“It wasn’t the dark. I’m not afraid of the dark. But this is better. Thank you.”

“Sure thing. Okay now?” She was crossing the room, making a wide arc around the stage, weaving through the chairs.

“Yeah…hey!” Milo called to her as she started to mount the stairs again.

“What?”

“Why’s there a bed on stage?”

“Don’t ask.” She trudged upstairs again. Milo heard her scuffling around, then slumping down and groaning quickly into slumber.

In cahoots. Definitely in cahoots.Milo whispered to himself, “I’m going to watch her. I’m going to find out about her. Her and Devore. They’re up to something. They think I’m dumb, but I’m going to fool them.”

No thorazine tonight. His muscles itched in places he couldn’t reach to scratch. Every time he closed his eyes, he was deeply asleep; if he winked them open again, it was as if he’d been out for hours. Every sensum was thick with Devore’s malevolence and Sylvie’s conspiracy. Like a bombarded infantryman: “Keep a tight ass, Milo,” he told himself.

Then Dede was cradling him in her lap, saying, “Everything is made of numbers, Milo. That’s what Pythagoras said. Whatever you are, honey, something’s the same, see? But what? Is it numbers? Euclid’s all wet; there’s nocongruence between a little boy and a BankAmerica Mastercard, is there? Nosimilarity , like angles and stuff. They’re not even the samegenus of topological space, because you got holes through your head and your butt and your little winkie, but a charge card’s all connected everywhere.

“Something’s the same though, because you go from this to that and back again, and whatever you are, you’reyou, aren’t you? So how do you do it?”

“Why do you care, Dede?”

“You do such nice things for me, Milo, when you do those change-ums, I never want it to stop. I gotta figure out what’s going on, so we don’t lose you.” She turns pages so furiously, a few of them rip. The librarian says something, but Dede pays no attention. “Maybe it has something to do with equideco…”

From upstairs: “Hey! You okay?”

“What?”

“You were screaming again.”

“Sorry!”

There was no sunlight in the cellar, and therefore no time, just blue. Milo slept and woke like a subway car surfacing and descending through a dark metropolis. He got up to find the toilet. He stumbled past the control board “backstage,” a closet with massive, ancient rheostats, a clipboard on a string, empty Coke bottles, and dust. Passing beyond the sphere of the backstage light, Milo knew where he was by the sound of his footsteps. They echoed more sharply as he reached the tiled room.

The bathroom door was held open by a mop bucket full of dirty water. On its scummy surface there were rainbows. Daylight leaked in through the bathroom window. Milo walked into the light and relieved himself into a urinal. The daylight, the tinkle, the morning breeze, were like a benediction. He walked out past the rainbows, the dimmers, and the stage, to the stairway. He smelled bacon.

He started up the stairs, when a gigantic crow peeked into the stairway from above, cawed a few times and said, in a high, scratchy voice, “Soup’s on, little man!” Milo stumbled three steps backward.

Then Sylvie’s face appeared next to the crow’s. She continued, in the crow’s voice, “Eggs and toast for humans!Picturesof eggs and toast for the puppets!” Then she thrust out one arm, at the end of it a puppet made of five or six tiny men in trench coats-one puppet with multiple jaws that moved together:“Hiss!

Boo!”

“Oh shut up,” Sylvie said, “or I’ll give you a picture of angleworms to eat.” She pulled out of sight, her puppets with her. A second later the tiny men reappeared.“Angleworms!” they shuddered. “We’re not partial toangleworms! ” They scooted off.

The walls upstairs were covered with posters, masks, hand puppets, and marionettes, from minuscule to elephantine, hanging by hooks and wire. There were posters for wassail consorts, pantomimes, plays by people named Beckett, Ionesco, Tzara, Artaud, old cigarette ads enameled in three colors, embossed on tin; also a wall- sized photograph of a man gleefully smiling as he leapt, bird like, from a high window onto the street below-a bicyclist trundling past, unawares. “SAUT DANS LA VIDE,” it said underneath.

“LEAP INTO NOTHINGNESS,” Sylvie explained.

Among the masks there were bug-eyed Balinese demons with teeth like tusks; there were lions’ heads, monkeys, frogs, grotesque insects, the mask of a beautiful girl with a skull mask nested underneath, also a variety of clown noses and Swiss carnival masks, larval, exaggerated, alive, that Sylvie said she had received from a “business associate” in Basel. And the puppets: the huge crow and the little men back on their hooks already, mustached villains with black hats, Punch and Judy, Orlando Furioso in a plumed helmet, and also a variety of animals and inanimate objects. There was a printing press puppet, a city block whose tenement windows were mouths, a sky with star eyes and the moon for a mouth, a mountain, a lock and key, a long-legged airplane, and a truck with teeth under its hood, among many still stranger.

Everything has its portion of smell.Sylvie had taken down the chairs from one round table and was laying down two steaming dishes of eggs and toast. Several flies accompanied her, and when Milo approached, they found their way to his face and neck. He slapped at them.

“Don’t,” Sylvie said. “Those are friends of mine, Eric and Mehitabel. The small one is Beulah. Leave them alone. They’re from upstate.”

“Are you for real?”

“I’m a vegetarian, okay?”

“What about the pig? I smelled bacon.”

“Nope. I can’t help what kind of grease is caked on the burner. That’s the owner’s, not mine. Pull up and chow down, little man. We’ve got a day ahead of us.”

Milo sat. Sylvie poured them both coffee. “You’re strange,” Milo said.

“Strange is good. I like strange.”

“You’re not rich. Not if you sleep inthis place.”

“Did I say I was rich, Milo?”

“Rich as Croesus.”

“No, you got me wrong.” Sylvie squeegeed egg yolk with her toast and folded the toast into her mouth.

“Rich in creases, that’s what I said. My costume gets all creased sleeping here under the tables, see?

Rich in creases, is what I said. It’s a Biblical locution.”

“Sure. Who owns this place, ifyou don’t?” Milo nibbled at his toast, played with the spoon in his coffee.

Nonchalant-that’s the ticket.

“The Grass and Trees?Some guy you don’t know.”

“You work for him?”Bet it’s Devore, he thought.

“Hell, no. This is afellowship I got here. No strings attached. Guy appreciates my artistic ability, see?

Why aren’t you eating? Miss the meat?”

“No.”

“Well?”

He started on the eggs, and then he couldn’t stop. He ravened the toast and licked the plate. Sylvie poured him some more coffee. “Hurry it up, though. We got a gig the other side of town.”

“We?”

Sylvie shooed Milo from the table, cleared it, and had him put the chairs back up and sweep while she did the dishes. She ducked behind a counter into a small enclosure covered with green striped awning, and fished out two black suitcases. She handed one of them to Milo. “Wait a minute.” Sylvie unlatched her case and pulled out a collapsible top hat, flattened to a disk. She contrived to blow on it, while flexing it just so, and it popped open. She twirled the hat between her fingers so that it wound up on Milo’s head. He flinched. She grabbed her bowler from behind the counter and twirled it onto her own head the same way. “See? It’s just business, little man. Now you’re withme. Moon and Stars!”

That’s what was stenciled on the suitcases, too:

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