose.” “Would you give Dukado a big kiss on the mouth?” “I’d do it for you, Maggie Rose. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do.”
    Maggie could remember whole days she had spent in school, going from class to class. She remembered Ms. Kim’s “special winks” for her. She remembered when Angel would curl up in a chair and sweetly make a sound like “wow.”
    “I’d do anything for you, dear, anything, ’cause you mean everything to me.” Maggie could still hear her mom singing the words to her.
    “Would you please, please come and take me home?” Maggie sang inside her head. “Would you please, please come?”.
    But no one sang anything. Not