“What am I not seeing about him?” I asked. “What haven’t you told me?”

“Just continue on your course. Just keep on keeping on.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Just don’t be surprised if he’s not dead.”

That wasn’t an answer, either.

“Who do you work for?”

“At this point, I think I’m doing the lord’s work. Don’t you feel you’re doing the lord’s work?”

“Rebel angels,” I said.

“No one gets to decide who god is anymore. I think we both know that by now.”

Was that true? Silvina was dead and still playing God.

“What do you think Silvina was up to?”

A pause, but he answered. “Something radical. Barely controllable. The things you don’t know, about the people Langer helped her meet. You know when they say someone grew human brains inside some fucked-up animal because they don’t have the ethics god gave a pig? That kind of person. People who think that’s exciting.”

“Roger Simpson is dead,” I said, hoping for a reaction, but it just felt like anticlimax. Deflection.

“Is that a fact.” Flat. Too flat. Some equation changing.

“Do you want to know who killed him?”

“He didn’t die tripping on a banana peel?”

“I guess you don’t want to know,” I said, and cut the connection. A mistake. Calling him. Stupid.

But after I hung up and continued on, I was calmer. Colder. Another hour and I’d be back at the farm.

Silvina had known my address. My rational mind said that was just dedicated research. My irrational mind wanted to feast on something more than that.

What would I find? Hellmouth on the stoop? Or just a disembodied series of stairs into nothing and nowhere, each step composed of the latest numbers.

Years from now, I could imagine myself still following the ever-staler bread crumbs, convinced that just one more clue would bring me the solution.

[88]

It wasn’t all terrible on the farm. Just most of the time. Even something like my mother’s mania could be funny, joyous, uplifting. It could draw my father out of his shell, place a light in his eyes as surely as Shot could put dull nickels over those same eyes. She liked to dance when manic and would put on her grandmother’s ancient white lace dress and hand silly notes to us. Little stories about the animals around the farm. The adventures of cows or chickens or raccoons. She memorized them so she could tell them to us even after she’d handed them out.

This cheerfulness made us happier because good humor soured Shot, but also drove him away. He wanted no part of it. While our mother wore those clothes, he could put up no meaningful or just plain mean protest.

“Oh, c’mon,” she’d say as he got up to leave. “C’mon, dance with me.”