Anton went on grousing about it, so much was to be expected, but my billboard featuring trainer and boxer brought plenty of attention to Duke’s fight with Jorgas. On the night of the match, Garrett and Paul flanked the pair of me and Karen, all of us occupying nonpareil seats just feet from the ring’s apron. I’d had to really plead with Karen to get her to come; apparently she lacked the taste for unvarnished violence. For her, you could hardly call tonight a sporting affair, though that is exactly what tens of thousands of spectators were willing to call it, if that’s what it took to bring a legend back—as well as a rogue. If she didn’t witness the absurdity first-hand, I’d argued, her contributions to the project wouldn’t properly marinate in events. So, after skipping the undercard, she’d appeared there next to me, completing our foursome, right beside the commentary team.
Paul looked especially weathered tonight, and muted hatred could be seen in his eyes. Even if he’d slept all day, it wouldn’t have helped him appear any fresher, any kinder, not after all the defeats he’d suffered at Garrett’s hands—and mine—these last months. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, actually; Garrett had been keeping me from him, or him from me. It was pointless asking him about Theria’s mysteries now, in front of everyone. He wasn’t going to reveal anything Garrett hadn’t instructed him to. I can’t say I didn’t take some pleasure in grinding down this superior lackey, this quasi-aesthete. Even Karen was no longer firmly on his side. What did it matter if her reasons had more to do with desire than truth, as long as Garrett and I had her support, and we could subdue Paul’s querulous being with it?
We’d gathered in the theater at Madison Square—not the main room, though it was big enough, and serious fighters worked here: Immo and I had watched Sergei Kovalev turn another man’s face into pulp some time back. Certainly the pay-per-view haul was going to be chunky, Freddie insisted, as plenty of people still believed, delusionally or not, that Jorgas wasn’t spent. Duke contributed to the take, too, bringing in fans in a way no ordinary tune-up fighter could. With our images suffusing the city for the past couple of months, and then Duke’s bizarre and self-inflicted dismissal from the Bears, this fight against an old lion, a resurrected legend, had number nineteen looping on sports radio and cable, infuriating many but fascinating all. On that basis, Freddie had expertly wrangled ten percent of the profits for Duke, a lot for a man in his first professional fight. Stretching back seven years, Jorgas had netted no less than three million per match, and several of them, in the middle of that stretch, had been superfights, scoring him north of ten million. If the desire for sports-reality television was strong enough on the night, our football player in exile looked set to clear a million. Could you put that past New York?
Attendance, I could see, was good or good enough: the sections in the back, roped off for undersold events, were swelling as the main event approached. The bill comprised seven bouts in total, the earliest of which we’d skipped, featuring as they did anonymous “boxers” fresh from penitentiary fighting only four and six rounds, guaranteeing their meaninglessness. Shortly before ten o’clock tonight, at the foot of a monumental digital image of Duke right up next to Jorgas, the Venezuelan-American who’d spent much of his career fighting at the Garden, if it wasn’t Mandalay Bay, I’d stood at the top of the Garden’s steps and watched Paul and Garrett converge on me from the north, down Seventh Avenue. Since then, Garrett had been scouring the Garden for every fan wearing a #19 Bears jersey, smiling each time he sighted another, while Paul managed a weary nod whenever Garrett turned his way.
The ring walks began, Duke first. Scabrous hip-hop, entirely unedited—nigger occurred every seven or eight words—blared through a sound system that would have had Rick salivating. The MC was a Bay Area legend, famous, I knew, for cerebral wordplay, political invective, and domestic assaults. I’d experienced this sort of vulgar pageantry before, but Karen was clearly struggling with the rawness of the sport. Actual DJs, like a house party or a rave? Duke strode toward the ring in white shorts and a long flowing robe—also white—taking a hint, quite clearly, from the tunic I’d put him in for the first picture; while Jorgas, the dark-skinned great, entered to mariachi music and profound cheers in a sparkling silver cape trimmed with fur, the sort of get-up even a high-class pimp would have struggled to pull off with a straight face.
Paul and Garrett were quietly conferring during all of this, I didn’t know about what, but at that moment I had other interests. My arm had been flat on the rest for some time now, with my fingertips grazing Karen’s stockinged leg, which lay exposed beneath her swooshy azure skirt. Having habituated her to my touch, I maneuvered my hand up her leg until I received a sting: she raked her nails across my forearm, laughing lightly, pretending to listen to our clients. I withdrew.
As always, the fighter introductions, comical in their bombast, ran on too long, yet eventually the men came together and received final instructions from the referee. Joyous boos covered Duke’s heart. They made Garrett beam as nineteen sauntered forward and, perhaps in answer to the odd ovation, cheerfully tapped the chest of Jorgas, who rippled with muscle as though he’d just stepped off Riker’s with a plan. For all his ease playing the thug, Duke was an intellectual, and his irreducibly meditative gaze into Jorgas’ homicidal eyes brought fans to a state of ironic rapture.
The two touched gloves and retreated to their corners, waiting for the bell, which sounded with an ugly clang. Duke came out with gloves held high, searching for position against the taller fighter, while Jorgas’ slick, stringy hair, black and white from the years—the man’s agedness couldn’t be denied—flew around with the weaving of his head. The veteran rifled off a few jabs straight into Duke’s guard, testing its strength and finding it wanting, his fist crashing through to Duke’s cheek. Twenty seconds in and squaring up to Jorgas already looked to be a suicidal enterprise. Yuri yelled something in unintelligible English or perfect Belarusian and Duke was suddenly in the shoulder roll, another trick he’d pinched from Sasha, a key partner in this experiment. Duke angled toward Jorgas, tucking his chin over his shoulder, bending his knees deeply, making himself small as this dark Goliath raged from distance, trying to end the fight early. Yet the football player’s delicate footwork saw him through the ominous opener: while he threw only seven or eight punches, all errant countershots, he never allowed Jorgas to trap him in a corner, never pulled straight back, always sweeping to one side or the other on instinct. In a way, he’d already put a dent in Jorgas’ night, simply by surviving the round. I could hear Yuri rasping encouragements as Duke sat on his stool, blank-faced, getting an end-swell pressed under his eye. If the champ were really back in form, how could he let a neophyte, a clown, out of the first?
Jorgas looked to soften up Duke’s lead shoulder in the second round, but his opponent’s great strength, I knew, had always been his timing. Soon he was making Jorgas miss, thrilling Garrett with every evasion. Even Paul, dejected though he’d looked earlier, seemed impressed and indeed relieved; he’d been told the bout was going to be ugly, one-sided, full of blood, which he manifestly didn’t like the sight of. Garrett, though, growing up largely on a ranch, and having gotten what his father preached was an essential American education, for a Protestant like him—slaughtering chickens and pigs, fattening calves for early deaths, hunting jackrabbit and deer on the plains—had different ideas. Blood and death were wholesome things, elements of the good life. And so it was with boxing.
Round three. Duke, who’d begun as prey, had managed to keep his blood in his veins: not a drop could be seen on either man’s gloves. Jorgas was looking frustrated. He’d stopped paying mind to Duke’s sporadic punches, which were mostly glancing even when they came, and began winging shots at will, upstairs, downstairs, anywhere, hoping to find a way through. All around them, throughout the theater, the scene was almost surreally hushed. It was the most remarkable fact, I’d always thought, about live boxing: the quiet. Even when the action was peaking inside the ropes, you mostly heard the thumps of gloves, not the roar of the crowd. All the crass pomp, the DJ, the wild outfits, the crazed and obscene hooting you heard breaking out haphazardly existed to establish and re-establish that we were definitely having fun, and not witnessing the forcible resolution of a conflict between persons. That dense, edgy silence that gathered at every boxing match was organic to every physical clash, even on the playground, and suggested things so different from pleasurable diversion: vigilance, fear, fate, and balance.
I wondered what Jorgas’ strategy was now, if he might even start to tire and the unthinkable might happen. Duke might start firing back. I’d seen his power in the gym; he’d knocked Sasha to the ground more than once with liver shots. He certainly had it, if he could get off first against Jorgas. Could we, incredibly, be headed the distance? Would the prey be granted reprieve? Might he even manage to turn things around and wound Jorgas, after the veteran had exhausted himself or lost his patience? I noticed Karen was hunched forward in her chair now. Garrett and Paul, too. These thoughts were pulsing through all of them, I realized, through everyone in the arena.
In the fourth round, far from losing his patience, Jorgas slowed his pace, his hands, disregarding the boos of the crowd. No longer under fire, Duke felt compelled to throw, but at least half the time he got hit with something heavy on the counter. Jorgas in his prime, I knew, had been a slick counterpuncher, not a crude knockout artist, and he was showing us that he was still the same man. Duke started tasting Jorgas’s measured shots and throwing from growing desperation, the sense of an ending; and this was just when things began to turn against him. Although Duke connected on a few flush bodyshots, one of which even stood Jorgas up, most of his punches found only air. Jorgas, with arms a half-foot longer that Duke’s, peppered the black man with sharp shots, three to every one of his opponent’s. Dropping the flash, managing distance, waiting for openings—Jorgas left Duke with an unfavorable rate of exchange. The crowd had savored the freewheeling brawl of the early rounds, but it was this calculated turn that showed Jorgas’ class. Sometimes you had to forget about the crowd to find your way.
In round five, Duke’s technical form began to fray, partly from Jorgas’ crisp, leveraged punching, partly out of disappointment with a battle of attrition that simply didn’t favor him. It was time for him to make way for instinct, fate. On a football field, Duke would summon his peak performance at nadirs like this. But—this is something he wouldn’t have anticipated—in a sport in which he was woefully overmatched, a reversion to instinct would only hasten his demise. And so, as the bout came to resemble an athletic competition less than it did corporal punishment, the crowd re-engaged, bellowing for their old hero. Garrett beamed solemnly.
With Duke fading fast, physically and mentally, Jorgas changed tack, returning to the seek-and-destroy style he’d begun the match with and landing three- and four-punch combinations without trouble: crushing shots to the chest and face. By this point Duke had sold out on defense, hoping, more than quixotically, to land a bomb, but coming nowhere close to it. Every time it seemed the match would be waved off, though, Duke, his mind presumably only fluttering with consciousness, would offer wild counters, preventing the referee from bear-hugging him for the standing TKO.
It was nearly a minute into the next round, the sixth, when a three-punch Jorgas combination—the second shot, a short straight right, seemingly soft but flush on the chin—finally sent Duke out of this world. He bounced off the ropes and avalanched onto the canvas, his knees landing just before his face, in two percussive beats. The breaking point came so suddenly, it took the crowd some moments to grasp what had happened. They were roaring cathartically at first, of course: silence only lost its grip on a boxing arena when someone landed on his back. By the count of two, though, it was obvious to all just how out Duke was, something first apparent only to the people nearest the ring, like me. Jorgas enjoyed a brief moment of triumph before being muscled out of the way by Duke’s entourage. Yuri gathered beside Duke, and Anton soon did, too, even if he’d refused to train Duke. This was, I realized, the companion scene to the one I’d rendered in my drawing: the somber, portentous face of Anton preparing Duke for this star-crossed battle. That image, the entombment of Duke like a pharaoh, beginning with the gauzing of his hands, had been all over town in the days before the fight, priming the moment of recognition now being felt throughout the arena and the city.
The oxygen mask, neck brace, and stretcher came out, all things Duke was on intimate terms with from his usual line of work. If only he were conscious to appreciate these ironies, that what he’d done in the ring tonight, novelty or not, was what he’d been doing all his life, on the field and in the streets. All this resided in Anton’s gaze upon Duke’s limp body. The good-natured novelty fight with the giddy atmosphere had turned instantly morbid; you couldn’t not feel implicated in the calamity, when an outgunned, underprepared man was thrown to a former champ like a dog. Karen had been right —where exactly was the sport again? Now she was speechless and on the verge of tears. Garrett’s face carried no expression, as though he’d been driven by the horrified commotion filling the Garden to some place deep within his skin, a theoretical point akin to the place Duke now lived, somewhere in the territory of non-being. Karen clutched my arm, asked me what was going to happen from here, but there was nothing to explain, really; the medical team poured Duke into a gurney and was shuttling him off to see what could be built out of him at the hospital. I said nothing as the tears came down her face, the confused, angry kind, as if, in convincing her of the soundness of tonight’s enterprise, I’d somehow betrayed her. Paul’s misgivings had been vindicated by the outcome, yet still he looked stricken in a way that couldn’t be simulated. I’d come to hate his captiousness, his constant interference with what we were doing or inventing here, and I scorned his grasp of art, which was as retrograde as Rick’s. But his response to the scene was as noble as any, any besides Anton’s, at least, who regarded Duke from the ropes now, consoling Yuri, his protégé, who was shaken and almost in tears. He’d failed Duke, not prepared him the way Anton would have—I could read his thoughts in his wet gray eyes. Beside him, standing right next to the stretcher, was a distraught woman in a short black dress. Hadn’t Duke sent me a family photo from years back with this girl in it? Jonda, his sister?
And what was my response to all of this, to finding my close colleague and conspirator, my accomplice in what we both didn’t quite understand, still unconscious? I had no time to contemplate this, for just as I came around to consider it, the quasi-pallbearers of his entourage carried off the stretcher, leaving Bryan and some of the other friends Duke had comped with tickets to trail behind them almost ceremonially. Duke’s leg twitched as he went by me in the aisle, and then one of his still-taped hands did. Anton appeared before me seconds later. He’d never asked my name in all this time; he’d only looked me in the eye on a couple of occasions. Yet now he gestured for me to follow him in the procession, join the obsequies.
I could see that neither Paul nor Garrett wanted another look at Duke’s face tonight. Whatever Garrett’s ideas about life, the reality of events had jarred him: none of this was going to serve anyone in the long run. I took Karen by the hand, and angry though she was, she didn’t pull away. No, she held on, wouldn’t let go as we followed Anton and Yuri through the arena tunnel and into a black car heading to the hospital, joining a motorcade for this casualty of our mutual ambitions.
By the time Daphne and I made it to his bedside, after Anton had been given a chance to speak with him alone, Duke’s face, which had been struck hardest not by Jorgas’ fists but by the canvas as he collapsed onto it, snapping his neck back gruesomely, had swelled severely. It was no longer possible to say whether he was smiling or grimacing, or if he was even looking at you, his eyes had closed up so thoroughly, both of them edged above with deep, two-inch cuts, like a second set of eyebrows. That we were permitted to speak to him at all suggested his brain wasn’t hemorrhaging, or anyway, no more than you’d expect after having sloshed around in his skull for six rounds. Karen went around to the other side of the bed, emboldened by Duke’s infirmity; and though she’d hardly seen him in all the days of the campaign so far, she held his hand.
“Seven rounds,” he slurred to her through fattened lips.
“Six, wasn’t it?” I said.
“I went half the distance with Jorgas. Not even four weeks of training. Half the distance.” Though he had trouble speaking, trouble seeing—his body was failing—he was giddy, perhaps as high as I’d ever seen him, notwithstanding the occasions when he talked about his lakeside apartment, which was what this fight was really about for him, wasn’t it? He tried looking over at Karen but was in too much pain to do it; probably the neck brace would have gotten in the way regardless.
“Are they saying you’re all right then?” she asked.
“Don’t I look all right? What’s Jorgas look like?”
I laughed, just as he’d hoped, though his face was too fat with fluid to read anything off it. Karen put both her hands on his veined forearm, just beneath the drip.
“Freddie’s been apologizing to me so much, like so much, like I didn’t know what I was getting into, as if I fell for his pitch. I didn’t fall for anything. I got what I paid for. Or I’m about to. He’s started texting me numbers. Pay-per-view. Big numbers.”
“There were a lot people in there supporting you, not just Jorgas,” I said. “You see the number nineteen jerseys?”
“You see the thirty-twos, though? The Cal jerseys?” He opened his hand and Karen took it, the spoils of the fallen. “And didn’t I hit him with some nice stuff? If I could have held out a little longer, I don’t know. You’ve seen my punch. But what’s it matter?”
Duke’s phone rattled on the bedside stand. It was Freddie again: We’re going to find you a team, and this season, I promise you. Just get better.
“You hear that?” Duke asked with a touch of pride. “Freddie is something. He’s a total shitball, yeah, but that’s what makes him good at what he does. I mean, I’m keeping my home because of this. I’ll be on the lake in a week. Forever.”
“Did your parents come tonight?” Karen asked.
“I’ll see them when I look right. They’re back home. My mom isn’t talking right now.”
He handed me his phone.
“Shoot me with this,” he said.
I shot him.
“Way fucking more, man.”
I put it on burst, like an AK, and got dozens of shots in under a minute.
“I’m going to pin all this shit up in my locker, the next team I’m on. They’ll know what the fuck it is I can take. Think I was going down in the first round?”
I’d never seen Duke so free and easy. He was like an ad for ECT, even a lobotomy.
“You were wobbling a little.”
“I was dying in there. I’m not even sure how I got through. Jorgas starts fast. Yuri tried to tell me that.”
Anton was still outside in the waiting room when we left Duke. I think he was going in after us for a second look. He cared enough, I knew, for his would-be protégé, that he hoped this fiasco would end Duke’s “career” in boxing. And probably it would. The receiver’s amateur background wouldn’t pay real dividends against contenders, and fights with contenders were where the public interest—and money—was. All the same, unless Freddie found him that roster spot he’d promised to, Duke might have to push the boat out even further from here. Where exactly, I didn’t know. He had imagination. It worried me.
Karen slept at my place that night—actually slept, I mean. Even though Duke looked as if he were going to recover, his bodily mortification had consumed her, so that I dreaded her waking in the morning. In the event, first thing, she groped me with a playfulness that soon turned to common lust. I couldn’t fully enjoy myself, though, as it was the kind of sex that wouldn’t detain us, not even for a moment, after it was over, from all the issues hanging about, which went well past Duke. The question of Claire, for instance, which we’d been avoiding. Would she be hurt by this, by us? Did she have any right to be? She would, I thought, probably have more of an issue with Karen than with me, given their longstanding friendship. Claire had also cut me off without much explanation, which gave me license, in my book, to do as I pleased. But not Karen. In any case, fearing the aftermath, I prolonged the act as much as I could, pulling out of her several times. When I was finally done, I tried to doze off right away. Karen wouldn’t let me, but not for the reasons I assumed. Her phone had good news, she said, news that couldn’t wait. The New York Post had confirmed Duke’s health, though apparently he was having trouble with one of his eyes. He’d even been released, and she was hoping, like Anton, that Duke would have the sense to stay out of the ring.
But there was more—much more. She’d decided, just last night, before things turned ugly at the fight, to put together an issue of Cosquer dedicated solely to my work. Some of her friends had suggested it, Lindy included, once they’d come to hear that those pictures all over town and country were actually mine. Karen wanted to collect it all in one spot, the entire campaign so far. No text either, it wasn’t about that. It could be just twelve pages even, a short little blast, a special issue. The work—my work—deserved that.
“The pictures,” she admitted, “make me feel a lot of unpleasant things, really. But they also feel big.”
She kissed me and I gave her all she could handle, as I would Daphne. This time she acceded, however sore she may have already been. I was sore, too.
“At what point,” she said, hours later, as we woke in the ghostly pall of a collapsing light, “are we expected to include, like, actual things? Products. For Antral.”
So far, neither she in her text pieces nor I in my images had portrayed anything directly about the smart drink or the whiskey. And though I’d depicted, quite loosely, one of the frames from the Obscura collection, even that I’d done in my own way, without drawing any links. How would anyone know who made those glasses and when they’d be available? Did Garrett even care anymore? No doubt such questions were responsible for the air of defeat surrounding Paul at the fight.
“I’ve asked Garrett so many times by now,” I said. He’d been putting off the matter of explicitness in the campaign for many weeks, and Paul, however reluctantly, had been going along with him. Garrett had been cagey at the fight, too, when we mentioned the business end of things, how our work would be tied up or resolved or carried into the future. Karen and I saw so little of him these days, because to see Garrett would reveal the depth of the rift between him and Paul over how best to prosecute the campaign. Garrett had probably brought Paul out last night to the fight, I thought, simply to defuse suspicions of such a rift. But that’s not the effect his doing so had on us.
Karen and I had suspected for some time that, just as soon as he could convince Garrett of the desirability of that move, Paul intended to force Cosquer’s hand with something bluntly Pavlovian. Eventually, he must have thought, Garrett would see the light, the value of simple conditioning, and on that day everything would turn. Paul’s research over the years had showed many conflicting things, partly for the lack of replication studies that might have narrowed things down. But one thing he and the others at Ehrenberg-Bass had found repeatedly, though sometimes he seemed loath to accept it—which might have been a sign of his humanity, his sense that life couldn’t be quite so brutish or animal, if it wasn’t just an index of his vanity, that only an expert like him could see how to proceed properly, because the circumstances of consumption and marketing had to be deeply complex—was that the most effective method of advertising was primitive stimulus conditioning. Which is to say, when the thought entered someone’s mind to buy a certain class of product, whether a soda, a computer, a belt sander, or a college education, it had to be your brand that came to mind first, or at least among the first cluster. But here was the startling, humbling conclusion: nobody needed to think well of the brand, really. There was no need for positive associations. True, whatever it was that stuck in the mind about the brand shouldn’t be express news of its inferiority: cars that won’t brake, phones that turn to fire in your hand. But pretty much any other sort of memorability, and not favorability tied to specific features, unique selling propositions, consumer likability, relationship building, or brand personality, would do. Making the biggest impression was all. Not loyalty. In fact, most consumers were far less loyal in their buying behavior than they themselves thought they were. They’d look on their office shelves and discover, for all their professed love of Apple, a rack of old PCs that they must have picked up somewhere along the way. It was troubled me, how so much of what consumers—and we were all consumers—actually did had nothing to do with what they believed about what they did.
The only property, Paul knew, that most market leaders shared was this: ubiquity. You didn’t need to hire the trendiest “ideas merchant,” just a very large megaphone. And no-one, these days, was more ubiquitous around the city than Duke and Daphne. Which meant that if the goal was just to figure out a way to stick in the mind, who could say that Duke’s vulgar theatrics wouldn’t do the job, however much people didn’t care to be like Duke?
That left a central problem: until Cosquer tied the two things together and closed the psychic circuit, the conditioning would be incomplete and ineffectual, with only one side of its terms revealed. But I think we all believed that soon enough, Paul would push for something coarse, simple, mind-numbingly direct. That’s what Siglin always pushed for, in the end: logos. Drawings of the drinks and eyeglasses, say, or better yet, photos, with their lingering sense of verisimilitude, starkly emblazoned with Arête, rather than the black-on-black versions I knew Garrett favored.
When the request for conceptual clarity finally came, it was actually put to Karen, not me. Paul couldn’t have been pleased about the Garrett-authored proposal, as ultimately it refused the brute force of fixed wordmarks and logotypes. Instead, when the time was right, once Adiaphora was released in the new year, Karen was to introduce, into her ongoing text project, the words Arête and Obscura and Theria and—what was the name of the whiskey? Surely we couldn’t keep on deferring that question. In any case, from now on, Garrett would effectively be supporting two artists, as Karen and I, beyond our individual works, jointly wove a kind meta-work between us. He wanted multiple typefaces used for all signage, as though Antral were working from an extensive set of them, when in fact the plan was to forgo any recurrence: each iteration would be a one-off. There’d be no repeating taglines either; Karen’s words would always evolve, spiraling, perhaps, but never doubling back.
While Karen went about picking initial fonts and drafting text as suggestive of the brands as of my pictures, I worked up the drawing I’d promised Duke when I’d been bedside at the hospital. Garrett, after regaining his composure post-fight, had actually come to see Duke in the hospital the next morning. He walked him out; they’d talked for a while. Yet Garrett never again spoke of the fight to me, or of this visit. And although he approved my plans for the image, he did it in a quick, clipped tone, as if it hurt him to linger on it: Duke’s mashed face—ballooning cheeks, deep gashes, bloodied scleras—bruised in Technicolor like an abstract canvas.
The picture had to be a pastel, I thought. I’d do it without the smallest boxing reference, just his pulverized head in white space, so that the injuries could be understood multiply, as the result of a robbery gone wrong, say, or a rough arrest, or any of the other events that made African faces so frequently look like some version of this. I took a technical pleasure in wrapping all this distorted flesh around the selfsame skull I’d rendered so many times now, seeing how many faces it might wear. Even before I’d finished it, I could see that the picture—the second image of brutality toward Duke I’d drawn for Antral—would be memorable. It would be ubiquitous, too, and it would resonate with the loathsome things Paul had discovered about consumption. You could accuse me, as some would, of salaciousness, fetishizing black death. But then, hadn’t we come by this violence honestly, from the course that Duke’s life actually took in the time I’d known him?
There was, in fact, another image of trauma I was working on now for his white counterpart, Daphne. We’d begun it based on events Garrett had learned of from Tony, although it was Daphne’s mentioning the matter to Karen that made it fair game for me. One part of the story was verified fact: a party gone wrong, two teenage boys, and too much booze. There’d been a Spence newspaper account of the incident, with the names redacted, but it was clear enough it was Daphne. I’d found the boys’ likenesses through Garrett, who got me the photos. But, ultimately, I was going to imagine it all for myself, alternate versions of them, thrown together with the Daphne of today. Why not? Fantasy was second-nature to me now. I didn’t need Theria anymore; apparently it had done its work.