Molly is staring bullets at me.

What?

I don’t know.

How is he? I say.

Yeah, she says.

He pissed himself. He’s not happy.

Molly wraps her arms around herself. She’s pretty, so pretty. I wonder what it’s like to be pretty. If it gives you strength. If it pulls you under the surface, somehow. Molly begins to rock back and forth and I know she needs me to talk to her, to sit on the bed with her and make sense of things but she’s going to have to wait.

Wait, I say.

Back down the hall and I have a feeling that Jude is lurking, waiting for me in the shadows. Jude will soon jump out at me and stick her tongue in my ear and say something freaky. Jude is always lurking somewhere, lately. But there’s no sign of her. I can’t smell her and instead I run into Huck. He’s crouched in the hall, a beer in each hand.

Hey, he says. Hey, man.

I stop and stare down at him. Huck is a big man but he manages to shrink into the shadows. He lifts one of the beers to his mouth and drinks. Then wipes his mouth on his sleeve.

Hey, I say. Are you okay?

No, he says. I’m about two thousand miles from okay.

Where is Jeremy?

The fuck I know. He went off with Jude somewhere, and Daphne.

Nice, I say. That gives me something nasty to think about.

Huck shivers. Uh-huh.

What about Miller?

The fucking Lizard Room, he says. Feeding another rabbit to his snakes, probably.

He’s watching us.

Fuck him. You want a beer?

No, I say. Thanks. The kid is waiting for me.

Huck crumples the empty beer can into a jagged knot and tosses it into a potted plant. He shakes his head and says, you tell that boy to keep the faith.

The boy is swimming in the bathtub when I return, the bubbles around him like fallen clouds. His head comes out of the water and he is slick and dark as a seal. I offer him the action figures and he takes them from me, murmuring. Batman he’s familiar with. But I have to give him the historical lowdown on the Silver Surfer. He listens intently, nodding. He frowns when I tell him how lost and heartbroken the Surfer was and there is a brief, contemplative silence between us.

Does his surfboard float? he says.

I smile. That’s the question, isn’t it?

Sam doesn’t want to wash his hair or his face but I figure he’s wallowing in enough cucumber bubblewater to purify a pig, so I leave him alone. He asks me to stay in the bathroom with him until he’s done with his bath. I tell him not to worry. I’m not going anywhere. I sit on the floor with my back against the wall, watching him play with Batman and the Surfer.

The surfboard does float.

It tends to fall over when the Surfer is actually standing on it, but the boy doesn’t mind. He’s got Batman hanging upside down from one of the taps, his legs tangled up in the cord of his own grappling hook. The boy is narrating.

Help me, says Batman.

I’m too sad to help you, says the Surfer.

Help me. I’m drowning over here.

Okay, okay.

I smoke a cigarette, dropping ashes into the toilet. I know that I shouldn’t smoke around him but this has been a long fucking day and I’m waiting for the boy to ask me about the rabbit. I want to tell him the rabbit wasn’t real. It was a fake rabbit and I know it looked real and maybe that’s why it was so disturbing but I know this is bullshit.

If you lie to a child, he will smell it.

He will smell the untruth coming from your skin like the sweet smell of rot and he may accept it or he may not, but he won’t thank you for it.

Footsteps and there’s a knock at the door, soft. The boy is spooked and disappears underwater. I figure it’s Molly at the door, come to tell me something. But when I open the door it’s Jude and I guess she sees my face change. She hands me a glass of scotch and a clean T-shirt for the boy. Her lips move to form the words I’m sorry and she touches my hand before turning away. I shake my head. Her talent for slipping and sliding between evil and kindness is extraordinary. I tell myself that everyone is this way, that most people are just very clumsy about it. I take a small, medicinal swallow of the scotch and it feels good, it goes down like liquid smoke and I am surprised to realize this is my first drink of the day. I thump the side of the tub with my knuckles and smile, remembering how I used to lie underwater with my eyes shut tight, the faraway echoes stretching in my skull.

Knock, knock.

The boy comes up for air and I tell him it’s time for bed.

He convinces me to let him stay in the bath for five more minutes. Five more minutes. He says it like a mantra and I imagine he has had this conversation with his father a thousand times.

Five minutes, ten.

I am not too concerned about bedtime, you know. What difference does it make. The boy is a hostage. It’s not like he has a soccer game tomorrow. And after a while, he tells me that the water is cold, that his skin is getting a million wrinkles. I pull him out of the tub and wrap him in one of the big black towels. I offer to help him with his T-shirt but he says he doesn’t need any help because he’s five and a half.

I’m big, he says.

Okay, I say.

I watch him wrestle with the T-shirt. He has a little trouble negotiating the second armhole but he sticks with it. The shirt is on backwards but he doesn’t care. His hair is sticking up all over the place and he looks like a little madman and when he smiles at me, I am tempted to take him to bed with Molly and me but I’m not sure this is a good idea and I know that Jude wouldn’t like it.

I take him through the library and down the stairs, taking care not to clue him in to the workings of the secret passage. This has to do with instinct, or respect for Jude. I tuck Sam into bed and he promptly burrows into the corner with the stuffed bear. He arranges the pillows around himself, like a fort. He’s got Batman in one hand, the Silver Surfer in the other. Vengeance and poetry. There are no books to read and I wonder if I should go up to the library and look for a copy of The Lord of The Rings, but the boy’s eyes are heavy already and I don’t want to leave him. I flip on the television, thinking cartoons will give him pleasant dreams, colorful and two-dimensional and easily resolved. If he was my son, I might lie down next to him and let the sound of my heartbeat ease his mind. But he’s not my son and I am reluctant to get too close. I don’t want to freak him out so I sit down on the floor beside his bed and halfway through Johnny Quest the boy is asleep and snoring softly.

twenty-seven.

MOLLY’S ROOM, NIGHT.

I lie on her puffy white bed, smoking a cigarette. I wear filthy blue jeans and nothing else. I am exhausted and pissed off about the rabbit, but I could be worse. I have a fresh glass of scotch balanced on my chest, my third of the evening. I am staring dumbly at the little television across the room. The sound is low but I can just make out the numbing dialogue of a sitcom involving a gang of attractive white people and their innocuous homosexual black pal. I flip around until I land on CNN, hoping to find something about Sam.

On the bed beside me is Miller’s script. The Velvet.

Yeah.

I don’t know what I think of that title. Too oblique, too nihilistic, or too esoteric or something but it’s not my problem. The Velvet is Miller’s baby. Molly has left the room, to get into character. She wants to run a scene with me and of course she already has her lines down. I have agreed to cooperate, but I’m going to read my lines from the script in a voice composed of discarded feathers and broken glass.

Molly enters, wearing white underpants and a little white tank top. Her hair is wet. She’s carrying an open bottle of red wine and an orange. She tosses the orange on the bed beside me. Takes a drink of wine and wipes her mouth on her wrist. She offers the bottle to me and I shake my head. I put the glass of scotch aside and sit up, the script in hand.