The boy looked at the beveled glass, the spattering of color on the marble table-top, the mercury-filled tubes, and stood there waiting for the woman to say something more about it. Actually, though, he knew the theory of the tubes himself. Heat causes metal to expand and the pendulum being metal will lengthen, lowering the center of gravity and therefore slowing the clock–not much, of course, infinitesimally, as a matter of fact, but when one is counting seconds over months or years the differences become significant, then profound. The mercury in the tubes is confined so that it can only expand upward, raising the center of gravity so the effects cancel.

(Well, he thought, standing patiently, politely, at the table, at least he could show off his knowledge.)

"It's about time," Darryl said as Sean sat across from him. "What took you so long?" In response, Shawn rolled something towards him. It was small and white. Darryl picked it up curiously. "It's an egg," he remarked. "Where'd it come from?"

"You don't want to know," Shawn said. His eyes were haunted.

It was the sort of thing that drove me to divorce her. She always made me feel that it was wrong to be normal. Like being normal made me guilty of something. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. Being normal should be comfortable.

Imagine a cemetery. Sunny day. Imagine exhuming a body buried for ten years. Pry open the casket. Spill the body out onto the warm close-cut cemetery grass. Undress the body. Ignore any mold. Ignore any changes in features. Ignore the heavily sutured and unhealed cuts from the embalming trochars. Ignore anything and everything that would suggest that it has not been exactly pleasant to have been dead for ten years. Attach an EKG machine. Turn the machine on. The rhythm displayed on the screen will be asystole. It is a rhythm for all time.

The EMTs are still talking. The pulse is 138. The bed at the scene was covered with black blood and coffee grounds. He is not known to have varices. They couldn’t get a line.

(Only the fact that he may not have varices is good news.)

Everybody stops and stares at the Ark, which is still buzzing but no longer shooting lightning. FRENCH JERK takes a few steps and, when nothing bad happens, walks all the way up to it.

FRENCH JERK opens the lid. He looks inside, but we can’t see the inside–just his face. He’s all happy and stuff, but then his smile turns upside-down because all of a sudden…

My gaze falls to the naked fingers of her left hand, and I smile. “Remember when we were fifteen and you told me the only way you would ever sleep with me would be if the world were about to end?”

Believe me, I’d had worse trips. And worse people claiming my paternity than the Dark Lord. I congratulated him on becoming a father and tried to usher him out the door, but he held up a hand and wouldn’t budge. “Son,” he said. “I’ll prove it to you.” He pointed to Jake, sleeping off the drugs on the sofa. “I’ll take your roommate’s soul.”

Inside the factory, the noise hits you like a blow to the chest. The shrieking and grinding; the omnipresent roar of the machinery; the clattering whiz of the rollers; the rumble and whine of forklifts… it never ends, but you get used to it. Just like surgeons learn to tolerate the sight of cancers eating bone and blood, and undertakers become inured to the delicate, raw-chicken feel of softly rotting flesh. It’s not difficult; it’s a matter of exposure. You can, with time, become used to anything.

Heather threw her head back. “Okay.” She looked at Brian. “I feel like you’ve been really withdrawn lately. I feel like you haven’t been present in our relationship. I feel like you aren’t interested in me sexually anymore.”

“And how does that make you feel, Brian?” Doctor Fishlove asked. He was an ordinary, Midwestern looking man somewhere on the downhill side of forty, with one disfiguring feature–a small wart perched precisely on the end of his nose. Brian couldn’t take his eyes off it.

“Well, I don’t know.” He paused. “Bad, I guess.”