“I never wanted to fuck you,” I said.

“It’s okay to admit it.”

“I never wanted to fuck you,” I repeated.

“That hurts,” she said, a blue cloud falling from her lips. “No wonder I killed myself. Do you know what I mean?”

“I suppose.”

She pushed her cigarette out on her palm and did not grimace. “And why was Lisbon worthy of such treatment and misery?” she said. “Like Voltaire, I hold contempt for such a god. To hell with Leibniz, that suck-up. And can you then impute a sinful deed? This, the best of all possible worlds. All for the best. God knows. It’s a mystery. His will. Ha! An absentee landlord at best. To babes who on their mothers’ bosoms bleed?”

I listened to dream-dead Hilary Gill and was willing to accept her as a ghost in my world, even if I didn’t know what she was talking about. However, it being my dream, my construction, I, logically, necessarily, must have understood her message.

“Was there more vice in fallen Lisbon found?” she asked.

amor tenebrescit

The nurse’s name was Kendall. I cannot say that I liked her very much upon meeting her. She was a young white woman with a sleeve of tattoos that interested me little beyond their mere color. There might have been a panda bear. She seemed competent enough. After all, she wasn’t there to stimulate my daughter, to teach her anything, to enrich her experience of the world. She was there to wipe her ass, feed her, and now, apparently, to keep her from burning down the house. I was disappointed in myself that her lack of education caused me to dismiss her. Perhaps it was that I could too easily imagine her as a girlfriend to one of the white militia members from the compound in New Mexico.

Had Sarah responded to her in any way, I might have felt differently. I looked to see any kind of variation in my child’s expression. Sadly, Kendall’s face was as blank as Sarah’s without the excuse of dementia. Then it occurred to me that I was looking to simply blame some body for some thing, which was slightly different from blaming somebody for something. Kendall followed Sarah around while I sat in various rooms of the house pretending to read or make notes, pretending as much for myself as anyone else. I was free to leave the house but found I could not.

On the desk in my study I had laid out the notes from New Mexico, and on a sheet of white paper I had mindlessly written again and again “Rosalita Gonzalez.” I could see the woman’s face as clearly as her name written in front of me. She had dark, defined eyebrows set above narrow, light brown eyes. Her face was round, like the faces of many pictures of Inuit women I had seen in books. Her skin was the light brown of my daughter’s skin. She had a scar on her forehead, left middle. Her teeth were straight, I knew, though I had not seen her smile.