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own hands and shown the doctors just how they worked. The idea of opening up these dumb, tearful animals didn’t faze these veterans, but English’s eyes burned and he sobbed deep in his throat, watching his own gloved hands tremble and stab limp-wristedly at gristle. Nobody talked much. Blood sprouted from arteries in brief, graceful ejaculations, like fronds of seaweed, and pattered to the floor or fell across their gowns. The ripped lungs flapped and wheezed, salesmen and saleswomen occasionally exclaimed over the unexpected force of a death rattle and made the kinds of jokes that medical people always made, and the staplers clicked, the scalpels clacked on the Formica, and once in a while, because they were slippery, a scalpel got away from somebody and went tinkling across the floor. English heard all these noises acutely, though his head hurt as much as if his eardrums had burst. The building pitched, humming, back and forth. The grasses outside no longer seemed to lie down in the wind, but cringed before the sexual approach of something ultimate. Like a long curse a jet’s sound passed close above the building toward the horizon. That an airport could go about its gigantic business in the same world as this laboratory seemed impossible, unless—and he didn’t think this so much as feel it as a self-evident fact—unless all things conspired consciously to do perfect evil.
    He couldn’t stop this. There was nothing he could do. It wasn’t his fault. This dachshund was finished, no matter what. The dog was already scarred down all four legs, and just above its tail and on top of its head two bald patches had been incised for the planting of electrodes. There was some undercurrent here that, even more than his job as a Minotaur salesperson, it was his nauseating privilege, his instinctive duty to do whatever the creatures who weren’t dogs were doing to the dogs.
    With the same blind gesture of childhood games like pin the tail on the donkey, he pushed his scalpel into what he hoped was the poor animal’s heart, and it expired like a balloon.
    The thing was, why had he submitted so mindlessly, why hadn’t it occurred to him at the time to stop, to object, to get away? The experience gave him, in a way he couldn’t explain, some slight appreciation of what rape might be like for the victim. And now, like a woman with a gun in her purse, he waited for somebody to try again. He wasn’t going to let it beat him twice. He would do whatever he had to do.
    When Marla and Leanna had fallen asleep, that first night, English climbed down from the tree with his bag of tricks and his fishing pole. He’d been aroused, even in the cold, by the sight of naked women.
    On the way home he threw the tape cassette in a dumpster, and later he told Sands, “I got nothing.” He told him, “I may be an idiot, but I’m not an acrobat.” He told Sands he wouldn’t work up that high, out on a limb. There was too much for him to juggle up there.
     
    He might have wished that he’d turned from the butter of moonlight on the harbor to see her standing there with the sea taste on her cheek, but as it happened she was in the drugstore on Commercial Street, buying something which she tried to hide from English when he said hello. Feminine protection evidently. She was dressed in a sweatsuit. She’d come from an exercise class. She smiled and seemed to give him the benefit of the doubt.
    Gusts of wind took their words away as soon as they’d stepped out the door:
    “Hello—”
    “Hello—”
    “Didn’t I—”
    “Yes—”
    “Right, a few weeks ago, at Mass—”
    “I told you we’d meet again—”
    “Let’s get a cup of java,” he said, private-eye-style, guiding her into a doorway out of the weather.
    He got the idea that she was laughing at him. “Java,” she said.
    “That’s right. Java. I thought you spoke Portuguese.”
    “Is that Portuguese?”
    “You tell me. I don’t speak Portuguese.”
    “What was your