The Mahwah woman recently convicted of aggravated battery against her karate teacher may have suffered from mistreatment in the workplace at Dataplex Corporation, it emerged today.

Karen Orbach was routinely expected to work up to 90 hours a week in Dataplex's Woodcliff Lake R&D department, according to her lawyer, Rita Schickworth.

'Our information indicates that Dataplex executives were aware that Ms. Orbach suffers from a mild form of delusional schizophrenia which is aggravated by stress, yet they took no action.'

Schickworth added that Dataplex 'will be investigated by the appropriate state and federal agencies in connection with my client's complaints.'

At her trial last week, Ms Orbach declined her option to plead guilty by reason of insanity and received an 18-month prison sentence.

A Dataplex spokesman said that the gruelling R&D project in question has been 'indefinitely suspended.'

The victim, John Norman, returned to his Wanaque home Tuesday after a five-week hospital stay involving reconstructive facial surgery and treatment for a ruptured spleen. Norman is a fifth-degree black belt and the founder of Minnehaha Karate Academy.

'Violence never solves anything,' said Ellen Payne, MSW. Her name tag glinted on her cheap polyester blouse, one of those with a ribbon-tie neckline that was supposed to disguise its wearers' flat-chestedness but never did.

'Karen, were you ever abused as a child?'

'Um, no,' I assured her, shaking my head. I could feel myself pulling the old politeness around me like a fur coat. The deference. It was safer.

'OK,' she said, sounding doubtful. 'Because if you had been, I think it would be really beneficial for you if we could talk about it. Abuse isn't always physical. Did your parents take drugs?'

I could almost see the mental checklist she was running down, ticking off the boxes, categorizing me. Questions about whether Uncle Marty had ever asked me to sit on his lap were bound to follow.

If there's one thing that really annoys me, it's people insulting my intelligence. What would Gloria do now?

'You know,' I said softly. 'I'm really offended by this line of questioning.'

'Do you want to hit me?' said Ellen Payne, MSW.

'Not yet,' I said. 'Violence never solves anything.'

'You're being sarcastic'

'Well!' I laughed.

'What do you mean by 'Well'?'

'Well, is that really what you think? Have you ever seen a movie where violence isn't the solution? Have you read the paper lately? Violence seems to be the preferred solution all over the planet, and if it's officially sanctioned it's wonderful heroism and if it isn't it's a crime. I lost my temper with that. . . that. . . A-hole.' I couldn't quite bring myself to say the full curse word but I think, for me, 'A-hole' was big progress. 'And I'm glad I did it because he deserved it and nobody else was going to step up to the plate. If I could do it all over again, I'd do exactly the same. Did he threaten me? No. Did I hear voices? No. Am I a mental case? Maybe. So what? I have every right to be here, Ellen Payne, MSW. So stop trying to make me feel like I'm broken and I need fixing. I don't want any counseling. I don't want to be rehabilitated.'

She listened to my outburst dispassionately, then cocked her head a little and pursed her lips.

'You know, Karen, most of the inmates here have below-average intelligence. Many of them come from deprived backgrounds or an abusive home life. Some of them have emotional problems. You're going to have to live among them for the duration of your sentence. You could have gotten an insanity plea, but you wouldn't even consider it. You ought to have been on medication in the first place. You are on tranquilizers now, I see from your file. Is that right?'

'I don't need them,' I said. I rolled my tongue around in my mouth. I had a celery string stuck between two molars.

'Does that mean you're not taking them? Come on, I know there are tricks. Are you not taking your medication?'

'Of course I'm taking it,' I lied.

'Well, it might be very satisfying to you to sit there and tell me that you don't want to be rehabilitated, but when reality sets in I think you're going to change your mind. You don't belong here, Karen. Wait until you make a wrong move. Wait and see who's the aggressor and who's the victim when you're up against some of these women, and then you can tell me that violence is a good solution. It wasn't a good solution for you, and if you can't see that now, you're going to.'

I sighed. Nothing like a good lecture on top of a bad night's sleep and an inedible breakfast. 'Now,' Ellen Payne, MSW continued. 'Something went wrong in your life to make you do this thing, and I'm here to help you work out what that was and how you can make sure nothing like this ever happens again. If you cooperate with this process, you could get out sooner.'

'Maybe I'm not interested in that.'

'Well, frankly, I'm having a lot of trouble understanding why.' She stood up and gathered her stuff. 'I'll check back with you in a few weeks, in case anything changes. I hope you'll reconsider.'

'I hope you reconsider your Aunt Pat's nursing home,' I heard myself say. 'She gets bedsores and the nurses steal her romance novels. When was the last time you went to see her?'

Ellen Payne, MSW slammed the door. I heard her heels go tripping down the corridor. She sounded like the seventh race at Belmont.

That night, I went to the TV room for the first time. The cigarette smoke made my eyes water. I wasn't the fattest person there. I wasn't the blackest, either. A sister the size of Rochelle Park took up most of the sofa. She was talking back to the TV.

'Aw, come on, can't you see that little weaselly guy done it? How stupid you want to get?'

'It can't be the little guy, it's always the guy with the English accent.'

I folded my arms across my chest and looked sideways across the TV. Playing safe.

The big woman glanced at me, said, 'Got a cigarette?'

I shook my head. I was petrified. Four skinny girls were crammed into a loveseat, whispering to each other and giggling. I could tell they were talking about me but I didn't dare look at anyone directly.

'Check it out,' a middle-aged redhead said, 'She's like a friggin' statue. You see that show the other night about them stone idols, she looks like one of them. What was that place called?'

'Easter Island,' answered one of the skinnies, couldn't have been more than nineteen. 'Hey, Easter! Newgirl, I'm talking to you.'

I looked at her.

'My name is Karen,' I said.

'You do voo-doo, Easter?'

I snorted. 'Do you?'

She licked her lips, wiggled her fingers in front of her face. 'Cuz I heard you spooked out Microtits this morning. Told her a message from her dead auntie or something.'

'I didn't mean to spook her out,' I said seriously. 'I just accidentally said something I shouldn't.'

'Don'tyousmokethen?' It all came out as one angry word, from Rochelle Park.

'No.'

'You know who did it, Easter? Who killed the heiress?'

At first I didn't know what she meant. Then:

'I don't like to watch TV,' I said, still deliberately avoiding looking at the screen, although I could hear the sound.

'Everybody likes to watch Tom Selleck,' said the redhead in her flat voice. 'Unless you're a dyke.'

I didn't want to be marked as a dyke in a women's prison, did I? Reluctantly, I turned to the screen.

It wasn't the Grid. It was Hawaii. Even I knew who Magnum was, because I often read TV Guide so as not to appear totally clueless when chatting with colleagues at the watercooler. But it was hard to follow the story. The women were making a racket, talking back to the TV, occasionally throwing wadded-up gum at it, making fun of people's clothes and imitating their voices. 'Oooh,' they'd say frequently to Magnum. 'You gonna take that from him?' Or: 'Psych! Lookit her face, any more mascara and she's gonna need a forklift just to get her eyes open.'

I'd never seen anything like it. In my houses, and my friends' houses, we always watched TV quietly. It was rude to do otherwise. These girls kicked their legs in the air and threw stuff at the screen.

Where were you guys when I was letting the Grid freak me out? I thought.

Then I started to join in. Nothing big, but I couldn't help laughing sometimes, or pointing, or muttering remarks of my own. And the TV stayed TV. No other planets.

It was pure magic.

'Get a nose job,' I heard myself say to one of the cops. The redhead heard me.

'Hah! You hear that? "Get a nose job," Easter says.'

'Don't mind Shannon,' said Rochelle Park to me. 'She don't know you beat up a karate master. Otherwise she wouldn't call you Easter, she'd call you Kung Fu.'

'What are you in here for, Shannon?' I managed. I wanted to smile but I couldn't make my face do it.

'Armed robbery. Oi, look out he's gonna—'

'—Left-hook you,' I finished, wincing empathetically as Magnum went flying over a table.

Maybe that's the key. Don't just watch. Don't just let them use you.

Maybe it's time for a little audience participation.

Back in my cell, I spent my nights working on a game plan.

It was no good being able to watch TV and interact with it and not see the Grid, if what I wanted was to see the Grid and act on it. What good is watching Magnum, P.I. in that situation?

It was true that at home I'd used a TV tuned to the static between channels, but I couldn't do that here because any private use of the TV had to be sanctioned through Ellen Payne, MSW, and I wasn't about to confide in her. All she knew was that I had delusional problems when watching TV. I could ask for therapeutic TV time, but if I then tuned in to dead air the guard would tell that to S.P., MSW, who would think I was yanking her chain.

Then again, there had been that time when Rocky had tuned in to Channel 11 in his attempt to watch Yankee baseball. I had flown through the Friday-night movie. I could do it.

But I had to do it right this time. I had to try to duplicate the conditions that had been used at Dataplex, but take control of them on my own terms. I was pretty sure that Miles had been right about what I had been shown at Dataplex: videotapes, not a blue screen at all. The blue screen probably came up when the nex snapped – when the video ended, in other words, or someone turned it off.

And the video I had been shown, complete with proposed commercial advertising, could only have been one thing.

Cookie Starfishes came on at 5:30 a.m. and again at 1:30 p.m. There was no way I could get to watch it in the afternoon during All My Children because, as I'd learned in the past few days, beautiful young Jenny had recently gone to New York to become a model and had no idea that the virginity she'd kept from and for her beloved Greg was about to be stolen and her good name besmirched by unscrupulous underwear-catalog photographers. Not to mention the fact that she was being stalked by a psycho.

So 5:30 a.m. it would have to be.

Ellen Payne, MSW did not come to see me again. I guess the Aunt Pat thing had upset her. Instead, she informed me by memo that a viewing could be arranged for my benefit on Thursday. Wednesday night, I didn't sleep. At the appointed hour, one of the guards let me into the TV room with a muttered, 'There ya go, Easter.' I was hungry, shivering, sweat-palmed as the guard went into the observation area and picked up the remote contol. The TV came on in a blast of happy music.

I sank into a chair and licked my lips.

'Right,' I heard myself mutter self-consciously. 'Interact. Talk back. Give 'em hell.'

The guard had her head down. She was doing paperwork.

'I'm not doing it, Dante,' I said, louder. The guard didn't even twitch. Who would, after the antics of Shannon and Rochelle Park - whose name turned out to be Malinda (car thief), by the way – and their cohorts?

'Go ahead and try me and let's see what happens,' I added. I leaned forward in my chair. I gesticulated. 'I'm gonna fly now and I hope you recognize that I don't belong to you anymore. You can't make me do anything. You can't make me do anything.'

I kept repeating it, but pretty soon I couldn't even hear my own voice, because I was there. The sky was loud with eventuality, with the sound of things being finished once and for all. I kept opening my mouth and forcing air past my vocal cords anyway, talking myself into existence just like the girls had sung up their city within the Grid.

I won't stay quiet anymore.