He hasn’t taken any meals since we started decelerating, though I set a place for him. He may be raiding the pantry odd hours, but Elza thinks not. She’s afraid for his mental state. Anorexia can precede suicide.

He sits plugged into his keyboard, and every now and then touches the silent keys. Carmen says she doesn’t think he’s actually composing; she glanced at the screen while he was working, and the page number hasn’t changed in two weeks.

I am not so much concerned for his well-being as I am afraid that he might fly off the handle and do some kind of irreversible damage. Paul has similar misgivings. When I broached the subject, he confided that the control room is kept locked now, and will not respond to Moonboy’s thumbprint. I would be inclined to go further and keep him sequestered in his room. Drugs could keep him from becoming suicidally depressed, and might even give him a measure of happiness—which I think he will never attain otherwise.

If we put it to a vote—shall we lock Moonboy up?—it would be a tie, along gender lines. Elza would be against it because it would be admitting clinical defeat (and because she can’t deny her role in precipitating his crisis); Carmen is by nature too humane, and Meryl, alone, loves him and wants to think he will grow, or snap, out of it. Dustin and Paul and I see him as a loose cannon that needs to be tied down, for everyone’s protection. I think Fly-in-Amber would agree with us, though I’m not sure about Snowbird.

So I suppose nothing will be done until Moonboy himself forces the issue. I’m not quite Machiavellian enough to set him up, but if he strays too close to the edge I might give him a nudge.

When I was in school, the consensus among medical people seemed to be that all mental illness would eventually be treatable by drugs, that psychiatry would be reduced to a systematic analysis of symptoms—identify the syndrome and prescribe its nostrum. In a way, I’m glad that the species has turned out to be more complex than that. Though I would not mind having a pill that could take Moonboy’s stepfather out of his life. And whatever else it is that’s turned him into such a liability. (I remember at first thinking that he was the one of the four that I would like, since he was unpredictable and amusing.)

Although we are in actuality going slower each day, it feels emotionally like we’re rolling downhill. Committed now, in a way we weren’t before turnaround. Wolf 25 or bust.