He was in the kitchen again. The drawer was open; the knife lay gleaming there. Tucked in the drawer like a baby in its crib.

“Theo, come on now. I’m telling you, all you got to do is pick it up and do her. You do her and this will all be over.”

The voice. The voice that knew his name, that seemed to crawl around inside his head, waking and sleeping. Part of his mind was in the kitchen, while another part was in the cell, the cell where he had been for days and days, fighting sleep, fighting the dream.

“Is that so fucking hard? Am I not being absolutely clear here?”

He opened his eyes; the kitchen vanished. He was sitting on the edge of the cot. The cell with its door and its stinking hole that ate his piss and shit. Who knew what time it was, what day, what month, what year. He had been in this place forever.

“Theo? Are you listening to me?”

He licked his lips, tasting blood. Had he bitten his tongue? “What do you want?”

A sigh from the far side of the door. “I gotta say, Theo. You do impress me. Nobody holds out like this. I think you’ve got some kind of record going.”

Theo said nothing. What was the point? The voice never answered his questions. If there even was a voice. Sometimes he thought it was just something in his head.

“I mean some, sure,” the voice went on. “In some cases you could say it goes against the grain, carving the old bitch up.” A dark chuckle, like something from the bottom of a pit. “Believe me, I’ve seen people do the damnedest shit.”

It was terrible, Theo thought, what staying awake could do to a person’s mind. You went without sleep long enough, you made your brain stand up and walk around day after day after day no matter how tired you felt—you did push-ups and sit-ups on the cold stone floor until your muscles burned, you scratched and slapped yourself and dug at your own flesh with your bloodied nails to keep awake—and before long you didn’t know which was which, if you were awake or asleep. Everything got blended together. A sensation like pain—only worse, because it wasn’t a pain in your body; the pain was your mind and your mind was you. You were pain itself.

“You mark my words, Theo. You do not want to go there. That was not a story with a happy ending.”

He felt his awareness folding again, taking him down into sleep. He dug his nails hard into his palm. Stay. Awake. Theo. Because there was something worse than staying awake, he knew.

“Sooner or later everybody comes around, is what I’m saying, Theo.”

“Why do you keep using my name?”

“I’m sorry? Theo, did you ask me something?”