Heath reached the end of the chapter and thumped down the book in exasperation, huffing out a breath which she did not realize she had been holding.

  Varkias blinked up from where he idled in a sleepy patch of sunlight upon the window sill. “What?”

  “Oh. It’s just this crazy book,” Heath said. “They’re all lunatics! These characters are all insane!”

  “Well what did you expect?” Varkias shrugged. “That’s why I never read. It’s enough work dealing with all the real people I know without having to bother with a bunch of pretend ones.”

  “There’s this girl. Aglaya,” Heath complained, feeling the need to explain all the swirling images and frustrations in her mind. “She’s the most beautiful girl anybody ever saw. She’s very, very beautiful. I even feel a little breathless just reading about her! She’s the most beautiful girl in the whole story. . , except for maybe this other woman, Nastasia. Except Nastasia is even more nuts than her! But Aglaya is nice, even if she is always getting angry. . .”

  Varkias raised one eyebrow, watching her as he listened. Heath continued, glaring at the book.

  “Though lately. . , at this part of the story, Aglaya seems like she’s skirting right on the edge of really losing it. —I mean, I don’t think she’ll actually snap or anything; she’s too smart and strong for that, but it’s like she was born half-crazy. It’s as if she sees too much and doesn’t know how to put it all into words. I don’t blame her, I guess, especially since she’s been kept indoors by her parents her whole life like some sort of pet. She’s got a very rich family. They’re like royalty or something. Half the rich people in these Russian novels seem to be descended from royalty someway or other. But anyhow. . . Aglaya’s got a really controlling family. They’re nice enough people, but they're still really controlling without exactly meaning to be. —She’s not even allowed to read the books she wants! And her parents never sent her to school or anything. She’s barely traveled at all. She feels like she’s been forced to live her whole life squeezed inside a bottle. So I guess I can see why she’s so angry and half nuts. But I do like her. I think she’d be a good person to be friends with. But I'll tell you! Reading how she talks and deals with things makes me feel like I’m going half nuts right along with her!”

  Heath’s words whistled from her like wind from a kettle just removed from heat. The hottest jet of frustrations now vented, she forced herself to breathe deeply. She steadied her head and sank into the bed. The sheets were warm and clammy, her muscles stiff and her brain foggy. She'd been lying reading ever since sunrise.

  “Phoo. . . You know, it’s really good to be able to put this book down and just sit here.”  She sighed and looked about her room in the tower which Rubel had built for her, at the simple design and at the patches of golden light fallen upon the floor. The stale feeling of lying in bed for too long chose that moment to gather a rebellion within her gut and chest. A wave of restless energy engulfed her and in a near panic she fought to untangle herself from the blankets, throwing them off and leaping to the floor. She flew to the window, only half-startling Varkias who was used to her outbursts of sudden energy. She clung to the stone window ledge with both hands and leaned her head out into the sky, swallowed huge breaths of the salty afternoon breeze until the claustrophobia faded.

  Left gazing peacefully over the city, she signed. The rooftops spread before her in shades of red and sand, and the ocean sparkled beyond in the mid-afternoon sun. The tower was solid and cool and calming; they’d built it that way on purpose. Those within and around their home felt strongly grounded and satisfied to be there; a complete contrast to the swirl of mad events described in the book she was reading.

  —All of Russia, as Dostoevsky wrote about it, seemed to her like one huge, half-starved, lunatic asylum. Filled with very rich and with very poor, with pistol duels and drunkards and everybody primarily worried about only two things above all; Money being the first, and who would marry the most beautiful women being the second, —to degrees which seemed to drive their entire society quite mad. All of it during that magical waking-up period after Napoleon was laid to rest and before the Worker’s Revolution turned Russia into a different kind of mad house. Heath huffed again. She had been doing a lot of reading recently, and Dostoevsky’s, “The Idiot” was her latest exploration.

  “Aglaya is a lot like her mother,” she explained, “-who’s also nuts, by the way. —They both start talking about one thing, get all excited and annoyed, and contradict themselves in the very next thing they say. They’re so emotional! Aglaya’s really smart, but lately she’s been pushed right to the edge by all of the things going on. Her words and thoughts are all over the place. Her mind is messy!”

  “Some girls are like that,” Varkias said.

  “Well, for goodness sake!” Heath admonished. “I’m glad I’m not!”

  “Me too.”

  She reflected for a moment. “Well. . , sometimes I can get a bit flustered, but not like these characters. They constantly seem to be right about to have nervous break-downs. And who knows? Maybe it really was like that in Russia. None of these characters seem altogether solid. This whole book is like a crazy dream. And the most annoying part is that it’s a really good love story, except just when it’s getting to the parts you want to read and where you’re about to find out what happens next, these stupid men get together and start talking about politics! I hate politics! Why would anybody write politics into a novel?”

  Varkias looked puzzled. “Well, I thought you said that was normal. It’s a Russian novel?”

  “Well, yeah. . . But this time it’s really annoying! I read a whole chapter yesterday where everybody was just standing around arguing about Liberals and Nihilism and ‘Men of Action’ and a bunch of other lofty ideas which hardly made any sense even to the people talking about it all. —Which I think might have been the writer’s point. But still. . !  And this morning, I was reading this stupid bit about why they think it’s okay to kill themselves!”

  “Huh?”

  Heath turned and jabbed the book’s cover with two fingers producing a sound like a door knocker. “I couldn’t believe that guy!  Hippolyte. In the last chapter, this sick guy named Hippolyte  –he was dying of consumption, which I think was probably a lung infection– he’d written forty pages of an incredibly boring and stupid. . . uh. . .” she struggled to find the right word to describe Hippolyte’s impassioned suicide treatise which he had called his, ’Explanation’ and which he had opened up from a sealed envelope to read aloud to a large audience of other characters, but in her irritation, Heath’s somewhat limited vocabulary left her struggling. “Grr!” She said simply, shaking her head so that her red hair flew. Messily.

  She swept it all back and huffed to herself. “The writer could have just said, ‘And he read out a stupid, long and boring suicide note’, which is what it was, but instead Dostoevsky actually wrote a LONG and BORING suicide note! It’s right here in the book! You have to read the whole massive thing just to get to the other end of it, and I didn’t want to skip over it, because it felt like cheating. And because I didn’t want to miss anything in it which might have been important. And there were some important bits in it, but not enough to make it worth being so long. —I mean, it did sound like the sort of thing somebody might really write, being that close to dying and all, but sheesh! I don’t see why he makes his readers go through the whole thing. And Dostoevsky even knew it himself! He actually wrote how all the people in the room listening were angry and annoyed with Hippolyte for reading something so long and stupid and boring and selfish. Argh! That’s not why I wanted to read this book! I want to find out if Aglaya is in love with the prince or not!”

  “The prince?” Varkias asked, looking confused. “I thought you said the book was about some idiot.”

  “Well, it is. The prince is the main character. He’s the one everybody calls, ‘The Idiot’, only he’s not. And it’s really mean how they call him that. He’s just very honest and noble and he doesn’t fit in with the crafty world he’s part of, so people look down on him as though he’s stupid, even though they’re the ones who are stupid! Though they all like him because he's honest and good. Though some of them also seem to hate him for it at the same time. Grr. . ! And he’s got a weak body and he has seizures sometimes. He’s very sensitive and he gets overwhelmed by things easily. He’s always halfway to having a nervous breakdown, but that’s only because nobody around him will leave him alone with all their insane yelling and getting upset all the time.”

  “So are you going to keep reading?”

  “Of course,” Heath said, angrily. “I want to find out what happens next. The good parts are really good. But I still can’t tell if Aglaya is in love with the prince or not.”

  “It doesn’t say?”

  “Well, I’m not even sure if she knows. She asked him to help her run away so that she could see the world and get out from under everybody’s control. But the Prince told her ’no’, and said that she was being silly, but it doesn’t seem silly at all to me. Hum. That’s the only part where I don’t agree with his thinking. They should have run away together! I really wish they would. It would be so good for them, but instead they’re staying in this useless place where everybody is making everybody else sick with craziness! Argh! I can really see why she’s half nuts. Nobody is letting her explore her life so that she can grow. They all expect her to get married and they keep pushing her that way. It’d drive me crazy as well!”

  Heath took another deep breath and turned to look around her room, at her bookshelf and the bed and furniture she had variously found, stolen or built with Rubel. —At the objects which were still settling and finding their places in the new tower. Even though it was nice and right and grounded, the tower, —and the kitchen and living area downstairs, and the second story garden balcony, all of it still had that quality of newness which freshly put-up shelves and new desks often share, where the objects upon them still looked placed rather than at home. But it was all settling nicely. As was Heath. “I’m really lucky to be here,” she said at length. “To have the kind of life I’ve got. I came to rest here by choice. Rubel and Kim and me. . . we built this place ourselves. But Aglaya hasn’t had the opportunity to even find out where she wants to be or who she is.” Heath went silent for a long space.

  “Yeah. This place isn’t bad,” Varkias agreed. “It’s better than Quinton’s stupid tower. I could never relax in that place. You never knew when something was going to spring out or explode or what. That whole place was one big booby trap! You want to talk about idiots. . ? Quinton is a prime example. Bah. Who needs books?”

  Heath carried on along her line of pondering, “I’ve already seen and done more than Aglaya, and she’s twenty years old! I’m way more grounded than her. I don’t get flustered and angry the way she does. I’m good at solving problems. When I get frustrated, I do something about it. Every time I’ve been trapped, I’ve gotten out. —I realized that’s how I was after something Smith Robins said to me once while I was living with Jenny. He said that we were both in chains and that we each had to break out. We were both trapped by our separate situations, and so that’s what we each did. We broke out! It was that night where I fought Jenny’s mother, where she almost made Jenny get engaged to somebody she didn’t want. That’s when I first realized how to use magic. Aglaya hasn’t been able to do that yet. She doesn’t have magic to work with, and she hasn’t found any other way out yet. She hasn’t broken her chains, so she gets angry and crazy instead.”

  “Yeah, well Quinton said you had a good head on your shoulders,” Varkias agreed.

  “Really?” Heath blinked. “He said that about me?”

  “Yeah. Though. . . I do remember knowing you once when you were more nuts.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. Long ago, I think you were pretty crazy. I can’t remember what your name was then, but you were plenty nuts.”

  “Hmm. . .”

  Heath didn’t realize the full extent of it. Her stability was not an insignificant thing. It was a product of not just her environment and the chance strings of experience which bundled together made up her life. There was more to it than that. There was a repetition of spirit which led to her being able to keep things tidy in her mind, which made her whole. It had to do with Power.

  When a powerful individual comes into the world, as she had into Oceansend, it is a difficult undertaking for numerous reasons. Being the Red Sorceress meant that she had access to levels of power and awareness which the average person working through the average life simply does not have to worry over. Each bit of power was like a puzzle piece. For instance, Heath was coming to terms with the curious ability of being able to feel other people’s emotions as they were broadcast and know them for what they were. —Not indirectly, through reading expressions and body language, though there was certainly that skill included, but also as though emotions were a type of energetic signal and the body and mind an antenna capable of both sending and receiving. Heath was empathic, and this was often a difficult puzzle piece to have to fit into her existence. There were several other pieces too. —She could remember from past lives big ideas and concepts which would normally have taken many long months of pondering and working out to assemble. For her, they would leap finished to her mouth and she could speak them at unexpected times when they were most needed. She found this both satisfying and somewhat alarming in one stroke. —She could also at times see the life energy of the people and world flowing around her like a glowing tapestry, and could at those times touch and alter that energy so that the world was changed on levels others had no direct awareness of. These were just some of the puzzle pieces which, because she was still young and still learning, did not yet all fit together properly into a finished product.

  The more powerful the finished product, the more pieces needed to be juggled. The difference between herself and a character like Aglaya was that Heath had fought with this same puzzle many times before in many previous lives, and she had gotten rather good at making it all click together after only a few years of struggle. She didn’t realize just how adept she had become over the many ages she had lived. —She and Aglaya were much the same sort of person, both sensitive and powerful, though Dostoevsky’s character was far less experienced –and had far less assistance from the world and people around her.

  All of these thoughts swam through Heath’s mind, and she sighed at length, understanding them but not quite able to express them. Words and their application were one of the things she had not yet fully mastered.

  “I’m just glad this is one of the shorter Russian novels.”

  Varkias eyed the book. It was much heavier than he would have been able to move without straining and pushing a great deal.

  “Well, if you’re going to keep reading, just try not to go nuts yourself,” he advised. “That can happen with books sometimes.”

  “I won’t,” she assured, sitting again and pulling the tome back into her lap. “I just hope it all works out for them. It doesn’t seem like it can end happily, though. The prince and Aglaya. —And Nastasia, the really crazy one. They just don’t seem like the kind of people who will be able to fall in love properly and be happy. It’s too bad, because I like them all. Even Nastasia seems okay, if she’d just stop being so nuts. She’s sort of like Soracia might be if she were having a breakdown and never got enough sleep.” Then she added thoughtfully, “though. . , it’s more than that somehow. It’s almost as if all of these characters are trying to exist in a state of negative hysteria because they think that’s how life is supposed to be lived. —Like they’d not be getting as much out of life if they were to relax and live sensibly. . . I don’t know. That’s the feeling I get. Or at least, that’s how Dostoevsky seems to like to fill his world. . .”

  She took another deep breath, shook her head, and started reading again where she left off. Varkias settled back against the window frame and gazed over the city while the cool summer breeze flowed comfortably around him.

Mark's Note: Turns out Heath was right. The stupid book ended in tragedy. Ugh. It was fun getting there, but I'll certainly think twice about getting aboard any more Russian roller coasters in the near future!