“I interviewed a number of your friends, including Sebastiana—the daughter of Salvatore Celli—and gathered that you had actually struck your brother on the day before he died. Is this true?”

“He kept running off.”

Though nodding gravely, the doctor seemed deeply disappointed.

“She also revealed—not in so many words—that the two of you had had some contact of a sexual nature that day, and my impression was that your brother’s behavior had interrupted this, making you angry with him.”

“No.” Lewis shook his head.

“So you let him out of the house.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“You then claim he went to some fire in the forest.”

“I saw the fire.”

“I’m a psychiatrist, Lewis. A good psychiatrist has an instinct for the truth. We’re no different, in many ways, from the shamans and soothsayers of old. I am an exceptional psychiatrist. So let me tell you what really happened that night.”

“What really—”

The doctor tapped his pen hard against Lewis’s forehead to stop him from speaking.

“Bear with me. My sense is that during that earlier incident at the sinkhole, by interrupting your sex play your brother became associated in what’s known as your subconscious with Sebastiana’s primary sexual protector, her father. So in replacing the truth of what happened—”

“I don’t understand, sir.”

Lewis flinched as Walthrop rapped his forehead again.

“Then you’d best listen, young man. To replace the truth of what actually happened on the bluff, the image of Sebastiana’s sexual protector—her father—activated earlier that day during the interrupted sex play, appeared from your subconscious as his opposite—as his own destroyer.”

“I don’t—”

“Lewis, how do you know I’m here in front of you?”

“What?” Lewis couldn’t make sense of anything he was saying.

“You know because your mind”—a softer tap with the pen—“interprets visual and other sensory data it receives and tells you I’m here. But when reality is something you don’t want to see and can’t accept, the mind either gets rid of it altogether or substitutes an image that both depends upon the reality and interprets events in a way that is acceptable to the psyche. It’s a kind of short-circuiting. The image substituted for the truth is a metaphor, and though it seems absolutely real it is imagined, like the pictures you get in your head when you dream at night. The children in this institution, Lewis, are here because they are dreaming while they are awake or because they have dreamed while they were awake and believe those dreams to be true. Your memory of Mr. Celli throwing your brother into the river is not real. It’s a kind of dream image you substituted for the reality because the reality is unthinkable. Our work here is to have you accept and integrate that reality and move on. In short, Lewis, if you are to get better and go back home, you must come to accept the truth. And the truth”—he paused—“the truth, Lewis, is that you killed your brother.”

Lewis couldn’t respond for a moment, each word of this last statement, like the cars of a runaway freight train, shunting one after another into the dead end of his mind.