hite, and that means that the room thinks I'm inside, but I'm
outside. You put your torso in, you take your torso out, you do the hokey-pokey
and you shake it all about.

In the corridor. I pad away from the nurses' station, past the closed doors and
through the muffled, narcotized groans and snores and farts that are the
twilight symphony of night on the ward. I duck past an intersection, head for
the elevator doors, then remember the tattletale I'm wearing on my ankle, which
will go spectacularly berserk if I try to leave by that exit. Also, I'm in my
underwear. I can't just walk nonchalantly into the lobby.

The ward is making wakeful sounds, and I'm sure I hear the soft tread of a
white-soled shoe coming round the bend. I double my pace, begin to jog at random
-- the hamsters, they tell me I'm acting with all the forethought of a crazy
person, and why not just report for extra meds instead of all this *mishegas*?

There's definitely someone coming down a nearby corridor. The tread of sneakers,
the squeak of a wheel. I've seen what they do to the wanderers: a nice chemical
straightjacket, a cocktail of pills that'll quiet the hamsters down for days.
Time to get gone.

There's an EXIT sign glowing over a door at the far end of the corridor. I pant
towards it, find it propped open and the alarm system disabled by means of a
strip of surgical tape. Stepping through into the emergency stairwell, I see an
ashtray fashioned from a wadded up bit of tinfoil, heaped with butts -- evidence
of late-night smoke breaks by someone on the ward staff. Massachusetts's harsh
antismoking regs are the best friend an escaping loony ever had.

The stairwell is gray and industrial and refreshingly hard-edged after three
padded weeks on the ward. Down, down is the exit and freedom. Find clothes
somewhere and out I go into Boston.

From below, then: the huffing, laborious breathing of some goddamned overweight,
middle-aged doc climbing the stairs for his health. I peer down the well and see
his gleaming pate, his white knuckles on the railing, two, maybe three flights
down.

Up! Up to the roof. I'm on the twentieth floor, which means that I've got
twenty-five more to go, two flights per, fifty in total, gotta move. Up! I stop
two or three times and pant and wheeze and make it ten stories and collapse. I'm
sweating freely -- no air-conditioning in the stairwell, nor is there anything
to mop up the sweat rolling down my body, filling the c