Zig gives us no direct guidance. He makes no official announcements. He does not appear in the holy mackerel sky and shout through a bullhorn, “Do not swipe another townie’s bike!” or “No food fights in the cafeteria!” But if we townies delve into the matter of guidance further, we will realize Zig directs us by means of inclusion and omission—in other words, the things he delivers and the things he withholds.

For example, if we stop by a supply warehouse on a delivery day, we will find freshly arrived bars of soap and bottles of shampoo. Zig is telling us to wash our bodies and hair. But we will not find deodorant, mouthwash, or perfume, which he must consider unnecessary. We will find blue jeans and sweatshirts, but no dress pants or tweed jackets. We will find typewriters, but no printing presses or photocopiers.

We will find sports equipment, musical instruments, paperback novels, and vinyl records. The items may look secondhand—some baseball bats are chipped, some books dog-eared, and some albums scratched—but these items tell us something nonetheless. They tell us what Zig deems valuable. In this way, they are our guides.

Johnny, Thelma, Esther, and I are thinking of Zig on the first morning of our road trip when we stop to visit a museum set up in the Guy Montag Library. It is known as Curios (rhymes with “Cheerios”). “The items on display are things we think Zig let slip through by accident,” Thelma tells us as we park our bicycles and tie ribbons to their handlebars. (Esther is one of the very few townies to actually own a bike. Hers is a smaller model that a bike mechanic redesigned especially for a little person. It is painted pink and even has pink streamers and a pink basket.)

Our group heads up the library stairs to the exhibition space on the top floor. Thelma leads the way. As the oldest townie among us (in heaven years), she likes to chaperone. By the time we reach the third floor, she is winded. “Doggone stairs!” She pants and dabs her forehead with a tissue.

Curios is laid out with a series of small rooms displaying objects in glass showcases, which appear to be aquariums turned upside down. The first object we see on display is a can of corned beef. The product is in an oblong tin. Attached to its side is a simple key used to open the tin. Corned beef is a curious object because Zig sends us only vegetarian food.

“Oh, wow! Far out!” Esther says. “I’m so moved I feel faint. Somebody catch me.” (Another example of true irony.)

“Oh, hush up,” Thelma says, peering so close to the aquarium that she leaves a shiny nose print on the glass. “I’m feeling homesick. You wouldn’t believe how many corned beef sandwiches I ate in my day.”

“I would believe,” Esther says, but Thelma ignores her.

“It’s so far from real meat it might as well be vegetarian,” Johnny points out. “It tastes like a mix of roadkill and Jell-O.”

Thelma reads aloud the typewritten index card taped to the side of the aquarium. The card claims nobody knows where the word “corned” comes from. “This popular luncheon meat,” the card says, “contains no corn.”

“The word ‘corn’ once referred to any coarse particles,” I say. “In this case, the particles were the coarse salt used to cure the beef.”

“How do you know this dumb stuff?” Johnny says, unimpressed, but I know Thelma is thrilled because I can see the gap between her front teeth.

Thelma starts to unpeel the index card from the glass. “I should introduce Oliver to Peter Peter, the curator,” she says.

“Peter Peter?” Johnny says.

“His real name’s Peter Peterman, but people call him Peter Peter.”

“He’s a square, but Thelma thinks he’s a dreamboat,” Esther says. “He’s the real reason we’re here, isn’t it, Thelma?”

“Is he is or is he ain’t my baby?” Thelma says in a singsong. She tells me to follow her, and she and I head off, leaving Johnny and Esther behind. As we walk through the halls, I glance at other items on display. I see a collection of batteries (D, C, and AA), an avocado-colored rotary telephone, a policeman’s nightstick, and a radio, which must pick up only static because there are no radio stations in Town.

We come across the curator next to a small tank of sea monkeys. He is setting up a poster explaining that sea monkeys are in fact brine shrimp, which are closely related to seahorses.

“Hi there, old boy,” Thelma says. (“Old boy” is a term of endearment that townies use for boys who have lived here for forty-five years or more.)

Peter Peter does look older, since he has wispy hairs above his lip and more musculature than, say, I do, which is not a difficult feat. I assume, however, that he had lip bristles and muscles on the day he arrived here. Some say old-timers are wiser, given the number of years in heaven they have under their belts.

“I’d like you to meet Oliver Dalrymple,” Thelma says to Peter Peter. “He’s a newbie.”

We nod hello, and I say, “I was unaware Town was home to brine shrimp.”

“We do receive occasional nonhuman life,” Peter Peter says. “A kitten, a budgie. My personal favorite was Lars, the gerbil that came to heaven in a crate of tennis balls.”

“Oh, he was such a sweet little fella,” Thelma says. “Remember how he used to stamp his hind legs when he got all excited?”

“Yes, that was a kind of mating dance, except the poor boy had no ladylove.”

Peter Peter stares at Thelma. “What a tragedy,” she says.

They are possibly flirting, but I am no expert on such matters. I interrupt them with the etymology of “corned beef.”

“Of course,” Peter Peter says, bouncing his palm off his forehead. “The word ‘corn’ meant any kind of crop or grain, not only the maize of American Indians. So it makes sense the word refers to anything grainy—like salt.”

“I am almost certain about the etymology,” I tell him. “How unfortunate that Zig sends us no encyclopedias or dictionaries to verify such things. Unless reference books are among the curious objects in your collection.”

Peter Peter shakes his head. “No dictionaries or encyclopedias. At least not yet. But new unusual objects appear all the time, so perhaps a full-edition Webster’s dictionary will slip through one day. I can only hope.”

Thelma tells Peter Peter that I have a keen interest in science. “Maybe you could use an assistant,” she suggests.

“Science?” Peter Peter says. “Well, do I have a treat for you!” He asks Thelma and me to wait for him while he goes to his office on the other side of the hall to fetch something. After he trots off, we notice that the visitors who were giggling around a nearby showcase have dispersed, and the object within is now revealed.

Thelma edges toward the showcase. “Is that what I think it is?” she says.

The object is a square plastic envelope the size of a saltine cracker.

“A condom,” I tell her. “A sheath placed on the penis during intercourse as a method of birth control to prevent sperm—”

“Oliver,” Thelma interrupts. “You don’t need to give me no eddy-mology about that thing, okay.”

“I don’t know the etymology of ‘condom,’ only its purpose.”

Peter Peter returns from his office wearing cotton gloves. He lays a magazine atop the case holding the condom display.

My heart flutters and hiccups—not literally, excuse the artistic flourish, Mother and Father. I am excited because what the curator laid before me is the magazine Science. Glory be, it is a recent issue, from October 1979.

“May I touch it?”

Peter Peter removes his cotton gloves and passes them to me. “To keep oil from the fingers off the paper,” he says. My hands tremble slightly as I slip on the gloves. I wonder if the two of you latched on to a way to forward my favorite magazine to me here. An absurd thought, I know.

“When did it arrive?” Thelma asks.

“Just last week from Four,” says Peter Peter.

“Are there other issues?” I ask as I examine the magazine, whose cover girl is the beautiful ugly mug of a brown bat. The lead article talks about echolocation.

“Not of Science, but other magazines sometimes come in,” Peter Peter says. “I have a Life from 1956, a few National Geographics, even a movie magazine from the thirties with the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion on the cover.”

The librarian at Guy Montag had told me the only magazines usually delivered to Town are comic books, so such finds are indeed curious.

“I wonder if Zig is telling us something by letting these things through,” Thelma says.

“Possibly,” Peter Peter says. “Or they may simply be an oversight on his part.”

I leaf through the pages. “Look, an article on cryogenics,” I say.

“Cyro what?” Thelma asks.

“Cryogenics. You know, the popsiclization of death!” (Ha-ha.)

“Oh, Oliver, you look like a curious object yourself,” Thelma says.

I continue turning the pages, but my giddiness is cut short by Esther, who hurries toward us. Her face is grim. “You better come quick,” she says.

“Johnny?” Thelma asks, and Esther nods. We all follow her back through the exhibition halls, past showcases containing prescription eyeglasses, a bottle of red wine (CHÂTEAU BEL-AIR, reads the poster), and a lunar globe. I am so worried that Johnny may have gotten into a fistfight again that I do not stop to examine the globe.

I see my roommate in front of a showcase in one corner of the room. Nothing looks out of the ordinary, at least not till we gather around him and I see his eyes. They are red and puffy as though he is having an allergy attack. His breath is also wheezy.

“What’s wrong, Johnny?” I ask.

Esther says, “Look in the case.”

The curious object, lying in its showcase on a white cushion, is a small revolver. It looks like a toy gun; if it were not deadly, it would even look cute. As you will recall, Mother and Father, Uncle Seymour bought one like this to protect himself after his bakery was held up.

“Goodness,” Thelma mutters, placing a hand on Johnny’s shoulder. “Come away from there,” she says, but Johnny brushes her hand off.

“When did this gun arrive?” I ask Peter Peter.

“A week ago, from Six. It can’t fire, though. It has no bullets.”

“Johnny, this can’t be the one,” I say.

“How do you know?” His voice is as hoarse as on his first days in Town. “It looks the same, Boo. I swear to Zig it does. Just like the gun I see in my nightmares.”

“Guns all look the same,” Esther says. “They’re all horrid. Let’s split, Johnny.”

She tries to slip her hand in his to pull him away, but he barks, “No!”

We leave Johnny alone. At Thelma’s suggestion, we go over to the doorway to the exhibition hall to wait for him, and then Thelma tells Peter Peter about Gunboy and our mission. We are interrupted by some visitors entering the hall, whom Peter Peter asks to avoid the display in the left-hand corner because “that chap over there is repairing the showcase and needs space to work.”

As we wait, Peter Peter asks if I would be interested in a job at Curios. “We could indeed use some young blood around here,” he says.

Despite my eagerness, I ask if we could speak of his job offer another time. “I need to watch over my friend right now,” I say. I take off the white gloves and hand them back to him.

“Certainly,” Peter Peter says. He tells Thelma to drop by again soon for a lunch date and then bids us all adieu with handshakes before he heads back to work on his sea monkey exhibit.

From the doorway, the girls and I continue to watch Johnny. We see him only from the back. He does not move an inch. He does not make a sound.

“You’d think he was praying at a church altar,” Esther says. “Like I used to do when I was Mormon in Utah, back when I gave a damn about Joseph Smith.”

“Who?” I ask, and she explains that Joseph Smith was the founder of Mormonism. In his backyard, the man dug up golden tablets that contained a god’s invisible writings that only Mr. Smith could read. “A crock of sh*t, I’m sure,” she says. “But come to think of it, no more far-fetched than this place we ended up in.”

As I listen to Esther, I keep an eye on Johnny, on the double crown on the back of his head. When a visitor draws too close to my roommate, I call out, “Give him space to work.”

Eventually Johnny turns and walks over to us. His eyes are no longer red. His face looks curiously serene.

“You ready, sweetie?” Thelma asks.

“Yeah, I’m ready,” Johnny says. “I’m not scared no more. I’m ready to catch that b*stard.”