It wasn’t neat and tidy like his house. In fact, it was kind of a mess, like a storage unit for someone who never threw anything away. That was part of the design process, Roy supposed, creating faulty prototypes and then dissecting them to see what was working and what wasn’t. A set of seven white wooden chairs—all in different sizes, their backs adorned with brass plaques bearing the name ELIZABETH—stood in a circle, like something out of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” only more sinister.

“Those are hers,” Tupper explained. “She’s interested in Identity.”

Roy thought he detected a capital I.

“Shifting identities within one person,” Tupper went on, as if that clarified it.

“Right,” Roy said.

“My workshop is back here.” Tupper led the way through the airplane hangar–like space filled with detritus. Roy tripped over a life-size boa constrictor that was wound around a rotten wooden oar. “That was from her Adam and Eve series,” Tupper noted as he continued on.

At the back of the enormous studio was a large glass box. Inside the box were two wooden cradles. Nestled in the cradles were two toddler-size papier-mâché dolls with yellow woolen yarn hair, black bird-feather eyelashes, painted red cheeks, and red kissy-face lips. Their lumpy bodies were swaddled in felt and birch-bark patchwork quilts with just the tips of their papier-mâché fingers poking out. The fingers were oddly gray, as if the girls had been playing on the sidewalk before their nap.

Roy stared into the glass box.

“The twins,” Tupper explained unnecessarily. “She wheeled them around in a carriage for two years.”

Roy followed him through a rusted metal door that led to a bright, spotless workroom with huge windows that looked southwest, toward Sunset Park and Industry City. In front of the windows was a long worktable with a large computer and 3D printer. There were also a potter’s wheel, a refrigerator, a kiln, and a wall of shelves filled with white, porcelain figurines. There were elves and unicorns, Arc de Triomphes and Eiffel Towers, parrots and peacocks, cacti and coral, pineapples and watermelons, gorillas and elephants, skunks and squirrels, mice and owls, sea lions and Sasquatches, wolves and polar bears. Lined up against the walls and in the corners were department store mannequins and other humanlike figures, all devoid of faces, clothing, and hair.

“This is where I work,” Tupper said.

Roy was entranced. It was a bit like Santa’s workshop. A person could really make things here. If only he had a workshop. He could go inside and close the door and feel instantly confident that he would achieve things.

Something was nagging at him. He picked up a polar bear and quickly put it down again. “Your… this… Elizabeth,” he said and swallowed. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but where exactly is she?”