Inky Blackness All Around Blackness, not a sound, not even a smell. The child had to get away. He walked ahead, four even steps. A needle-thin white ray shot out, right from where he had started, hooked him by the seat of the pants, held him a second, then jerked him back. He set out again - this time faster. Again the ray shot out and jerked him back. He set out again, and again, and again. Each time the ray shot out and jerked him back. He had to get away. He had to find light. He had to find people - anyone! He set out yet again. Again the ray shot out at the fourth step and jerked back, but this time it had missed him. It shot out and jerked back at the seventh step but missed him again. By the tenth step he was in his bed. The same thing had happened each of the last many, many nights. He was too young to know the difference between dream and reality. Immediately he pulled up the shade - not even considering that 240-pound Beatrice had ordered him twice to leave that shade down. Outside were vacant lots and unpaved streets - none of which he was allowed to cross without an escort. The nearest structure in sight was beyond three such barriers - four counting the alley. And nobody of any possible interest to him was allowed to cross those barriers either - nor anyone who could possibly be interested IN him. His plight had been thus ever since his parents bought this house - more than two years ago. By then the big war already had begun. Even a half-wit would know that no new houses would be built here until that war ended. The view from other windows was almost as forbidding. The youngest person next door was twice his age - and huge. The other three houses on the block contained only grown-ups. To be sure, from the front of the house one could see a school, Mom's alleged reason for picking that house, but it too was across three forbidden barriers - and to this day there never had been anything about that school to provide or attract anyone of interest to him. He still was too young. He did not know the half of the trap he was in, and what he did know was too large and too painful to view all at once. He jumped at every chance to go with anyone - anything to get away - forgetting that he never had been allowed to participate in any activity of his chaperones and not even suspecting that this denial of all right to participate in life would stunt the development of his muscles, his physical coordination, his tolerance of rejection, and even his perception. His lot was to sit in a corner with one tiny model house and one tiny model hotel for hours while his sister and her friends played "Monopoly"; to sit still, similarly deprived, while anyone nearby, child or adult, played any game; to be stigmatized and made-fun-of for being chaperoned by his sister; to be entrusted to one incompetent housekeeper after another, with only the child beaters staying for any appreciable tenure and with his own mother's touting to the skies each and every one of them - to the point of pre-empting anything he might say to the contrary, not that she ever listened anyway. He had no way of knowing that if this near-solitary confinement ever ended, all of the development that he had missed would be expected of him - fully expected. He had no way of knowing that if children his own age ever became readily available, they would not share the ethics or friendliness that he had been taught - much less any desperation to break a solitude. He would have no way of being able to prove himself physically - the sine qua non of acceptance. He certainly would have no way of matching the martial arts training and drilling that so many war veterans personally bestowed on their sons - any veteran who ever, even for a moment, had felt physically inadequate on the battlefield. Even this would be nothing to what he would face when he was about to finish school; found the world vastly different from what he had been taught to expect; and found his dreams shattered. He then would have to sort out his agonizing past and discover what went wrong before he could possibly look to the future - a past that he would not be able to confront except one small particle at a time. He would attempt to discuss each element with his immediate family and find desperate denial with anger, contempt, grief, and his communication constantly chopped up - even an accusation of constantly having rubbed salt into an injury that he could not possibly have known about. He would find an insistence that he could not perceive accurately and, in the same breath, an insistence that he belonged in engineering - just as though that profession never required accurate perception. Ultimately he would have to choose between rejecting his own mother and rejecting literally everyone else in the world. Then he would find a host of relatives insistently demanding why, but with intent to invalidate, not to know - relatives insisting that they, not he, had first hand data on his life, yet unwilling to disclose the details to him so that he too, the interested party, might know. This is how hard a parent must work to end up in a nursing home with nary a visit.