Caul asked to speak to Billy, and when he saw the knees jiggling and knew who he was speaking to, he told him of the decision made by Arthur and Ragen. Caul saw the combination of excitement and fear as Billy nodded and said he was ready? The doctor put the tape cartridge into the recorder, adjusted the sound and then settled back to watch his patient’s reactions.

Billy, smiling self-consciously, watched himself on the monitor. When he saw the image of his jiggling legs and noticed he was still doing it, he put his hands on both knees to stop them. And when the monitor showed his lips moving silently, he put his hand to his mouth, eyes wide, not really comprehending. Then came Ragens face, looking exactly like his own, and Ragens voice, for the first time not in his own head but out there on the screen. And the words: “You have made quite a few enemies, Dr. Caul.”

To this moment Billy had accepted on faith what others had told him—that he was a multiple personality—even though nothing inside him made him feel that was true. All he had known until now was that occasionally he heard voices and he lost time. He had believed what the doctors told him, but he never felt it. Now for the first time he saw it with his own eyes, and for the first time he understood.

He watched in fearful fascination as Ragen spoke of the twenty-four names on the paper and of the undesirables. His mouth stayed open as Ragen spoke of the Teacher, who had taught everyone all they knew. But who was the Teacher?

“The Teacher is Billy all in one piece. Billy does'not know he is Teacher,” Ragen said from the screen.

Caul watched as Billy went limp. He looked weak. He was sweating.

Billy walked out of the medical microwave room and took the stairs up to the third floor. People passed and greeted him, but he didn’t respond. He walked through the nearly empty lobby of AIT. Suddenly weak and trembling, he dropped into an easy chair.

He was the Teacher.

He was the one with the intelligent, the artistic talent, the strength, the escape-artist abilities.

He tried to understand it. At first, there had been only the core Billy, the one who was boen and who had the birth certificate. Then he had broken into many parts, but all the while behind these many parts there was a presence without a name—someone that Ragen had said was the Teacher. In a sense, the unseen, fragmented, spiritlike thing called the Teacher had created all the others, children as well as monsters—and therefore he alone bore the responsibility for their crimes.

If the twenty-four people fused into one, that would be the Teacher. That would be the whole Billy. What would it feel like? Would he know it? Dr. Caul had to meet the Teacher. It was important for the therapy. And the writer needed the Teacher, too, to learn everything that had happened …