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the hall. All four of Connie's older sisters came, along with her reading teacher and eight of her girlfriends, half of whom had been cured that month, one on the previous day. They danced the Upright while a compact disk of the newest Probity hit wafted through the ward:
    When skies are gray, and it starts to rain,
    I like to stand by the window pane,
    And watch each raindrop bounce and fall,
    Then smile, 'cause I'm not getting wet at all.
    The hospital supplied the refreshments — a case of Olga's OK Orangeade, a tub of ice-cream from No Great Shakes, and a slab of chocolate cake the size of a welcome mat. All the girls, I noticed, ate in moderation, letting their ice-cream turn to soup. Artificially induced slenderness was, of course, disingenuous, but that was no reason to be a glutton.
    The gift-giving ceremony contained one bleak moment. After opening the expected succession of galoshes, reference books, umbrellas, and cambric blouses, Connie unwrapped a fully working model of an amusement park — Happy Land, it was called, complete with a roller coaster, ferris wheel, and merry-go-round. She blanched, seized by the panic that someone who's just been through a brainburn invariably feels in the presence of anything electric. Slamming her palm against her lips, she rushed into the bathroom. The friend who'd bought her the Happy Land, a tall, curly-haired girl named Beth, reddened with remorse. "I should have realized," she wailed.
    Was the Happy Land a lie? I wondered. It purported to be an amusement park, but it wasn't.
    "I'm so stupid," said Beth.
    No, I decided, it merely purported to be a replica of an amusement park, which it was.
    Connie hobbled out of the bathroom. Silence descended like a sudden snowfall — not the hot snow of a brainburn, but the cold, dampening snow of the objective world. Feet were shuffled, throats cleared. The party, clearly, had lost its momentum. Someone said, "We all had a reasonably good time, Connie," and that was that.
    As her friends and sisters filed out, Connie hugged them with authentic affection (all except Alice Lawrence, whom she evidently didn't like) and offered each a highly personalized thank-you, never forgetting who'd given what. Such a grownup young lady, I thought. But her greatest display of maturity occurred when I said my own good-bye.
    "Take care, Connie."
    "Thanks for coming, Unc, and thanks for the roller skates. Thing is, I already have a pair, better than these. I'll probably swap them for a sweater." A citizen now. I was proud of her.
    * * *
    Back at the apartment, the phone-answering machine was blinking. Three flashes, pause, three flashes, pause, three flashes, pause. I grabbed a bottle of Paul's Passable Ale from the fridge and snapped off the top. Three flashes, pause. I took a sizeable swallow. Another. The late afternoon light poured through the kitchen window and bathed our major appliances in the iridescent orange you see when facing the sun with eyes closed. I finished my beer.
    Three flashes, pause, three flashes, pause: a staccato, insistent signal — a cry of distress, I realize in retrospect, like a call beamed semaphorically from a sinking ship.
    I pushed PLAY. Toby had written and produced our outgoing message, and he also starred in it: My folks and I just want to say / We'd love to speak with you today / So talk to us when you hear the beep / And we'll call you back before we go to sleep.
    Beep , and a harsh male voice zagged into the kitchen. "Amusing message, sort of — about what I'd expect from a seven-year-old. This is Dr. Bamford at the Kraft Institute, and I presume I'm addressing the parents of Toby Sperry. Well, the results are in. The Hob's hare that bit your son was carrying high levels of Xavier's Plague, an uncommon and pathogenic virus. We shipped the specimen to Dr. Prendergorst at the Center for the Palliative Treatment of Hopeless Diseases in Locke Borough. If you have any questions, I'll be only mildly irritated if you call