'How are you doing, Mr Gyges?'

The man turned and looked at him as though he were a stranger.

'Better, Professor Bible.' His smile was big and Greek. 'I'm trying to win back my wife.'

'Making amends?'

A scowl darkened the broad face. 'You're not a priest.'

Winded by the encounter, he went upstairs to the kids' room and curled into a ball on Frankie's bed. He hugged the sheets tight, as though holding onto a shed skin. He could smell him, his boy, his dancing little body fresh out of the shower, all questions and movie quips. When he closed his eyes, it seemed that he floated in some strange amoebic world, a place where touch and pain were all that was.

So much dark… How could anything be so small as a helpless father?

Once again, he prayed or begged or haggled or whatever it was called, offering anything to anyone on the great Ebay of the soul. And even though he believed none of it, he did so with more conviction than he had done anything in his entire life. Please, uttered with such inner force, it seemed his chest and head and limbs would split open, peel inside-out in offering. Anything! Of course he knew the reasons. He knew that some nameless ancestor had suffered a mutation, a happy madness allowing him or her to extend social and psychological categories to the world, to theorize. He knew that Thomas Bible was a human and that humans were hard-wired to anthropomorphize.

To see people in dead things.

Please… Give me back my boy.

Give.

Him.

Back.

He lay thoughtless for a time, drawing in oxygen, metabolizing. He stirred when images of Cynthia Powski began crowding his thoughts. Pouting pleasure, nipples pressed hard against sail-tight linen…

Somehow he found himself on the living room couch, watching news. There was nothing so desolate, it seemed, as watching the tube out of a sense of futility. The drying pupils, the nervous limbs. The stationary dementia, the world flickering so bright and so fast in rooms of silence and gloom. And the screen, as supple and as insidious as language, but without any truth-preserving rules, stacking image after image, wiring and rewiring a billion visual cortices.

His own included.

Once again, the Chiropractor dominated the leads, even though events elsewhere were murdering thousands. Apparently several blood-caked vertebrae had been found in a subway car. On the obligatory news conference clip, a task force official described the find as a 'major break'. They were compiling the biometric data even as she spoke, she said, and everyone who rode the car in question would be interviewed within a matter of days.

Thomas felt like spitting.