Free Endless Love by Scott Spencer

court during my hearing and had actually been officially marked as evidence. They’d helped keep me out of jail, helped to prove the extraordinary emotional pressures I was under. But what had happened to them afterwards?
    Once more I flipped through the letters, with a wrist-and- thumb dexterity developed trading baseball cards. It would have been too easy, too kind to find them straight off. They must be somewhere else. I opened my dresser. Top drawer: three new pairs of Esquire socks and a couple unopened packets of Fruit of the Loom underpants. Second drawer: an old white shirt back from the laundry, folded and bound by a strip of heavy turquoise paper. Third drawer: empty. The important thing is to guard against jumping to conclusions. Not to think ahead of myself. Quietly, though my hands would not quite behave, I closed the drawers and went to the window.
    I sat on the sill, moved the brown curtain to the side, and like a thief, a spy, I looked down at the street. The rain had stopped. A black teenager was walking by with a steel, four- pronged comb stuck in the back of his helmet-like hairdo. In a strange way, I had forgotten about black people. All the staff at Rockville were white and the only black patient who had been there during my stay was a girl named Sonia Frazier, whose father taught logic at Northwestern. Sonia had twig-like scars starting at her wrist and going more than halfway up her arm from countless suicide attempts. Failed suicides suffered a generally low status among the other patients—they were not considered serious people—but Sonia overcame this by not speaking to anyone about anything. She sometimes played the guitar and one day, quite unexpectedly, she sang English folk songs for an hour. By the time she was finished nearly all of Rockville had gathered into the Common Ground to hear her soft, penetrating voice. I admired her remove and guessed that she too wanted her solitude so she might savor secret memories and irrevocable decisions, and whenever we met I nodded at her, as if we were allies in a secret spiritual war. Sometimes she returned my sign. A couple of months into her stay, her parents withdrew her from Rockville. I happened to be crossing the main entranceway as the three of them left, each carrying two large plaid suitcases, each looking determined and scared. I went to her side, touched her on the shoulder, and said, “I think you’re a great person.”
    I sat at my window now in a state of terror and the terror would not recede. I stared down at Ellis Avenue until it was blurry. I simply could not imagine setting foot on the street below. Two professorial-looking men walked by, one swinging an unopened black umbrella, the other with a raincoat hooked onto a finger and slung over his shoulder, like a TV star. People and their lives. People and their pictures of themselves. It was astounding and it gave me motion sickness to think of it. How could I ever find a place among them and how could I learn to want to? I had nothing to say to anyone; everything I cared about was exclusive. I thought of suddenly braving it, of just going outside and asking the first person I saw—what? Anything. Directions. To the Museum of Science and Industry. Yet what a poor choice, even in fantasy. It was in that very museum that Jade and I had spent our first afternoon alone, in that palace of progress with its towering lobby and the genuine World War I fighter planes hanging from the ceiling on steel cables. Holding hands—it was really more like touching fingers—we had ridden the jolting trolley through the replica coal mine and then, later, spoke to each other in whispers, each facing a scientifically molded sheet of Plexiglas separated by some two hundred yards. Our murmurs had carried with miraculous intimacy and fidelity: it sounded as if we whispered to each other in bed, though we did not know that yet. Finally, we strolled through a gigantic model of the human heart, in the company