TWO

BILL WAS OVERCOME BY TRANSPORTS OF HATRED. HE underwent a swift reversal—the click-change of scenes through a Viewmaster. There was no slow evolution. He woke Estée up in the small hours smashing displays. Roused by the noise she padded out in T-shirt and bare feet, but her soles encountered splinters and she had to retreat, to watch him from the doorway. “Ugly bugs! Ugly bugs!” he shouted, tearing moths off the walls, stomping, waving his arms. When he was finished there was not a display case left intact. “Scorched earth,” he yelled at his daughter, and performed a clumsy dance amidst the ruins.

He left the gallery in chaos, glass and wood and pin-stuck moths all over the floor. To get through the hall Estée had to navigate over the wreckage, careful where she stepped. At 8:00 a.m. maids were already stooping and sweeping.

He posted a note on her bedroom door.

The Specimens are grose, vile repugnent Creatures. The Management will no longer be maintaning a Museum for Them. However we will continue our Study. You will resieve you’re Instrucsions here. You will Create a chart for the Specimens and record there Progress on this Chart. Specimens shall be numbered from One on. You will be supplied with Live Specimens for you’re Experiments. You’re first Assinement is to put Specimen One, a mamber of Acrolophidae, in a jar and Keep Him there by Starvation until he is Dead. Write down how long it Takes and what you’re observations. Love, Dad.

Estée was initially confused by this directive. Bill explained to her, while she hefted free weights, that the work of preservation had changed its course due to his recent revelation—viz., that moths were hateful, disgusting, and possibly alien. Their provenance might, for all he knew, be another planet. He suggested Mars off the top of his head but indicated that he had little interest in further speculation. The workroom would be converted into a laboratory. He would keep a steady stream of live moths coming in. Her job, as his assistant, was to corral them in a variety of habitats and subject them to experiments.

Every evening a new specimen, every evening a note with instructions. On a clipboard she would keep a journal. “In the records,” said Bill with great effort, “you tell what they act like when you do stuff to them, for me plus also for science in general. For the future history.”

“I don’t want to experiment on them,” she ventured boldly, fully expecting a physical assault. Bill stood over her as she completed a cycle of knee bends, his midriff her sky above.

“Honey,” he gravely intoned, “it is for the good of the many. The experiments we do are for Posterior.”

“We’re not biologists,” she said. “We don’t know the first thing about experiments. No one experiments on moths anyway. We know about them already.”

“How did Mary Curry invent tuberculosis? How did Alex Bell invent the phone? By accident! Discoveries happen when you least expect it.”

He would not be swayed from his mission. She tried to ignore him, but he threatened to withhold food, to prevent her access to Betty, and finally to lock her in her room. She decided to comply.

Bill’s notes told her to sequester moths in jars, without food or air; to drown them, burn them, dissect them. He had shelves constructed, with dividers between the numbered sections. Each moth remained in its section even after it had died. She had to spray them with insecticides, feed them poisoned food, remove portions of their bodies while leaving others intact. She had to closet them with predators: spiders, beetles, frogs, lizards, birds, even rodents purchased by her father from mail-order suppliers. On one occasion she had to insert the head of a cat, presented to her in a shoebox, into the mesh cage of a tiger moth and catalog their joint deterioration. The lepidopterans were provided routinely with dung, chitterlings, and pickled pigs’ feet. Bill wanted to reform their eating habits: he had never trusted vegetarians. They preferred a lingering death.

“You’re not going to change them,” she argued. “It’s evolution. Their digestive systems weren’t made for meat.”

“Esty,” chided Bill, “your lepidopterans can adapt. Survival of the fittest, Esty.”

She made careful entries on the chart. Her father bade her read them aloud and would nod sagely and say, “Ah, oh yes,” as she read.

Number 32 has sacrificed sections of both maxillary palpi in his efforts to escape the jar. He has abandoned all fungal matter and appears to be ingesting nothing. All his energies are directed toward freedom. Number 41 is bereft of both wings on the left side. Her right eye is severely damaged from constant pressure against the side of the can, yet she stubbornly persists.

Bill ordered books for her with which she was able to bone up on the biology of butterflies—life cycles, food, and natural habitats. In some cases, she could delay their deaths by making small adjustments, unbeknownst to the boss. But usually there was no balm for their suffering, and she watched them shed their parts until they were nothing.

Mr. Kraft bought her a high-priced microscope, a digitized scale, an antique Bunsen burner, and a handsomely laminated poster of the periodic table. She had no use for them, but Bill was pleased by the expansion of his high-tech lab. He was prepared to make additional expenditures to keep it, as he said, State of the Art. Estée could invoice him for whatever tools she wanted. “Science is advancing,” he said as he tweezed the wings off a monarch.

Mrs. Kraft, behind her double door, wished to hear nothing of the proceedings. She had her shrine, and telephone calls from old friends. Frequently, when Estée came into her room, she was telling a story to a childhood pal in Baltimore or a relative in Orlando. “There we were, in the kitchen with apple pie à la mode,” she would say. “The golden retriever was lying at the hearth, and Bill leaned over to me and said, ‘God bless America, sweetie pie, I sure love you.’” Her decay had accelerated; she had no appetite, forgot to wear her teeth, and repeated herself four or five times whenever she spoke. She ordered Estée to keep sending off for Betty artifacts, always said, “Yes, yes,” with a nod and a sweeping hand gesture, “Buy it, buy it, buy buy buy,” but when the items came in she paid no attention, letting them accumulate on the wall, on top of tables, littering her room.

Estée adopted a policy of noninterference. She was an adjunct to the whims of Bill and Betty, whose schemes were as random as laughter, as senseless as an accident. She disavowed all connection to the tasks she performed. “Dear Diary: the Age of Majority. I saw it on TV. I will leave here and be in the world. I will see the normal people in malls and on the street. Normal people will be everywhere, teeming.”

For the lab experiments, she found that Betty’s training came in handy. She went though the motions faithfully, all the while remaining, in secret, cold and motionless, inanimate. She identified with walls, chairs, tables, any collection of atoms turned callously to function.

Bill made a concession to her new maturity by allowing her three hours of television viewing per week, which she used to watch the news on CNN since she was not allowed access to print media. He decried all so-called facts set in type. Almost everything presented to you on paper, he said, was a falsification, the product of numerous conspiracies between corporate and government interests vying for positive coverage. There had never been, for example, men on the moon. “Plain as the nose on your face. Trick photography,” he asserted, wolfing down spareribs with sauce dribbling over his porous chin. “News is just like any other show. All done for ratings, girl. For bucks.” As a businessman himself he was in on the game. He was wise to their schemes. “Sure,” he said modestly, “if I was in that line, I’d be a straight guy. I’d probably get crucified. You know what a stickler your dad is for the truth. But I’m not, I’m in cremation. And there too I’m just as honest as the day is long.”

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was another popular myth. “There’s no such thing as a nuclear bomb,” stated Bill over a megabowl of ripple chips. “That’s a line they cooked up so they didn’t have to have as many wars. It’s a doozy. You got a lotta folks fooled on that one, but me and a few other guys know the deal.”

Bill was no longer a purposeful strider, the man who in younger years had warded off naysayers and skeptics with the square set of his shoulders. Now and then Estée caught him in confusion: hiding under a pile of coats in the foyer, speaking in a referee’s booming tones, he would arbitrate a tussle between himself and himself. The coats would roll and quake. He gave himself split lips and bruises and chipped one of his bottom teeth with a fist. When she caught him at it he would shrug his shoulders and continue his struggle, strangling himself until his eyes bulged while she looked on. He groped and blundered in broad daylight; surprised during acts of lunacy by a maid or deliveryperson, he kept up his activities until they wandered away again and then subsided into a stupor. She found him grappling with Betty’s bedroom door one night, delivering a soliloquy. “She took it from me. Give it back!” He noticed Estée staring from the shadows and whistled nonchalantly. “It’s my heart kid. Weaker than it used to be, can’t get the damn thing open.”

“I’ll open it for you,” she offered, but Bill took his hands off the door and stepped back shaking. “No. No way. A man does these things by himself.” Later he denied all charges.

Still, he had the presence of mind to leave live moths for her nightly. With hundreds of specimens dying or dead in their cages in the lab, he liked to visit while she worked and stick a finger through the mesh. Some of the early captives still refused to shuffle off, remaining in their small demesnes without eating or flying, huddled against the wall with wings folded, resolutely though barely alive. Bill was fascinated by these fighters. “How’s that rascal 76?” he asked at breakfast almost every day, for Number 76 had held on for months in a state of fossilized morbidity. He was covered in dust, he had lost all his legs and half his thorax, but still when Estée blew gently on him his antennae quivered, out of keeping with the wind.

Thursdays Estée had the evening off and Bill would catalog the night’s new specimen for her, setting it up in its habitat and initiating the round of punishments. On Good Friday in the spring before her eighteenth birthday, she came into the laboratory and found that Specimen Number 228, trussed up with ropes, legs bound, in a cage against the wall, was a dog.

Number 228 will be disected live as per Usual procedure starting with Feet. It is a Miniture Snauzer. It will Not be Sedated if thats what your thinking. Tools for this Esperiment will be found in supplys Cuboard. Please begin Immediately. As I will Brook no Delay. Thanks alot, love Dad.

The muzzled schnauzer craned its neck and looked at her through plaintive eyes. She unbound it, removed the muzzle, and let it out of the cage. It trotted happily at her heels as she left the lab.

She found him in her mother’s room, where he sat beside the bed reading slowly to Betty from a picture book as Betty’s right hand, always busy under the sheets, fomented dissent in an unseen quadrant, causing her to breathe rapidly and lick her lips. “Little Pig, Little Pig, let me come in,” read Bill, ignoring the commotion. “Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin.”

“Won’t do it,” said Estée right off. “No way.”

“Now honey,” he said. “Let’s not bother your mother. We’ll take this shoptalk outside,” and he closed the book.

Betty only had eyes for the schnauzer. “Pooky poo!” she said, and patted the quilt beside her. The dog leapt up, wagging its tail.

“He wants me to cut off its feet,” said Estée. “Can I have some support from you for once?”

“Oh dear,” said her mother, and stroked the dog’s head with her free hand.

“Taking it outside,” said Bill in his warning voice, rising. “Come on.”

“We can discuss it right here,” said Estée.

“Let’s not make trouble,” said Bill.

“After all,” said Betty, “there’s a lot of little doggies like this one.”

“Forget it,” said Estée.

“The penalty for mutiny is walking the plank,” said Bill. “In the King’s Navy, it’s hanging by the neck.”

“We’re not pirates,” said Estée. “There’s no king either. We’re American citizens in the twentieth century. We don’t torture dogs. I can call the ASPCA in fifteen seconds flat. That’s where they take care of animals. I found it in the phone book.”

“Dear oh dear,” said Betty. “Father knows best.” She picked a frilly baby bonnet out of her bedside drawer and affixed it on the dog’s head, tying the pink ribbon under his chin.

“It’s for the sake of progress,” said Bill. “How about those guys with monkeys and electrodes? Defense Department, those guys do ’speriments on half a million critters every year. No one calls the ASPCA on them.”

“You don’t have a license,” said Estée.

“License, schmicense,” said Bill gruffly. “What’s the difference? Up the evolutionary scale a bit. There’s plenty of stupid critters around. Dumb beasts Esty. Cool down.”

“I’m not going to let you,” said Estée. “I draw the line at higher mammals.”

Bill grabbed up the dog, which whined in his arms, its bonnet falling lopsided over one ear.

“For this you’re picking a fight with your father? This little overgrown rat? Its brain is the size of a walnut. Come to your senses!”

“Absolutely not,” said Estée. “If you want to talk senses, I’m ready.”

“I’ll break its leg right here and now,” said Bill, and started to twist its paw. The schnauzer screamed and bit him. He let it drop. Estée retreated beside it as it limped into a corner.

“You try that again and I’ll knee you in the balls,” she told him, gritting her teeth.

“Oh my,” whispered Betty.

Nursing his wounded arm, Bill shook his head. “Sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” he said.

She was able to pick up the whimpering dog while Betty, playing Florence Nightingale, kissed Bill’s bite wound and emitted coos of sympathy. She left the room, ran to the front door, and let it out. “Go away,” she yelled when it lingered on the steps. “Just go away!”

Bill was subdued for a few days, and then left a raccoon in the lab. This was followed by an opossum. Both of them she carried outside, in their cages, and loosed on the lawn. She and Bill began a speechless battle. Nothing was said about the new specimens, nor about the notes that accompanied them.

This Specimen #231 is a Very Mean Giunea Pig, note the Large Incisors. In Various countries this pig is Eaten after Stewing, plus it is Kept as Pets. Please flay 25 Strokes per night until Death occurs.

Number 232 is a Lop Eared Rabbit. This Specimen will be Garroted with a Coat Hanger but not killed, then make it run in a Whole bunch of Circles.

Afraid that grisly fates would befall Specimens 231 and 232 if she released them in the backyard, Estée transported their cages into her bedroom, where she fed them scraps of lettuce from the kitchen. Bill didn’t ask where she’d put them. He’d abandoned his practice of coming into her room while she slept; she’d bribed a carpenter to install a lock and wore the key on a shoelace around her neck. Anyway, his concerns had shifted; he was preoccupied. Obviously it no longer occurred to him that she was anywhere when she was out of his sight. When she retreated she dissipated like vapor; a fading feature of the landscape, she diminished unnoticed as the scene changed. Bill’s paternal neglect resulted less in melancholy than relief.

Though they hardly spoke as the weeks passed, Bill checked the moth charts. She kept up her observations of the lepidoptera as their few remaining representatives, one by one, gave up the ghost. No new moths appeared, and the stubborn importation of mammals decreased until it happened only once a week. She had a collection of rodents in her room, six in all, and had freed a weasel, a stoat, three cats, and a poodle when her father disappeared.

“Where is he?” she queried Betty, who’d had herself transported on a stretcher to her sunken bathtub and, imagining herself Ophelia, languished there with flowers scattered on the water and the tresses of a long wig floating on the bubbly surface around her head.

“Your father is everywhere,” mumbled Betty, brushing at the wig with an affected air, her eyes, adorned with fake lashes, shuttered closed.

“When’s he coming back?”

“Your father never leaves, Estée,” said Betty. “He’s with us all the time. Would you hand me my mirror?”

She stayed in the bath until her skin was waterlogged and began to peel off, at which point she allowed the maids to lift her out.

Number 76, the last of the faithful, was the only moth left alive when Bill returned from his hunting odyssey. He had a special treat, he told Estée, taking her aside when he came in the door. “The specimen to end all specimens. It’s the big one, kid,” he bragged, and rushed for the kitchen to pop open a beer and swig. His face was gritty, mottled with sweat and dirt. “Breaches of security will not be allowed. You will not be leaving the house till the specimen’s been experimented.” He ushered in a corps of four burly security guards and ordered them to post themselves as sentinels at the front gate, the front door, outside the first-floor windows.

“I will bring the specimen in through the back door and afterwards one of these fine gentlemen will be on guard there too,” he said to her in confidence. “Luckily we have the weekend to ourselves.”

“I don’t condone this,” said Estée. “I’m not your ally.”

He dismissed her protests with a wave, chucked his half-full beer can through a window, and went out. She watched him reverse a rented van up to the back door and trundle in, on a dolly, an eight-foot box covered in white cloth. The portals were closed after him by a uniformed man, wooden faced, bearing truncheon and holstered revolver.

Estée retired to her room, where she locked herself in and read an old history textbook. “Copernican theory displaced the ancient Ptolemaic system, in which the earth was at the center of the universe, unmoving.” One of her mother’s Valiums improved her mood till boredom moved her, eventually, out the locked door again and into the kitchen. She was snacking on Doritos and bootlegged Coors when Bill snuck in behind her, put her in a headlock, and dragged her to the lab. A crowbar lay on the linoleum beside the open crate; inside, on a bed of straw and foam, an old woman was curled, snoring.

“Specimen 243, Homo sapiens,” said Bill proudly.

“You’re a fucking lunatic,” said Estée.

“Language!” reprimanded Bill, casting an eye upon the woman, and clapped his hands in glee.

“You can keep me here,” she told him. “But you can’t make me do anything.”

“You can take notes,” suggested Bill.

“I’m going,” she said, and turned to leave the room. Bill performed a flying tackle and they landed in a painful sprawl. Her back hurt, her chin bled. She’d bitten a ridge in her tongue when she hit the ground and Bill’s weight, pinning her beneath him, more than compensated for his poor muscle tone. “Jesus Christ, get off!” she said, and elbowed backward till her funnybone crunched his nose.

Bill bellowed and mooed, a wounded steer. He rolled off her and staunched the flow of blood with a dust rag he dragged from the counter. Leaning into the crate, Estée shook the old woman’s shoulders. “Wake up!”

“Ha ha hee,” giggled Bill, with a nasal twang. “That won’t do anything. Shot a trank right into her main line. A trankwee-ly-zer.” He wore a small goatee of blood.

“Who is she—?”

“Old bag. I found her selling Bibles in Tulsa, and crappy pictures of angels. Religious comic strips.”

“You’re letting her go,” Estée said, but again she’d misremembered Bill’s strength. It had been a mistake to try straightforward defiance; a devious path would have been wiser. Her father was a fat man, some might say obese, but that didn’t stop him from charging. He had the strength and mass of a bull, the speed of a human cannonball. He was on top of her again in seconds, pressing thick thumbs against her windpipe.

She woke up with a headache and swollen tongue, her back sore, across the room from the old woman. They were both caged. She sat up, put her hands on the bars, and threw up. Bill pulled life-size cages from his hat. He was a prestidigitator. Had he planned the operation in advance, reckoning on her resistance? Was the old woman merely a ploy? Red-herring bait for the real prize? Specimen 244: daughter.

“I’m not surprised,” she said aloud.

The granny raised her head. She was thin and grimy, potbellied and bleary. Her white-crusted eyes were gummed shut.

“I’m sorry,” ventured Estée.

The woman blundered around in her cage, feeling at the bars. “Hello?” she quavered. “Hello?”

“Hello,” said Estée. “Can you hear me?”

“Are we at the hotel?” asked the biddy. “In Bermuda?”

Senile; possibly blind.

“Excuse me. Can you see?” asked Estée.

“See? See what? Where’s my beads?”

“See anything?”

“See everything. I seen it all,” said the woman. “Is this the presidential suite?”

“Presidential suite, oh yeah,” said Estée. “What’s your name?”

“Margaret! Margaret. Tell me the view.”

“I can see white sands,” tried Estée. “Tall palm trees, date palms, and the water’s green. There’s a cool breeze when I lean out.”

“I’ve always wanted to come but they said I couldn’t go,” sighed Margaret, pulling at a matted gray lock. “They said I couldn’t because of the money. The people at the hostel, those mean girls. That bitch Maria, and she was dead wrong. Tribulations! Trials! I knew I’d get here, the Lord made me a promise. Did we fly?”

“We sailed on a cruise ship,” said Estée. “It’s beautiful here.”

Margaret sniffed and nodded, her iron smile unflinching.

“A couple’s lying on the sand. They’re tanned dark brown, wearing swimsuits. Their skin’s shiny with coconut oil, can you smell it?”

“It smells good enough to eat,” said Margaret.

The door opened and Bill stood over them, a tray in his hands.

“Room service,” said Estée.

He handed her a sandwich through the bars.

“I don’t want it, can’t you see I was sick? And how am I going to go to the bathroom?”

“A chamber pot will be supplied,” said Bill.

“Don’t they have modern plumbing?” queried Margaret.

“It’s the simple life,” said Estée. To Bill she whispered, “What are you doing? Let me out. I won’t go anywhere.”

“If you’re not part of the solution, my girl, then you’re part of the problem,” he said, waggling a finger in warning.

“But what are you planning? Come on.”

“Ho! That would be telling,” said Bill. He shoved an apple through Margaret’s bars. She dropped onto all fours and felt around on the floor till she found it.

“I would like a Wiener schnitzel,” said Margaret with her mouth full. “And a Rhine wine. Dry. And I’ll take the whole bottle, waiter. Tell him to bring the whole bottle.”

Bill picked up a pointer from the countertop and poked her thighs and stomach through the bars. She dropped the apple and cowered at the back of her cage. “Stop poking! Make him stop the poking,” she shrieked. “This hotel has bad waiters.”

“Physical fitness,” said Estée firmly. “It’s to improve your cardiovascular endurance.”

“Stop it anyway,” grumbled Margaret, her arms up protecting her face.

When he left them alone Margaret polished off her apple, drank the water Bill had left, announced she was having a siesta, and went to sleep again. With a neck cramp and one foot full of pins and needles, Estée counted the pocks in the hardboard ceiling tiles and computed the average number of pocks per tile. She tried to discern signs of movement from the cage of Specimen 76 against the wall, and finding none memorized portions of the periodic table. 75. Re. Rhenium. Atomic weight 186.2. 76. Os. Osmium. Atomic weight 190.2. She played at establishing a correlation between Specimen 76 and osmium. The atomic number of osmium was 76. There were 76 protons in the nucleus of an osmium atom. Specimen 76 was the longest-lived of all the specimens she and Bill had subjected to pain. Did it signify? Seventy-six was also the name of a chain of gas stations. Gas—osmium—octane? Ga-O-O. Ga was the abbreviation for gallium, and O for oxygen. Possibly she had hit on a formula. GaO2. A miracle molecule? A secret yielded up by chance?

Exercises were futile. Tedium blurred the surfaces, the counter and the fluorescent bulbs in their white metal casings. She dissected the sandwich, lined by Bill with rancid salami and yellowed mayonnaise, and threw it through the bars.

Margaret stirred in her sleep and muttered, “Hot, hot, the spaniel.” Estée was longing for change, any change. She fell asleep watching fleecy white grannies leap over picket fences, counting them as they baaed.

Bill woke her up by rattling her cage. It was night and he was a ghostly Michelin man, nude and white.

“How long are you keeping me here?” she asked him groggily. “And her? She’s blind. Plus she’s senile. How long?” In her sleep, Margaret moaned. Bill munched on a moonpie.

“Until I prove my point,” he said, licking a crumb off his lip.

“And what’s your point?”

“I have it here,” said Bill, and lifted an envelope, “but it is highly secretive. Though at the same time, if I may say so, it is widely understood by geniuses. Such as yours truly.” He stuck it through the bars. “You may read it after I leave. I will flick the lights on.”

“Just tell me what you’re doing. What?”

“A test, whaddya think?” said Bill indignantly, and snuck off, his buttocks flopping like dimpled saddlebags on the flanks of a pack mule.

4 TRUTHS

1. This Old Bag is Genus Homo Sapiens. Homo Sapiens in general are all Secret Aliens. Proof: SAPIENS-ALIENS
   • If you change a P for a L the Word Alien is Hidden in Sapiens!!!!
2. An Alien does Not feel Pain.
3. Aliens are Enemys.
4. “We have seen the Enemy and He is Us.”
5. Solve this clue: Ima dog

“Please call room service for my potty,” said Margaret. “I gotta go.”

“Room service can’t come yet,” said Estée. “They’re having a problem in the kitchen. You have to wait.”

“Can’t wait,” said Margaret. She squatted and urinated in her cage.

“I’m sorry about this,” offered Estée. “It wasn’t my idea.”

“Some enchanted evening,” warbled Margaret softly, “you may find your true love.”

Bill came in with breakfast trays after Margaret had sung three verses.

“Shut your trap, granny,” he said.

“Let me out,” said Estée. “This is ridiculous. I’m not going to run off.”

“Got my guards out there, you couldn’t go if you wanted to,” said Bill, and unlocked her cage. She crawled out and stood up, then stretched and ran to Margaret’s cage, but Bill was ahead of her.

“Let her out too,” said Estée.

“Hold your horses,” grumbled Bill, but he opened Margaret’s door and, while Estée hoisted her out, laid down paper towels to soak up the pool of her urine. Margaret roamed around the room, bumping into things, and then sat down cross-legged on the floor to eat her grapefruit. Estée leaned against the counter, drank the coffee Bill had brought, and watched him drag a spool of twine from the supplies cupboard. He hammered three-inch nails into the linoleum, four of them in a large rectangle. Margaret ignored this, smiling and nodding. “You hear the wedding bells?” she asked Estée.

“Bells, yes,” said Estée. “A white church with a steeple, on the beach.”

“You may see him dancing . . . across a crowded room.”

“What are you blabbing about, you stinky hag?” asked Bill. He dealt her knee a quick kick as he knelt down to tie twine to a nail. “Your religious crappola? I’ll show you who’s boss, not some old faggot with white hair and a dress.”

“What a lovely vacation,” said Margaret, and spat out a grapefruit seed.

Bill attached four stout lengths of twine, with a lot of slack, to the four nails. He made them secure with many complicated knots and then fed their ends through four small plastic collars. He took the grapefruit rind away from Margaret and snapped one of the collars around her right wrist.

“Jewels?” she said, and went compliantly to her bondage. “Lovely. They are fit for a queen.”

He snapped on the second collar, and then the last two to her ankles, around the grimy bobby socks.

“She reeks,” he remarked.

“Some enchanted evening,” sang Margaret, and smiled.

Bill pulled out a plastic groundsheet and cut a hole in it. He put it over Margaret’s body, with the hole over her face. “For observation of the subject,” he told Estée.

“You may find your true love.”

“She’s revved and ready to go,” said Bill approvingly. “Don’t try anything. I’m going out, but I’m locking the door behind me. Back in five.”

“What’s the young man doing now?” asked Margaret, as he went out.

“A mud pack. For the skin.”

“Some enchanted evening . . .”

“Don’t worry.”

“. . . you may see a stranger . . .”

She was spread-eagled, arms and legs splayed. Estée knelt beside her and patted her arm.

“You may see a stranger . . .”

Bill came back in pushing a dolly loaded high with bricks.

“The mud packs,” said Estée nervously.

“Here we go, here we go,” trilled Bill.

“Come on,” Estée urged him. “You don’t need to hurt her. Your theory is true, completely true. Who needs to prove a truth? I believe it 100 percent.”

“It’s not enough to believe,” said Bill. “You have to know. I know I’m the boss. She doesn’t think so now, she’ll know it soon. Seeing is believing.”

“She knows. She knows, she’s just senile.”

“You think she knows? Then what’s that bullshit? You hear that?”

“Across a crowded room . . .”

“Write this down,” said Bill. “Experiment on Subject 243 began at 9:32 a.m.”

He started piling bricks on Margaret’s abdomen.

“Are you taking me dancing?” she asked Bill, blinking.

“He’s submerging you in the mud and then you soak for a while,” said Estée. She smoothed the ratty hair on Margaret’s temple.

“Shut up,” said Bill. “No bullshit. Stand back. No interference! Mediation could wreck the whole thing.”

“Some enchanted evening, when you find your true love . . .”

As the bricks weighed her down Margaret sang louder. They stacked up in a pyramid on her midsection.

“. . . when you hear her laughing . . .”

“Shut up,” said Bill, heaving three bricks onto her pelvis.

“Stop!” said Estée, grabbing them off again. Bill cuffed her hard and she fell back, hand up to a bloody nose.

“. . . across a crowded room . . .”

He dropped a brick on Margaret’s mouth and then picked it off to survey the damage. Her lip was split and teeth might have been broken, but she licked the blood off. Estée watched her eyes glint from between the near-closed lids, darting back and forth as the chapped lips puckered and stretched.

“. . . then you will know, you will know even then . . .”

“She’s a beaut, ain’t she? Now who’s the boss, you old sow? Who’s the boss?”

“. . . the sound of her laughter . . .”

Bill was dropping the bricks now. They fell on Margaret’s legs and chest, gouged her forehead and slid off.

“. . . will haunt you again . . .”

Estée scuttled backward on the linoleum and struggled to her feet, retreating toward the door. Bill had forgotten to lock it when he came in with the bricks. She opened it and was out in the hallway, home free, dashing for the telephone in the foyer. She dialed 911 and ran out the front door. She paced on the porch, wiping blood from her nose. No one came. Maybe they were driving slowly. The Kraft house was set far back from the street, but beyond the palm tree border she could see the orange cast of a streetlamp. Otherwise, dark and silent.

“Police!” she yelled, but no one answered. Finally, shivering, she went back inside. The guards had disappeared.

In the lab, nothing was visible but bricks. Bill must have trundled in a second dolly: at its peak the pile was as high as her waist. Bill stood back, his arms crossed over his protuberant belly. “Experiment concluded at 10:28 a.m.,” he told Estée. “Write it down. The subject showed a complete lack of awareness of masonry weighing her down. The subject was dumb and insensate.”

“But where is she?” asked Estée, and started to pull off the bricks. Bill drummed his fingers on his stomach and then rooted in one ear with a pinky. She dug through bricks until her fingers were raw.

“We showed ’em who’s boss Esty. Me myself and I.”

“But she has to be there,” said Estée, digging with frantic hands. She could find nothing but bare floor.

“Number 76,” announced Bill gravely, “is deceased.” He raised his hand to Estée and showed her the last of the moths, dangling single-winged between thumb and forefinger.

“What happened to Margaret? Where did you put her?”

Bill shrugged and flung Number 76 carelessly to the floor as he exited. Estée dropped to all fours and kept scrabbling through the bricks, but nothing lay beneath them. Rotting salami was scattered and trodden underfoot.

Despairing, she repaired to Betty’s room, where she found her mother knitting a cat-sized sweater. The bed was hung with crepe-paper streamers, and Betty sported a frilly pink pinafore. “A little party for your father,” she chirped. “The man is a martyr to science,” and as Bill descended on them, for once decent in a dressing gown, she cast away the needles and opened her arms. “Here we are!” she said brightly, hugging Bill to one side of her and Estée to the other. “Just one big happy family.”