I … see. That’s all. Except if I see it hard enough, it starts to be real. The way Detta Walker got to be real.

All over this version of the Dogan, amber lights were glowing. Even as she looked, some turned red. Beneath her feet—special guest feet, she thought them—the floor trembled and thrummed. Enough of this and cracks would start to appear in its elderly surface. Cracks that would widen and deepen. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the House of Usher.

Susannah got up from the chair and looked around. She should go back. Was there anything else that needed doing before she did?

One thing occurred to her.

THREE

Susannah closed her eyes and imagined a radio mike. When she opened them the mike was there, standing on the console to the right of the two dials and the toggle-switch. She had imagined a Zenith trademark, right down to the lightning-bolt Z, on the microphone’s base, but NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS had been stamped there, instead. So something was messing in with her visualization technique. She found that extremely scary.

On the control panel directly behind the microphone was a semicircular, tri-colored readout with the words SUSANNAH-MIO printed below it. A needle was moving out of the green and into the yellow. Beyond the yellow segment the dial turned red, and a single word was printed in black: DANGER.

Susannah picked up the mike, saw no way to use it, closed her eyes again, and imagined a toggle-switch like the one-marked with AWAKE and ASLEEP, only this time on the side of the mike. When she opened her eyes again, the switch was there. She pressed it.

“Eddie,” she said. She felt a little foolish, but went on, anyway. “Eddie, if you hear me, I’m okay, at least for the time being. I’m with Mia, in New York. It’s June first of 1999, and I’m going to try and help her have the baby. I don’t see any other choice. If nothing else, I have to be rid of it myself. Eddie, you take care of yourself. I …” Her eyes welled with tears. “I love you, sugar. So much.”

The tears spilled down her cheeks. She started to wipe them away and then stopped herself. Didn’t she have a right to cry for her man? As much right as any other woman?

She waited for a response, knowing she could make one if she wanted to and resisting the urge. This wasn’t a situation where talking to herself in Eddie’s voice would do any good.

Suddenly her vision doubled in front of her eyes. She saw the Dogan for the unreal shade that it was. Beyond its walls were not the deserty wastelands on the east side of the Whye but Second Avenue with its rushing traffic.

Mia had opened her eyes. She was feeling fine again—thanks to me, honeybunch, thanks to me—and was ready to move on.

Susannah went back.

FOUR

A black woman (who still thought of herself as a Negro woman) was sitting on a bench in New York City in the spring of ’99. A black woman with her traveling bags—her gunna—spread around her. One of them was a faded red. NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT MIDTOWN LANES was printed on it. It had been pink on the other side. The color of the rose.