The Candy House(70)
It is essential that you remove yourself from enemy possession.
44
When you find yourself cornered and outnumbered, you may unleash, as a last resort, your Primal Roar.
The Primal Roar is the human equivalent of an explosion, a sound that combines screaming, shrieking, and howling.
The Roar must be accompanied by facial contortions and frenetic body movements suggesting a feral, unhinged state.
The Primal Roar must transform you from a beauty into a monster.
The goal is to horrify your opponent the way trusted figures, turned evil, are horrifying in children’s stories and in nightmares.
Deploy your camera flash repeatedly while Roaring.
When approached by a howling, spasmodic, flashing monster, a woman holding her newborn will quickly step aside.
Discontinue Roaring the instant you’re free from immediate danger.
Those stampeding to the aid of a powerful man will barely notice a disheveled beauty they pass in his hallway.
If you’re lucky, this will buy you time to flee the house.
Resume your beauty role while running: Smooth your hair and cover your bleeding wound with the sundress scrunched in your pocket.
The fact that you can’t hear alarms doesn’t mean you haven’t set them off.
45
After violence in a closed room, cool night air will have a clarifying effect.
Get to the bottom of a steep dirt path any way you can, including sliding and rolling.
In residences of the violent rich, there will be at least one guard at each port of egress.
In deep night, if you are extremely lucky (and quiet), that guard will be asleep.
Assume, as best you can, the air of a beauty larkishly gamboling.
If running barefoot onto a dock transports you back to your childhood, pain may be making you hallucinate.
Lying on a warm dock near a country club, holding a boy’s hand for the very first time, is a sensation you remember after many years.
Hindsight creates an illusion that your life has led you inevitably to the present moment.
It’s easier to believe in a foregone conclusion than to accept that our lives are governed by random chance.
Showing up for a robotics course by accident, because of a room-assignment mix-up with your Homer class, is random chance.
Finding an empty seat beside a boy with dark skin and beautiful hands is random chance.
When someone has become essential, you will marvel that you could have lain on a warm dock and not known him yet.
Expect reimmersion in your old life to be difficult.
Experience leaves a mark, regardless of the reasons and principles behind it.
What our Citizen Agents most often require is simply for time to pass.
Our Theraputic Agents are available around the clock for the first two weeks of your reimmersion and during business hours thereafter.
Describing any aspect of your mission to civilians, including mental health professionals or spiritual counselors, is strictly forbidden.
Trust that we have every resource necessary to address your needs.
46
Even preternatural swimming strength cannot propel you across a blue-black sea.
Staring with yearning ferocity from the end of a dock cannot propel you across a blue-black sea.
When your body has been granted exceptional powers, it is jarring to encounter a gulf between your wishes and your abilities.
For millennia, engineers have empowered human beings to accomplish mythical feats.
Your husband is an engineer.
Children raised among natural predators learn to detect irregular shapes and movement in a landscape.
Intimacy with another human can allow you to scrutinize your surroundings as he would.
Along a rocky, moonlit shore, the irregular shape is a right angle pitching in time with the waves, beneath an overhang of brush.
A speedboat has most likely been hidden by your new host as a means of emergency escape.
The key will be inside it.
47
Slither between branches and board the boat; untie it and lower its motor into the water.
Be grateful for the lakes in Upstate New York where you learned to pilot motorboats.
Fluff up your hair with your functional arm and force a wide, carefree smile across your face.
A smile is like a shield; it freezes your face into a mask you can hide behind.
A smile is a door that is both open and closed.
Turn the key and gun the motor once before aiming into the blue-black sea and jamming the accelerator.
Wave and giggle loudly at the stunned, sleepy guard.
Steer in a zigzag motion until you are out of gunshot range.
48
The exultation of escape will be followed almost immediately by a crushing onslaught of pain.
The villa, its occupants, even the gunshots will seem like phantoms beside this clanging immediacy.
If the pain makes thought impossible, focus on navigation.
Only in specific Geographic Hotspots can we intervene.
While navigating toward a Hotspot, indicate an emergency by pressing the button behind your knee for thirty continuous seconds.
You must remain conscious.
If it helps, imagine yourself in the arms of your husband.
If it helps, imagine yourself in your apartment, where his grandfather’s hunting knife is displayed inside a plexiglass box.