I found myself requiring time alone, time to become accustomed to my new properties, my new gifts. I also needed cash.

I rummaged in Sarah’s dresser and found the envelope marked “Rent.” It had one hundred dollars in it. There was another ten in her purse, which I took without remorse. Money was a mundane thing; Sarah had no further need. I borrowed her car and drove to a small motel several miles from Red Creek and checked in, requesting a room at the back.

I posted a letter of explanation to the bank in Wilton, giving the motel as my current address. By return mail, they sent me, per my request, a cashier’s check.

The week I spent waiting for my money, I also spent adjusting. I had acquired some wild talents, the most dramatic of which was the use of the music. Yet the tremendous gift of music was nothing next to the immense confusion it brought. Questions and answers, mismatched and abstract, tumbled about in my head like laundry in a dryer. I would hook up one question to an answer as it fled by, creating a composite question, leaving me to chase down another answer that refuted the first, masking the question and turning the whole of my conscious mind into a vast bowl of noodles, questions and answers all wrapped around each other, with no beginning and no ending.

Was I odd at birth or did I acquire oddities? Were there others like me? Were my oddities perversions of the personality, or was an outside influence controlling me as I once thought She had done? And if and when I discovered that influence, would it wash over me in a moment of extreme hostility and become part of me, leaving me to discover that there was still yet another influence, higher, more covert, more ominous? Was I at the center of a hideous puppetry plot that would reveal layers of self as I matured? Had I a disease or a gift? Was the music universal? Could others hear it? Could others control it the way I could?

How I longed for the simple questions of adolescence, the questions of “Why me?” Now it seemed that a sense of eternity hindered my thinking, expanding the simplest of ideas into a complex march of countermoves and strategies.

Could I change the future? Could I change the past?

For five nights I sat in the motel room and pondered the questions. For five nights I listened to my internal music, turned it up, down, on, off, changed the tempo, and studied the effects. It erased the pain in my legs. The cane was still a necessity, as my legs were not healed—they were weak and inconvenient—but they no longer ached.