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narcotic spaghetti western

Young women, let me address you directly. I bet your names are either Emily, Alice, or Ishmael. How do I know? Because my father named you. Yes! Imagine those days before the Millennial Blackout, when your parents were just youngsters rehearsing your conception. In those days wattage buzzed above the avenues. A man's home was so wired that electricity poured from spouts in the walls. Extension cords snaked under every carpet. And oh, the glow! Televisions and laptops and surveillance monitors illuminated the night.

And lightbulbs! Let me tell you about lightbulbs -- I hunger for those knobs of hollowed glass as if they were illuminated fruit. The nights were so alive back then that I bet your father reached up from the couch and killed the lights so he could grope your mother with only the glow of the TV to guide him.

Those were the days when my father -- fashion guru supreme -- had his first vision of Lit Wear. His subsequent devotion to the publication of hems and stitches and spaghetti straps was tireless, but not even he foresaw that his Nineteenth Century Lit Couture would make Lewis Carroll, Saint Emily, even Herman Melville, as big as Elvis.

At this point most of you Alices and Emilys shake your curls and say, "Your father had nothing to do with my naming." You'll claim that the name Alice predates Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Emily comes years before "My life had stood a loaded gun." Okay. Technically you're right. Both names are even older than AC/ DC -- Ben Franklin surely flew his kite above the wet heads of many Emilys and Alices.

But Ishmaels -- forget it.

If my dad had not stitched your fathers' Melville trousers and your mothers' Melville blouses, you would all be strangers to your call. You were born into an America without electricity. But imagine an America with no Lit Wear. Your caretaker would have leaned over the rail of your crib and called out something conventional, like "Good morning, Baby Chelsea!"

But thanks to Lit Wear, your parents feminized a Biblical name that was never in vogue to begin with, and christened you Ishmael. That's why I favor you more than those Emilys and Alices who deny that my father named them.

As for my name -- I hate it: Dylan.

Say it -- Dylan.

Dyl pickle.

That name can be denied my father as well. My mother chose it. (Kiss me and taste the vinegar on my lips!) My father wanted Nathaniel, but Mom shook her head. "Too GOP."

So instead of being Nat, I ended up Dylan. Me and a hundred thousand other men. And a few women. All named by our mothers back in the last decades of the Twentieth Century -- a time of kilowatts and power lines.

I know the retro-Marxists among you are shaking your hot heads. You believe we still live in a time of kilowatts -- the power companies secretly shooting volts into the sockets of the rich. Why else would the windows of the mansions in Beverly Hills and Grosse Pointe be lined with blackout curtains? The rich hide their light.

Sounds good on paper, but I believe Con Ed. I've sat through a dozen public lectures about how some "Morphemic/Quantitative Aberration" triggered the electrons in AC/DC to begin speeding in their orbits. Run faster and faster until they were spinning faster than light. Perhaps faster than time itself.

I've heard all the theories: Con Ed's electric current has volted itself into the past and the ancient Greeks are paying power bills now. Or maybe Nefertiti. Or if electricity is like karma, it only flowed back a century to Thomas Edison in Menlo Park. ...

Well, I say let Tom keep his volts. The days of wattage weren't so great. I'm old enough, Ishmaels, to remember wires and sockets, when Manhattan's Great White Way referred to the glow of theater marquees instead of big shot Caucasians. I remember how fathers wandered the streets strapped to their Walkmans; how moms knelt at the household TV, channel-hopping through network product.

My own mother did the network kneel, but my dad never did the Walkman walk. He ignored VCRs. Miami Vice. All of it. Instead, he began his first sketches of Lit Wear in the Reagan days and twenty years later looked up from his deathbed to watch his boyfriends modeling the new line of Melville couture -- those young blond men in their Omoo pants and their Pequod shoes and their Billy Budd shirts. I tell you that my father died smiling like a baby. America was about to become literate again!

. . .

Let me follow in Dad's footsteps and sew a few words. Write you a first-person wardrobe in the present tense. God writes this way, although I'm influenced by memories of Mom's TV more than the Bible. Not that I'm the star of the show. My protagonist is female.

A George Eliot kind of fem.

A Bronte-style girl.

She is a little older than you, but young enough I can get away with using the G-word girl. God knows (speaking of G-words), my protagonist is a dozen years younger than me -- she was just a kid when electricity became history. But there's nothing juvenile about this tomato now. The first time I see her I do a double take. Wow! I say to myself. Then I'm puzzled. What's so exciting? She's dressed a little funny -- wearing a pair of slim Jane Eyres under a Bret Harte duster. That sounds like a mismatch, I know. But it works.

Her name is Clare. She'll tell me her father chose it from one of Hawthorne's posthumously published romances about a little Puritan girl buried alive in an avalanche. Although -- as I said earlier -- there's nothing girlish about Clare, she fits Puritan intentions. She is a severe, askew beauty.

Picture her almond-shaped cheeks with their almost Mongolian contours. It will sound crazy, but I see Clare's face as being from some past electric era paradoxically more modern than our own. Say, the 1920s. Old photos reveal that women then were streamlined curves of chrome with their tight dresses and cropped hair. They were modern in a way that no modern girl has been since.

Not that Clare is ever adorned with Art Deco nose-pegs. She never wears earrings. No rings or lipstick. The first time I see this woman her only accoutrement is a baby -- she's strolling through Washington Square in Greenwich Village holding a child. The imp looks bored, flicking its fingers in front of its face. What are these little things. Oh. My fingers. I've seen these before. A little mirrored reflector is stitched on the baby's bonnet. The kid looks like an old-fashioned surgeon.

I know Clare is not the mother.

It's in the air.

I bet some of you are Isis fanatics who believe only women have psychic powers. I'm a guy who follows Rupert Sheldrake's Twentieth Century guidebooks. You know, the ones postulating that human thoughts and memories and even intentions resonate across the atmosphere as signals called Morphic Resonance. When electricity vanished, we discovered he was right. Some men found they could forecast the weather, while many women began taking dictation from the dead. I can sheldrake too. I'm one of those guys who pick up the experiences and stories and memories of others in his head -- although my ability is gender-specific: I can only sheldrake women.

Don't think this dismisses the mystery of your gender. Female Morphic Resonance is never simple or obvious. For example, I can sheldrake Clare's nonmaternal state but don't realize that she's a nanny until the gunplay starts -- an understandable oversight perhaps, because Clare is not wearing her guns in the open like other nannies do.

Are any of you carrying a piece? Your life stood a loaded gun? Modern girls know a hundred ways to hide their magnums under a pretty Jane Eyre. But nannies always hang their pistols around their hips like cowboys.

To discourage kidnappers.

I appreciate that there are no guns around her belly immediately. I'll later learn she keeps her heater tucked under her arm because she hates holsters flapping her flanks. Another man may smell his girl's nylons and smile, but I will grow to crave the fragrance of Clare's single holster -- especially when the leather is moist and earthy.

Don't hold Clare's nanny status against her. When you were a kid, there wasn't an epidemic of white-collar Americans out kidnapping babies. In those early Blackout days, children were still being born. Every hour. Every minute. There were so many tykes to go around that your caretaker tormented you for sport. Not anymore. What's the frequency nowadays -- two births a day in Manhattan? Three for the tunnel-and-bridge crowd? Both Columbia Presbyterian and Con Ed claim the birth rate plummeted because of men, not women. Men, and, of course, the absence of volts. Doctors tell us that semen is just a form of slow electric current without the charge, each sperm sympathetically aligning itself with a corresponding electron. They theorize that if electrons are orbiting backward, a man's tadpoles must swim backward too. Away from the womb. Away from the egg. "Let's get out of here, boys!"

My own doc believes that the only reason that a few babies are still being born at all is because of a biological counteroffensive: The mothers' eggs became predatory. Hunters. Your baby brother is here because some hungry egg got lucky.

Of course, there's no proof that this is true. It's not like anyone can attach a movie camera to an electron microscope and find out what's going on down under. I'll let other writers speculate about sperm on the run. But we all know nannies are armed because kidnapping has become rampant. Grannies kidnap fully grown children. Milkmen climb through windows to snatch newborns. When I first see Clare and her baby, she is heading toward the nanny corner of the square -- "Niagara Bawls." Aptly nicknamed, as you can hear the squall of crying babies all through the park.

How do nannies ever get used to the din? In Manhattan, biological parents stay as far away from the nannies as possible. In Washington Square, real parents sit with their babies at the eastern edge of the park, within the confines of a safety pen strung with bright Easter egg barbed wire -- Real Mom and Real Dad jiggling their young under manned gun turrets.

Tourists ask, "Why keep the nannies out?" I'll tell why: Local ordinances require nannies not only to remain indifferent to the babies in their care, but also to encourage the kids to holler and cry. This assures the parents that the nanny and baby aren't bonding, because -- God forbid -- then the nanny might kidnap the child herself. In the Op-Ed page last Sunday in the Times, yet another antinanny Californian squawked that "an East Coast nanny upbringing is a deterrent to healthy childhood development." Oh, blah, blah, blah. The citizens of the Golden Bear are just jealous because they can't afford armed nannies themselves.

Most New Yorkers have the bucks for nannies, as well as illegal narcotics -- which is what the economy of Washington Square Park is all about. Dudes and dudettes slouch every ten feet selling designer drugs and reefer. Clare's path takes her past two who appear to be selling joints 'n' bags.

I say "appear to." As dope dealers, these kidnappers can act nervous "naturally." See the chick say to the guy, "Cops." The dude quickly drops to a crouch, as if he is hiding a Baggie of weed in his shoes. But Clare ducks too -- kneeling eye-level with the guy, baby in one arm and the other extended holding a gun, an action that causes the baby to begin shaking its arms, laughing.

"Shut up, rat," Clare says, with gritted teeth. She says this to the baby, not to the man kneeling before her black pistol -- a compact semiautomatic made of plastic, of all things, ridiculously called a Glock.

Regardless of the dumb name, the gun looks lethal. It gets the guy's attention. And this encounter is not lost on the nannies at Niagara Bawls, where the eight women stand as one -- each nanny suddenly holding a handgun, save for a squat one who whips out a sawed-off shotgun from inside her baby buggy.

You know that nannies are usually hard women, but if you could see this crew! Do any of you smoke? You wouldn't think twice about striking a match across any of their cheeks. And get what they're wearing. The two nannies gripping magnums sport Ambrose Bierce boots and Devil's Dictionary burnooses with the hoods down.

Ah, Nannies from Hell.

The ones with Colt .45s are all fitted in Poe. There's a few pairs of Marie Rogets. A Ligeia sweater. One woman even wears a tight Masque of the Red Death skirt. The only nanny not wearing Lit Wear is a beanpole girl with a bushel of black hair above her ears. But with that sharp nose -- her beak -- she might as well be bleating, "Nevermore. Nevermore."

The Poe vibe stops with the other faces. One nanny has a classic George Washington pinched jaw. Another is more toothache and nosebleed. The most cheerful nanny is walleyed, her forehead ringed with green aboriginal tattoos.

Wait. I finally register that the nanny with a harelip is wearing Lit Wear von Kraut -- her body sheathed in a soiled Critique of Pure Reason jumpsuit.

Each of these nannies is just standing there, doing nothing. Just waiting. Watching to see if Clare needs backup. While the man who is eye-to-eye with Clare's Glock is saying, "It's cool. It's cool."

He drops the crowbar that he had slipped from his pants and holds his palms out empty. Clare is supposed to think that he was intending to hit her knees. Steal her baby. But something seems wrong. What are these amateurs really after?

His female partner's face is tense, but tense with excitement. I sheldrake her thoughts -- Things are going as planned.

The guy on his knees sees that the nannies are all distracted. He almost smiles. Then doesn't. He doesn't want to give anything away. I'm the only one besides him who sees the plump woman hurrying between the chess tables at Niagara Bawls. Sees the woman dip down into a beige baby carriage. Whip up holding the child. Then this babynapper abruptly leaps over a cement park bench and lands on the sidewalk in a small cluster of pedestrians. Suddenly the plump woman becomes two -- both women instantly running in opposite directions. Both holding babies. One is a decoy. But which one? Then a cart blocks the intersection. Suddenly a third fat woman appears running with a baby. She's heading west toward Sixth Avenue.

The nannies have been taken in by a plot originally conceived by Louisa Alcott in an unpublished story that was discovered by a professor of literature at NYU. He's kept the story secret all these years so he can sell the plot to customers he hears are sniffing around the black market baby trade. Today's buyer is a senior editor at Calvin Klein. The fake dope dealers are juniors (junior editors, that is). At this very moment, the editor is standing on top of a hot dog cart at the eastern edge of the park, watching the scene with what looks like a pirate's telescope. (Actually, it's the device his wife uses to peer at birds in Central Park.) The birdwatcher herself paces below the cart, asking, "How is it going? How is it going?"

"So far, so good," the man says, so breathlessly that his wife can barely hear him.

Now two of the nannies -- George Washington and Raven Beak -- are rapidly pushing the baby buggies into a circle while the plump one with the shotgun jumps atop a chess table. She peers down at a dozen New York University types who have gathered on the sidewalk, all with the same hungry look on their faces -- Unattended babies. Unattended babies.

"Stay away, dog-fucks," the fat one spits, poking her sawed-off in the air as her compatriots begin to sprint down MacDougal. Five armed nannies chase the wagon rolling downtown. They know which woman had the real kid. The nannies only hold their fire because they don't want to hit the baby. After the cart blocked the view, each nanny knew that all of the runners became decoys -- the real child is now hidden on the cart. The nanny with the forehead tattoos shouts, "Shoot the ponies, girls!"

Man! I have to tell you that the resulting gunfire is just pop! pop! pop! MacDougal Street has history, but it has nothing to do with gunplay. My namesake used to live here. In the days before I was born, Bob Dylan rode his motorcycle from one sidewalk cafe to another until he ended up at Kettle of Fish. Anyway, once the nannies start firing, no one cares about folk history. The horses rear and bolt across the concrete, the cart bumping over the cobblestones.

The Immanuel Kant nanny stands behind the others, aiming her gun my way. I see her features clearly. And wish I didn't. This woman's harelip makes her face appear sideways. The Colt goes off. The chubby decoy running east goes down. The harelip nanny spins and fires at the decoy running north. That decoy is hit too. The woman takes it in her shoulder. Crashes through the doorway of a store -- no, the doorway of a Christian Science Reading Room.

The harelip starts laughing. Many nannies are, in fact, Christian Scientists. I sheldrake that the harelip certainly isn't. (Neither is Clare, for that matter.) But the boss of this particular nanny company is. The harelip knows that to finish the decoy babynapper off in a reading room will be sublime pleasure in the fullest Immanuel Kant sense of the word -- sublime equaling beautiful violence, e.g., an eagle fighting a snake in the air.

This particular prey is now inside the reading room, crouched behind a bookcase clutching her shoulder, whimpering. Rocking back and forth. Let's say that this woman is a proofreader by trade. Her name is Constance. She thought a little bit of babynapping would be more exciting than inspecting paragraphs and hems. But Constance never figured on getting shot. When the bullet first hit, her shoulder and collar felt as if they were suddenly part of an apparatus much bigger than her body. A monstrous scaffolding. Invisible, and towering as high as the steeple at St. Patrick's. As she assimilated this vision, she stumbled into the reading room, thinking, Thank God. Sanctuary.

Big mistake. We all know a reading room is not a church.

The harelip nanny walks through the doors singing. Her song sounds like an old Beatles melody with simple new lyrics composed of just two words, "Fresh meat. Fresh meat."

It's a song about the drug she's on.

There's no reason -- no practical reason -- for this nanny to pursue the decoy babynapper in the reading room except for the sublime pleasure of it. Some grotesque sport. She's peaking. It's the drug that nannies are on. Not even Seattle's retired grunge junkies dare to play around with nanny dope. Most of us can't even imagine being a nanny au naturel, let alone one who is tripping. I went out with a nanny once or twice a few years ago when I lived in Park Slope, and she told me they take drugs because of Nannies' Paradox: Nannies are conditioned not to bond with the baby they're caring for, yet they're also trained to lay down their life for the child if they have to. How can a girl reconcile these two states?

Vengeance.

Nannies sniff lines of Vengeance -- although in a jam they use a hypo too, which is why they have tracks on their ankles. I myself do occasional hits of youth drugs like Twenty Something, and my chemist tells me that Vengeance works like this: When adrenaline hits a nanny's brain, she is instantly filled with mother-animal instinct. The nanny will do everything possible to protect her baby until the adrenaline has subsided -- presumably because the kidnapping has been prevented and/or the kidnapped child recovered. But a nanny can't be allowed to feel any joy. Nor can she be allowed to think too much about Nannies' Paradox: I was willing to throw down my life for a baby that, frankly, I don't give a shit about.

So come with me into a nanny brain when this drug twists and gives her a different endorphin. A different high. Suddenly the vengeance switch is flicked on. Most nannies agree that this part of the trip possesses audibility, sounding like a bass drum beating the words, Vengeance. Vengeance. Vengeance. This is why nannies always kill the kidnappers, then shoot up the bodies.

And the harelip nanny finds her fresh meat hiding behind Bengal translations of Science and Health. Constance looks up. Eyes wide with fear. With her good arm she holds up the plastic baby -- the goo-goo ga-ga decoy. "See? It's not even real."

"This is," the nanny says, raising her gun and holding her free hand over her mouth. This nanny, named Katrinka, will not allow a babynapper to be terrified of her harelip. Her lips are God's private joke on her.

"What's your name?" Katrinka asks.

"Why do you want to know," the injured woman answers.

"I want to know what your name is before I shoot you."

Constance gasps, then shouts, "Shoot me? You're not going to shoot me."

"Yes I am," the nanny says, moving her hand closer to her mouth. "What's your name?"

Constance winces. My shoulder -- it hurts. "I won't tell you," she replies. "I won't tell you."

The nanny sighs. She lowers her free hand, then makes a puppet mouth with her fingers.

"All right then," her hand says. "Say cheese."

Katrinka answers in a different voice. "All right, Ms. Hand -- cheese."

She smiles her harelip at Constance.

Talk about twisted.

Talk about sublime.

The cornerstone of Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science is mind-over-matter. Mind-over-disease. But what nanny's brain is big enough to overcome that particular pair of lips?

The smiling nanny fires four times. Three shots are Vengeance. The fourth is for God.

Clare is one nanny who is opposed to the cerebral architecture of Vengeance. She'll later tell me she prefers to peak with the rescue of the baby and tries for premature vengeance state whenever possible. Let's go back in time a few minutes. Clare is still on her knees as her fellow nannies start shooting at the carriage with a wad of Vengeance in her cheek like chewing tobacco.

"Stand up," she barks to the kneeling man.

He gets up. "Careful, sweetheart. Be cool."

"What's your name?" she asks.

"Edward Mars," he whispers.

"Take care of Mr. Mars," Clare says to his partner. She quickly turns sideways to protect her baby from any blood spray and shoots Eddie Mars in the stomach. Then Clare leaps up and heads toward Washington Square South.

She sees everything. She knows the woman running in her direction isn't a decoy. That woman has the real baby. The other nannies were fooled by the babynapper's body language -- but Clare isn't. The babynapper doesn't run like a woman gripping a doll. She runs like a man cradling the real thing. She is a he, a babynapper wearing drag. When he is shot by the harelip, only Clare sees him roll over and kneel -- the kidnapped baby still in his arms -- then shake his head. Stagger up. And continue running.

Police vest.

Clare stops and raises her Glock. But the baby that she is holding reaches too. Giggling. Bouncing its head, causing the little reflector on its brow to produce visual pops of glare and sun spots. Clare extends her arm. Aims for the babynapper's head. Easy shot. And with his brain gone, his shoulders and elbows will lock, and he'll stay gripping the baby in his arms.

Monique thinks differently. That's the name of the baby in Clare's arms. This nanny will describe Monique as a tolerable baby. She will say this the way you'd say, "My head hurts, but it's tolerable." But now, the child starts bawling -- giving out twisted whahs. The volume of the complaint louses up Clare's shot and she shoots out the window of a church.

The nanny stares down at the child and says with gritted teeth, "Shut up, runt."

Clare took night school courses to perfect this look. The philosophy of the class is a belief that everything that will happen to us is already recorded in our brain. Including our own death. The look Clare gives the baby makes the kid see that same vision.

If it doesn't, no matter.

The child immediately shuts up. You may ask, "Why on earth should the kid continue living now that she's seen her own Inner Death manifested in the world?"

Valid question.

But it's not my concern.

By sheldraking, I only function here like some floating camera. What I'm seeing right now is Clare looking away from the baby and sighting down the barrel of her gun. She pulls the trigger. Clare loves her Glock because "there's no hammer bite to distract a girl." She shoots the running man exactly where she is aiming -- his skull taking the XTP Jacket Hollow Point bullet in the rear, JFK style.

Clare now starts running herself, Baby Monique in her arms. The man continues for two more steps, then he stumbles to his knees on the street.

But now another man is at the body. The editor. When Clare is perhaps twenty feet away, his wife steps out from the hot dog cart with her rifle. "Stop. I don't want to hurt your baby," she calls.

Clare stops.

"I'll fire if I have to," the wife says.

Clare lowers her Glock. And says, "Shit."

"Turn around," the wife orders.

Clare does. At this movement, the editor exhales. The baby he's holding begins pawing at his nose because his nose is a shiny thing. This baby is named, of all things, Dylan (please tell me that this name is passe beyond belief in your region of America too). I'll hear later that this new father -- this false pirate father -- is a Whitman freak who intends to name this child Calamus. And don't think rename. The pirate father doesn't even know the name of the baby in his hands. His choice will be this child's true name. "Forget your old name, this will be your only relevant christening," he says to this baby, then intones, "`For you these from me, O Democracy.'" He laughs. "`To serve you mon homme!'"

Clare doesn't hear his words, but their force apparently resonates Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman, because Clare whispers, "I celebrate myself ..." and peers into the reflector on Monique's forehead. And in ironic glory of our wattless era, Clare begins reciting "I Sing the Body Electric": "Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm sinews ... and Glock." She recites these words raising her gun hand above her own head, as she simultaneously kneels, arches backward, and then shoots the editor's wife.

An upside-down shot.

Glorious shooting. Oh, the glorious backbone of that nanny! What choreography!

And I'll tell what I withheld from you. The editor's wife was about to shoot Clare in the back. The wife was thinking, Why not two children? She was licking her lips over the baby in Clare's arms. A little Ishmael for me!

I could have told you this earlier while Clare's back was still turned. But then you would have thought Clare fired in self-defense. She didn't. She was going to kill that woman regardless. And the editor's wife takes Clare's bullet in the chest. The woman is blown backward. Her husband starts shaking his head back and forth, his consciousness oscillating from glory to mystification (What's going on? Where did that nanny get her gun?) to absolute horror (This is my wife. That was my beloved. We married before the electricity disappeared).

He opens his mouth and takes a step toward her body and starts talking. He tells his wife the plots to her favorite Harding novels. He tells her about what he is editing now. They both used to talk lots -- over wine, over coffee. They were each other's favorite companions. They'd yack for hours about fashion and literature. They'd discuss things of substance: Their needs. Their Inside Child. Their desire for a whole-grain diet. Their craving for a son. And now his wife, his Electric Age bride, is lying there, a hole in her chest actually exhaling breath.

He takes another step.

"No," Clare shouts, pointing the Glock. "Give me the baby." He looks at the child. So quickly his. So quickly gone. He reaches out his arms and hands the child to her. Clare cradles the new kid in her gun arm. Like dogs checking each other out, the two babies, Monique and Dylan, reach and coo at each other.

Clare turns and walks with the babies away from the editor.

The other nannies run up and Clare tells them, "We have a stable situation here, girls."

Raven Beak and George Washington exchange looks. The one with the tattoos says, "Vengeance." Then the nannies all start chanting, "Vengeance. Vengeance."

All except Clare.

"Let him be," she tells her sisters. "He already wants to be dead."

The nannies all nod, but continue walking to the editor and his wife.

"He'll eat the gun someday, don't worry," Clare calls over her shoulder. Dylan starts squirming furiously, and she glares at him. She doesn't have to say anything. That baby stops and begins trembling -- a hot-wired neurological response that shouldn't have kicked in until the child was at least two or three.

It takes all day for Clare's dose of Vengeance to wear down. Although I don't actually follow her, sheldraking makes me like God and Santa Claus: I know everything that happens. I know that Clare considers going to the movies -- there is a Valentino playing at St. Marks. But St. Marks is a crummy crank-joint. Their lanterns are dim. You stand there cranking the nickelodeon, squinting at the silent movie through an eyehole crusted over with God knows what. People who are addicted to watching flicks at St. Marks all wear Coke-bottle glasses.

Instead Clare goes home to her fifth floor walk-up on East Eighth and Avenue A. This is unexpected: no tech-nostalgia inside, the space mostly wood and brick, with no shrines to television or telephones. Just a candle burning beneath a portrait of Gaston Glock. She must really be into pre-tech comfort, because above the cast-iron potbellied stove hangs a reproduction of American Gothic. Wait a minute. Gaston Glock isn't Clare's household saint. There's another American Gothic in the hall, hanging above Clare's static electricity treadmill. Let's slap our foreheads! This woman has a reproduction of American Gothic in every room. How can a girl be this sober? And we know she has a thing about pistols, not pitchforks ...

Clare is in her bedroom now, where she lines up five pairs of shoes on the floor, not a high heel or flat among them. No re