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preferringto sleep. She settled into hospital life and seemed to have no interest in “recovering” or resuming a “normal life.”
    Mallory had been a librarian, second in command at Oneonta’s main library. When “reminded” of this, she shrugged. She’d been an avid reader of murder mysteries, and a friend brought her the latest from one of her favorite authors. She flipped through the pages and set it aside. But then it seemed to give her an idea.
    She asked for a book with pictures in it—but she asked in sign, which her friend didn’t understand. A speech therapist was called in to translate, but he refused.
    “Mallory can tell us what she has on her mind,” he said. “Can’t you, Mallory? There’s nothing wrong with your voice, and you’ve got to start using it to get the things you want. That’s what it’s there for.”
    They could see she was tempted to tell them to go to hell, but then, after thinking about it some more, she evidently decided she really wanted that book.
    “I want a book with pictures,” she said—or at least intended to say. She had to make several trials before it was intelligible.
    “What kind of pictures?” her friend asked.
    “Pictures of people.”
    “What kind of people?”
    “Many,” Mallory said. “Many.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Different kinds. All different.”
    Her friend still didn’t quite fathom what she was getting at but promised to look around and see what she could find.
    The therapist said, “Wouldn’t you like to see a newspaper? Or a magazine?”
    “No!”
    That was one word she’d mastered.
    Both of Mallory’s parents were profoundly distressed, of course, but Mrs. Hastings was the more eloquent of the two, threatening alternately to sue the hospital into oblivion if they didn’t fix whatever they’d done wrong and to flay her daughter alive if she didn’t stop playing the fool. After four days, hospital officials tried to explain to her that there was no reason why Mallory couldn’t go home, but she was obviously not going to do so if Mrs. Hastings continued to terrorize her.
    The woman said, “Why, Mallory knows very well I wouldn’t harm her!”
    She stubbornly refused to hear anyone say that Mallory evidently knew no such thing.
    Mallory’s friend returned with an armload of coffee-table books filled with pictures of people—movie stars, fashion models, musicians, workers, farmers, people at sporting events, at political rallies, at concerts, on holiday, in courtrooms, on street corners. Mallory went through them like a threshing machine, giving each page no more than a glance, then furiously swept them all off the bed and buried her head under a pillow.
    “What is it, Mallory?” her friend asked, stunned. “What are you looking for?”
    Mallory shook her head wordlessly.
    Her friend gathered up the books and was about to leave when it occurred to her to wonder if Mallory wanted to keep them. After voicing the question, she realized she was wasting her breath, since Mallory probably couldn’t comprehend what she was hearing. She carefully set the books down on the bed, close enough to Mallory that she couldn’t avoid feeling them against her hip. With a convulsive twist of her body, Mallory sent them flying off the bed a second time.
    Her friend gathered them up again and left without saying another word. At this point (she would later say), she knew the woman in the bed “wasn’t Mallory.” Mallory, she insisted, would never behave that way, not in a million years.

BECAUSE THE New York newspapers carried the story (in a predictably souped-up version), we heard about it in Tunis almost immediately, and I took the first available flight out. I might have saved myself the trouble, since hospital officials saw no reason to let me in, and Mr. and Mrs. Hastings turned up their noses as soon as I explained who I was. Members of the sensationalist press had standing, but I was persona non grata (and a foreigner as well,