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said. “I didn’t mean it. Things just got a little out of control. An accident, really. Really no more than a mistake in judgment. I’d like to go home, now. I’m sorry. I promise to be better. Much better. It was all just an error. Nothing meant by it. Not really. I apologize.”
    The doctor nodded, but didn’t precisely reply to what Francis had said.
    “Are you hearing voices, now?” he asked.
    Tell him no!
    “No.”
    “You’re not?”
    “No.”
    Tell him you don’t know what he’s talking about! Tell him you’ve never heard any voices!
    “I don’t exactly know what you mean by voices,” Francis said.
    That’s good!
    “I mean do you hear things spoken to you by people who are not physically present? Or perhaps, you hear things that others cannot hear.”
    Francis shook his head rapidly.
    “That would be crazy,” he said. He was gaining a little confidence.
    The doctor examined the sheet in front of him, then once again raised his eyes toward Francis. “So, on these many occasions when your family members have observed you speaking to no one in particular, why was that?”
    Francis shifted in his seat, considering the question. “Perhaps they are mistaken?” he said, uncertainty sliding back into his voice.
    “I don’t think so,” answered the doctor.
    “I don’t have many friends,” Francis said cautiously. “Not in school, not in the neighborhood. Other kids tend to leave me alone. So I end up talking to myself a lot. Perhaps that’s what they observed.”
    The doctor nodded. “Just talking to yourself?”
    “Yes. That’s right,” Francis said. He relaxed just a little more.
    That’s good. That’s good. Just be careful
.
    The doctor glanced at his sheets of paper a second time. He wore a small smile on his face. “I talk to myself, sometimes, as well,” he said.
    “Well. There you have it,” Francis replied. He shivered a little and felt a curious flow of warmth and cold, as if the damp and raw weather outside had managed to follow him in, and had overcome the radiator’s fervent pumping heat.
    “… But when I speak with myself, it is not a conversation, Mister Petrel. It is more a reminder, like ‘Don’t forget to pick up a gallon of milk …’ or an admonition, such as, ‘Ouch!’ or ‘Damn!’ or, I must admit, sometimes words even worse. I do not carry on full back and forth, questions and replies with someone who is not present. And this, I fear, is what your family reports you have been doing for some many years now.”
    Be careful of this one!
    “They said that?” Francis replied, slyly. “How unusual.”
    The doctor shook his head. “Less so than you might think, Mister Petrel.”
    He walked around the desk so that he closed the distance between the two of them, ending up by perching himself on the edge of the desk, directly across from where Francis stayed confined in the wheelchair, limited certainly by the cuffs on his hands and legs, but equally by the presence of the two attendants, neither of whom had moved or spoken, but who hovered directly behind him.
    “Perhaps we will return in a moment to these conversations you have, Mister Petrel,” Doctor Gulptilil said. “For I do not fully understand how you can have them without hearing something in return and this genuinely concerns me, Mister Petrel.”
    He is dangerous, Francis! He’s clever and doesn’t mean any good. Watch what you say!
    Francis nodded his head, then realized that the doctor might have seen this. He stiffened in the wheelchair, and saw Doctor Gulptilil make a notation on the sheet of paper with a ballpoint pen.
    “Let us try a different direction, then, for the moment, Mister Petrel,” the doctor continued. “Today was a difficult day, was it not?”
    “Yes,” Francis said. Then he guessed that he’d better expand on that statement, because the doctor remained silent, and fixed him with a penetrating glance. “I had an argument. With my mother and father.”
    “An argument?