“Are you finished already?”

He looked up and saw the teacher standing over him.

“Yeah.”

“You mean you didn’t check your answers?”

“Nope.”

“Do you have that much confidence you’re going to pass this test?”

“I dunno,” Billy said. “Only way to find out is to grade it.”

She took the test paper up to her desk, and a few seconds later he saw the frown on her face. She walked back to his seat. “Let me see your book, Billy.”

He handed it to her and she leafed through it.

“Let me see your hands.”

He showed her his hands. Then she asked to see his shirt cuffs and the contents of his pockets and the inside of his desk.

“Well,” she said finally, “I don’t understand. There’s no way you could have the answers, because I just ran the test off on the mimeograph this morning and the only answers are in my purse.”

“Did I pass?” Billy asked.

She gave him back his paper reluctantly. “You got a perfect score.”

Billy’s teachers called him truant, troublemaker, liar. From fourth to eighth grade, he was in and out of offices of advisers, the principal, the school psychologist. Growing up was a constant battle of making up stories, bending the truth, manipulating explanations to avoid admitting that most of the time he didn’t know what had happened to him days, hours, even just minutes ago. Everyone noticed his trances. Everyone said he was strange.

When he came to understand that he was different from other people, that not everyone lost time, that everyone around him agreed he had done and said things he, and he alone, couldn’t recall, he assumed he was insane. He hid it.

Somehow he kept the secret.

It was in the spring of 1969, the Teacher recalled, when Billy was fourteen and in eighth grade, that Chalmer took him to the farm, out beyond the cornfield, handed him a shovel and told him to start digging …

Dr. Stella Karolin was later to describe this alleged event in her statement read into the court record: “[His stepfather] abused Billy sexually and threatened to bury him alive if he told his mother. He even buried the child, leaving a pipe over his face for air … Before he shoveled the dirt off the child, he urinated through the pipe onto the child’s face” (Newsweek, December 18, 1978).

… from that day, Danny feared the earth. He would never again lie in the grass, touch the ground or paint a landscape.

(5)

Several days later Billy went into his room and reached over to switch on his bedside lamp. Nothing happened. He clicked it again and again. Still nothing. He shuffled out to the kitchen, got a new bulb and came back to change it as he had seen his mother do. He got a shock that sent him back against the wall …

"Tommy” opened his eyes and looked around, not knowing what to expect. He saw the light bulb on the bed, picked it up, peered under the lampshade and started to screw it in. As he touched the metal collar he got a shock. Son of a bitch! What the hell was that? He pulled off the lampshade and looked into the hole. He touched it and felt the shock again. He sat there trying to puzzle it out. Where was this shit coming from? He followed the electric cord to where it plugged into the wall. He pulled out the plug and touched the collar again. Nothing. So the goddamned shock was coming from the wall. He stared into the two little holes, then jumped up and ran downstairs. He followed the wires from the ceiling to the fuse box, followed the cable from the fuse box outside the house, and stopped in amazement as he saw the lines leading to the telephone poles along the streets. So that’s what those goddamned things were for!