My name is John Pelagrine. I can try to describe my malady to you, but really there's

only one person who can truly understand, and that's Mandy. It has to do with doors. Let's say for

example, you come home at night and you step up to your front door under the weak porch light,

maybe the sound of crickets and wind all around, and you put the key in the lock and turn it.

You've been gone for hours. It's dark. At that moment, how can anyone cross that threshold

without fear? Any number of things can be waiting just inside that door in the shadows.

For me, at the age of eight, it was Misty, my babysitter, who had died of a drug overdose.

My foster mother had dropped me off at Misty's house and said, go on, she's waiting for you. I'll be back at 10.

I pushed the front door open, called out, got no answer, and went deeper in.

They told me I found her in the tub. My memories of that were totally blacked out, thank God,

by a forgiving brain. But that's just one of the many things that can be waiting for us at that moment,

at that threshold moment. At 16, it was something far worse. I was living with a different foster

mother in Tom's river by then. Oh, she was hard. Slowly, she was driving her other foster son,

my foster brother. Crazy. His name was Scott. Even at 22, Scott couldn't escape her harshness.

He had a very irregular children's show on public access TV. Bruce Caboose, it was called. He and I

never talked much. He would spend the time he wasn't working at a toy store avoiding our foster mom

and writing the scripts for his shows in an upstairs room. I never watched them. Nobody did, really.

One night I came back from studying at the library and I knew something was wrong. The second,

I put the key in the lock. I pushed the front door open real slow.

All the lights ran. When I turned them on, life took another great step into these surreal

although the two hours before and after I discovered the body were again blessedly erased from my

mind just like with this D. They found me collapsed on the street after screaming myself into unconsciousness.

...