Josephine’s eyes had been on an edge of a menu sticking out between a napkin holder and a ketchup dispenser. Before she realized what was happening, the letters on the menu seemed to leap upward, almost as if they were written in the air above the paper. She even swore that she saw shadows fall behind the letters for an instant, before the perspective of the entire menu changed. That is, the menu now appeared to form itself about the letters so that the word bacon not only seemed alive in the strangest fashion, but seemed to form the rest of the menu around itself. Each word made the menu pucker or change, as in turn each word became prominent and the others faded from view almost completely. Then—she gasped—all the words came into prominence at once, so vividly that she could hardly bear to look, and each word had a hand in forming the menu upon which it was written.

George Brainbridge had been staring rather impolitely at the spot in the front of John Window’s mouth where he’d removed the bad tooth. The gap was quite noticeable, and George was idly thinking that after he took out the one beside it, he’d fit Window with a bridge. Just about then, his eye roamed toward a good tooth on the other side of the gap in Window’s mouth, and what happened next left George literally breathless. (“I almost peed in my pants,” he said later to Josephine, who wrinkled her lips distastefully.)

That one tooth instantly took all of George’s attention. He felt the life of the roots beneath, of the nerves, the rich bed of the gums, but more … the tooth seemed to form the gums as much as the other way around. No, that wasn’t it, he thought, struggling to understand. It was as if the tooth had a part in forming the gums that would later hold it so snugly … as if ahead of time the tooth, knowing its reality, demanded a mouth to hold it.

All of these changes began as the man who now called himself Monarch said, “Christ is a Window who heals.” And to Seven, it was as if the man had two sets of eyes, or rather, double vision. Seven saw the restaurant, precise and definite, yet the effect was as if he were looking through the small end of a telescope—one that probed into time instead of space. At the other wide end, the full-sized, flesh-and-blood Monarch of the twenty-fifth century looked out at the expanse of landscape outside the museum; he was talking to himself. Except that it was John Window’s “Monarch” in the restaurant who spoke the actual words Seven heard: