“I’ve been planning to let Billy take the spot more frequently,” Arthur said. “After he meets Dr. George, it will be time for Billy to meet the rest of us.”

(5)

As Milligan entered the interview room on Wednesday, May 24, Dr. George noticed the frightened, almost desperate look in his eyes, as if he would flee or collapse at any moment. He stared at the floor, and Dr. George felt there was a tenuous thread holding him in the here and now. They sat silently for a while, Billy’s knees jiggling nervously, and then Dr. George said softly, “Maybe you can tell me just a little bit how you feel about coming up and talking with me here this morning.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Billy said, his voice nasal and whining.

“You didn’t know you were going to come up and meet with me here? When did you come on the spot?”

Billy looked confused. “The spot?”

“When did you become aware that you and I were going to be talking?”

“When that guy came and told me to come with him.” “What did you think was going to happen?”

“He told me I was gonna go see a doctor. I didn’t know why.” His knees were jiggling up and down uncontrollably.

The conversation moved slowly, with agonizing silences, as Dr. George worked to establish a rapport with what he felt certain was the core Billy. Like a fisherman handling his pole with delicacy to work the line but keep it from breaking, he whispered, “How are you feeling?”

“Fine, I guess.”

“What kinds of problems have you been having?”

“Well… I do things and I don’t remember ’em … I go to sleep … and people tell me I do things.”

“What kind of things do they say you do?”

“Bad things … criminal stuff.”

“Things that you thought of doing? Most of us think of doing a whole lot of different things at different times.”

“Just every time I wake up, somebody says I did something bad.”

“What do you think of it when they tell you you’ve done something bad?”

“I just wanna die … ’cause I don’t wanna hurt nobody.” He was trembling so badly that Dr. George quickly changed the subject. “You were telling me about sleeping. Just how much do you sleep?”

“Oh, it don’t seem like a long time, but it is. I keep hearing things, too … somebody trying to talk to me.”

“What are they trying to say?”

“I can’t really understand ’em.”

“Because it’s in whispers? Or garbled? Or indistinct, so you can’t make out the words?”

“Its real quiet … and it sounds like its from somewhere else.”

“Like from another room or another country?”

“Yeah,” Billy said. “Like from another country.”

“Any particular country?”

After a long pause as he searched his memory, he said, “It sounds like people on James Bond. And the other sounds like Russian. Is that the people the lady told me was inside me?” “Could be,” Dr. George whispered, almost inaudibly, worried as he saw the look of alarm cross Billy’s face.