“Have you been to all of those places?” I said. “With all of those pins?”

The estate agents had called Henry Lake a recluse. They hadn’t mentioned anything about world travel.

“In a manner of speaking,” he said.

“What manner?”

He didn’t answer me. Not directly. He said, “Have you ever seen these dogs in the wild?”

“Me? Nope. Never been anywhere. Not like that. I don’t even know what kind of dogs they are.”

“Well,” he said, flourishing his hands like a magician at the end of a trick. “There. Painted dogs. You’ve seen them now.”

“Yes, but we’re not in the wild, are we. We’re not actually there.”

Henry reached out a hand to touch the screen. “We work with what we have,” he said. “There’s more than one way to see the world these days.”

“Okay,” I said. “If you say so.”

The look on his face was kind of pleading. He so wanted to be right. “Those dogs are moving across that ground right now. Right this minute. Look. Isn’t that something? Isn’t that good enough?”

He typed something into the filthy keyboard and the picture zoomed, close up, a dog moving low to the ground, ears turning like satellite dishes, mouth dripping chewed foam and a grin. I remember the stark, strong shadows and the dogs’ tongues lolling, and I might have heard the ragged sounds of their breath. I can’t have felt the blunt heat of the air, the greasy nap of their fur. Still, my memory fills in those blanks for me anyway, and those dogs seem hyperreal now to me.

“How does it work?” I said. “Do you just shut your eyes and stick a pin in the wall?”

“Something like that.”

“Right.”

“Modern technology. It’s a tremendous help for someone like me.”

“Someone like you?”

“I can’t get out,” Henry Lake said.

“What, ever?”

He shook his head. “It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Really?”

I wanted to know how he lived like that. Where did his food come from? What happened if he got sick? And I wanted to know why too, more than anything, but I’d only just met him, so I was nervous to ask. Mum started calling me from downstairs, fifth-gear annoyed with me already—something about a chest of drawers, something about my skateboard being a death trap, something else about me lifting a finger to help.

“You’d better go,” he said, and I picked up my boxes from where I’d left them by the door, and our conversation was over.

Henry hunched down closer at his table, a world traveler under house arrest, with his elbow in a plate of dried sauce, his gnarled, papery hand scratching at the roots of his beard. One foot in the savanna, the other trapped in the yolk of an egg.

SEVEN