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face turns pink, then red, and Paula is shouting at the woman behind the windowed wall to do something about him, and Wes is urging him, in gentle tones, to desist, and Anna grips my arm, her face in an attitude of fear, and the man continues to fix me with his gaze, the light winking off his black-framed spectacles.
    The light—yes, the light—another wonder. There are no candles anywhere, yet there is glowing light behind glass in the high ceiling, emanating from a lamp beside the bank of chairs, shining upon the woman behind the windowed wall.
    “Are you here for the facts? Here for the facts?”
    I stand up and gaze into the upturned face of the suffering man. “Indeed. I cannot imagine anyone more eager than I to know the facts.”

Six
    T he man halts in mid-rant, his mouth open, his eyes wide behind the spectacles. And slowly, the O of his mouth shapes itself into a broad grin. “God bless you,” he whispers. “God bless you.”
    “Miss Stone?” A lovely Chinese woman in a rose-pink bodice and matching trousers is speaking to me. Is my name supposed to be Miss Stone?
    I turn towards Anna, who is nodding her head at the Chinese woman and pointing at me.
    “Miss Stone, Dr. Menziger will see you now.” The Chinese woman’s English is perfect, though also not in the accent of my country.
    Wes rises from his seat and lightly touches my arm. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
    Paula fixes him with a baleful eye and takes my arm. “She needs help, you idiot.”
    An older man and a woman, he in a gray coat and trousers and a crisp white shirt, she in a relatively modest dress of dark blue that falls to her calves, make their way down the passageway in front of us. They are supporting between them a young man of no more than sixteen years, long black-brown hair falling into his face, the rest of it sticking up as if he were a child roused from slumber, his eyes half closed, stumbling between these two more capable-looking adults, their faces lined with anxious care for their charge, the young man saying, over and over, “I won’t do it again. I promise. I won’t do it again.”
    Wes sweeps his arm in a gesture that takes in the unfortunate threesome and the man who has seated himself in front of us. “You call this help?”
    Paula ignores him. “Come on, Courtney.” She and I follow the Chinese woman through a door, down a checkered corridor, past white tables and chattering females, brown- and black- and white-skinned females, all uniformly clad in the same rose-pink trousers and short-sleeved bodices, and atop the tables are glowing boxes that remind me of the one in the room where I awoke but which appear to have lines of printed text on them instead of actors, and before I can make any sense of what I am seeing—as if there is sense to be made—I am inside a room without Paula and facing a large, lightly colored wooden table, behind which is a person rising out of a chair and offering a hand for me to shake.
    “Welcome, Courtney. I’m Dr. Menziger, Paula’s cousin. Call me Suzanne.”
    This sweet, feminine voice is most unexpected, for she has a bristly head of closely cropped, dark-blond hair, broad shoulders, and squarish white teeth smiling in a square face. The hand held out to me is blunt and square as well, with closely trimmed, squarish nails. Her one beauty, her eyes, are azure-blue and sparkle with diamonds, like the sun shimmering on the sea.
    Her eyes are those of an angel. I smile my approbation as I shake her hand, though it is an intimate gesture for one I have just met.
    I take one of two chairs which face her, and I find my attention seized by a most astonishing picture which sits in a frame atop a light-colored wooden cabinet behind Dr. Menziger. The rendering of a brown-haired woman with a confident smile is as lifelike as the picture in the calendar on the wall of the rooms in which I awakened. I have never seen any artist’s efforts create such likenesses; they are so true