“Dear Seven, please. You must remember. You create your own reality. “But it was too late. Seven felt himself drawn up toward the middle box, analogy or no; and into its mosaic-like structure. There were cubes within cubes within cubes, endlessly it seemed. And in one Lydia waited.

Chapter Eighteen

Out of Body, Out of Mind — Lydia Takes a Journey

Sweet Young Thing was the patients’ name for the newest nurse. She’d been there three days now. She handed Lydia her pill and said, “There, let’s just open our mouth and swallow this, and we’ll feel so much better.”

Lydia’s thick tongue pushed out dutifully and the cracked lips opened; but craftily, oh craftily, Lydia made swallowing motions while holding the pill in her cheek. When the nurse turned away, Lydia spit the pill out and waited.

Old Cromwell, in the wheelchair next to her, leered his approval but kept silent.

Tranquilized, Lydia had more trouble than usual concentrating, but she knew now that she could do what she wanted to, if she only tried hard enough. She’d been “out,” as she called it to herself, twice now. She mumbled irritably; she was bored rotten. To hell with it, she thought. She closed her eyes and imagined herself out of her body, standing right beside it. At first she made all kinds of mistakes, straining her physical muscles instead of using the peculiar inner tension that she’d discovered only the other day. A few times she swore under her breath. If her body moved too much, some troublemaker might come in and think she was trying to get out of the wheelchair. Then they’d add more restrainers, or strap her in tighter.

“Out, out, out,” she kept saying to herself.

“Old Lydia’s talking to herself again,” Sweet Young Thing said, passing by.

“Poor old Lydia, my foot,” Lydia thought angrily, and in that moment she was out. In a snap, a real snap, she felt as if rubber bands went zinging too far, and then broke, and there she was. Oh, God. Unbelievingly she saw the really wild old bony body, the sly face with the eyelids closed, hiding such great secrets—her body in the silly robe and pink slippers, and that stupid little-girl bow they’d put in her hair, so condescendingly. And there the others were, all of them, in the stark room, the propped-up half-empty bodies. The shock of seeing her body almost made her hysterical, but she caught herself at the sound of her first crazy chuckle. She didn’t know how long she could stay out of her body yet, or what she could do. Could she; for example, just sneak away from it, and not come back? And if she did, what would happen?