When I first met Azabel Vintage, her hair had been burning for approximately two years. It had caught fire, coincidentally, at the hairdresser's; the subsequent lawsuit, however, had cleared the hairdresser of all blame.
        I was taken, right from the first, by her poise. It was the unforgettable charm of her gracefulness which impressed itself upon me at the very moment when she opened the door to the two of us — myself and my colleague Elroy Sams.
        "Do come in, Dr Heptical," she said, addressing herself first to me, and, indeed, initially ignoring Elroy as she graciously admitted me into her Long Island home.
        From the first, she made me the focus of her gaze, and the force of that focus was not lost on me.
        "I must apologize in advance," she said, "for the billiard table in the living room. It is my husband's, and — but you don't want to hear about that, do you?"
        Indeed, it had not been my intention to inquire into Azabel's marital relationship, though it immediately occurred to me that this relationship (plainly a problematical one) was perhaps not unrelated to the pyrotechnical difficulties which Azabel was experiencing.
        Closely followed by Elroy Sams, I entered, noting both the pink flames ascending from Azabel's hair and the high ceilings of her spacious home, which rendered this pyrotechnical effect (at least in its present setting) for the most part innocuous.
        However, where there were chandeliers above, Azabel had to maneuver to avoid pyretic damage to the delicate ornamental glass. She did this with a delicate sidestep, which seemed to contain within it the evolutionary potential of a ballet dancer's pirouette. She seemed unconscious of her own actions.
        I hypothesized that part of her brain might have already been remapped for enhanced spatial awareness, giving her a positively balletic awareness of the three-dimensional space she inhabited. And this, I thought, might be the benefit she was fated to derive from her condition. Her life might be physically awkward, but it would be geometrically richer, enlarged by a sense of the world overhead of which most of us have, at best, only an intermittent and fragmentary awareness — the world of pelmets, ceilings, arches and chandeliers.
        " ... unprotected sex?" she said, smiling slightly as she raised one eyebrow archly. "Well, Dr Heptical?"  
        A conversation had started, initiated by either Azabel or Elroy Sams. And I, deep in my musings on the mysteries of neurology, was contextually adrift, and so unsure as to how to respond to the question which Azabel had just addressed to me with such attentive politeness. Indeed, I was not quite sure what the question, in its entirety, might be.
        "I hesitate to say," I said, with an awkward laugh. "And please don't call me doctor."
        I have always felt that my title places an unnecessary barrier between myself and the people (I prefer not to think of them as "cases") whom I visit, so pressed her to call me Jerome, and was pleased when she agreed to accede to this request.
        It was at that time that I first caught sight of Tim, Azabel's son, who had just turned four. But Azabel, giving him a glass of his "special milk" (one third brandy, one third tonic water, and one third cream) and three sleeping pills (the number three seemed, though I was never to have the time to explore this, to have a special significance in her life), led him to the nursery.
        "Daphne is more flamboyant when Tim is awake," explained Azabel, on her return. "We can talk more easily if Tim is asleep. And could you introduce ...?"
        "But of course," I said, and, rather than probe the matter of how she had come to domesticate her affliction by naming it "Daphne", I attended to the business of introducing my Texan friend, Elroy Sams, who (though I did not say so) had insisted on inviting himself to this affair after seeing Azabel's photograph.
        "So," said Azabel, seating herself on a piano stool (earlier, on the telephone, she had confessed that her burning hair made armchairs impractical), "you have a special interest in pyrotechnics, Mr Sams?"
        "No, ma'am," said Elroy, falling back on that imitation cowboy persona which always tended to surface in situations of any difficulty. "Exorcisms are my speciality."
        At this, Azabel seeming to take offence, I hastened to say that, in her case, I did not believe that there was any reason to presume that possession (demonic or otherwise) might be a contributing factor. I had always believed (and continue, as I write this, to persist in such belief) that cases such as hers are neurological at root, with the physical functioning of the brain being implicated in their genesis.
        Seemingly relieved by this (no hostess, after all, likes to think that her visitors may abruptly start trying to drive evil spirits from her body) Azabel permitted me to turn the conversation to the subject of her burning hair.
        The flames arising from her brunette hair were, on that day, of approximately six inches in height. Their color, as I have mentioned, was pink. I was struck by the delicately feminine nature of that pink, a kind of reserved pastel which seemed in keeping with Azabel's patrician breeding, which had given her a reserve which ran counter to our society's usual habit of casual self-disclosure.
        The flames (as scientific investigation by other researchers had already established) were cool at the base (thus preserving her scalp from injury) but intensely hot at the tips. Azabel explained that she had been forced to take to sleeping in the living room, with her head cushioned on an inflammable fiberglass pillow, permitting the heat to ascend up the chimney.
        "Actually," said Azabel, "the flames do die down to almost nothing in the night. But, sometimes, when Tim wakes up, there are these positive — spikes, you might say. Spikes. A yard long. They come shooting out. Particularly if Tim wakes screaming. He does have nightmares, you know."
        Other than that, her life (now that the initial burst of media attention had died down) was almost normal. She was, however, largely confined to her home and its surrounds; visits to Manhattan, formerly one of the focal points of her life, were out of the question.  
        "True, one can shop by Internet," she said, "but it's not the same."
        Initially, she had found this hard to accept. But, after her burning hair had set off the fire sprinkler system in her local dress shop, she had been forced to accept that any building with a low ceiling was essentially off limits.
        In our discussions, it soon emerged that the main effects of Azabel's affliction were social. At one and the same time, it had largely alienated her from adult society, while forcing her into an ever-closer relationship with her son, with whom (even before her hair caught fire) she had already bonded in a particularly intense fashion, her husband's frequent absences (he was often called upon to fly to the West Coast to address problems concerning the management of one of his several pheromone factories) meaning that her son was (in many ways) the most important person in her life.
        "Might I see his room?" I inquired, thinking that this might be instructive.
        On permission being granted, I looked in on Tim, who, by that stage, was in a profound sleep scarcely to be differentiated from the unconsciousness induced by concussion.
        Tim's bedroom was that of a typical four-year-old boy, complete with model trucks, jigsaws and so forth. The one anomalous thing was the golden halo hanging in the air above Tim's face. On impulse, I applied a piece of paper to it. The paper caught fire. Awkwardly, I realized that there was no ashtray or other receptacle in which I might place the piece of burning paper. I resolved this problem by slipping off my shoe and dropping the piece of paper inside, where it soon burnt itself out with no more than a slight singing of the leather interior.
        In my prior reading of the literature concerning Azabel's case, I had met with no indication that her condition might also extend to her son. Naturally, Tim's halo seemed to me to be evidence that Azabel's condition, which had so far resisted the efforts of researchers to explicate it, might be in some way hereditary, or, at least, influenced by hereditary factors.
        It was at that point that the sounds of something verging on an altercation recalled me to the living room. I tilted my shoe to let the ashes slide toward the toe, then inserted my foot into the shoe, safely crushing and hiding the evidence of my unauthorized investigation.
        I then returned to the living room, where I found Azabel sitting rigidly on her piano chair, staring at the fireplace. Elroy, for his part, stood at one of the picture windows which afforded a view of multi-million-dollar rusticity, gazing outward as if looking for the arrival of a long-anticipated guest. Thus positioned, they bore no social relationship to each other; they looked like characters from different movies somehow manipulated into the same frame, but textually unrelated to each other.
        I was very keen to discuss the halo of fire which I had so recently seen floating above Tim's head. However, when I endeavoured to open lines of communication, Azabel responded by adroitly guiding the conversation into neutral territory (discussing, for example, her collection of carnivorous plants, and the story of how her father made his first fortune in the canned worm business.)
        Eventually, I realized that I was being subtly advised that our consultation was at an end. Concealing my disappointment as best I could (there were several neurological tests I would have wished to administer, had circumstances permitted) I took my leave.
        On the drive back to Manhattan, I tried to probe the question of what (if anything) might have happened between Elroy Sams and Azabel Vintage while I had been out of the room. But Elroy maintained (as he continued to maintain, later, during his trial) that nothing had happened.
        "I'm not interested in her," said Elroy.
        "But you must admit," I said, "she is an extremely elegant woman."
        "I could never like a woman with kids," said Elroy. "If you've got kids, you can't be free."
        I felt at the time that this was a strange, even evasive, response, but did not pursue the question further, instead allowing Elroy to turn the conversation to the subject of truck racing, which permitted him to perform in a professorial role, myself taking the part (and I was pleased to, for from time to time one wishes to be relieved of the role of explainer) of the student who sits and receives instruction.
        It was six months later that Azabel, of her own initiative, contacted me. She had a problem which her own suite of caregivers had been unable to resolve, and wished me to come and see her. By then, Azabel's husband had left (though his billiard table yet remained) to begin his relationship with the senator from New York (a relationship by now, of course, publicly notorious, but, at the time, a secret as yet undisclosed to the world at large) with the result that Azabel was more isolated than ever, which may well be what had prompted her to call me in.
        In any case, the situation was that Azabel wished to accept a job as a talk show host, the idea being that the show would focus on people with "unresolvable afflictions". In fact, a pilot series had already been made, and this had occupied much of the intervening months since my first visit. The problem, however, was that her son was hostile to the idea. Even though the studio facilities were in Long Island — in fact, for the pilot the TV company had rented a property within walking distance of Azabel's own home — Tim saw his mother's periodic departure as desertion.
        During the making of the pilot series, Tim had become more and more vocal in his opposition. Things had now reached the stage where he screamed and screamed for as much as six hours at a time during each of his mother's absences; proof, one might think, that the socially isolating effects of Azabel's condition had bonded mother and child in a manner which not everyone would think of as healthy.
        "I will be there tomorrow," I said.
        Naturally, Elroy Sams having been present on my first visit, I took the opportunity to e-mail him to see if the intervening six months might have given him any unexpected insights into Azabel's condition. I was taken aback, however, when he arrived on my doorstep the next day, insisting to accompany me.
        "I'm not entirely sure that this would be appropriate," I said.
        "Trust me," said Elroy.
        At the trial, I was asked why I did in fact trust him. The answer I gave then, and which I must repeat now, is that one must act as if the world is peopled with sane, normative individuals, otherwise everyday life becomes unsustainable. Lacking trust, one imprisons oneself in that strongbox known as paranoia.
        When Azabel found that I was once again accompanied by Elroy Sams, her displeasure was plain. Nevertheless (and I think a habit of propriety is largely to account for this) she invited us in with all the graciousness she could muster.
        It was immediately obvious that her condition had taken a severe turn for the worse. Jagged flames up to a foot in height were leaping in irregular intervals from her hair, and the scorched condition of the ceiling suggested outbreaks of far greater seriousness. And, though the underlying color of the flames was still that same delicate pastel pink, it was now contaminated with globs of curling red, of coagulating black, of shredded purple and Gorgon green, a histrionic palette very much at odds with the continuing cool composure of her social manners.
        "It looks bad," said Azabel, seeing the direction of my gaze, "but it's much worse when Tim's awake. Anyway — would you care for something to drink?"
        I accepted a glass of oolong tea; Elroy, a beer.
        After exchanging some small talk, I steered the conversation in the direction of her worsening condition, and asked her if she knew of anything which might account for this change, and received a strange answer which did not quite seem to accord with the question.
        "Perhaps," she said, "pain is simpler than you think."
        I interpreted this anomalous response as an (understandable) reluctance to engage with the complexities of her own condition. While it was understandable, it also suggested the existence of a certain resistance to analysis which might make it difficult for us to work together in the direction of a solution.
        It was at this point that piercing screams began to emanate from the bedroom.
        "It's Tim," said Azabel. Then, explaining, "He has nightmares."
        "I'll see to him," I said.
        At first, as if reluctant to permit this, Azabel rose from her chair. Then, changing her mind, granted permission.
        "You're bound to find out in any case," she said.
        What I found out, on entering Tim's room, was that his condition, too, had worsened. That was obvious from the architectural rearrangements in the bedroom. The ceiling had been raised some six feet, the walls paneled with fireproof tiles, and a suite of stainless steel furniture installed, all, evidently, to keep Tim's condition from endangering either himself or the safety of the household as a whole.
        As for Tim, he was tossing and turning in the throes of a nightmare. Floating in the air above his body there burnt not a discrete halo but an angry Moebius strip of red flame tinged with inclusions of bitumen black.
        As gently as I could, I roused Tim and suggested that he come to the living room to be with his mother. By the time he was properly awake, all evidence of his pyrotechnical affliction had vanished; my initial theory, which I hoped to be able to investigate at leisure, was that he only experienced symptoms when asleep, and thus, quite possibly, was unaware of his own condition.
        Returning hand in hand with Tim, I was unable to keep from hearing Azabel's raised voice coming from the living room, addressing my friend Elroy in terms which suggested an ongoing connection between them over the preceding six months.
        "I am sick," she said, "of your phone calls. I am sick of your e-mails, and I want to you to get out of my life and stay out."
        Hearing this also, Tim grew agitated. When we entered the living room, he screamed at Elroy with his (surprisingly powerful) four-year-old voice.
        "Leave my mother alone!"
        It was at that point that the flames, previously confined to Azabel's hair, shot up everywhere in the surrounding neighborhood. Trees, fields, fences and houses caught fire. Only the house in which we presently stood was (miraculously) spared from the conflagration all around.
        With that, Elroy pulled out a gun (from where, I have no idea) and shot Tim. The force of the bullet's impact, like a giant's backslap, knocked the little boy dead into the fireplace. The shock of this event is with me still. To see a human life demolished, struck out of our frame of reference, is a truly shattering experience.
        Outside, the flames died down. They vanished with preternatural suddenness, leaving behind a neighborhood of ashes hued in a grey which emulated asbestos. As for Azabel Vintage herself, her neatly coiffed brunette hair betrayed not the slightest hint of anything out of the normal. Daphne (as Azabel styled her affliction) had finally been extinguished.
        "There," said Elroy, flushed but triumphant. "You see?"
        I did not see at all.     "Kindly put the gun down," I said, truly shaken by this unexpected turn of events.
        The irretrievable is not my field. As a therapist, I am committed to the notion that all conditions can be at least ameliorated, if not cured altogether. But the boy was dead. There was no retrieving this disaster.
        In any case, on receiving my command Elroy obliged, depositing the handgun not on the chair which was to hand (an elegant object manufactured in a style which would not have been unfamiliar to Louis IV) but on the billiard table, which he had to walk across the room to reach.
        As I phoned the police, I could not help but note the stylistic integrity of the manner in which my friend Elroy Sams had positioned himself. Leaning back against the billiard table with a kind of James Deanish insouciance, his hands in his pockets, a bright Jackson Pollockish splash of the boy's blood spritzed across his blue denim jeans, he was a man not so much speaking for himself as having a culture speak through him; he had become, if one might venture to appropriate a term from the cultural discourse of California, a channel through which the cowboy archetype could manifest itself.
        At his trial, Elroy explained the logic of his decision. The flames which afflicted Azabel were high when Tim was awake but weaker when Tim slept; moreover, the crisis worsened when the mother abandoned the child by going to work; and the abrupt conflagration which had destroyed the neighborhood had coincided with Tim's discovery of Elroy and Azabel in confrontation.
        "The kid was doing it," said Elroy. "That was obvious. I had to save our lives. So I shot him."
        The logic was impeccable; the unfortunate flaw in the defence was that, by the time of the trial, the fire had returned, worse than ever.
        Two years after his conviction, Elroy Sams died in jail, the apparent victim of a case of spontaneous combustion. Perhaps coincidentally, in the same week I saw Azabel Vintage on TV. She was being transported across country on a flatbed truck, which was forced to halt at intervals so overhead wires could be temporarily removed.
        I assumed that this was to be my last sight of her: Azabel pacing restlessly on the back of the truck, a pillar of fire ascending from her head. However, two weeks later, I received from the woman an invitation (in the form of an e-mail, as it happens) inviting me to visit and inspect her changed circumstances.
        My emotions were mixed. On the one hand, Elroy Sams had been a friend. To revisit Azabel Vintage would be to reawaken the pain caused by his unpardonable lapse of judgment, which, to tell the truth, had shaken me to the innermost core of my being. On the other hand, the demanding imperative of a researcher's curiosity is difficult to resist.
        Science, in the end, decided; and so it was that I saw Azabel again in the desert in Nevada. Her abode had once been reserved for nuclear bomb tests; and, though it had never actually been used for such purposes, it remained under government control.
        There, Azabel sustained a kind of open-air camping existence, surviving outdoors in the middle of a wasteland of glazed sand and fractured rock, which served as evidence of the severity of the worst of her pyrotechnical outbursts.
        It was distressing to find that Azabel, who, on our first meeting, had presented herself as a person both polished and composed, seemed somehow frazzled, as if she might be on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
        Initially, I was baffled by this. After all, her condition was not new, and my experience has generally been that patients adapt to their conditions. The original affliction, originally seen as an impediment, is gradually perceived as opening up new ways of relating to the world, deepening and enriching the patient's experience, to the point where a cure (if one is forthcoming) is often experienced as an exile from a known world which, like the prison where one has resided for the last several decades, is a home of sorts which one is reluctant to leave.
        As delicately as I could (for I was sensitive to, and indeed pained by, her obvious suffering) I endeavoured to broach the subject of Azabel's difficulty in adjusting to her changed circumstances.
        "What do you expect?" she screamed. "My son has been murdered. My husband has left me. I am living in hell!"
        Our subsequent discourse was therapeutically unproductive (this sometimes happens) and she suggested that we part immediately, and that we do so on the understanding that further meetings were not to be expected.
        "But I love you!" I said. To this day, I have no idea why I said such a thing. I have no idea where the words came from. They blurted out as if in confession, intolerably shocking and totally unexpected.
        "You do no," said Azabel Vintage, in mounting fury, "show love by ignoring someone for two years — for twenty-four months! — while she descends step by step into the lowest pit of hell! Are you crazy or are you what?"
        I was taken aback both by her anger and by her surely exaggerated sense of her own suffering. After all, as a therapist I have many demands on my time, therefore it would be unreasonable for her to expect my visits to be frequent. Furthermore, my memories of the death of her son (as I have already indicated, this is a shock from which I will never properly recover) had made me hesitant to seek a meeting.
        And now she was accusing me of being insane?
        "I think I should leave," I said.
        "You do that," she said, shaking with unspeakable fury. "You just do that now."
        And I did.
        Since then, after long meditation, I have come to the conclusion that it is the singularity of Azabel's unparalleled affliction which has made it difficult for her to adapt to her changed circumstances.
        Those with whom I consult, for all their individuality, have conditions which are typically manifestations of known syndromes, historically documented and (if not understood) at least emblematically represented in our culture. This, as a general rule, makes it possible for them to appropriate for their own purposes a kind of readymade artistic ordering of experience, absent which extreme affliction may bring about a kind of raw and unnerving despair.
        In Azabel's case, however, the singular uniqueness of her condition means that the cultural apparatus which eases the task of internal adaptation is missing. Furthermore, existing as she does sui generis, she is unable to achieve that sense of community which affliction usually permits.
        A disease, almost invariably, has a socializing function. The hospital ward, the leper colony and the local meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, are all examples of this.
        It is the knowledge of these ameliorating factors which has made it possible for me to engage in my professional career without needing to acquire a veneer of surgical remoteness. But Azabel's case has shaken me to the core of my being. It is intolerable for me to think of her as being the only one of her kind, excluded not just from our social groupings but from the imaginative engineering by which we domesticate and make palatable the intolerable starkness of naked existence.
        It was perhaps an unconscious understanding of this, existing prior to my conscious explication of her circumstances, that led me to endeavour to throw her that lifeline, to declare (so unexpectedly!) that "I love you."
        Anyway. Enough of that. My next case (the details have just arrived by courier, and I am keen to get started) is that of Roy X, and autistic savant who, though unable (or unwilling) to express himself in natural language, can apparently process commands in the Unix programming language, and has been programmed, so to speak, with an increasingly complex set of skills, ranging from playing chess to designing thermonuclear weapons.
        After the emotional complexities of my involvement with Azabel Vintage, I look forward to the more purely neurological challenges of this encounter with a sense of release and relief.