On Thursday, April 5, at three-thirty in the afternoon, Danny found himself walking the hospital grounds. He looked around, trying to figure out where he was and why. Behind him he saw the old Victorian red-brick mansion with the white columns, and in front of him the river and the town. Strolling along the grass, he realized that before Rosalie Drake helped him at Harding Hospital, he could not walk outside like this— without terror.

Suddenly, he noticed some pretty little white flowers. He picked a few, but saw that on the higher ground the blossoms were larger. Following the flowers up the hill and around the gate, he found himself near a small cemetery. The markers had no names—only numbers—and he wondered why. The memory of being buried alive when he was nine years old made him tremble, and he backed away. There would have been neither a name nor a number on his grave.

Danny saw that the blossoms were largest at the top of the hill, so he kept climbing until he reached a cliff that dropped off sharply. He moved to the edge and braced himself against a tree as he looked at the road below, the river and the houses.

Suddenly he heard cars screeching and saw flashing lights in the curved road beneath him. Looking down made him dizzy. Very dizzy. He started to sway forward when he heard a voice behind him say, “Billy, come down.”

He looked around. Why were all these people surrounding him? Why wasn’t Arthur or Ragen here to protect him? His foot slipped and pebbles under his feet bounced down the cliffside. Then a man reached for his hand. Danny took it and held on as the man pulled him back to safety. The nice man walked back with him to the big building with the pillars on it.

“Were you going to jump, Billy?” someone asked him.

He looked up at a strange lady. Arthur had told him never to talk to strangers. But he could tell there was a lot of excitement in the ward, and people were looking at him and talking about him, and he decided to go to sleep and let someone else have the spot ….

Allen walked the ward that evening, wondering what had happened. His digital watch said ten forty-five. He hadn’t been out for a long time, satisfied, along with the others, to listen and learn from the Teacher’s story of their lives. It was as if each of them had possessed just a few pieces in the giant puzzle of consciousness, but now the Teacher, in trying to make the writer see it clearly by putting it all together, had made all of them aware of the lives they had lived. There were still gaps because the Teacher hadn’t told everything, just the memories that would answer the writers questions.

But now the Teacher was gone, and the lines of communication between the Teacher and the writer, and between himself and the others, were broken. Allen felt confused and alone.