That night as I lay in my cell, immersed in the quiet of the cellblock like a live coal at the heart of a diamond, growing ever more anxious at the thought of Czerny in his cell of gold and marble, an old mad king whose madness could kill, for I believed now he was the genius of the place … that night I determined I would escape. Despite the caution implicit in Czerny's final words, I knew I could never thrive there. I needed firm ground beneath my feet, not philosophy and magic or the illusion of magic. If I were to live bounded by walls and laws—as do we all—I wanted walls manned and topped with razor wire, written regulations, enemies I could see. Yet the apparent openness of the prison, its lack of visible security, did not fool me. Power did not exist without enforcement. I would have to ferret out the traps, learn their weaknesses, and in order to do that I needed to become part of the prison and pretend to embrace its ways.

My first step in this direction was to find an occupation, a meaningful activity that would convince whoever was watching that I had turned my mind onto acceptable avenues; since my only skill was at art, I began drawing once again. But making sketches, I realized, would not generate a bona fide of my submersion in the life of Diamond Bar; thus I undertook the creation of a mural, using for a canvas the walls and ceiling of an empty storeroom in one of the sub-basements. I chose as a theme the journey that had led me to the prison, incorporating images of the river crossing, of Frank Ristelli, the gray van, and so forth. The overall effect was more crazy quilt than a series of unified images, although I was pleased with certain elements of the design; but for all the attention it received, it might have rivaled Piero della Francesca. Men stopped by at every hour to watch me paint, and the members of the board, along with their entourages, were frequent visitors. Czerny took particular interest in my depiction of Ristelli; he would stand in front of the image for periods up to half an hour, addressing it with his customary vacant nods. When I asked one of his attendants the reason for his interest, I was told that Ristelli was revered for a great personal sacrifice made on behalf of us all and reflecting on the origins of our common home—he had been on the verge of being made a member of the board, but had forsworn the security and comfort of the prison and returned to the world in order to seek out men suitable for Diamond Bar.

Placing Ristelli's zoned piety in context with the psychological climate of the prison, it was not difficult to understand why they perceived him to be their John the Baptist; but in the greater context of the rational, the idea was ludicrous. More than ludicrous. Insane. Recalling how laughable Ristelli's preachments had seemed back in Vacaville reinforced my belief that the population of Diamond Bar was being transformed by person or persons unknown into a brain-dead congregation of delusionaries, and fearful of joining them, I intensified my focus on escape, exploring the sub-basements, the walls, the turrets, searching for potential threats. On one of these explorative journeys, as I passed through Czerny's block, I noticed that the massive oak door leading to the new wing, heretofore always locked, was standing partway open and, curious, I stepped inside. The space in which I found myself was apparently an anteroom, one more appropriate to a modern cathedral than a jail: domed and columned, with scaffolding erected that permitted access to every inch of the roof and walls. The door on the far side of the room was locked, and there was little else to see, the walls and ceiling being white and unadorned. I was on the verge of leaving when I saw a sheet of paper taped to one of the columns. Written in pencil upon it was the following:

"This place is yours to paint, Penhaligon, if you wish."

A key lay on the scaffolding beside the note—it fit the oak door. I locked the door, pocketed the key and went about my business, understanding this show of trust to signify the board's recognition that I had accepted my lot and that by taking up their charge I might earn a further degree of trust and so learn something to my benefit. To succeed in this I would have to do something that would enlist their delusion, and I immediately set about working on a design that would illustrate the essence of the delusion, The Heart of the Law. Though I began with cynical intent, as the weeks went by and my cell walls were covered with sketches, I grew obsessed with the project. I wanted the mural to be beautiful and strong to satisfy the artistic portion of my nature, my ego, and not simply to satisfy the board—in truth, I presumed they would approve of anything I did that hewed to their evangel. The dome and walls of the anteroom, the graceful volume of space they described, inspired me to think analytically about painting, something I had not done before, and I challenged myself to transcend the limits of my vision, to conceive a design that was somehow larger than my soul. I came to dwell more and more on the motive theory of Diamond Bar, that the criminal was the fundamental citizen, the archetype in whose service the whole of society had been created, and in the process I came obliquely to embrace the idea, proving, I suppose, the thesis that high art is the creation of truth from the raw materials of a lie, and the artist who wishes to be adjudged "great" must ultimately, through the use of passion and its obsessive tools, believe the lie he is intent upon illuminating. To augment my analytic capacities, I read books that might shed light on the subject—works of philosophy for the most part—and was astonished to discover in the writings of Michel Foucault a theory mirroring the less articulate theory espoused by the prison population. I wondered if it might be true, if delusion were being employed in the interests of truth, and, this being the case, whether the secret masters of Diamond Bar were contemplating a general good and the experiment of which we were a part was one that sought to evolve a generation in harmony with the grand design underlying all human culture. The books were difficult for me, but I schooled myself to understand them and became adept at knotting logic into shapes that revealed new facets of possibility—new to me, at any rate. This caused me to lose myself in abstraction and consequently diminished the urgency of my intention to escape. Like everyone who lived at Diamond Bar, I seemed to have a talent in that regard.

The design I settled upon owed more to Diego Rivera and Soviet poster art than to the muralists of the Renaissance. The walls would be thronged with figures, all reacting toward the center of the design, which was to occupy the dome and which I had not yet been able to conceptualize—I felt the image would naturally occur as a byproduct of my labors. It took three months of twelve-hour days to lay out the sketch on the walls, and I estimated that, if done properly, the painting would take a year to complete. Chances were I would be gone from Diamond Bar before then, and realizing this, when I began to paint, ensorcelled by my vision; driven by the idea of finishing in a shorter time, I worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. Dangling in harness from the scaffolding, crouched over, forced into unnatural positions, I gained an appreciation for the physical afflictions that Michelangelo endured while painting the Sistine Chapel. Each night after work I tried to shake off the aches and pains by walking through the sub-basements of the prison, and it was during one of these walks that I encountered the plumes.

In prison, sex is an all-consuming preoccupation, a topic endlessly discussed, and from my earliest days at Diamond Bar the plumes had been recommended as a palatable alternative to self-gratification. The new wing, it was said, would house both women and men, thus ending the single unnatural constraint of prison life, and many held that the plumes would eventually become those women, evolving—as were we all—into their ideal form. Even now, Causey said, the plumes were superior to the sex available in other prisons. "It's not like fucking a guy," he said. "It feels, y'know, okay."

"Is it like fucking a woman?" I asked.

He hesitated and said, "Kinda."

"'Kinda' doesn't do it for me."

"Only reason it's different is because you're thinking about it not being a woman."

"Yeah, well. I'll pass. I don't want to think when I'm fucking."

Causey continued urging me to give the plumes a try, because—I believed—he felt that if I surrendered to temptation, I would become a complicitor in perversion, and this would somehow lessen the guilt attaching to his sexual assault on me. That he felt guilty about what had transpired between us was not in question. As our relationship progressed, he came to speak openly about the event and sought to engage me in a dialogue concerning it. Therapy, I supposed. Part of his process of self-examination. At the time, I rejected his suggestions that I visit the plumes out of hand, but they may have had some effect on me, for in retrospect I see that my initial encounter with them, though it seemed accidental, was likely an accident I contrived. I was, you see, in a heightened state of sexuality. Immersed in my work, essentially in love with it, while painting I would often become aroused not by any particular stimulus—there were no visual or tactile cues—but by the concentrated effort, itself a form of desire maintained at peak intensity for hours on end. And so on the night I strayed into the section of the prison occupied by the plumes, I was, though tired, mentally and sexually alert. I was tempting myself, testing my limits, my standards, hoping they would fail me.

Three levels down from the main walls were dozens of rooms—bedchambers, a communal kitchen, common rooms, and so forth—an area accessed by a double door painted white and bearing a carved emblem that appeared to represent a sheaf of plumes, this the source of the name given to those who dwelled within. Much of the space had the sterile decor of a franchise hotel: carpeted corridors with benches set into walls whose patterned discolorations brought to mind art nouveau flourishes. The common rooms were furnished with sofas and easy chairs and filled with soft music whose melodies were as unmemorable as an absent caress. No barred gates, just wooden doors. The lighting was dim, every fixture limned by a faint halation, giving the impression that the air was permeated by a fine mist. I felt giddy on entering the place, as if I had stood up too quickly. Nerves, I assumed, because I felt giddier yet when I caught sight of my first plume, a slim blond attired in a short gray dress with spaghetti straps. She had none of the telltale signs of a transvestite or a transsexual. Her hands and feet were small, her nose and mouth delicately shaped, her figure not at all angular. After she vanished around a corner, I remembered she was a man, and that recognition bred abhorrence and self-loathing in me. I turned, intending to leave, and bumped into another plume who had been about to walk past me from behind. A willowy brunette with enormous dark eyes, dressed in the same fashion as the blond, her mouth thinned in exasperation. Her expression softened as she stared at me. I suppose I gaped at her. The memory of how I behaved is impaired by the ardor with which I was studying her, stunned by the air of sweet intelligence generated when she smiled. Her face was almost unmarked by time—I imagined her to be in her late twenties—and reminded me of the faces of madonnas in Russian ikons: long and pale and solemn, wide at the cheekbones, with an exaggerated arch to the eyebrows and heavy-lidded eyes. Her hair fell straight and shining onto her back. There was nothing sluttish or coarse about her; on the contrary, she might have been a graduate student out for an evening on the town, a young wife preparing to meet her husband's employer, an ordinary beauty in her prime. I tried to picture her as a man but did not succeed in this, claimed instead by the moment.

"Are you trying to find someone?" she asked. "You look lost."

"No," I said. "I'm just walking … looking around."

"Would you like me to give you the tour?" She put out her right hand to be shaken. "I'm Bianca."

The way she extended her arm straight out, assertive yet graceful, hand angled down and inward a bit: it was so inimitably a female gesture, devoid of the frilliness peculiar to the gestures of men who pretend to be women, it convinced me on some core level of her femininity, and my inhibitions fell away. As we strolled, she pointed out the features of the place. A bar where the ambience of a night club was created by red and purple and spotlights that swept over couples dancing together; a grotto hollowed out from the rock with a pool in which several people were splashing one another; a room where groups of men and plumes were playing cards and shooting pool. During our walk, I told Bianca my life story in brief, but when I asked about hers, she said, "I didn't exist before I came to Diamond Bar." Then, perhaps because she noticed disaffection in my face, she added, "That sounds overly dramatic, I know. But it's more or less true. I'm very different from how I used to be."

"That's true of everyone here. The thinking you do about the past, it can't help but change you."

"That's not what I mean," she said.

At length she ushered me into a living room cozily furnished in the manner of a bachelorette apartment and insisted I take a seat on the sofa, then went through a door into the next room, reappearing seconds later carrying a tray on which were glasses and a bottle of red wine. She sat beside me, and as she poured the wine I watched her breasts straining against the gray bodice, the soft definition of her arms, the precise articulation of the muscles at the corners of her mouth. The wine, though a touch bitter, put me at ease, but my sense of a heated presence so near at hand sparked conflicting feelings, and I was unable to relax completely. I told myself that I did not want intimacy, yet that was patently untrue. I had been without a woman for three years, and even had I been surrounded by women during that time, Bianca would have made a powerful impression. The more we talked, the more she revealed of herself, not the details of her past, but the particularity of her present: her quiet laugh, a symptom—it seemed—of ladylike restraint; the grave consideration she gave to things I said; the serene grace of her movements. There was an aristocratic quality to her personal style, a practiced, almost ritual caution. Only after learning that I was the one painting a mural in the new wing did she betray the least excitement, and even her excitement was colored with restraint. She leaned toward me, hands clasped in her lap, and her smile broadened, as if my achievement, such as it was, made her proud.

"I wish I could do something creative," she said wistfully at one point. "I don't think I've got it in me."

"Creativity's like skin color. Everyone's got some."

She made a sad mouth. "Not me."

"I'll teach you to draw if you want. Next time I'll bring a sketch pad, some pencils."

She traced the stem of her wine glass with a forefinger. "That would be nice … if you come back."

"I will," I told her.

"I don't know." She said this distantly, then straightened, sitting primly on the edge of the sofa. "I can tell you don't think it would be natural between us."

I offered a reassurance, but she cut me off, saying, "It's all right. I understand it's strange for you. You can't accept that I'm natural." She let her eyes hold on my face for a second, then lowered her gaze to the wine glass. "Sometimes it's hard for me to accept, but I am, you know."

I thought she was saying that she was post-operative, yet because she spoke with such offhanded conviction and not the hysteria-tinged defiance of a prison bitch, I also wondered, against logic, if she might be telling the truth and was a woman in every meaning of the word. She came to her feet and stepped around the coffee table and stood facing me. "I want to show you," she said. "Will you let me show you?"

The mixture of shyness and seductiveness she exhibited in slipping out of her dress was completely natural, redolent of a woman who knew she was beautiful yet was not certain she would be beautiful enough to please a new man, and when she stood naked before me, I could not call to mind a single doubt as to her femininity, all my questions answered by high, small breasts and long legs evolving from the milky curve of her belly. She seemed the white proof of a sensual absolute, and the one thought that separated itself out from the thoughtlessness of desire was that here might be the central figure in my mural.

During the night that followed, nothing Bianca did in any way engaged my critical faculties. I had no perch upon which a portion of my mind stood and observed. It was like all good nights passed with a new lover, replete with tenderness and awkwardness and intensity. I spent every night for the next five weeks with her, teaching her to draw, talking, making love, and when I was in her company, no skepticism concerning the rightness of the relationship entered in. The skepticism that afflicted me when we were apart was ameliorated by the changes that knowing her brought to my work. I came to understand that the mural should embody a dynamic vertical progression from darkness and solidity to brightness and evanescence. The lower figures would be, as I had envisioned, heavy and stylized, but those above demanded to be rendered impressionistically, gradually growing less and less defined, until at the dome, at the heart of the law, they became creatures of light. I reshaped the design accordingly and set to work with renewed vigor, though I did not put in so many hours as before, eager each night to return to Bianca. I cannot say I neglected the analytic side of my nature—I continued to speculate on how she had become a woman. In exploring her body I had found no surgical scars, nothing to suggest such an invasive procedure as would be necessary to effect the transformation, and in her personality I perceived no masculine defect. She was, for all intents and purposes, exactly what she appeared: a young woman who, albeit experienced with men, had retained a certain innocence that I believed she was yielding up to me.

When I mentioned Bianca to Causey, he said, "See, I told ya."

"Yeah, you told me. So what up with them?"

"The plumes? There's references to them in the archives, but they're vague."

I asked him to elaborate, and he said all he knew was that the criteria by which the plumes were judged worthy of Diamond Bar was different from that applied to the rest of the population. The process by which they entered the prison, too, was different—they referred to it as the Mystery, and there were suggestions in the archival material that it involved a magical transformation. None of the plumes would discuss the matter other than obliquely. This seemed suggestive of the pathological myths developed by prison queens to justify their femininity, but I refused to let it taint my thoughts concerning Bianca. Our lives had intertwined so effortlessly, I began to look upon her as my companion. I recognized that if my plans for escape matured I would have to leave her, but rather than using this as an excuse to hold back, I sought to know her more deeply. Every day brought to light some new feature of her personality. She had a quiet wit that she employed with such subtlety, I sometimes did not realize until after the fact that she had been teasing me; and she possessed a stubborn streak that, in combination with her gift for logic, made her a formidable opponent in any argument. She was especially fervent in her defense of the proposition that Diamond Bar manifested the principle from which the form of the human world had been struck, emergent now, she liked to claim, for a mysterious yet ultimately beneficent reason.

In the midst of one such argument, she became frustrated and said, "It's not that you're a non-conformist, it's like you're practicing non-conformity to annoy everyone. You're being childish!"

"Am not!" I said.

"I'm serious! It's like with your attitude toward Ernst." A book of Max Ernst prints, one of many art books she had checked out of the library, was resting on the coffee table—she gave it an angry tap. "Of all the books I bring home, this is the one you like best. You leaf through it all the time. But when I tell you I think he's great, you …"

"He's a fucking poster artist."

"Then why look at his work every single night?"

"He's easy on the eyes. That doesn't mean he's worth a shit. It just means his stuff pacifies you."

She gave her head a rueful shake.

"We're not talking about Max Ernst, anyway," I said.

"It doesn't matter what we talk about. Any subject it's the same. I don't understand you. I don't understand why you're here. In prison. You say the reason you started doing crime was due to your problems with authority, but I don't see that in you. It's there, I guess, but it doesn't seem that significant. I can't imagine you did crime simply because you wanted to spit in the face of authority."

"It wasn't anything deep, okay? It's not like I had an abusive childhood or my father ran off with his secretary. None of that shit. I'm a fuck-up. Crime was my way of fucking up."

"There must be something else! What appealed to you about it?"

"The thing I liked best," I said after giving the question a spin, "was sitting around a house I broke into at three in the morning, thinking how stupid the owners were for letting a mutt like me mess with their lives."

"And here you are, in a truly strange house, thinking we're all stupid."

The topic was making me uncomfortable. "We're always analyzing my problems. Let's talk about you for a change. Why don't you confide your big secrets so we can run 'em around the track a few times?"

A wounded expression came to her face. "The reason I haven't told you about my life is because I don't think you're ready to handle it."

"Don't you trust me?"

She leaned back against the cushions and folded her arms, stared at the coffee table. "That's not it … altogether."

"So you don't trust me, and there's more. Great." I made a show of petulance, only partly acting it.

"I can't tell you some things."

"What's that mean?"

"It means I can't!" Her anger didn't seem a show, but it faded quickly. "You crossed the river to come here. We have to cross our own river. It's different from yours."

"The Mystery."

She looked surprised, and I told her what I had learned from Causey.

"He's right," she said. "I won't talk about it. I can't."

"Why? It's like a vow or something?"

"Or something." She relaxed her stiff posture. "The rest of it … I'm ashamed. When I look back, I can't believe I was so disreputable. Be patient, all right? Please?"

"You, too," I said.

"I am patient. I just enjoy arguing too much."

I put my hand beneath her chin, trying to jolly her. "If you want, we can argue some more."

"I want to win," she said, smiling despite herself.

"Everything's like you say. Diamond Bar's heaven on fucking earth. The board's …"

"I don't want you to give in!" She pushed me onto my back and lay atop me. "I want to break you down and smash your flimsy defenses!"

Her face poised above me, bright-eyed and soft, lips parted, seemed oddly predatory, like that of a hungry dove. "What were we arguing about?" I asked.

"Everything," she said and kissed me. "You, me, life. Max Ernst."

Though giving and enthusiastic in sex, Bianca's disposition toward the act impressed me as being on the demure side of "reg'lar wild woman." Nevertheless, I withheld comment.

"She was too wild for me," Stringer went on. "It's not like I don't enjoy screwing chicks with dicks. Truth is, I got a thing for 'em. But when they got a bigger dick'n I got … guess I felt a tad intimidated."

"Hell are you talking about?" I asked.

He gazed at me in bewilderment. "The plume I saw you with. Bianca."

"You're fucked up, man! She doesn't have a dick."

"You think that, you never seen a dick. Thing's damn near wide around as a Coke can!"

"You got the wrong girl," I told him, growing irritated.

Stringer glowered at me. "I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know who the hell I'm screwing."

"Then you're a goddamn liar," I said.

If it had been another time, another prison, we would been rolling around on the floor, thumbing eyes and throwing knees, but the placid offices of Diamond Bar prevailed, and Stringer dialed back his anger, got to his feet. "I been with that bitch must be fifty times, and I'm telling you she gets hard enough to bang nails with that son-of-a-bitch. She goes to bouncing up and down, moaning, "Only for you …" All kindsa sweet shit. You close your eyes, you'd swear you's with a woman. But you grab a peek and see that horse cock waggling around, it's just more'n I can handle." He hitched up his trousers. "You better get yourself an adjustment, pal. You spending way too much time on that painting of yours."

If it were not for the phrase "only for you," I would have disregarded what Stringer said. Indeed, I did disregard most of it. But that phrase, which Bianca habitually breathed into my ear whenever she drew near her moment, seeded me with paranoia, and that night as we sat on the sofa, going over the charcoal sketches she had done of her friends, I repeated the essence of Stringer's words, posing them as a joke. Bianca displayed no reaction, continuing to study one of the sketches.

"Hear what I said?" I asked.

"Uh-huh."

"Well?"

"What do you want me to say?"

"I guess I thought you'd say something, this guy going around telling everybody you got a dick."

She set down the sketchpad and looked at me glumly. "I haven't been with Phillip for nearly two years."

It took me a moment to interpret this. "I guess it's been such a long time, he mixed you up with somebody."

The vitality drained from her face. "No."

"Then what the fuck are you saying?"

"When I was with Phillip, I was different from the way I am with you."

Irritated by the obliqueness with which she was framing her responses, I said, "You telling me you had a dick when you were seeing him?"

"Yes."

Hearing this did not thrill me, but I had long since dealt with it emotionally. "So after that you had the operation?"

"No."

"No? What? You magically lost your dick?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Well, I do! Hell are you trying to tell me?"

"I'm not sure how it happens … it just does! Whatever the man wants, that's how I am. It's like that with all the plumes … until you find the right person. The one you can be who you really are with."

I struggled to make sense of this. "So you're claiming a guy comes along wanting you to have a dick, you grow one?"

She gave a nod of such minimal proportions, it could have been a twitch. "I'm sorry."

"Gee," I said with thick sarcasm. "It's kinda like a fairy tale, isn't it?"

"It's true!" She put a hand to her forehead, collecting herself. "When I meet someone new, I change. It's confusing. I hardly know it's happening, but I'm different afterward."

I do not know what upset me more, the implication, however improbable, that she was a shapeshifter, capable of switching her sexual characteristics to please a partner, or the idea that she believed this. Either way, I found the situation intolerable. This is not to say I had lost my feelings for her, but I could no longer ignore the perverse constituency of her personality. I pushed up from the couch and started for the door.

Bianca cried out, "Don't go!"

I glanced back to find her gazing mournfully at me. She was beautiful, but I could not relate to her beauty, only to the neurotic falsity I believed had created it.

"Don't you understand?" she said. "For you, I'm who I want to be. I'm a woman. I can prove it!"

"That's okay," I said coldly, finally. "I've had more than enough proof."

I retreated into my work. I slept on the scaffolding, roused by the mysterious cry that like the call of some grievous religion announced each dawn. I lived on candy bars, peanut butter, crackers, and soda that I obtained at the commissary, and I rarely left the anteroom, keeping the door locked most of the days, venturing out only for supplies. When I woke I would see the mural surrounding me on every side, men with thick arms and cold white eyes pupiled with black suns, masses of them clad in prison gray, crowded together on iron stairs (the sole architectural component of the design), many-colored faces engraved with desperation, greed, lust, rage, longing, bitterness, fear, muscling each other out of the way so as to achieve a clearer view of the unpainted resolution that overarched their suffering and violence. At times I thought I glimpsed in the mural—or underlying it—a cohesive element I had not foreseen, something created from me and not by me, a truth the work was teaching me, and in my weaker moments I supposed it to be the true purpose of Diamond Bar, still fragmentary and thus inexpressible; but I did not seek to analyze or clarify—if it was there, then its completion was not dependent upon my understanding. Yet having apprehended this unknown value in my work forced me to confront the reality that I was of two minds concerning the prison. I no longer perceived our lives as necessarily being under sinister control, and I had come to accept the possibility that the board was gifted with inscrutable wisdom, the prison itself an evolutionary platform, a crucible devised in order to invest its human ore with a fresh and potent mastery, and I glided between these two poles of thought with the same rapid pendulum swing that governed my contrary attitudes toward Bianca.

From time to time the board would venture into the anteroom to inspect the mural and offer their mumbling approbation, but apart from them and occasional sightings of Causey and Colangelo, I received no other visitors. Then one afternoon about six weeks after ending the relationship, while painting high on the scaffolding, I sensed someone watching me—Bianca was standing in the doorway thirty feet below, wearing a loose gray prison uniform that hid her figure. Our stares locked for an instant, then she gestured at the walls and said, "This is beautiful." She moved deeper into the room, ducking to avoid a beam, and let her gaze drift across the closely packed images. "Your sketches weren't …" She looked up at me, brushed strands of hair from her eyes. "I didn't realize you were so accomplished."

"I'm sorry," I said, so overcome by emotion that I was unable to react to what she had said, only to what I was feeling.

She gave a brittle laugh. "Sorry that you're good? Don't be."

"You know what I mean."

"No … not really. I thought by coming here I would, but I don't." She struck a pose against the mural, standing with her back to it, her right knee drawn up, left arm extended above her head. "I suppose I'll be portrayed like this."

It was so quiet I could hear a faint humming, the engine of our tension.

"I shouldn't have come," she said.

"I'm glad you did."

"If you're so glad, why are you standing up there?"

"I'll come down."

"And yet," she said after a beat, "still you stand there."

"How've you been?"

"Do you want me to lie? The only reason I can think of for you to ask that is you want me to lie. You know how I've been. I've been heartbroken." She ran a hand along one of the beams and examined her palm as if mindful of dust or a splinter. "I won't ask the same question. I know how you've been. You've been conflicted. And now you look frightened."

I felt encased in some cold unyielding substance, like a souvenir of life preserved in lucite.

"Why don't you talk to me?" She let out a chillier laugh. "Explain yourself."

"Jesus, Bianca. I just didn't understand what was going on."

"So it was an intellectual decision you made? A reaction to existential confusion?"

"Not entirely."

"I was making a joke." She strolled along the wall and stopped to peer at one of the faces.

"I wasn't," I said. "What you told me … how can you believe it?"

"You think I'm lying?"

"I think there's drugs in the food … in the air. Or something. There has to be a mechanism involved. Some sort of reasonable explanation."

"For what? My insanity?" She backed against the wall in order to see me better. "This is so dishonest of you."

"How's it dishonest?"

"You were happier thinking I was a post-operative transsexual? It's my irrational beliefs that drove you away? Please!" She fiddled with the ends of her hair. "Suppose what I told you is true. Suppose who I am with you is who you want me to be. Who I want to be. Would that be more unpalatable than if my sex was the result of surgery?"

"But it's not true."

"Suppose it is." She folded her arms, waiting.

"I don't guess it would matter. But that's not …"

"Now suppose just when we're starting to establish something strong, you rip it apart?" A quaver crept into her voice. "What would that make you?"

"Bianca …"

"It'd make you a fool! But then of course I'm living in a drug-induced fantasy that causes you existential confusion."

"Whatever the case," I said, "I probably am a fool."

It was impossible to read her face at that distance, but I knew her expression was shifting between anger and despair.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"God! What's wrong with you?" She stalked to the door, paused in the entrance; she stood without speaking for what seemed a very long time, looking down at the floor, then glanced sideways up at me. "I was going to prove something to you today, but I can see proving it would frighten you even more. You have to learn to accept things, Tommy, or else you won't be able to do your time. You're not deceiving anyone except yourself."

"I'm deceiving myself? Now that's a joke!"

She waved at the mural. "You think what you're painting is a lie. Don't deny it. You think it's a con you're running on us. But when I leave it'll be the only thing in the room that's still alive." She stepped halfway through the door, hesitated, and, in a voice that was barely audible, said, "Goodbye, Tommy."