I called my dog’s name as I passed through the rooms, or rather plans of the rooms. In the library where books had never been touched, because here they were not books but precise, one might say exact, if one were inclined to such speech, replicas of the actual books in the actual library, in the actual house of the actual vice president. I thought I heard Trigo whimper, but it turned out it was me, the me caught in a hall mirror as I passed. I realized that the image of me in the mirror was not me, not only because it was my reflection, but not of me because the mirror was not a real mirror but a marker for the real one that was in the real residence. And then I reasoned that if I could manage to find my actual reflection someplace in the floor plan then I could use that real reflection’s connection with me, it being me, and find my way into the actual house where Trigo was being held. I sat on a sofa that wasn’t a sofa in the not-sitting room, found it uncomfortable nonetheless, and wondered if I was actually in my dream or in a dream mock-up, perhaps a set of a later dream. Since I couldn’t dream without Trigo, what was I in fact doing? Nothing haunted me as I wandered from room to room, until I found myself in the living room, near the windows that opened onto the veranda, where stood the not-vice president. The replica was different from the real thing. There was more spark of life in his eyes, though he didn’t engage with me, but stood there, dusty like the unread likenesses of books from the plan of the library. I asked him where was my dog, but there was no discernible response. Beside him stood a Secret Service agent that I had not seen before, yes, that I had not seen before, because … you know. But oddness being as oddness does, this replica of an agent wore dark glasses, and as I recalled, this agent whose actual self I recalled from the observatory wore no glasses. I conveniently dream-reasoned that therefore the glasses were not replicas but actual glasses and so I looked into them for my reflection, found it, and then in turn found myself in what I knew to be the real residence. I was lying on the floor next to a sitting Eigen. We were bound, wrists behind our backs and ankles crossed, but not to each other. We were on the rough wall-to-wall carpet of one of the basement bedrooms used by the navy stewards who attended to the needs of the house. The room was dark except for some light that spilled onto us from an overhead bathroom fixture that had been left on.

“Are you okay?” Eigen asked. “Your head is bleeding.”

“I think I’m all right.”

“I don’t know where we are,” she said.

“We’re in the vice president’s house.”