Summary

13. Joy describes encounters with what she says was the spirit or the memory of Marcus – with masked figures in the Stop and Shop, on street corners, and in the mask that she bought herself to try and connect with him. She also describes riding the bus on her way to work a short while after her last sighting of him, and being licked obsessively by a seeing eye dog. This, she says, was only a few weeks before the encounter with the man who told her about the Hospital, adding that she now wonders whether Clara Sue Borden (identified as the first person to experience the sickness) felt a similar roughness around the edges of her memory as she (Joy) felt in the roughness of being licked by the dog.

14. The next morning, Joy discovers (along with everyone else) that the twins have...