The service was over. When had it ended? Had anyone else spoken? The few mourners were standing. It was time to walk into the cemetery, for the burial.

Stuck in armor, visor fixed down. Not just punished, but hoping and then being punished. Starving, eating his shoe. Infested by an entire flea circus. Napoleon at Elba.

The back doors were swinging closed. He was still standing in the aisle. Mildred was next to him. He looked over his shoulder, toward the altar, where there were bouquets of flowers, and the coffin.

Training not a dog but a child to break windows. Of course. The Little Fellow then comes by to fix them.

Mildred had lifted her veil. “Charlie?”

“I want to see him.”

When he tried to walk toward the altar, she was holding his arm. “Please don’t,” she whispered.

“I’m fairly sure I have to,” he whispered in return.

She nodded. “Just, please, please, don’t be angry.”

So many things had made so little sense recently, he did not know how to respond.

“It was Minister Jim’s idea. He felt it was the right thing to do.”

Chaplin felt a lump in his throat, something expanding and rising and unavoidable. He took Mildred’s hand off of his arm, and then walked alone to the altar.

The light was coming in from stained-glass windows, lives of saints, both kind and cruel, through which shone the happy happy Hollywood sun. Chaplin heard organ music from a funeral one chapel away. Before he opened the lid to the coffin, he had a strange, prescient understanding of what he would find. He looked over his shoulder, at Mildred, who was wilting.

Chaplin’s fingers found the brass railing around the tiny coffin. It opened silently on expensive, oiled hinges. The casket had white satin padding, plush and overstuffed, and almost lost inside was the tiny form of the Little Mouse. He wore a blue silk wrapper on his broken balloon of a body.

And then the lid of the casket slipped from Chaplin’s fingers, for they had slicked with sweat. The coffin closed with a bang.

Mildred jolted in place, the echo playing against the high stone walls.

Now the chapel was as tense as if a shot had rung out. Mildred heard something. It was something animalistic, deep and rutting, a wild beast’s song of triumph. It was Charlie laughing. She had never really heard him laugh. It wasn’t the heh heh-heh of his quiet side. It seemed to come from so deep within him that nothing had ever touched it before.

His jaw was aching, the back of his head hurt like an ice-cream headache. The question posed in the sermon—was there inherent meaning in the universe? He began to frighten himself, because now, finally, after so many false starts and declarations, he understood.