The idea was that Ed sat with his arms and legs strapped to the arms and legs of a big raw-looking wooden chair that came with the rest of the equipment, while Sandra Shen connected herself to the valve amplifier. She then settled the fishtank on Ed’s head and asked him questions until she got an answer that suited her. Her voice came to him close and intimate, as if she was in there with him and the eels on their weird, tiring journey beneath the Alcubiere sea, forward towards some unwelcome revelation of his youth. The questions were meaningless to Ed.

“Is life a bitch or isn’t it, Ed?” she would say. Or: “Can you count to twelve?”

He never heard his own answers anyway. The part of him inside the fishtank wasn’t hooked up to the part outside: not in any way as simple as that. The bar at the Dunes Motel lay in its baking afternoon darkness, split by a single ray of white sunlight. The oriental woman leaned against the bar, smoked, nodded to herself. When she got an answer that suited her, she cranked a handle on her apparatus. Curious bluish jolts of light were emitted undependably from its cathodes. The man in the chair convulsed and screamed.

In the evenings, Ed still had to give his performance. He was exhausted. Audiences dwindled. Eventually, only Madam Shen, dressed in a frankly décolleté emerald cocktail dress, was there to watch. Ed began to suspect the audiences weren’t the point of it. He had no idea what Sandra Shen wanted from him. When he tried to talk to her about it before the show, she only told him not to worry. “More practice, Ed. That’s all you need.” She sat in the best seats, smoking, applauding with soft claps of her little strong hands. “Well done, Ed. Well done.” Afterwards two or three carnies would drag him away. Or if Annie happened to be around, she would pick him up with a kind of tender amusement and carry him back to her room.

“Why are you doing this to yourself, Ed?” Annie asked him one night.

Ed coughed. He spat into the sink.

“It’s a living,” he said.

“Oh, very entradista,” she said sarcastically. “Tell me about it, Ed. Tell me about the dipships again, and what hard-ons you all were. Tell me how you fucked the famous lady-pilot.”

Ed shrugged.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes you do.”

Annie looked as near exasperated as she could, and went outside so she could stalk about without breaking anything.

“What do you know about her, Ed?” she called back in. “Nothing. Why is she making you do this? What does she expect you to see?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “It’s just another version of the tank. You twinks will accept any amount of shit not to face the world.”