I’d order Jenny to go at them with a couple of unwound coat hangers, tweezer them up and out of there (if they went in, they’ll come out) and wash them with care, and present them to Dodge as something lost and now found, to draw from him the raw delight he gets at the appearance of a new toy, or of an old one lost for days (years in his time) under the couch. When he sees a toy resurrected before his eyes, he’ll often squeal and dance wildly about in an aboriginal manner, twisting his body. Before I proved to be one hundred percent committed to the project, in the weeks when I was still somewhat ambivalent about keeping the yellow-pad record of my ventures, I often used the original source of the mission—examining the house for signs of the termites—as an excuse to dig into places that were of little interest and held my gaze for no more than twenty or thirty minutes, such as down in the basement, in the little crawl space beneath the front entry-way—prime for bugs, snug against raw earth, offering them ample entry for their foraging white bodies. There was little to see except for the substructure of the porch thatched over by planking, and slices of white sunlight coming in through cracks from the street, disturbed and broken up by the movement of people. While I watched, Dodge passed back and forth, playing alone, his little murmurs barely audible enough to identify. He made sounds like a dove or a nightingale (although for the life of me I’ve never heard a real nightingale and wouldn’t know one if it were whistling in my ear), babbling mostly in his own language; back and forth, he broke up the slices of light until Jenny came out and called him in to lunch and I saw her legs pass over the slits, or what I had to presume were her legs, or her ankles, moving through the light, and then Dodge, too, and then nothing but long graceful dust-moted angles coming into the rubble floor of the crawl, against my cheek—or one cheek, to be specific, because to get in there I’d had to wiggle and waggle and snake, leaving my feet out in the basement itself. Two hours that observation took, yielding me little, on the pretext of a termite hunt, though I did find a spot, flaking off a fine top layer of wood and making out in one slim band of light their milky bodies spilling against each other—an opportune find, really, because behind me Jenny was tugging at my shoe and asking me to come to lunch and wondering if I’d found any bugs, and I was able to say yes I had and to even let her look in and see the eaten spot. Now, a few days later, I venture into the garage, to the rotted baseboard along the south wall. A long vestige of dry rot leads to the corner, where water is seeping in and a small mushroom has bloomed; there are little shells of dead insects that require the utmost observation and seem so numerous as to be uncountable, but count them I must, I conclude, because it seems as if the project depends on the closest of scrutiny and an accounting of everything; whether I, for that matter, am fully up to the task is a question I can ill afford to ask, but ask it I do, on my knees on the cold concrete with only a slim light through the window, blocked by a great clump of brambles and allowing past only a dry, dusty afternoon light.