I worked with the music, fine-tuning its minute variations and reveling in the dramatic changes I could make in the room with the slightest alterations of tone or substance. As I worked, I began to find a confidence in myself, a confidence that I had always associated with wisdom. I felt confident that I could begin to deal with the more delicate of life’s situations—could issue the appropriate music at the crucial time.

Altering the mood of a room filled with people had always been a talent, but I’d gone about it blindly, instinctively. Now I had tools, insight, and a scientific approach. The knowledge calmed me.

When the envelope from the bank came, I merely wafted a delicate mist of melody under the clerk’s ear and he gladly cashed the check.

I paid my motel bill, bought some clothes, as my pack had been lost in the paint-container episode, and filled the gas tank of Sarah’s car.

The following evening I left New Mexico forever, heeding the call to the north. I drove back toward Pennsylvania—back to Wilton, back to my roots, back to the frozen soil of my birth.

Freedom was a different thing behind the wheel of a car. I was independent, and independence felt like responsibility.

The headlights gleamed along the desert highway ahead of me, and I soon became accustomed to the brightness of the consistent, oncoming traffic. The tires on the road made their own music, monotonous, low-key, depressing.

Then a flicker of something at the side of the road ahead caught my eye. A hitchhiker. Company. My attention perked as the tires slowed.

He opened the back door and got in. A boy—dirty, odorous, offensive from the first moment. This was not what I had in mind for company, but perhaps . . . I lashed at him with a sharp run of command notes and he opened the door again and got right out. Then I sent forth a seductive little tune and he spun around, then opened the front door. He was so simple to manipulate. So simple. He was not to my liking, but there would be others. I made him shut the door, then open it and shut it again, without getting in, then I had him whirl around, touch his toes, then whirl again and again, and I watched him dance to my music. I jerked the puppet on my strings until I began to giggle, then I drove off, alert, watchful for more possibilities on my journey to Wilton.

I drove, minding the speed limit, into Texas before I saw the next hitchhiker, but I couldn’t stop. The morning was approaching, and I had to find a place to bed down.