Dreams under glass by Anca L Szilagyi 02

Chapter 10. If it is possible for a Monday morning to be sweetly sleepy. Benny found that Monday in February to be so. Cars honking, dogs barking, cabbies yelling, it all softened into a haze. Perhaps it was the approach of a Valentine's Day that she actually cared to celebrate. She planned to fashion for Gary a jewel-like heart made of red gummy worms. The soft haze followed Binny into the lipstick building. Meline greeted her warmly, peaceful and refreshed from her vacation. And the approach of Martyra, a holiday Benny didn't celebrate, presented an opportunity to click through photo streams of sequined and feathered carnival masks and muted videos of massive samba numbers. Then the phones rang. Multiple calls at once and Meline and Benny and Beatrice and Rick all answered in rapid succession. And then Capra was in the hall, face the color of chili peppers, yelling about a mistake in the brief served to a dozen people on Friday afternoon. Benny couldn't explain what had happened. She'd have to figure it out. And in the meantime, the phone rang again. And Capra was in his office and she was in the kitchen where Friday's dirty cups were gone, presumably scrubbed by Meline. A new batch was sure to come. Benny found a freshly opened bag of coffee and made a pot. Temporary salvation. She felt that her face had already turned upside down and inside out and puckered and was trying to scurry into her skull. Her ears burned, anticipating the further wrath of Capra. She resolved not to hide in the kitchen. She prepared a cup of coffee for him the way he drank it. No cream, no sugar. No brown drips marred the white mug or the black sand of the Kapra Zimon Baxter LLP logo. She thudded down the carpeted hall toward his office. Baxter barreled toward her at a right angle toward Capra's doorway, open white cake box in hand. A square of paper fluttered from the box to the carpet. "What's always coming but never comes?" Baxter said loudly buoyantly outside Kapper's office, oblivious to the remnants of Furer. Or maybe trying to diffuse them. Benny picked up the greasy bit of paper. Capra slammed his phone in the receiver. "I don't know, Bob." "What? Your wife?" Rick muttered. Beatrice sucked her tongue. "Which wife?" Benny stopped herself from asking. "Tomorrow," bellowed Baxter. "And any decision Bob Baxter makes," Capra snapped. "But umping." He bared his teeth. Baxter smiled before Capra could recant and opine on his bad decisions. "Morning, Benny," Baxter said punchily. He ripped a piece of cake from the golden roll already mangled he'd apparently partaken earlier. Green and purple and yellow granules of sugar skittered down into the box as he sunk his teeth in. Homey scents of butter, cinnamon, and vanilla melted with the coffee still in Benny's hand. The paper from the box explained that the cake was a king cake and that inside the cake was a tiny plastic baby Jesus and that the tiny plastic baby Jesus was a choking hazard. Whoever found the tiny plastic baby Jesus in their slice of cake would have good luck for the day. "Let them eat cake," Benny thought. "Morning," she said. "This cake is delicious and none of these clowns can have any of it," Baxter said. He devoured another buttery hunk, the crunch of decorative sugar faintly audible. Crumbs stuck to his lips. "A better person would say something," she thought after a beat. "Watch out for the baby Jesus," she said finally, waving the greasy square of paper. "It's a choking hazard." Baxter laughed, but behind his eye twinkle, she sensed a glimmer of misery, like he should be so lucky. He chomped again, swallowed, then coughed, as if the cake had gone down the wrong pipe. He turned away and coughed more, spittle and moist crumbs flying. Benny thought that maybe some cake going down the wrong way would shake him out of himself, like with Capra and his near-death experience changing his position on sick days. Baxter was nodding as if he was fine despite the coughing. She'd thought, "Let them eat cake." And now she thought, "Why not let him choke? He's miserable. He wants out." Benny whacked him hard on the back because he was still coughing. "We're [ __ ] anyway," she thought. "All this waste for what? Oil bobbles? Let them all eat cake. Let them all choke on the plastic baby Jesus. All but the ladies on their sugar cleanse. Start a fresh." She shook her head and asked as she whacked his back, her hand a buzz, "You okay?" Baxter nodded but coughed harder, swayed forward. His face and ears were all red. He kept convulsing. He beat himself on the chest, wheezed. Index finger in the air as if to excuse himself. He left the office. Where was he going? "He all right?" asked Beatrice, poking up from her cubicle wall. Benny rushed after Baxter, slipping into the men's room before the door locked behind him. He hadn't made it to the toilet before he fell to his hands and knees, still purpling, rasping, stating the obvious, Benny said, "Mr. Baxter, you're choking." He would not lie down. So she straddled him piggyback and hugged him from behind and remembering high school first aid lessons, heaved both her fists into his diaphragm. Desperately, she squeezed, hoping to dislodge the baby Jesus. Shoving him all the way to the ground with no small measure of violence, she bore down again with her hands, with all of her weight, with gravity, punched his gut with relish, gritted her teeth in a contorted grin. His eyes widened. In a gust of air deep from Baxter's lungs, the peach plastic Jesus flew out of his mouth and into a urinal with a dull, high-pitched tink. A call of saliva made the doll slick. Baxter gasped, the color draining from his face. He touched his chest, rubbed his throat. He tried to stand, then thought better of it and sat. "Are you all right?" Still catching his breath, he made no answer, focusing his attention on the tile floor, shook his head ever so slightly. His face tinged verdigree. Something flashed across his face, as if he suddenly understood something completely. And that understanding was utterly terrifying. He held out his hand as if to keep Benny at bay, as if to say, "You've done enough. Leave me to my humiliation." But the sickness didn't stop, and Benny didn't leave. His torso convulsed and torquked. He barfed into the urinal. It was no small episode of vomit. Remnants of the previous night's dinner, or perhaps midnight's snack, mixed with all that he consumed that morning, sprayed against the porcelain. First, the unnatural yellow, purple, and green of a king cake. Then, a tint of red, as if in his stomach something had torn, a bleeding ulcer. Benny thought, "Surely it would end here. Surely that was all he had inside of his system." But the last splatter, the last splatter glowed an unearly hue. Turquoise shimmering in the light as if as if as if he'd stuffed his gullet with fistfuls of morpho butterflies. An acurid odor of bile wafted past her nose. By now, Beatrice was unlocking the men's room. "Oh my god." She held the door open for Kapper and Zimon. Meline peeped over their shoulders. "Mr. Baxter, you're all green." Meline stomped back to the office. "Are you all right, Bob?" Kappa edged closer to Baxter, who half grunted. Sweat bubbled at his temples. Meline rushed back with an ice pack wrapped in paper towels and applied it to his forehead. "Let's get you out of here," said Zimon, hitching him up. Baxter leaned on him, groaning. Beatric's brow crumpled at the unnatural mess in the urinal. "We should call an ambulance," she said to Capra. "Let me call my personal physician first. I don't trust emergency rooms." Capra hustled back to the office. Beatrice surveyed Benny, who averted her gaze toward the pool of blue flecked with the colors of Martyra. "I'll call for a janitor," Benny volunteered. Beatric nodded, stared at Benny, staring at the aftermath, and returned to the office, allowing Benny to collect herself. Alone in the men's room with shaking torso and pinser-like fingers, she plucked out the baby Jesus and washed it. "My pearl," she thought. She cursed the lack of pockets on her dress, almost slipped it inside her mouth before finding a snug spot in the toe of her ballet flat. Baxter slumped in the vestibule. Meline pressed the ice pack to his forehead. Simon paced the small area and Benny zoomed by trying not to limp with the stowaway Jesus in her shoe, pretending her task to call the janitor was as urgent as the emergency at hand. Cabra hung up the phone, hollering at Beatrice as he hurried over. "Call 911. My doctor says call 911." Beatrice dialed. Benise snuck into the kitchen, found a Ziploc bag, and back at her desk, transferred the doll inside of it. She hid the thing in a bottom drawer and beckoned a cleaning crew. Task complete. She rested momentarily in a daysaze. Kea urged the curious to give Baxter space. The zombie wandered back to his office, shaking his head. Simon paced in and out of the vestibule, dragging his hands down his face, exposing the red insides of his lower eyelids. Rick stretched over the cubicle wall with a hint of excitement in his eyes. Mirthth. In the Roman era, in the coliseum, he'd be delighting in the emperor's thumbs down. "Finish him," he'd holler before biting lustily into a hunk of bread. Benny shot him down with a glare. His eyes slithered to a screen. Benny sat at her desk, listening to the bustle of the EMTs, their clipped orders, pronouncements of vitals. "His vomit was blue," Beatus told them. "Could be food coloring," one said. One of them assessed the mess in the bathroom. "Whoa." Came the sound of the cleaning crew with clinking slop buckets. The metallic wine of Gurnie, the [ __ ] sounds of walkie-talkies, the slam of the door. Simon went with the ambulance. Capra called Baxter's wife, Kim. Benny heard his report in snatches. "Allergic reaction. NYU Medical Center." He hung up and sighed. Capra patted to Beatrice. "If you're able to do so," he murmured, leaning on her cubicle wall. "Please put together an accident report." Grimly Beatress nodded. Never in Benny's life had she seen in the context of the human body that unearly shade of blue. She trembled. "Let them eat cake." Her mind had made itself known to her, and it was ugly. The office staff dispersed early that day. In the last rays of sunset, Vinnie moped to Essabagel for a cheap dinner. Inside, two Orthodox women wigged and in pillbox hats sat at a side table with a laptop and ledger. A pound of walnut salad, a pound of tuna fish salad, 20 bobkas. One recided while another checked off boxes. Benny remembered the egg salad and black and white cookies Baxter had brought in the Saturday before trial when he also gifted a silk scarf to Benny and silk ties to Capra and Zimon. His cheerfulness, a thin mask over anxiety. Capra and Zimon seemed vaguely disgusted with him. She couldn't quite understand why. A prickly response to his cloying plea for solidarity or something to do with their disapproval of his clients. Maybe it was simply an irritation with people who weasled out of things like paying what they owed. She grabbed a cookie sheathed in saran wrap. Over the cashier's head, a green lettered box of napkins said borax. A strange name for paper products, Benny thought. Two pounds white fish salad, two trays noodle cougle. She chewed on the word borax as she ate her bagel in the near empty shop and pictured an assemblage. A barrel of shiny plastic fish next to a barrel of shiny shellaced egg noodles. Why a barrel of noodles? What did that mean? It was eerie, but why? The borax logo behind them in the back of the box, giving everything a vaguely familiar quality. Was there a way of making it smell like childhood? What did childhood smell like? Ritz crackers and the industrial-grade cleaning products of elementary schools. Three lb rugula. No, four. Make it four. Industrial-grade cleaning products brought her back around to Baxter's vomit in the men's room. Her mind pivoted again. Borax was also roach poison, wasn't it? 8 lb Nova locks. 10 lb Nova. The white bakery box had arrived Friday, the day of the exterminator's visit. "Did you forget the potato cocoal to a trace?" She'd left the cake on Baxter's desk after he quit for the day. It marinated in insecticide fumes all weekend. "Two," the women droned on. "Two. You got the kosher beef salami and he'd eaten the cake." Had the exterminator warned about food? "Three 2-lb logs. Yes, he had. He'd asked if everything was well sealed." She'd thought, "Let them eat cake." Even if she'd forgotten, maybe her subconscious had known exactly what was happening the whole time. Benny rose from her seat and dropped the halfeaten sandwich and cookie into her jacket pocket. "Wait," said the woman with the ledger. "We forgot the liver w." Benny was out the door. In the excitement of the choking, no one had thought about the pesticide, not even her. But she'd thought, "Let them eat cake." And now the borax logo at Essa Bagel was a sign. Her breath grew ragged as she hurried home. Meline had been out, and Benny had put that cake in his office and left it there while the exterminator, with his sweet smile, sprayed the whole place. Monday morning, Baxter ate big hunks of king cake, and she knew something was off, but she said nothing. Her mind had said, "Let them eat cake." And now he was in the hospital spewing blue, green puke. Her hands shook as she turned the lock to her apartment. Bent over her laptop. She googled borax and pesticide and consumption and variations on those terms. Boric acid. That was it. The main symptoms of boric acid poisoning, she read on Medline Plus, are blue green vomit, diarrhea, and a bright red rash on the skin. Bile rose in her throat, and she swallowed it back down. She scrolled down a long list of other possible symptoms. Blisters, collapse, coma, sloughing of skin. Death from complications may occur as long as several months later. Holes, perforations in the esophagus and stomach may result in serious infections in both the chest and abdominal cavities, which may result in death.

Chapter 11. At the window of her studio, so sad and cramped, yet so spare, a modeling of green, yellow, and sludge brown with specks of black haloed the edges of the glass. She knew she ought to tell Beatrus about the pesticide, but she was afraid. Was Baxter in for a slow, painful death? What constituted the large amount that Medline warned about? Children were most at risk, the page said, but the blue green vomit was not promising. Not that a scientific description of amounts relative to body size would ease her horror. Her throat began to burn just thinking about the word perforations. Had she swallowed trace amounts? Had they all? She called Gary. As the phone rang, her mind spiraled back to the pause before the choking. The thought, "Let them eat cake." "Can you come over?" she asked, jettisoning greetings. "I'm too rattled to talk on the phone." "Right now? Right now? Yes, please. Please." "You do sound rattled," he said. Something swished and zippered his coat. "I can be there in an hour." In fact, she worried about leaving records, indulging guilt. The cell phone company would surely have some kind of recording of their conversation in a vast archive somewhere. She wasn't so paranoid that she feared her apartment was bugged, nor did she see a need to line her walls with tinfoil. But she did worry about phone calls. Oh, but that was crazy, too. Maybe her fear of poisoning had begun before all this. Maybe the years of glue and shellac and poorly ventilated spaces had damaged her mental faculties. Nervously, she paced, devouring stale saltines. The building's heat was still not working properly, so she kept her coat on. Across the hall, Carl blasted the evening news. The cadence of the reporting came through, but no distinct words, no hints of a local man dying a horrible death by poison cake. "What's wrong?" Gary asked when he arrived, frazzled, ears pink with cold. With her cheek to his cheek, eyes unfocused and directed toward the rough wood floor, Benny told him about the cake, the pesticide, the vomiting, the turquoise hue. Gary pulled away, grasping her arms as if to steady her. "The cake wasn't turquoise, was it?" "No. Well, there were some green sprinkles, but not blue green." She didn't yet mentioned that she'd Googled the symptoms, and they matched the effects of boric acid listed on Medline. "No one thought of the pesticide." "Benny, you have to say something." "Won't they see it in a blood test?" "I don't know. You have to say something." His grip on her arms tightened. "I know you're right." She wriggled away. A baby cockroach ran along the floorboards. She warmed her clammy hands by squeezing them under her arms. "What if I get fired? What if he dies?" "Okay. Okay. I have Beatric's cell number in case of emergency. This is an emergency." Gary's face seemed to harden toward her. Sensible shoes maybe, but no sensible mind, she thought as the phone rang. No sensible mind at all. Beatrice picked up the phone, not pleased to hear from Benny at 10 p.m. She sounded thoroughly drained, even more than when she'd started her punishing greens and lemon juice cleanse and squats regimen, the modern version of the hair shirt. Benny's whole body clenched. She tried to sound calm while still showing concern. "How are you doing?" Benny asked, hoping she wouldn't report any vomiting of her own. "Me? I'm okay," said Beatrice. "Backter? Not so good." "No." Benny's stomach lurched. She glanced at Gary, who knit his brows, and nodded at Benny as if to say, "Do not chicken out." "He got to the ER, still vomiting a high fever." She paused. "Don't share the details with anyone, please. His wife got there in time, but he he didn't make it." "What?" Beatric started sobbing. Benny started shivering. She couldn't understand what Beatrice was saying. The receiver filled with wet mucous sounds. Benny's throat constricted. The shivering grew violent and Gary stared at her trying to understand what was happening. He twisted his face as if to say, "Aren't you going to say anything at all?" He could obviously hear Beatric's sobbing through the telephone. It obviously sounded bad. His expression slackened with the loss of hope. He held Benny to quell the shaking and tilted his head toward her phone, trying to listen to Beatric's side of the conversation. Benny thought to ask whether the office would be closed in the morning, but felt funny about it. Felt some relief at being able to realize that the question might be inappropriate. Beatric's voice quavered, rose in volume. "There's nothing we can do now." "Jesus," said Benny. There was a silence between them. "I'm speechless. I mean, Jesus." "Yeah," Beatrice breathed. "We'll have to have some kind of announcement tomorrow morning. Kapper will do it." Beatric hung up. "He's dead," Benny said, disbelieving. "Jesus," Gary said. "That's what I said." Benny lay down, coat and shoes still on, stared at the ceiling, shuddered. Gary walked with purpose to her kitchenette, rumaging in the cabinets. He found Benny's dusty bottle of wild turkey, which she'd bought as a college graduation present for herself. At the time, she thought she'd finish it at crazy summer rooftop parties in Bushwick, but she never ended up attending. "You poured a finger into a glass, helped her sit up, and urged her to drink." "One more should knock me out," she said, holding up the empty glass. He rubbed her back while she finished the second drink. He pulled off her boots and coat and helped her into pajamas, thick socks, a hoodie, which he drew tightly around her face, and a double blanket. "Let me hide forever in this cocoon," she thought. Gary stayed the night, holding Benny. The shivers kept returning. He agreed somewhat that maybe at this point it didn't make sense for Benny to say anything to anyone. Binnie lay in his arms as he drifted off and gently snored. The bourbon warmed her, but didn't help her sleep. Maybe he won't come back, she thought that Friday when he left early. Her gut had told her on Monday that something was wrong. Let them eat cake. All but the ladies on their sugar cleanse. She knew that cake was poisoned and she'd let him eat it. She'd wanted all the lawyers dead. She wriggled her face into the pillow. Was that it then? Was she losing her mind at the tender age of 25? The thoughts kept coming back despite her attempts to push them away. Maybe he won't come back. Let them eat cake. She blinked up at the ceiling, adjusting to the dark, tracing the patterns of cracks in the plaster. The occasional streak of light zoomed by her window, throwing new shadows on the wall. Maybe he was out of his misery now. And now she didn't have to deal with him anymore. "You are disgusting. Go find that cake in the trash and eat the rest yourself." What if his wife, his daughter? All night, Benny lay awake. She wasn't sure what time it was when a final question and answer drifted through her mind. "I killed Baxter. I killed Baxter. I wanted him to die. I [ __ ] killed him. I'm a killer." The next morning, she held her breath in the elevator and tried to compose herself as she exhaled outside the unmarked door of the fund of funds. The door to CZB winded as she opened it. Meline was at her desk, averting her gaze, and the zombie was behind his door coughing. At 10:15, Beatrice gathered Meline, Rick, the zombie, and Benny into the conference room. She said the meeting would be brief, so there wasn't a need to sit down. They waited for the partners. The sun shone in from Queens. Beneise squinted at the dust moes floating in the shaft of light that fell across the oak table. Her eyes felt sunken. She wanted to run out and get Beatrice a blood dark beet juice to put roses in her wand cheeks to help to get away from what was about to be said. Not long ago, in late August, just before the trial, everyone had convened here for cupcakes and plastic fluts of champagne on Baxter's birthday. It was a bigger crowd then with Paul and Baxter's daughter doing her summer internship. And well, Baxter. Baxter asked Benny to slice the enormous cupcakes in half so everyone could watch their girish figures. The cupcakes, thickly frosted and goop filled, disassembled under the plastic knife. Simon asked why she was butchering them. Capra said, "Damn it, Mark. She's a parallegal, not a baker." Baxter laughed. She felt good hearing Capra call her a parallegal. Even as she bristled against it, it meant she belonged. Was she going to say anything to anyone about the pesticide? She bit the inside of her cheek. Capra trudged into the conference room, more sluggish than Benny had ever seen him. Simon trailed behind him, eyes bloodshot, salow skin a unique shade of chartreuse. Capra cleared his throat and surveyed the room as if he were searching for Baxter, Baxter's ghost. His face crumpled at the absence, and she could see in his eyes a flash of real honest to goodness grief. He recomposed himself. "We've lost a member of the Capra Zimon family." He paused. "Last night, a little after 9ine, our Bob Baxter passed." Kapper swallowed. "We're not certain of the cause of death, but his wife was able to be with him before he went." His head bowed slightly. "We're going to send out an announcement later today. Let's have a moment of silence for Bob." He bowed deeper. Binnie's waxy pale hands folded in front of her. From the corner of her eyes, she could see tears rolling down Meline's cheeks. Sickly Beatus remained stoic, already rung out. Benny avoided looking at Rick. She did not want to risk seeing Glee. At the end of the silence, she looked at him anyway. His face was appropriately sober. Vinnie exhaled through her nose. "Are we going to sue Verier?" Rick asked Capra as they streamed out of the conference room. Capra cocked his head to the side and stared as if Rick had lost his mind. "Not likely," he said, shaking his head and jangling his keys in his pocket, gazing down at 53rd Street. The atmosphere remained brittle. Cabra and Zimon met in the early afternoon. Not a decibel of raised voice slipped through the closed conference room door. But after an hour, when Zimon opened the door, he turned back to continue talking as he came into the hallway. "What I don't get is the sudden orthodoxy. All right, we're going in circles. Let's get back to work." "You know, Bernie," he said, keeping his voice steady. "I really ought to just retire." "Oh, come on, Mark," said Capra, deep voice breaking into an energetic shriek. Then settling down again. "You say that every year." "It's a little different now, isn't it?" The lion share of Baxter's work went to the zombie. What kind of bonus would he get for that? Rick and Benny and Meline were to take turns going into Baxter's office and trying to make sense of the chaotic piles of paper, often covered in complex phone doodles. Nothing was to be thrown out. Beatrice filed the accident report and an outside accident investigator was set to come that day and ensure everything was on the up and up, that CZB wasn't some chronically unsafe workplace. Not that anyone worried Baxter's sweet wife would sue. As Benny puzzled through Baxter's piles, his heavy-handed zigzag doodles and tiny, incomprehensible handwritten notes with the letters all shaky and clumped. The question of whether she'd been responsible collided with the vague notion that Baxter might have died somewhat intentionally. Was that possible? She'd felt that hitch. She'd had that thought as he was eating the cake that he wanted it and therefore she should let him. Had he rushed to the bathroom to continue choking, gone off to die alone like an old dog? More important, wasn't it possible he knew about the pesticide? He had chosen the exterminator after all. But if it had been a suicide diligently planned, he might have chosen something more clean, more certain. Perhaps he chosen the workplace to protect his family from witnessing his death or finding his corpse. An accidental poisoning would also leave the door open for a change of heart. You could ask for the stomach pump if you got cold feet. It would hide the fact of his suicide. Keep his desire a secret. Did he feel stuck after the Pancorp loss? Did he sink his life savings and his kids' college funds into maid off scheme, lose them forever? Was he trapped in a job that he hated but had to go on with because of a mortgage, wife, children? The vitamin supplements and pain relievers remained lined up at the back of his credenza. The potassium supplements were nearly gone. What was it that he had asked Beatrice to do? Get an extra policy writer on his life insurance? What had Zimon meant by sudden orthodoxy? These questions did not relieve Benny of the sense that she should have thrown out that cake, should have realized the possibility of danger as soon as he fell ill, should have said something sooner. But also she wagered if he planned to kill himself, he would have tried again with another method later. Snooping was warranted. She had permission to be in his chair rifling through his things. She opened Outlook, scrolling up and down for clues, anything about the policy writer or maid off. There was an email from Capra's wife Margaret without a subject line. Emails without subject lines always seemed like red flags. This message cannot be comfortably summarized, they implied. She opened the thread. They'd made plans for coffee, but the details were vague. "I'll call you," Baxter wrote. "Thanks," she replied. Neither bothered with punctuation, suggesting a certain level of intimacy. She searched for more. Of course, Baxter wouldn't have emailed anyone about his plans or problems. Emails took him forever. He always preferred the phone. Less of a record. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe Margaret was just planning a surprise party for Capra's birthday. She rummaged through the mastrom of paper. There, beneath a response to the panc appeal, still awaiting judgment and an assortment of junk mail, was a copy of the policy writer. She skimmed it over and over, trying to make sense of it. It took some doing, getting her mind to glom onto the verbiage. In the event of Baxter's accidental death, it said Capra Zimon Baxter LLP shall be an additional beneficiary. He'd signed it the day after Thanksgiving, though that wasn't so long ago. The pages had been handled so often they were crinkled and worn. She left the document exactly as she'd found it, slightly a skew at one corner of the desk. So, was CZB now in the money? She supposed it depended on the insurance company. Under Baxter's desk, there was an open bag of pretzels. Vinnie reached for a handful, almost began absently munching until she realized that these two might be tainted. She dropped the twists, retracted her hand from the bag, rolled it up, and took it out, pushed the pretzels deep into the kitchen trash, underneath old coffee grounds, empty bags of mixed greens, and thoroughly squeezed lemon halves. After the violence of the choking and the himlick came the vomit. The vomit too came from the poison. She'd washed her hands with soap and scalding water until her skin pinkedked. At some point, Baxter's wife would probably want to come in and bring home his personal effects. Family photos he gazed at while lost mid-sentence in an email. The baseball bat he swung while deep in thought. Her voice on the phone had always been so calm and kind. The only thing she ever pushed on him that Benny could surmise was that she wanted them to take a proper summer vacation, not squeezed in at the last minute after agonizing over how to serve shady clients who did not pay their bills. The accident investigator interviewed each employee of CZB individually in the conference room, if only to briefly determine they'd not been in the office at the time of Baxter's demise. Benny dreaded her interrogation. Should she come clean, say she felt responsible? Would that mitigate any repercussions? No. She had to believe that her fear was irrational. She had to assume it wasn't really her fault. She had to cover her ass. "I won't take much of your time," the khakis suited, tiny chinned investigator said. Window washers dangled outside the window behind him, squeegeeing lines of water smooth to nothing. Beyond the washers, the sky was impossibly blue. "I came in yesterday morning," she told the investigator. "He'd apparently eaten one slice of cake already, maybe more. I don't know. He meaning Mr. Baxter." "Yes. Then on his next slice, Mr. Baxter. He started coughing, wheezing. I thought he was choking on the little plastic Jesus inside the cake." "Wait, what? There was a little doll in the cake? It's a martigraph thing." The investigator carefully noted that. "Do you have that doll? Is it around here somewhere? No one else mentioned the doll? I'm asking you." "I'm not sure if it's still around. I think maybe the janitor mopped it up." She was saving it for a piece. The secret working title of the piece was the death of Baxter. She needed a different public title. The baby would be hidden peekaboo style. The investigator jotted that down and nodded as if everything was starting to gel. "Continue, please." "I tried to help. Gave him the Heimlick. Then this is so strange. He started vomiting, maybe from the choking. That was the last time I saw him." Her eyes welled up. She wondered at their earnestness. Did she feel grief or was she performing? She had quite intentionally omitted mentioning the shimmering turquoise color he'd expelled. The investigator softened. A prefuncter softening, she thought, and passed her a Kleenex. "I know this is difficult, but is there anything else you could share about what happened?" This was her chance to confess, but she didn't bring up the extermination. The investigator had explicitly asked her about yesterday morning, and she decided to keep her answer confined to yesterday morning. She paused as if to reflect, then said, "No." The investigator thanked her for her time, said he might come back with follow-up questions, and left for the day. Free for now. That night, Benny dined on beans straight from the can like a hobo. The slimy bottom greeted her spoon just as Gary called to see how she was doing. "Bh," she said, lying down on the floor and setting the empty can of sludge by her head. "Ba, should I come over?" "No," she said, elongating the O and turning her head to the side, feeling her skull against the kitchen lenolium. The no so childish. She picked up her head and thunked it on the floor. "I'm just laying here contemplating mortality." The plastic baby Jesus in the Ziploc bag was now in her studio inside her garbage bag of materials. "I'm coming over right now," he said with a fatigued sigh. Perhaps he dreaded the commute and another encounter with all her hyperactive neurosis, but he knew it was best not to let her stew. When he arrived an hour later, she was still on the floor. She heard her extra set of keys jingle outside and sat up, eager to burrow her head into the crook of his neck. "You might feel better if you say something," he said, coaxing her onto the futon. "Get it off your chest," he stroked her back. She pictured the warmth of his hand penetrating her spine, seeping into her murderous heart. "Get what off my chest? Do you think it was my fault?" "No, but you're obviously miserable. I mean, if you brought up your concerns, wouldn't they appreciate your honesty?" The room narrowed and darkened. She wasn't so sure. "I just have to get past this. I'll feel better with time." Gary crinkled his brow. The sharp exasperation in his sigh surprised her. "You have to share things, Benny. I don't necessarily mean now, but you have to share things of yourself to make people care. If you hold it all in, no one will ever know and they'll stop asking eventually, if they ever asked at all." Benny took a mental step backward. What was he talking about? Not the law firm or Baxter. What was she keeping from him? What secrets did he sense? In their silence, she suddenly felt very adult. Was this what it meant to be an adult? Cautiously skirting implication and crimes. Benny reached for the bottle of wild turkey, now stored under the bed, and took a tiny baby swig of it. They snoozed in their clothes for a few hours, then stripped at 3:00 in the morning and slept in a tangle. The morning proved difficult. They breakfasted wordlessly on peanut butter granola bars, crumbs scattering in the bed sheets. They moved robotically toward their jobs as if on autopilot. She watched him descend into the subway beneath the lipstick building, closed her eyes, queasy with the elevator's ascent. The raw atmosphere of the office seemed to have been cauterized overnight. The oil co case jolted forward with the arrival of a box of discs containing hundreds of thousands of files. There was no mention of Baxter, yet he seemed to be at the back of everyone's throat. Once in the vestibule, Meline murmured to Beatrice, "I still can't believe it." Benny wondered if Capra would have Beatric send out an email about grief counseling. After 9/11, her college had offered everyone counseling. She'd gone to one session, and all the therapist had said was, "You seem to be doing okay. Why don't you make a list of things you like about yourself?" There was no email about grief counseling. Instead, Kea asked Rick and Benny to stay late. At least the extra work might distract her, drown her mind in petrol. She tagged hot documents in the discovery database. She spent more time with the environmental impact statement than she was supposed to. It was irrelevant to the case, which was like everything squarely about money, hunting for ideas, flora and fauna, sparrows and grouse skittering in Wyoming sage brush. Her mind drifted in and out of the database. Without Baxter, the oil code case became Capras entirely. Benny wondered if that meant he got a larger share in the profits and whether there was any kind of secret guilty pleasure in that. Rick said Kapper felt entitled to work in a relaxed manner because he'd worked ridiculously long hours in the first 20 years of his career, that he'd never learned to drive, bought a car, or had a real relationship until he made partner at a big-time firm at age 40. He met Margaret soon after that. Rick said that everyone at Capra Zimon had it easy, that this was nothing like these sprawling white shoe law firms downstairs where an 80hour week was the norm, implying we're wimps, she wondered. A deep smoker's cough rattled from the zombiey's windowless office. Every time he coughed, Rick sneered at Benny as if Dick's inability to work through the night over and over again and simultaneously be healthy was a major flaw in his being. As if Rick were the only one here who was truly fit to work, the only one worthy of survival. All he had to do was drink a cup of soup and non-carros while he worked and worked, giving CZB their full money's worth. She wondered if his snears were an attempt at bonding with her through mutual hate, or perhaps he was just desperate for the chance to sneare at someone, anyone. She kept her expression blank, which she knew irritated him to no end. The day darkened quickly, but there was still plenty of work. Simon and Capra left at 6, expecting Rick and Benny to stay. Even the zombie left before them, and it seemed like each of them wanted to be the last to leave. Did he want to be last to win at work, or did he, like she, intend to meddle? In the long hours steeped in the unpleasantness Rick exuded, she felt compelled to get on his good side, if only to make her life a tiny bit better, a tiny bit more livable. There had been moments when she thought they could form an alliance of sorts. That one time he offered her tea, for example, and every glancing invitation to Shod and Frea, even though she dreaded those looks. His Shod and Frea was much more malicious than Ellen's. There seemed no better way to appease Rick than engaging in a little gossip. Gossip was the office's social mortar. Early in her time there, she'd invited him to lunch, hoping he'd be nicer afterward, but he'd shut her down, reminding her they couldn't both be out of the office at the same time. After that, she could never gear up to ask Rick if he wanted to grab an afterwork drink. She did not want to open the possibility of his laughing in her face. But there was always gossip, and maybe he knew something more about Baxter. The nauseating fluorescent lights were off. They worked under the warm yellow glow of their desk lamps. He'd stopped chomping on his infernal carrot sticks. Benny sat taller in her seat. From behind their shared cubicle wall as she lengthened her spine, Rick's red hair emerged, slightly sweaty against his pale forehead, then his hazel eyes, the bridge of his nose. "Did anyone say anything about Baxter's autopsy?" she asked. Rick sat back, curious. "Was there an autopsy?" "Oh, I assumed there had been," Binny said. "I hadn't heard anything about that." "Why would you assume that?" "I'd assumed it was some kind of freak allergic reaction. I guess I assumed autopsies were done as a matter of course," she said, trying to cover her tracks. "If no prior allergies were known." The words felt nonsensical and yet upon reflection retained logic. This scared her. She didn't consider herself the most logical person and now reasonable explanations formed on her tongue a tad too easily. The endless database stared back at her. Long rows of coded documents sortable by date and whether something was hot or not. They were examining every email and every board of directors meeting minutes that contained the word volume. Smug little missives about silica gel and cryop plant expansions and natural gas liquids and petroleum pipelines and volumes being excellent. Forceful flows of black oil rumbling beneath scrubby deserts. She suspected that every redacted sentence and phrase contained vital information, that everything they needed hid behind a solid black rectangle. The head honcho of the scheme had a face like a snapping turtle. She imagined a sprawling Texas ranch adorned with a pelts of polar bears and Siberian wolves hunted from the perch of a helicopter with the ease of a sniping rifle. "Did you have another theory?" Rick persisted. "Don't do it, Benny." She thought, "Be careful." Was it the guilt gnawing at her resolve? A spineless slug the size of her fist slurping at her guts. She had the sense of losing control, veering off course. Just as she'd spewed logical ideas to cover her tracks, she would now spew self-inccriminating words against her will. She'd always thought Rick resembled a clean shaven Rascolnikov, axe wielding murderer of old ladies. But she was Russ Colnikoff in this situation, not him. Sort of. That wasn't true. She reminded herself. She hadn't murdered anyone with an axe. Could she redact her thoughts, her memories to stop this endless thought sludge? Could she successfully redact these parts of her life? "No, but I mean the office had been fumigated the previous Friday. We all had to clear out and that cake that you think he was allergic to sat there all weekend. I mean, he ate two pieces of that cake and it had marinated in poison for 2 days. No one thought about that." Almost imperceptibly, Rick grinned. "Did you tell the investigator?" "Didn't even cross my mind until just now. I mean, you know how it is. Things are quiet and then all of a sudden a million things happen at once and we're running around like headless chickens and things fall through the cracks." Abruptly, she shut up. It was absurd. She felt better having said it aloud, having heard herself say it. She felt better. For a moment. Rick raised his eyebrows and smoothed his voice. "Yeah, okay. Too late, right?" Spilled milk. Was he implying she didn't care? What was he implying? Oh, God. She jumped out of her seat. From the waist down, her body trembled. Not a torso shudder like the night she'd called Beatrice. Her left leg and butt cheek twitched, and she was sure that if it hadn't been for the cubicle wall, Rick would have noticed. Only once before had she shaken like this, the one time she had to speak before a crowd in college. She'd run out of the rare books reading room before she could barf on the display case, inside of which sat a newly acquired illuminated manuscript, a jewel toned chronicle of nobility, the People magazine of the medieval era. Baxter's body had gazered hot, iridescent butterfly vomit until he died. "What the hell, Benny?" She lowered herself back into her seat. Her pants felt damp. Was she sweating or had she pissed herself? She didn't want to excuse herself. Couldn't excuse herself now. She had to act cool at least for a minute. She counted to 60, staring at the marks on the screen, the barely comprehensible document numbers, scrolling up and down with no purpose. She knew she couldn't ask Rick not to tell anyone. That would only make things a hundred times worse. Maybe tomorrow she would call the investigator or tell Beatus. Maybe tomorrow. Really, she should beat Rick to it. In the lady's room, Biddy splashed cold water on her face and neck, then rubbed her eyes and skin dry with a coarse paper towel. She filled her lungs as full as they would go until it was painful until she could feel the tips of them hitting the inside of her shoulders and hissed out a slow exhale. When she returned to the office, Rick was gone, his desk lamp. Binnie's lamp was the lone light shining in the office. Goosebumps spread across her clammy body through the conference room windows. The yellow lights of Queens wavered and the red lights warning off airplanes in route to LaGuardia winked on winked off.

Chapter 12. A Mac truck rumbled down First Avenue in the dark. Benny wound herself tightly in her bed sheets. Lurid stories about Joseph Cornell came to mind, hints of criminality. A rumor she'd stumbled upon on the internet insinuated he'd been a pedophile, abusing the neighborhood children who wandered into his yard in search of toys. But that biography she had been reading never said as much. In fact, it had been criticized for dancing around the subject, absolving him of this possible crime. In his 50s, Cornell began to hire college age assistants, always female. One such assistant found copies of Playboy spplayed open on his workt. Shoe boxes filled with pink doll parts from Woolworth sat on nearby shelves. A box for legs, a box for arms, a box for torsos. Naturally, this particular juxtaposition creeped her out. She'd quit that very day. The gleam in Baxter's eye at the phrase choking hazard. He'd known the exterminator had been scheduled, hadn't he? And if he'd known, he'd wanted it. And she let him. These ideas and images flickered through her mind in a blur, as if in a zoat trope. Why did she assign so much meaning to that gleam? The alarm blared at 7. Benny smacked it off and slept until almost 10:00. A cold shower will shock me awake, she thought. In the tiny stall, she dropped the economy sized shampoo bottle on her foot, sliced her leg open with the razor, and bumped her elbow into the wall. "Oh, Benny," her land lady said as she rushed down the stairs. "I'm glad I caught you. You forgot to pay the rent this month." "Yes," she said. "Yes, I'm late for work, but thank you very much for the reminder." Benny edged past her on the narrow stairs. She would have to continue forgetting until payday. The hair on her landlady's chin, long and wiry, glinted in the hall light. She thought of Rascolnikov murdering an old lady just to see if he could. "You still have soap in your hair. Are you going out like that?" "What are you, my mother?" Biddy stomped back up the stairs and shoved her head under the kitchen sink, finger pads

kneading her scalp. Sped to the lipstick building with wet but soap-free hair. "Sorry," she said to Meline and Beatus, dumping her bag under her desk and wrenching off her coat. She woke up the computer and poured herself black coffee, spilling some on the counter. Baxter's name on the mug taunted her. She wondered if the partners would leave it there to honor his memory, or if one day in the future, Beatrice would smash these mugs for her garden, too, just as she'd done with the old mugs. When there had been a fourth named partner who'd left, the new mugs would instead say Caprain. It reminded her of the pharaohs who demolished the likenesses of their vanquished rivals. No, that wasn't an apt metaphor, but the eraser seemed significant. She dumped her coffee in the sink as if the name on the mug had tainted it and poured more into a paper cup that came from a sealed plastic sleeve and wiped down the mess she'd made on the counter.

After the chaotic morning, she tried to approach Meline quietly. "Is it my day again for cleaning Baxter's office?" Meline jumped in her seat. "Benny, I didn't hear you there. Sorry." Benny's hand shook as she drank her coffee. "I was just offering to do Baxter's office if you didn't feel like it today." "Thanks." I Kra's keys jangled in their direction. "Benny, glad you decided to join us today." "So sorry, just overslept a smidge." She giggled nervously and backed away from the tight quarters of the reception area, feeling an awkward heat between Capra and Meline. The odd expression on his face was not comforting. She patted her head. "Damp hair is a sign of unprofessionalism." A garbage article on LinkedIn had once declared. Maybe he was just looking at her weirdly because she looked like a drowned rat.

She gravitated toward Baxter's office, which appeared neater today. All the files that had been on his desk, including the policy writer, were gone. The files that had been on the top of the credenza were gone. The pain relievers and vitamin supplements were gone. She checked the waste baskets, empty. His personal effects, too, were gone. The family photos, the baseball bat, gone. Gone. She constructed a banker's box and pulled out a file drawer, rolling up her sleeves. Rick walked by the open door, and when their eyes met, she could not help but read this sentence in his glare: "You'll be gone, too, soon enough." The objects in her mind formed a gaudy, sinister assemblage: sparkling king cake, a skull in crossbones representing roach poison, a shimmering turquoise puddle, a bony-hipped pinup girl. Without Baxter's wholesome family staring at her from framed photographs, she felt emboldened to meddle further. His personal banking statements, investments he had invested in. Maid off. Becca must have been skiing in the Swiss Alps when he found out. She imagined it's all downhill from here. Was he paying for toughs out of pocket or had they taken out loans? What about the Escalade he'd gifted her when she graduated from high school? And what could Benny do with any of this information? Was there anything to do?

As soon as she returned to her desk, Meline popped up, pulling on her coat. "I'm out of here," she said. "See you tomorrow." "You're not coming back." Meline shook her head and waved, the big cuff of her coat drooping down to reveal a solid black eight-pointed star on the inside of her wrist. This made Benny catch her breath. Was the universe providing a clue? To what? The solid blackness like a redaction, the stars, eight directions, too many ominous possibilities. "Is that a new tattoo?" Meline admired her wrist, smiled, and nodded, slipping on an enormous pair of sunglasses like an incognito movie star. Beatrice asked Benny, "Where have you been?" The door slammed behind Meline and the phone rang. Beatrice sucked her tongue, left Benny to her duty. Benny lingered over Meline's desk as she answered the phone. On her computer screen, 50 astonishing photos of the Milky Way. Photo 50 of 50. A thick luminous swirl ejaculate of the cosmos. Capra and Zimon both left early.

Benny ducked into Capra's office. Maybe she'd find the original pinups. Maybe she'd find a clue. "Is a small treat?" she joked with herself. "You can steal one." Her eyes darted over each tower of files on the credenza, on the floor, on the chair facing his desk. She shook the mouse. If someone inquired, her story would be simple. Capra had asked her to pull up an email. He'd done that before, even though he owned a Blackberry. In fact, she'd get that same email if need be. Something about a state insurance commissioner. But now, she searched for honeybear6969@gmail.com. Nothing. Should she figure out how to clear the search history? Or would that be even stranger, more suspicious? She should have just typed the letter H to see what would pop up. Stupid. Her eyes darted again around the room. In the bookcase across the office, wedged between two red leather [books], an outcropping of paper like a finger in the crack of a doorway beckoning, "Come hither." Benny exed out the search box, went to the shelf, and tucked out glossy photos. Colorful 8x10s. Georgina. Anyone could have come in here, scanned these photos, and returned them with Capra having no idea. How is she going to prove it was Rick? If she confronted Capra, he'd have to ask Rick, and Rick would never come clean. Should she save the photos as leverage in case Rick said something about her and the roach poison? The firm should not allow such images in the office, not stuck on a shelf more or less in plain sight. To leave copies on an employee's computer, that was harassment. Impulsively, she picked up a file folder and slipped one photo inside without looking to see which one it was. She settled back in at her desk, snapped the file in her shoulder bag, acted busy. Something pounded in her ears. The refrigerator, the Xerox machine, the computers hummed. Outlook notified Benny of a new email. That blue rectangle. She'd never considered it ghostly until now. The message was from Honey Bear. "I know what you did," it said. That was it. No subject line, no salutation, no signature, no allusion to Baxter or roach poison or murder, no allusion even to the pinups that had been sent from her work email to Honey Bear. Just that one cheesy slasher flick sentence. "I know what you did." She created a separate folder, H_bear, and stored the message there within the nest of another folder, miscellaneous. Should she respond? Imprudent. She should rummage around on Rick's computer to see if he'd use that Gmail account. All she'd have to do is open Gmail and type H in the login to see if Honey Bear came up. How much snooping can you do without getting caught? Her gut rejected spying on Rick's computer. Capra was one thing. He got so many emails each day, there was a slim chance of his noticing something amiss. Rick, on the other hand, Rick was organized, shrewd, and ready to skewer her. Of that, she now felt confident. The imminent skewering was palpable.

More and more she gravitated toward a plan that would either succeed or fail spectacularly: bring the pinups to Capra's attention, complain of a hostile workplace, maybe even maybe get rich through a settlement because it was a hostile workplace with these uncomfortable, inappropriate photos just sitting around intruding on her psyche. And if that worked, then maybe she could live the artist's life she'd always wanted. And this was not a small thing. If she tried to stay objective and rational, she knew she had nothing to do with Baxter's death. She had to keep exonerating herself on that front. It was sickening to keep thinking she'd put him out of his misery over and over again till the thought wore a rut in her brain. She half expected Honey Bear to read her mind and email a goading message. "Go on and try that. See how far it gets you." She had to beat Honey Bear. Beat that nasty pipsqueak to a pulp. Metaphorically, that is.

At home that night, she celebrated her plan with a glass of her new best friend, Wild Turkey. She finished a finger of it before shakily pulling out the folder with the glossy photo of Georgina. It was the one with "I love you, Bernie," written in blue gel on her belly. It had weird repercussions now, what with maid off. But also, if this was a true declaration of love, was this the worst theft possible? Would Kapper miss this photo especially? Would he care? Georgina would. Margaret. Margaret would care in an altogether different way. She loomed over her worktable, cleared, except for Aunt Ruby's perfume bottle and the installation sketches. If she was to survive this life drama, the possibility of maybe actually one day succeeding as an artist was a lifeline. Even if she had to serve prison time for manslaughter, was that actually possible? No. Banish the idea. She would have something to look forward to. The plastic baby Jesus was the perfect little bobble to build a diorama around. The perfect compliment to the little boy with the ice cream smile. Maybe she should develop a triptych of sorts: Birth, the baby, sex, the pinup altered somehow, perhaps with a martyr's mask over Georgina's face. Death, infection. Gary texted. When she didn't respond, he called. "I don't know, Gary." Vinnie swirled the amber liquid in her glass, ice cubes clinking. "I think I need to be alone tonight." She didn't want to tell him about the photos. She didn't want him to dissuade her. "Okay," he said, voice sagging. She turned away from the table. For a second, she considered consulting Ellen. Those late-night chats in college. She was the keeper of secrets. She might have ideas. "Tomorrow I'll be in a better place tomorrow." "Sure," he said. "Tomorrow. Love you." "Love you, too." She set the phone face down on the table, caught her reflection in the dark window. Her face crumpled. Damn it. She ascended the cabbage-scented stairway. Arlene, in an ankle-length flannel nightgown, opened the door, eyes widening. She pulled Benny inside where the heat immediately overwhelmed. "Mom, what? What happened? Did you get fired?" "No." "Oh, thank God. Take off your coat. What's wrong?" They sat on the sofa in the living room. Benny wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Down the hall, her father snored. "I don't know where to start." A gap-toothed portrait of a six-year-old Benny hung on the wall. Her wild, wispy curls shorn into a pixie cut. Fallout from a safety scissors self-styling experiment. Arlene petted her hand. She mentioned Baxter's death. "Oh no. And the pattern of fired people. The pattern of Rick picking them off. Oh my. And the pinups. How odd." Arlene clucked her tongue. "Honey. Honey. If this guy is trying to get you fired, why would he give you this gift of the pinups? Huh? Why would he sabotage himself like that?" "I don't know." "Because he doesn't think I do anything. Because he thinks I'm scared and he wants to torment me." "It's got to be this guy. Kapper's wife or another girlfriend." "Wait, but why? You are a young lady. You know how things go. I bet it's a veritable harem over there." "Ew, Mom, you read too many romance novels." "If this were a romance, you'd be married already." Benny picked a lint on her sleeve. "I hate to say it, but maybe you're right about the ick factor, not the married part." "Of course, I'm right. You say something to those lawyers, they'll crap the pants. You'll be fine." "But what about my job?" "Well, find a new one. In the meantime, in the meantime, suck it up. You can't afford otherwise." Benny bit her lip. "But it's terrible. What about me? What about my art?" Benny knew these questions would not persuade her mother to offer better advice. Arlene shook her head. "Oh, honey, you always wanted to do something different. Remember your fourth-grade prom?" Benny grunted and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, generating white-blue splotches beneath her eyelids. "Arlene liked to bring up this prom party in Benny's moments of distress. Remember you said everyone wants to be Esther. Esther. Esther. Esther. That's boring. I'm going to be Vashy. Uh-huh. Vashy the rebel. Vashy who refuses to dance for the king. But Vashy gets killed. Esther knows better. She games the system. She saves the day. Yeah. Remember how disappointed you were when the girls didn't get your Vashy idea?" "This isn't making me feel any better, Mom." Arlene stroked Benny's head. "What I'm saying is one of these days you will learn how to game the system." She shrugged. "Oh, you won't. That's life." Benny stuck her head under the comforter and screamed into the pillow, which tasted faintly of prune jam.

Chapter 13. Maybe quitting coffee would help quash the waves of panic, Benny thought. The next morning, she bought plain green tea from the cart, but by the time she took a sip, it tasted like metal and fish. On her desktop, a new PDF taunted her. Meline, Beatus, and the zombie murmured in the vestibule. Capra and Zimon toiled in their separate quarters. Suddenly, Simon shot out of his chair and closed his office door. A faint noise came through like a strangled sob. Benny's hand flew to her neck in sympathy. Despite all his hectoring of Baxter, or maybe because of it, the two men had often remarked they were like brothers. Capra jerked up his head, dialed into Simon's office. "Are you okay?" She could hear his voice both down the hall and on Zimon's speaker phone. She couldn't hear Zimon's reply. Kapper hung up, shuffled down the hall, slipped into Zimon's office. Rick's pale forehead, framed with faintly damp red locks, was visible over the cubicle wall. On his side, a tiny broadcaster muttered about the NASDAQ. They peered over the wall at each other, but said nothing of Zimon's apparent sob. Secure in the location of her nemesis, Benny exhaled, double-clicked on the new PDF. There was Georgina again, this time in a Polaroid, topless, g-stringed, sporting thigh-high black leather boots and a glittering 8-inch strap-on. Twisting at the waist to face the camera, she perched one small stiletto-heeled foot on the peach buttocks of a man. His head was not in the frame. She held up a riding crop with palpable relish. So very different from the woman with the tremulous voice that Benny had encountered in November. Benny coughed to hide her involuntary gasp. Moving that photo to the nest in the paralegal folder. Despite the heart palpitations it induced, she had to hand it to Georgina. This last photo suited her best. On the other side of the cubicle wall, Rick typed feverishly. And now again, the hated blue rectangle of Outlook. Honey Bear, I know what you did. Delete. Delete. Delete. Abort. Delete. Benny jumped up and rounded the corner toward the file room in an attempt to see from afar if Rick was in fact Honey Bear. If he was, though, he'd already clicked out of Gmail and back to the oil code database. She circled around the cabinets in the center of the room and grabbed an expandable file at random. She passed Meline on the way back to her desk, but Meline avoided her eyes. Capra returned to his office. Simon kept his door shut. The zombie plopped a file on Benny's desk. As she headed for the copy room, she heard Rick say, "Mr. Capra, can we meet in your office?" A door closed gently. Beatrice inhaled audibly. If you really want to murder someone, the life science teacher had said, give them an extremely high dose of potassium. Potassium naturally increases in the body upon death, so it's a lethal agent impossible to detect. Death by super banana. What the hell was Baxter doing with potassium supplements? She dared not Google it. The air seemed to crystallize. In the conference room, dust motes floated, sparkling, faintly, squeaking. She slipped a stack of papers into the fellow binder to be punched, then threaded plastic teeth into the punched holes and sealed the binding. Chemical stink and melting warmth rose as the machine buzzed. Her phone rang that afternoon. The red light flickered a moment, the ringer insistent despite its low volume. Not the shrill of an outside call, but a discreet beckon from inside the office. Would it be Honey Bear calling from the file room? A soda accusation. "I know what you did." "Can you see me, please?" Capra was on the line, unusually subdued. So that she could not hear any echo of his voice coming from the direction of his office. She wanted to ask why. Instead, she said, "Okay." That question, "Can you see me, please?" always made her apprehensive. But if he was really mad, he'd storm over to her desk, indignant, and ask with a voice like a hatchet, "Whatever happened to?" And she would have to calmly explain what had happened. Once she'd thrown Meline under the bus, said Meline had sent a document to the wrong recipient. Meline told Capra she must have gotten confused. This was well before the chaos of the morning Baxter died. It seemed insignificant in light of the tragedy. But that subdued voice, "Can you see me, please?" What about the strange tone he'd taken with Meline before the holidays about enjoying her bones? Was this somehow the same? Was it him sending the photos all along? Like when Cornell left Playboy out for his assistant to see? Capra was smarter than that, she kept telling herself. It didn't seem possible. But lately, the realm of possibility had grown exponentially. It gaped. An abyss, an eight-pointed star. Being smart might be beside the point. Being powerful might be the point. She licked the finger and turned her notepad to a fresh page, picked up her favorite pen. "You'll be fine," she told herself. With deliberate steps, she walked to Capra's office. But the steps, she hoped, were not so deliberate as to give pause to anyone watching. She channeled an image of poise. "Close the door and have a seat," said Capra. "Uh-oh. Well, that was a first." She closed the door carefully, as if the gentleness would help her somehow. A green-tinted goat flew across a Chagall print on the wall, tiny crescent-shaped whites in its eyes. It wasn't a whimsical goat. It was white-eyed with goat fear. Dizziness wavered through Benny's head as she sank into a chair. She wanted to plunge her face ostrich-like into a pit of jujubes. Capra rummaged for the right words. It occurred to Benny only now that this man named Capra had a painting of a goat on his wall. And another time this would have made her giggle. She widened her eyes and stared at the floor to prevent, even now, giggling. "Lunatic. I'll just get to it," he said finally, gaze steady. "There's some serious charges against you in this office." Heat streaked through the core of her body. Slicks of sweat formed on her forehead. The front of her neck, armpits, backside crack. The space between her toes. She said nothing, swallowed. "I wanted to talk to you alone and give you a chance to tell you a side of the story." "My side? Okay. My side? What's my side? What do you mean, charges?" She softened her voice so as not to sound defensive, simply inquiring, concerned. "I won't go into who said what, but the suggestion is that you've grown careless in your work, that you have not been as reliable as we've come to think, as you've appeared, that you've become very distracted." "What?" She leaned forward, pulled back. She urged herself not to be rash. "Did Rick say that?" Capra paused. She took his silence for a yes. "It was an accident, Mr. Capra. If I had known and if I had been able to, I would have pumped his stomach myself. Jesus." She snapped her palm tight against her mouth, elbow rammed into her knee. In a picture that came to eye level, Capra and his wife grinned at Machu Picchu. When she looked back at Capra, he appeared alarmed. "What? What are you talking about?" "Mr. Baxter, the cake, the exterminator." Margaret Capra? Margaret had emailed Baxter. Did Baxter tell her about Georgina? Did she then exact atonement for what he knew? Wait, if Honey Bear was Margaret, did she think Benny was Georgina and send the photos as evidence of her transgression? Or did she think Benny herself was with Capra, another liaison? Margaret never came to the office, so maybe she didn't know. Maybe she envisioned the same harem Arlene envisioned. Disorientation sprouted in Benny's mind, a gangly web of mold-green muck to Binise casting about. Capra said, "Please try and stay calm. Let's backtrack. Why don't you tell me what happened from your point of view?" Vinnie swallowed. Mentioning the pinups now would just confuse him. He spoke and listened in a linear, methodical way. Deviations from the linear always incited his ire. "Begin at the beginning." Capra picked up his fountain pen, ready to jot notes. "Okay. Verier's cake arrived Friday around 10:00. Mr. Baxter asked me to put it on his credenza, then left early. Toward the end of the day, we were scrambling, busy with a heap of last-minute projects. You know, we had those 12 briefs to send out. The cake is the last thing on my mind. At 5, the exterminator comes in, tells us to clear out, and we do. He sprayed pesticide all over the place. Monday? Well, you know what happened Monday? Mr. Baxter ate a slice of cake, choked on a baby Jesus, and got sick. I gave him the Heimlich. I saved him, nearly." Capron noted everything, pen gliding across his legal pad. How he enjoyed the fluidity of that pen. "Yes," he said gravely, "in the moment of the emergency. I didn't think of it, but I wanted to commend you on that. On the Heimlich." Benny exhaled. Did that absolve her of anything? It occurred to her now that "I forgot about the pesticide" might not be a suitable defense when a matter involved death. But she had no experience with criminal law. And anyway, what about everybody else who forgot? "Mr. Capra, can I ask, was there an autopsy?" "Kim refused one on religious grounds." "I thought Mr. Baxter wasn't so religious." "I don't get the sudden orthodoxy," Zimon had said. Kim was Catholic. She'd understood. Did they object to autopsies, too? Capra pressed his lips together. "It's what Bob would have wanted," Kim said. Would now be the time to mention the photos? Speak now or forever. She could at least insinuate something about Rick's pattern of having people fired. He had been at CZB for nearly 5 years. No junior paralegal had stayed with CZB longer than a year or two during Rick's tenure. The many additions to the red paralegal binder, each with their dated departure memo and instructions and advice for their successors, showed that Benny had been at the firm about 9 months. Her time could be nearly up. Capra would take Rick's word over Benny's. Had he gotten each of her predecessors fired or coerced them somehow into quitting? There was the part-time contract attorney, Paul. Rick had said he wasn't pulling his weight. And before her time, there was that paralegal he caught snorting coke in the bathroom. "Oh, I got him good," Rick had said. Maybe for Rick it was win-win-win. Baxter dies in extravagant fashion. Biddy quits or gets fired. Capra implodes. Maybe for him it was like a video game. "The point is I wasn't negligent," Benny said. "I think." A drop of sweat fell from her neck to the brown wool of her lap. "I think someone in the office is trying to set me up." She pulled a loose curl behind her ear. Capra set his pen down. He did not seem to think this madness was worth recording. Benny grew lightheaded. Was Rick banking on her being too timid to mention the photos? Maybe he underestimated her. Maybe he expected her to be too afraid to say anything. And indeed, if Honeybear were not Rick but Margaret, the intimidation factor remained valuable. Who was Margaret to blame Benny for Capra's leery? Beat Honey Bear. Out with it. "Listen," she said. "I'm not sure what anyone's told you, but there's something going on. Something strange has been happening." Capra picked up his pen. "Yes, there were strange files on my desktop. Maybe as a prank. They made me very, very uncomfortable. Unsafe, even. I don't know who did it, but someone scanned inappropriate pictures." "Inappropriate?" "Yes. Of Georgina. Boudoir photos." Capra's skin tomatoed. He glanced over Benny's head through the window into the rest of the office. His eyes flitted upward at the blinds as if he wished to draw them down, but of course he couldn't. He regarded Benny. Her legs trembled. "What do you mean?" The blood drained from his face. "Are you trying to change the subject?" "No, don't change the subject." "I... I..." Benny's head buzzed. Her face felt cold and hot at once. She glanced toward the bookshelf where the photos had been stuffed. They were gone. "Whether it was intentional or careless, I am extremely uncomfortable." Keer pressed his lips together, tapped his pen on his legal pad, and exhaled through his nose. Vinnie stared at his notepad. Was he going to write any of this part of the story down? He seemed to notice her questioning this. Then he did it. He wrote something down. This encouraged her. "Rick is up to something." She spat. "What makes you say that?" "Well, for one, he's always bragging about paralegals he's gotten axed." A faint, bitter chuckle slipped from Capra's mouth. The bitterness suggested defeat, like Rick knew too much about Capra and was already lording something over him. "You say I've been careless, but how can I work with with pornographic material shoved in my face?" "Is this about the chapter 7 case?" "It's about... there were pictures of your girlfriend on my computer." The clarity of the statement shocked her. Capra sat silently, taking it in. The phone rang and momentarily he looked unsure, but he picked up on the third ring because he could not resist. He never could let a phone ring. Still, he indicated Benny should stay, so she did. After a minute, the mold-green muck of her mind began stirring. Capra hung up and she asked, "So, what's happening? Am I getting fired?" "Not necessarily." "Not necessarily, so I might get fired." Kapper relaxed. His voice, grown brittle, regained energy as if the mention of firing brought back the issue of carelessness for him, which brought back the issue of Baxter for her, which made the mention of the photos disappear as if he could steamroll over them. "It's serious, Benny. The carelessness, the unreliability, and now we have to take into account your computer. Do an internal investigation, comb the files. This is a serious accusation you've made. So, in the interim, I think you're going to have to take some time off. I believe that's what's best. Paid leave." "Huh?" The moisture on her neck and back grew clammy. She'd [messed] up. "Paid leave." Plenty of time to scrub her computer clean. She lowered her eyes. There was the photo Benny had taken home, but admitting to theft was problematic, and despite everything that was happening, she thrilled at using it in a piece to show Alexis. What would he have said if she'd never brought up the pinups or Baxter? "I never expected anything like this to ever happen." Her voice frayed. She tried not to cry in front of Capra. Crying could render her sympathetic or just pathetic. Capra handed her a tissue. "Take the rest of the day off. Let me walk you out. Beatrice will give you a call later." As they passed the Chagall print, the sheen in the eyes of the green flying goat hinted now at a fear of destruction. An investigation. She was ruined. Capra hovered beside her cubicle to supervise her gathering her purse and coat. She didn't want to look at any of the others, their dead-eyed stares. She was just fodder for future office lore. Despite herself, she looked. Simon's gaze was pained, a glance. Rick's malicious. Dick trudging toward the coffee machine in the kitchen, jaw working on a ball of gum, seemed indifferent. A roach scuttled past his shiny black shoes. He stepped around it. Wait, but had Capra said investigation or criminal investigation? No, he'd said internal investigation, right? It was too late to ask. Beatrice appeared and put a hand lightly on Benny's shoulder, and the two women rode the elevator down to the lobby together. "Beatrice, are you going to help me out on this?" Her throat constricted. Beatrice's expression betrayed nothing. "I'm sorry this is happening. Take care of yourself." At the security gate, Beatrice asked for Benny's ID. Vinnie wanted to ask why Rick was ruining her life. She handed over the idea and tried to act calm, sane, and at the same time indignant, but not so enraged as to be considered a danger. "Thanks. We'll call you." "Okay. Be available by phone." Outside, the air was brisk. A hint of spring wafted up from the south, plunging Benny into a deep melancholy. Mored on Third Avenue. She imagined a doll version of herself, dressed in a little brown wool suit, slumped on the edge of a planter empty of flowers, just a little pile of dirty snow to keep her company. The rush hour crowd thickened. What if mentioning the pinups had made everything worse? What if Arlene was dead wrong? Minnie's mom trusted a system that was falling apart. Had expectations of financial security in old age. Expectations that somehow things would work out. That Benny's leverage would mean she'd be taken care of. No one would be taken care of. She flipped open her phone. "Seriously need a drink?" she typed to Gary. He wrote back immediately. "Margaritas in 45." She took the F train to Brooklyn. F for felon. F for [fucked]. F for failure. At least it was Friday. She had 48 hours to regain her wits, or 48 hours to plunge deeper into uncertainty. She balled all the way to the restaurant. Most people scooted away from her, but one brave lady handed her a packet of tissues before debarking. She clutched the packet gratefully, a morsel of sympathy onto which she could cling. The cavernous dark of the Mexican restaurant on Fifth was a balm. She flopped onto the vinyl seat, drained. "Can we do a pitcher of Sangria instead?" Sangria felt more appropriate than margaritas. Maybe it was the reference to blood. The salt in a margarita reminded her of mummies. Blood equals life. Salt equals a corpse. "Of course, whatever you like." Sullenly, they devoured a basket of warm tortilla chips. "Are you going to tell me what's wrong?" "I don't know that I can. I mean, I guess I can. I think, but I don't think you can tell anyone." She drank. An apple chunk bobbled against her lip. "Remember when you came over the other night, the emergency with Baxter?" Gary nodded gently, brow crinkled. "Well, I seem to be getting in trouble for it, maybe." Gary's eyebrows slowly uncrinkled. "Really? Uh, I was escorted out of the office today, like forcefully. No, not like that. Though Beatrice did put her hand on my shoulder. Anyway, I had to hand over my ID card. I have to take time off. They're investigating." Gary's head threatened to pop off his neck. "Should you get a lawyer?" Binnie wiped her sangria mustache. "Maybe. I don't know how I'm supposed to afford that. Wait, are you getting sued or arrested? What exactly happened over there?" "I don't know." She plunked her head on the table. It smelled like stale beer. "I might get fired, at least. They said something about carelessness, about me being unreliable." She thought about Ruby's apartment. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. Gary hedged. "You're very upset." "Ah, therapist mode. I appreciate the empathy, Gary. I do." She grabbed his hand. He put his other one on top. She rested her forehead on the warm pile of hands. "What I need is problem-solving. Okay, maybe Gerardo would take you back." Benny lifted her head up just enough to scowl. "I kind of screwed her over, didn't I? Leaving at the last minute." Her head shot up, a surge of anxiety propelling her. "Seriously, what if I do go to jail?" "That's ridiculous. I'm sure you're not going to jail, Gary." "I'm serious. I visited Riker's Island on a high school field trip. They didn't take us to the women's unit because it was too dangerous. I'm going to get shanked in the kidney. Ice picks, nail files, dull knives." The corrections officer conducting the tour showed an elaborate collection of homemade clandestine weapons. The young men in holding cells had hooted at her criminal sight class, thinking they were in a scared straight program. The older inmates who'd been inside for much longer were more subdued, resigned. "Breathe," Gary said, pouring each of them more sangria. "You might be tormenting yourself for nothing. We should order dinner. Let's take it to go, and you can tell me exactly what happened." Benny nodded, chewing on wine-flavored ice. Gary checked to make sure his apartment was empty. "No one's here. Let's eat at the table." The few times they dined at his place before, it was on the relative island of solitude and cleanliness that was his bed. The one clear spot in his room, apart from a sort of triangular path between the bed, the door, and the dresser. "You can go over what happened. Maybe start back from when Baxter got sick, or whenever. Whenever's the beginning." The scent of melted cheese from the enchiladas sickened Benny. She couldn't talk about it and eat. She pushed the container away. "So, here's what I think happened." Her words slurred, the half pitcher of Sangria tugging them down. Her cried-out eyes felt sunken. "Friday at 10 or so, Baxter gets a package from a client. This big white bakery box. I leave it on his credenza and he leaves early without it. But we have a roach problem, right? In comes the exterminator at like 5:30. He needs to fumigate on a Friday night to give the office time to air out. He starts off in the kitchen, closing its doors. He sprays his pesticide all around the office as we clear out for the weekend. No one, I guess, especially me, thinks to take the box home or whatever. I mean, it's a completely forgettable box. We're too busy. We're always running around like beheaded chickens with 50 million last-minute things to do. Monday, we've already forgotten about the fumigation. Baxter's one slice into the cake. It's big and doughy and I guess absorbent. But it didn't occur to me at the time. If it had occurred to me, I would have said something. I could have said something sooner. He eats another slice. There's a baby Jesus inside." "Wait, what? A little plastic baby Jesus?" "That's what a king cake is. It's supposed to be good luck." Benny rubbed her face. "He chokes on the baby Jesus. I whack him on the back, but he's still choking. And for some bizarre reason, he runs to the bathroom. I follow him there and give him the Heimlich." "Why is this all news to me? You gave him the Heimlich. That's got to count for something." "I gave him the Heimlich. That's true." Still, she felt the violence of her gesture had been unwarranted. If she were 50 lbs heavier, she would have broken his ribs. A jagged rib bone piercing a lung. "I don't know. I'm obviously no doctor. But it set off a chain reaction. Or maybe it just coincided with this horrible reaction to the pesticide. Vomit, fever." "The vomit was blue-green." "Yes, I remember." Her mouth was dry. "So, I'm working late Wednesday night with Rick on this big oil case, and I don't know, I get this urge, this need all of a sudden to talk about it with someone who knew him." She paused, glanced to the side where a little mouse dropping sat beside the floorboard. "Hi," the turd seemed to say. "He was listening to me so intently, Gary." He didn't really say anything. Her voice lowered. "He said, 'Listen, Benny, just forget about it.' But he looked kind of smug and satisfied about it." Gary leaned forward. "And here's another weird thing that happened. I can't help but feel it connected somehow. I found strange pictures on my computer, scans of boudoir photos of Capra's girlfriend." "I thought Capra was married." "Well, there's this girl, Georgina, I meant to tell you." Gary's wholesomeness had put Benny off from divulging this information. Salacious gossip seemed beneath him. Mostly she admired it. The wholesomeness? Mostly. She came to the office once, everyone just accepted it. "How come you're only telling me now?" "I'm sorry. I don't know. I guess I guess I thought you wouldn't be interested. It's just gossip." "Huh? Anyway, I doubt Kapper would be dumb enough or insane enough to put those pictures on my computer. I think someone is trying to mess with me. First, I thought it was Rick, but maybe it's someone else, like Capra's wife." "Why would Capra's wife do that, though?" "Because she's angry? Because she's never there and maybe thinks I'm Georgina." Binny hesitated. Capra's wife suspected Benny of wrongdoing. Was Gary now suspicious, too? "Listen, I think Rick's trying to get me fired. He's a sociopath. But so I tried something." She swallowed. "I told Capra about the photos and told him I feel extremely uncomfortable. Like harassment." "Yeah, except I didn't use that word, just implied it." "What did he say?" "He said all this is very complicated and that he would look into it. But see, I skipped something important. I was scared to say something about the boudoir photo sooner because I didn't really want to pull Kapper into this. I didn't believe he had anything to do with it. He's smarter than that. Anyway, at 4:00 today, Capra pulls me into his office and says, 'Someone,' I think it was Rick, but Capper wouldn't say. He said, 'Someone has been saying I'm too careless.'" "And do you think they can charge me with like, man?" Her throat closed up again. Gary handed her a glass of water. "Manslaughter." She swallowed the water and unsteadily returned her glass to the table, hand shaking. "Dear softly," Gary asked, "Like for negligence." She nodded. Wished he hadn't asked that. "And you thought you could go to jail for something like that, so you threw in the pinups, like a bargaining chip?" "I guess. Yeah. Bless the Heimlich." She rubbed her cheeks and eyes until she saw spots. Maybe he would be disgusted with how calculating she was, break up with her, turn her in even. "But Benny, you weren't the only one aware of the pesticide, right? Isn't that on everyone?" Benny's voice got very small. She didn't look at Gary when she said, "I suppose so." She didn't want him to see the lie in her eyes. "Let them eat cake." "Okay. Okay." Gary took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, his brows smoothed over. "Okay," he transformed into something else. "Ultra calm man. Maybe that helps you. Maybe not. Something's not jelling. Let's be on the safe side and assume it won't pan out. Maybe it would help if we do some research into manslaughter." Would that help? At first, the suggestion horrified her. He believed she was culpable and wanted her to get used to that idea. Then she thought maybe he meant something else. He had the same tendency she did to try to imagine the worst possible outcome precisely so that it would never occur. In bed, they hunched over Gary's laptop. The defense lawyer at the top of the search results specialized in accusations of rape and domestic abuse. "Let's pick someone else," Benny said, sorely wanting another drink, even as the room gently spun. Wikipedia listed varieties of manslaughter. She skipped down to the part about sentencing. For a lesser gross negligence, she could go away for 3 to 15 years. She pressed her face into a cushion and bellowed. Gary rubbed her back and said, "Sh, sh. We'll figure this out." Benny wiped her eyes even as they kept streaming. "Maybe in prison I'll have time to make art. I'd be a real outsider then." She laughed somewhat crazed and smashed her face into Gary's chest while he balanced the laptop on his knees and kept reading and saying, "Sh." She accidentally yanked out some of his chest hairs as she gnashed her teeth. He said, "I'll get a hold of yourself, please." Then, "Sh." Gary researched for what seemed like hours. "I think it'll be okay," he said before putting away his laptop. There is a lot that would need to be proved, but the words barely penetrated her consciousness. She couldn't sleep. Baxter was dead. At 4 in the morning, Benny rose, careful not to wake Gary. The mattress creaked as she knelt by the window, which was really just an air shaft, illuminated indirectly by a street lamp. Opening it enough to peek out, she spied forms below. The faint outlines of discarded tricycles, deflated beach balls, and plastic dolls in the toy store's informal dump. Everything speckled with crumbled plaster. Cornell was down there, she imagined, kneeling in junk, frantically salvaging, his body bent, iridescent moonlight on his fragile white hair, his breathing anxious, white grit scratching his fingertips. He unearthed a glass eyeball, cracked. Benny's phone chirped. Gray light seeped through the window. It felt like she'd slept deeply for only 20 minutes or so. She curled into a fetal position, stretching her neck and lower back, groaned. The phone chirped again. It was 10:00. Brunch. "Want to come to Brooklyn?" Ellen. Her mind felt porous. Her muscles clenched. She remembered what had happened and bolted upright. Whole body in a primal state of alertness. Gary turned in the sheets, snaking an arm around her waist. "Want to get brunch with Ellen?" He smacked his lips. His voice croaked as he said, "Seriously? Okay." In a sun-dappled corner of the restaurant's patio, tall potted ferns and orchids surrounded Ellen. She was reading Art Forum. The cover featured a black and white photo of iron cross beams and planks of wood, but in disarray. "Construction or destruction, it was hard to say." "The mister sends his regrets," Ellen said, tucking the magazine into a leather bowling bag. Their metal chairs scraped on the terracotta tile. The orchids' scent assaulted the nose: camphor and musky honey and artificial orange sweetener. It made Benny think of cough drops and laryngitis. "Picture of mimosas?" the waitress asked. "Yes, please." All three replied. Ellen and the waitress cackled. Benny relaxed into her chair and snatched up a menu. If you were personable, she thought, you can make an okay living as a waitress. But you're probably looking at $3 an hour, plus tips. "So, what's new?" Ellen asked in a sing-song voice. Benny glanced at Gary. His face was a hazy tingle of meaning. "Oh my god!" Ellen's eyes sparkled as she leaned in. "Already?" "What do you mean, already?" Gary asked. "Oh, you're not getting married?" "No," said Gary. Benny blushed. Ellen's assumption and Gary's swift denial a bruise. "You're pregnant." "No, sorry to disappoint," Benny mumbled. "Oh, thank God. No one should marry before 35. It's like running for Senate." The waitress reappeared holding a silvery pitcher wet with condensation and poured the first round of mimosas. Benny drank half her flute in one gulp. Ellen watched her. "Mom is thirsty." "Well, I might lose my job," she blurted. Ellen closed her menu with a snap. "No. What happened?" Talking amid the din of brunch seemed safe. Vinnie told the story quietly. Gary listened, fidgeting with his napkin. Ellen snorted at the mention of the photographs. The hot, sickly sweet room combined with mimosas and Benny's empty stomach worked quickly. "But Benny," Ellen said, refilling her flute. "Did you know about the roach poison?" "Well, sort of." Ellen glanced at Gary, uncomfortable. Gary met her stare. Ellen inhaled, then waved her hand. "Come on, you couldn't have known." Benny recalled all the late-night conversations with Ellen where she dreamt of violent revenge art, like putting a man's plastic head on a spike, and felt herself shriveling. Was Ellen remembering those ideas? Was she saying you couldn't have known to protect her? And what about the photos? "What about them?" "I mean, what do you think?" "Sure, they're a problem, but not for you exactly." Gary still wasn't saying anything. Why wasn't he saying anything? It dawned on Benny what was happening. When people disappointed Gary, he dropped them. He dropped them and he would drop her, and maybe Ellen would be no better. She'd ripped out his chest hair for crying out loud. She shook her head. Stay rational. And yet she was standing. "I'm not feeling so hot. I... I think I better go clear my head." The seat fell behind her with a head-throbbing clank. Yanking it upright, she headed for the door. "BBenny, wait," Ellen said. The hot plastic curtain yielded. Benny said, "Gary. Maybe she needs some time to herself." The plastic muffled Ellen's words. The cold air between patio and restaurant was a brief reprieve. In the dim hall beside the restrooms, the black hole diorama reemerged. Except now instead of the roof of a Bozart bank caving in, it was Benny's head. And the expressionless suited doll that had stood on the stone steps was inside her skull, and it was Baxter with cake smeared around his mouth or red doughnut jelly or blood. The door swung again, another burst of cold. Gary grabbed her arm. "Look, you need to try and be level-headed. Maybe today is not the day, but tomorrow it ought to be. Do you think they ever have muffins in jail?" "Benny, stop. Riker smelled like ammonia and baloney. Listen, I did a lot of reading last night and I think you're going to be okay. I don't think that's where all this is going." "You're not a lawyer, though." "I appreciate it, Gary. I do, but I don't think Wikipedia is going to make me feel better." "Okay. I don't know, Binny. I'm trying." His eyes narrowed in a way she'd never seen. "Go ahead," he said, voice flat and dry. "Hire a lawyer." "I'm sorry." Her sensible leather loafers were starting to crack. She addressed her feet, frightened now that losing him felt imminent. "I didn't mean to snap. I know you're upset and tired." "I know I'm really tired." The desire to talk to him caught in her throat, a stifled sensation between chest and tongue. "I'm going to get out of your hair today. Can you tell Ellen I'm sorry for leaving?" She kissed him a short, sweet kiss. He held

Her other arm as she did. "I'm worried about you," he murmured. Their eyes met soberly. A moment that felt real. Not a flirtation, not a performance, but something alive.

"I know," she said. "Do you want me to come with you?"

"I I'm not going to do anything rash. I need to be by myself." He nodded reluctantly, scrutinizing her before she turned away. A noxious ball of anxiety somersaulted in her belly.

Hire a lawyer. She could barely meet next month's rent. At Grand Army Plaza, she boarded the two train with no destination in mind. She felt like she was seeing things, but flying blind. Her body jolted as the train whooed toward Manhattan. The whoosh was what she wanted, the feeling of progress. Even if she wasn't fired, she realized she probably couldn't stay at CCB. Not comfortably. Rick wins either way. What a scam. How could the pattern of quitting and firing be so obvious to her, but go unmentioned by others? Perhaps because it didn't concern them. It wasn't their job at stake. It had been so easy to get the job. Maybe that was the problem. 4.0. Low desired salary. Sure, we'll give you a spin.

[ __ ] Rick and his villainous cackle. He didn't exactly twirl a long mustache or rub his hands together while she lay on the train tracks all tied in a rope. But he wasn't a good person. Maybe he thought he was doing the right thing. Careless? Sure, she was careless. So careless she'd let someone eat cake.

Time Square was where she landed. The journey out of the subterranean air and through the clog of tourists halted momentarily the train of thought. She drifted to Bryant Park, the setting for Cornell's short film Nymphlight. Was he what she was after today? A trip back in time?

A young Grace Kelly lookalike in white gossamer carrying a broken parasol sprints through a flock of pigeons. Tracks their upward flight to sky through fountain spray and canopy of trees. She disappears. Green buses barrel down 42nd Street Straight. There's a taste of 1957. Men in white t-shirts, sllicked hair, tight jeans. An elderly man in a blazer and red t-shirt slouches on a bench. The gossamer woman reappears, gazing at a girl in a blue skirt, lost yet apparently not distressed, twiddling with a button on her waist. The young woman's parasol ends up in the trash. The film ends with a dark reflection. A fountain grotesque. A sad old man in profile. A standin for Cornell drips water into the pool which ripples.

She began a pilgrimage to Cornell's old haunts. Chewing on stale soft pretzel along the mile and half walk south. She imagined flipping through stacks of $1 ephemera at the cheap Fourth Avenue bookstores, now long gone, collecting things. A photo of a film noir starlet with a cigarette perched on her pouty scarlet lip. Inspiration. She would sing a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. What? Never? No, never. And the song would echo across an astronomical map from the Renaissance. visions of Galileo Capernicus. Unpeeling these clues, imaginary gifts from the universe. Her mind moved laterally, sifting for a creative solution.

What about the Bickfords? The Netics, the Woolworths, where Joseph ate jelly and custard cream and jotted notes about girls. the Strand Food Shop, where he met a waitress, Joyce Hunter, whose frequent presence in the Cornell home irked his mother, who later stole his art for cash, whom he forgave and bailed out and later gave more money, who was murdered in her Upper Westside hotel home. Was that her destiny? Death in an SRO?

Benny's phone warmed in her fist. She was ready to pick up at its first vibration. Every few blocks she checked the screen and every few blocks there were no missed calls. She texted Gary, "Thank you for everything, heart." The heart emoticon fell far short of what it was meant to do. When Gary didn't write back immediately, she turned off her phone. Still southbound, she started seeing NYU dorms and swung east to Alphabet City. The forward motion she hoped would allow a plan to form magically, but it didn't. The curiosity shop where she'd splurged on taxiderermy sparrows was shot. Had that been where she was heading all along? A purple neon palm in a neighboring window offered $5 psychic readings. The woman inside, slyed, beckoned Benny with a finger. Benny's shoulders hunched up. She turned her phone back on and kept walking.

At 3:00, just as she slipped into a dive bar, her phone rang and Capra's voice surprised her. Ker blam went her heart. She ran outside, plugged her free ear with a finger, squinted at the slender trunk of a sidewalk tree in concentration. "Listen, Benny, I hope you're not too shaken up. Have you talked to a lawyer?"

"Not yet."

"Okay, good. Can you come in tomorrow at 11 to meet with Mock and me?"

"Sure, of course. Meet us in the lobby."

"Sure, sure." He hung up. Too quick to agree. Instead of a beer, she crossed the street for a $5 peanut butter and strawberry jelly milkshake, the kind of thing Joseph Cornell would lunch on, if there had been such an invention in his time. It was difficult to slurp the goop through her straw. The sludge sank into her belly.

The anemic yellow light sifted through the lipstick building's lobby Sunday morning. Vinnie waited by the shuttered newsstand. The security guard at the main desk scrolled through his phone. Zimon and Capra arrived together. They buzzed her through the security gate.

"Did you have breakfast?" Zimon asked, filling the silence.

"Yes." The rest of the elevator ride up was quiet. Capra's nose whistled. They settled into Capra's office. Zimman sat behind him on the edge of the credenza. At his back was the window looking down on 54th Street. The only thing visible was the glass and steel across the street.

"So, here's the deal," Kapper said, clearing his throat. "First, I'd like to remind you of the NDA you signed when you started working here."

Benny gulped. "Yes."

"This is all highly confidential, you understand? But I'm telling you in case it brings you some peace of mind, some closure. As you recall, Kim objected to an autopsy on religious grounds."

"Yes, it would desecrate the body."

Simon said, "I'm sure she knows that."

Keer said, "It's worth mentioning."

Benny hedged. "I thought she was Catholic."

"In any case," said Simon, "Bagster wanted a Jewish burial, and time was getting on. The funeral was yesterday, a small, quiet ceremony."

"Oh, so a good lawyer knows the law. A great lawyer knows the judge. So, case closed," Capra said.

"And the the negligence? Who said anything about negligence?"

"Oh, I thought I mean, didn't Rick imply?"

Capella long blinked. "Let's set Rick aside for a moment. You'll be relieved to know that criminal negligence would be a lot to prove, and without Kim, there's nothing doing. She wants to move on."

Benny sat back and exhaled. A weight began to ever so slightly lift. "But um we do still need to have a discussion about your future, about what's best."

"What's best? You're not happy here, Benny. And unfortunately, you let it show in your work. Times are tough, but we're sure you'll find a great job. We're prepared to offer a generous severance, and of course, you can apply for unemployment."

"What? What about the pictures? Is this about the pictures?" Zimon asked.

"What pictures? On my computer. I told Mr. Capra on Friday. Naked photos of Georgina scanned to my desktop."

Simon grimaced. "Show us," he said, voice level. It was like the grimace wasn't from shock, but from embarrassment that Benny would even pursue the issue. At this point, they loomed over her at her computer, a cloud of Old Spice and Ben Gay. She checked the email folder, the parallegal folder, the trash. She searched the whole hard drive, but it was excruciatingly slow. Capra's nose whistled again, and it sounded angry now. Once he had joked, "Your cheap boss should buy you a new computer." And Beatrice had suggested she should give the tower a hearty kick. No images appeared. It had all been scrubbed.

"The pictures were here. I'm positive."

"Look, I think you're getting very mixed up and emotional." Capra said, "Take the time off."

Simon said, "A clean slate."

Benny stared at the search box on her screen. Zero files found.

"A generous severance," she said.

Keer softened. "Yes. I thought times were tough. Did this come out of Baxter's extra policy writer?"

"What are you?" Capra's lips pursed, making each word a dart. "the one naming the firm as a beneficiary in case of his death."

Simon said urgently, volume rising. "Do you not see a good deal when it comes to you on a silver platter?"

Capra spoke firmly, quietly, eerily calm. "One month's pay."

Minnie found herself back at her interview, wondering if she'd asked for a high enough salary. She had no idea what constituted a generous seance, but now seemed like the wrong time to dig in her heels. She remembered when Capra had laughed at a summary judgment as if he'd gotten away with something scot-free. Her mouth twitched. at the Twitch. He added, "You've been here less than a year. Most people get one week's pay per year worked." She rose. She looked neither of them in the eye. "Get out of here," she thought. "Just get out."

"Okay," she said.

"Very good," Capra answered. He returned to his office. Simon and Benny followed. Capra pushed a short document across the desk referring to the NDA in the severance and a windowed envelope with a check ready to go. Beatrice was in on it. Benny assumed. Simon handed her a pen. Well, she uncapped the pen.

"At a girl," Zimon said quietly as she signed. The flying goat on the Chagal print by the door braided. Her stomach squirmed. Settlement. A cedar box of dirt filled with worms. The viewer may add soil at top them and tamp them down, but the worms persist, wriggling up, slimy against the viewer's palms.

That night she found herself back in Kensington. Balling and hicoping with her head in her mother's lap, Arlene stroked her head. "Maybe it is for the best." The worms of settlement writhed. Albert patted her head and said, "They're there." and steeped a concoction of sleepy time extra and tension tamer tea. Added a big squirt of honey. They opened up the couch and tucked her in with an old comforter. A Wheel of Fortune marathon washed her in a rainbow swirl.

The next day, while Arlene went to work, Benny and Albert walked to the bank on Park Circle to deposit the check. "Maybe I could get a job in your shop," she asked. "Hacking wood all day wouldn't be so bad." He did not wave his pinky stump in disapproval. Maybe. His lower lip turned. "Take some time to think."

Albert went to his shop on Prospect Park West. A new cafe had opened. The nearest place that wasn't a greasy spoon. Alone. Benny shivered on the edge of one of the freshly painted Adirondac chairs outside. They sat in a spritly row of red, white, and blue. The cafe had a stupid name, the boonies, but it was perhaps appropriate given the cell reception at her parents' place. She flipped open her phone and dialed a number anyway. Across the street, Canadian geese lurched over the treetops, honking in syncopation.

"This is Alexis."

"Oh, hi. Um, this is Benny Greenson."

"Who?"

"Benny. Benny Greenson. We spoke just after New Year's. You saw a diarama of mine and said to call. Oh, I left you a message a while back. I'm sure you're very busy, so I thought I'd give you another ring." A breath. "Help me out here. The little boy and the maragolds."

"Yes, right. Charming." Cars whooshed by.

"Tell me more about your work." An ambulance siren made her cringe. "Well, uh, she hadn't had to talk about her work in a long time. I like to do dreamy assemblages, but I've also played with silicone. My senior year show was a silicone cast of my foot." Why was she bringing that up? Her professor had liked the title, finding my footing, but it had been so on the nose, it was like a curse. And here she was, and she still hadn't found her sticktick. Gary was right. She needed to practice one. "I like to combine found objects to create a dreamlike narrative." She said, "I'm a big fan of Joseph Cornell, his ephemeral qualities." It was so jumbled. She was throwing anything out there, hoping something would stick.

"Oh, yes. Yes, I can see that. You know, there was a lovely show. Now I'm just thinking aloud. I'll have to go back and look. I'd make a terrible art historian, huh?" she said, her speech cranking up in speed as she seemed to position Benny in a certain slot. "I'm trying to remember who was in it. Jackson Pollock, I think. Pollock or someone of that stature in the front in an intimate room of Cornell's assemblages in the back. I might like to do something like that. The big and the intimate together. The intimate sort of a dark, warm cocoon." Her voice resonated on the last word, as if she dreamed of crawling inside herself.

"Oh," Benny recalled something about that show. Cornell had felt slighted by the arrangement, pushed into a corner. Still, she surged forward.

"Come by and show me a few more pieces," Alexis said. "Whatever you like. No promises, of course, but maybe we'll spark something." Spark something. had a flirtatious ring to it. The sail of art a dance of seduction. Her chest pounded, her throat opened. Something to live for.

"Happy to when?"

"Oh, anytime, I suppose. Uh-oh. I'm sorry. I got to go, but do come by. A few pieces." She bit her lip. Birth. Sex. Death. Birth. Sex. Death of childhood. the little plastic baby, the pinup, the alter to the ice cream smile.

She put off texting Gary again. He would be happy for her. She was sure, but he hadn't texted, and she couldn't tell if he was giving her space or wanted it for himself. Preemptive protection. She would tell no one until she had something real. At her work table, she collected a raggedy Andy doll, a toy gun, a John Wayne figurine, tiny plastic colts, tumble weeds made for architectural models, and monopoly money, credit card offers, foreclosure documents, pocket-sized Bibles, headlines from the Wall Street Journal. Every distinct picture of Bernie Maidoff's sorry face available in print. Marty GR beads and multicolored sugar and little pink plastic baby Jesus's. She wanted to make things that turned off the analytical brain and tugged tongue and heart in opposite directions. But these were the objects she compulsively collected. The ones that made her feel like she had some minuscule bits of control. Obvious statements, but that was what compelled.

In her fantasy world, if she'd made her lipstick building installation, one floor would be wild, wild Wilmington and encompass all of these objects. An avalanche of rogue cowboy businessmen. Game show style martyra hysteria. Televangelist pyramid schemes. Maid off medi slot machine cacophony. An unsettling soundsscape of laugh tracks and mania. And often a dark corner. Something less careful viewers might miss. A hunchbacked underworld god of jewels. A quasimoto Pluto, a mixed metaphor monster who wants to be loved, whom you want to love, but who must die. Skin, silicone erupting with dim emeralds and shining boils, chest subtly rising and falling with spasmotic wheezes.

Googling prosthetic eyes again. She found something a bit more affordable than the $60 peepers she'd first found in November. She would see Alexis soon before Alexis forgot her again. 18 seemed like a lucky number to start with. She splurged on nine pairs 2-day delivery. Couldn't lose momentum now, could she?

Chapter 14. The box of eyeballs arrived on time. She still hadn't decided where to move, how far out she would have to go to keep things affordable. She read the rest of Yayoi Kasama's autobiography. Kusama was somewhat contrite about her meanness to Cornell, but justified it by explaining how clingy and needy he had been. "Dolly picks me up in a Rolls-Royce," she said to him when he was recovering from prostate surgery and asked her to visit. "Can't you show more respect for the love of your life?" It was a depressing anecdote, but the arrival of the eyeballs buoied Benny up. She cut open the cardboard and lifted off the bubble wrap. Pupils up, nestled in egg crates cushioned with paper shreds, a mix of blue, blue, gray, gray, green, brown, hazel, violet.

She bought a spring form cake pan. She set it on the floor and sat beside it with a box of eyes. In a circle inside the pan, she laid out the tower's base. Six balls, irises out. She nestled Olsen's shard in the middle. The piec's special secret. Chewed on a green mic and Ike and contemplated this first tentative step. Nursed lime flavoring off a moler. The problem was, she had to remove the cake pan structure to see the work clearly. What if it sucked? Yet, gluing the balls together was too much of a commitment. She wanted to see what she was doing, but premature glue could ruin her investment. The adhesive could only go on after she knew it looked right. Conundrum. She exhaled. "Use your imagination, Benny. You have to start somewhere. You have to take each step." She sniffed at a pink mic, held it on her tongue, studied a laminated anatomical diagram, soaking up the names of eye parts she didn't know. Koid phobia, optic disc, aquous humor, ideas to collect and ponder. She kept the first layer in the pan scaffold, added five more eyes on top, the next level in the tower. Crystals of artificial strawberry expanded on her tongue.

The phone vibrated. "How are you doing, Gary?"

"So sorry I haven't been in touch," she wrote. "It's been tumultuous."

"I'm sure. Meet me for dinner. Her heart surged, then sank. Was this his version of we need to talk? Anywhere you like, anytime. Lots of free time now."

"You lost your job."

"I'll tell you in person. 5:30 the Flushing Main Street Station. Can't wait. Miss you."

An excruciating pause. "Miss you too, Benny." She surged at that. He misses me. In a bout of feeling good, in about of thinking clearly, she deconstructed the eyeball tower and discarded Olsen's eyeshard. The pirate banker's eye had no place in her tower. It was, she thought, a relic of a rotten system, and the relic need not be at the core of her piece. Would that make any sense to her? Later, she delicately placed the eye shard in the waste basket that had held her rubber octopus and all manner of materials hoarded and discarded before the trial. She put the eyeballs back in the cake pan. She couldn't bear to stay inside and work out a thorough solution just now, even though she had hours to kill. She put a little sketchbook in her purse and headed for a Queensbound train. At the top of the stairs, she stopped herself, having a better idea. Went east to the 59th Street Bridge, zoomed up in the gondola over the East River to Roosevelt Island, past the blackened ruins of the mental hospital where Nelly Bllye had feigned insanity. In that report she'd written in middle school, that unit on Great New Yorkers, the story of the cold baths had struck her, how the inmates have been treated with icy water. The island was called Blackwells before being renamed Roosevelt. Names masking identity, changing identity. Maybe she needed a new name, a persona. What was Ruby's maternal grandmother's maiden name? What had she wanted? The usual, husband, children, health, happiness. As a newcomer, a nimblefingered child in Brooklyn, she rolled paper flowers around wires for lady's hats. Her daughter became a seamstress. Her granddaughter Ruby manned a perfume counter. What had Ruby dreamed? snapdragons in gladiolas and a cut glass vase graced her nightstand every day until she couldn't get to the florest down the street. Had the lack of flowers propelled her decline?

Benny continued on to Queens. Joseph Carell had lived on Utopia Parkway. She knew he wasn't the answer to her problems. Yet, in some intangible way, she needed to see where he'd lived. glimpse through a basement window, the place where he'd worked for hours and hours alone, as if she would see his fragile bird-like bones. The back of his neck, small, wrinkled, and vulnerable. The idea of him was like a meditation stone she thmed in her pocket. Despite the lurid gossip about him, he maintained an aura of innocence. He'd once made an art show for children with chocolate sodas and artwork at eye level for little ones. It was an idea that made her happy. It had perspective. In his biography, in the first pages, the author said that Cornell's childhood didn't teach him to meet the challenges of life, but how to avoid them. That in order to survive, his life would need to be a profound act of imagination. That idea had stopped Benny in her tracks. She wanted and didn't want to know more. She worried knowing more would ruin his art for her. But even as she learned more about him, read more about the private details of his life that he surely would not have wanted made public and the purant insinuations on anonymous internet discussion boards. He continued on in her mind as a figure on which she meditated, not as a goal. She did not want to live like him, but somehow a guide. She could not explain it.

The tract of land that became Utopia queens had been named by developers wanting to build real estate for Jewish families who moved up from the tenementss of the Lower East Side in the late 19th century. The developers went bankrupt before they could build. So, it remained farmland until the 1940s when another developer, building itself as America's largest home builder, put up 24 blocks of two and three-bedroom Cape Cods and Colonials. Cornell's family didn't settle into one of these developments because they'd already been living there. They lived in an older house on Utopia Parkway, having moved out of a rambling Victorian in Nyak. His mother in Nyak had been accustomed to the finer things, trips to Hudson Valley resorts, bridge parties, lace doilies, operetas. After becoming a widow and moving to Queens with Joseph and Robert, whom she'd considered a burden, she'd felt deeply bitter. This was not the life trajectory she'd hoped for. The parkway ran north south along the neighborhood's easternmost border. Benny took a bus from the train in Q Gardens, intending to stroll the length of the parkway. She had to give up the studio soon. Maybe she'd move deep into Queens. She'd see if there was a plaque on Cornell's house, if it was landmarked, if she could divine anything from it, if it had a ghostly presence. She thought about meeting Gary, right when he got off work for the day. They could reconcile. They could travel the world together, one stop on the seven train at a time. Or maybe over Bulgogi, he'd let her down gently, ruin Korean barbecue for her forever. Her thoughts, her neurosis tainted everything. It amazed her that some people lived and worked in one burrow their whole lives, maybe even never left that burrow. Cornell in later years shrank his world, rarely leaving Queens, preferring the Flushing branch of the library to the stately central branch on Fifth Avenue, where the reference librarians had shared with him their vast knowledge of the children's literature archives and invited him to display his work in the children's reading room. This one burough existence was as common for residents of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn as it was for many a Manhattanite who vowed to try and leave the island at least once a month and failed. There were so many tiny self-contained universes. What was the cosmology of New York City? Which areas were dark stars, red dwarves, which were now growing, pulsing with the strongest gravitational pull? Where would she be pulled? Would she find work in the Brooklyn Navyyard? Could she find herself a nice black hole in which to disappear?

No plaque marked the building. It was not a historic landmark. Hesitating in front of the small green lawn, she approached the unassuming house, hoping whoever lived inside would not chew her away. Sunset through the smog shown orange fuchsia against its white sighting. She touched what had been the Cornell house where Joseph had cared for his ailing brother and his nagging mother where he survived them both and grieved their losses in a nightmare of an empty house where he'd subsisted on weak tea and store-bought cake. where in the basement he'd spent countless hours alone arranging and rearranging his collages and dream boxes forever works in progress he could almost never let go. The musty windows reflected pink light on Benny. She glanced over her shoulder at the sun, turned back to Cornell's house with a flare of light in her eye. The image of his house doubled and twisted in the air as her gaze moved up beyond its sloped rooftop toward the sky as if it were a film projection refracted through a prism. A series of film stills overlapping a mixedup zoatrope, a three-dimensional eightointed star. The twisting house grew enormous in its multiplying. Its overlapping corners forming facets like a cut glass perfume bottle or a tower converted from steel and granite to pink rock candy or thousands of shards of cracked glass eyes catching light. Silvery windchimes stirred on a neighboring porch. Dazzled, Benny focused on the cool grass at her feet, the damp air, a haze of twilight lavender. She thought of that botched senior project, her silicone foot, and contemplated the difference between silicone and skin. She slipped off her shoes and stood on the grass. In her mind's eye, the storied house pulses, hovers, grows. A gray dog barks from an open window on an upper floor, a powerful animal with warm eyes. Lacy white curtains drape his muscular head. She imagines the pleasant touch of soft eyelids on his fur. The way the fabric brushes the dog's skull, the way is draping seems maternal. She steps away from the house and waves. And the dog barks louder. "Hi. Hi. Hello." Softly. She smiles and the dog hollering raises up his snout to the paling disc of the sun.

about the author. Anka Elsoi is the author of the novel Daughters of the Air, which Shelf Awareness called a striking debut from a writer to watch and the Seattle Review of Books called a creation of unearly talents. Her writing appears in Orion Magazine, Lilith Magazine, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Hugo House, Jack Straw Cultural Center for Culture, Artist Trust, and Vermont Studio Center. Originally from Brooklyn, she has lived in Montreal, Seattle, and now Chicago, where she teaches creative writing and lives with her husband and son.

Acknowledgements. I am grateful for the many people who helped this book into existence. Thank you to Christine Nylub once again for your brilliant editorial insights. Thank you kind early readers of whole or partial drafts. Chris Walter, Larry Zuckerman, Corin Manning, Nancy Joy Yun Kim, Christristen Miis Young, Sonora Ja, Lisa Nicholas, Paul Vega. Rest in peace dear friend Peter Montford, Lacy Clemens and Irene Keller. and my 2015 Jack Straw Writers Program cohort, Linda Andrews, Emily Bedard, Laura Dah, Bernard Grant, Claire Johnson, Martha Crryer, Aaron Malone, Ross McMakin, LJ Morren, Matthew Sherman, and Janine Walker. Thanks to Brian Edenfield for the EFrantics event at the Greg Cusera Gallery, which generated Benny's idea for the lipstick building art squat installation. Thank you to for culture for supporting this novel with a 2014 art project grant. Thank you to the Jack Straw Cultural Center, Levi Fuller, Joan Rabinowitz, and Kevin Craft, 2015 writer program curator for supporting this book. Thank you to David Eaton and Sonia Cook for providing feedback on legal content in the book. Any mistakes are, of course, mine. Thank you to Amanda Thomas and Feliza Casano and everyone at Lantern Fish Press for being such lovely, hardworking people. Thank you always to my parents for encouraging my creative pursuits. Thank you always to Michael Podloic Kent for reading multiple drafts and supporting my endeavors. Thank you Judy Kent and Annabelle Barklay for help watching Damian so this novel could get done. Thank you Damian, sweet boy for being enamored with lights and string. This is Kelly Taker. We hope you have enjoyed dreams under glass. Text copyright 2022 by Ena Locki. This audio book is published by Arrangement with Lantern Fish Press. Audio production copyright 2024 by Script Audio. This program was produced by B Audio Limited. All rights reserved.