—Bring square.

In the end, he would bop the white ball over to her. It was his favorite toy, and he’d hit it right into her hands, so very accurate. She didn’t know if he didn’t understand what she was asking. Perhaps instead he considered her sentence less of a command and more a part of a dialogue.

Each day, she practiced these lessons with him.

* * *

One of the books she read was an older one about phrenology by a British anthropologist. She wasn’t sure why the men had decided to bring such an outdated science book. Perhaps they thought it was funny what science used to believe, or perhaps one of them was secretly sympathetic to the concepts.

Each chapter described the typical measurements of the skull of a different race (Semite, Hamite, Negroid, etc.) and used these measurements to make statements about that race’s propensities. Each race was compared to the typical Anglo-Saxon skull, the gold standard.

The third chapter was about the Eskimo race. The chapter was based on eight skulls in the Berlin Natural History Museum. There was a footnote mentioning that these specimens had come from two families who’d been persuaded to travel to Germany in the 1800s, where they had been exhibited in the Berlin zoo for a few months before dying from smallpox (no one having remembered to vaccinate them). The footnote stated the paucity of the sample size, just eight skulls, was somewhat compensated for by the samples covering the gamut of development from a fifty-year-old to a ten-month-old.

She stared at that footnote for a long time, absorbing it.

(With each book, she felt the words on the page were like following the path of some never-before-seen creature through the woods. For clues she had some broken twigs, and the footprints, maybe some scat. From these details, she had to imagine the animal that had made them, what kind of gait it had and how far it could see, what gave it sustenance and what frightened it, what destination the creature was aiming for and why.

The creature who had written that footnote terrified her.)

That night she dreamed of those two Eskimo families in the zoo. She was floating high above them, moving closer. She could see them, lit up in their enclosure, a large crowd watching from just outside the glass. The families appeared to be still healthy. She circled down, almost swimming through the air. The audience, she noticed now, was wearing white lab coats and taking notes.

It was beginning to get dark, so one of these people stepped over to the wall to turn on the enclosure lights.

Just before the lights clicked on, the person turned to look at her. It was Blum.

Although it might not seem like it, this was a nightmare. She got it repeatedly. Each time, she woke up from it, breathing hard, her heart thumping. She blinked around at her bed and the homearium. She stared at this exhibit she had designed and the men had built and she had entered. The dark windows of the house facing her, the microphones above. She had an inkling of how the families had felt in their enclosure, waiting for what might happen next.