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Show 292 people in the living room were or what he was doing in their house. It seemed somehow odd and unaccountable that someone named Sorenson was outside waiting for him in a car while he, Lorin, stood here in this hallway with his hand on a doorknob. And he understood, finally, that he was afraid to turn the knob and open the door because he knew if he did he was going to see himself sitting at the writing table looking up irritably to see who had just come in. He tasted something nasty in the back of his mouth. He took his hand from the knob and backed away from it along the hallway, watching it carefully to see if it turned, until he was back in the living room, at which point he turned around and walked past the family as calmly as he could, saying goodbye again, and then went out to the car. "Find it?" Sorenson asked. "No. If the branch president asks me to speak pretend you're me." Unlike the voices, which, though irregular, came only when he was starting the decline toward sleep and thus belonged within a certain spectrum of consciousness when his resistance was softened, this new sensation, though less frequent--it was to happen no more than a dozen times-was likely to strike any time. He could be cheerful and normal one minute, frying eggs on the hot plate and regaling his companion with UCLA anecdotes, and the next minute, without warning, he could not look at Sorenson because Sorenson was sitting next to the window and Lorin would not be able to avoid the sight of himself standing outside the window peering in, his nose and palms white against the glass. Once, in the middle of the day, he could not bring himself to go into the bathroom because he would encounter himself sitting on the toilet. Another time he invented an excuse not to go out to the car to help Sorenson bring in the groceries, because he would have to pass by the open garage to get to it, and he knew who was standing |