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about Quincey
in the present tense, Katharine might have thought she had died in infancy.
    Sometimes the photos had captions, sometimes not. Katharine found out that Thisby had a dog named Snout and a best friend
named Maxie Glenn. Her neighborhood cronies were named Curt and Steve and Laurie and Falfa — the most interesting of their
photos, a lineup against a mural of the American flag almost obscured by gangland graffiti. There were pictures of cousins
and aunts and uncles and grandparents and various boyfriends she captioned “Jack,” “Ryan,” and “Jake.”
    Rob was often a subject by himself, hamming it up with odd postures or silly faces. Sometimes the captions underneath read
“The Merry Wanderer” or “Goodfellow” or what looked like a P with a great flourish underneath. But the pictures of Rob slowly
decreased. By the time he looked to be in high school, there were hardly any at all, and it appeared as if Thisby had gone
out of her way to distort the ones she did take of him. Sometimes he looked to have a tree sprouting from his head, or a shadow
like a cancerous growth crawled up his face. Sometimes he looked like a mannequin. One photograph she had entitled “The Freshman,”
and he had shadows like thick horn-rimmed glasses around his eyes. He looked like some sort of diddlebockian nerd, and Katharine
couldn't tell if the effect had been intentional.
    People were replaced by buildings in the last album. The photographs were even more distorted by strange lighting and odd
angles. Katharine realized the photos in the living room had been taken by Thisby, and these were their precursors. They were
black-and-white, but Katharine had a sense that color wouldn't have mattered; everything was made up of grays: dirty, smoggy
skies, grimy concrete and stone buildings, rubbled streets. It took Katharine a while to realize, however, that there were
people in the photographs, but they could be mistaken for a part of the landscape, the architecture. They were slouched against
the walls of buildings like rumpled gargoyles or stood stock-still like extra support for the columns. One photograph, taken
at a slant, was of a low billboard with one side sagging to the ground. The advertisement was for a housing community called
Pacific Heights, and in the corner a palm tree waved in the breeze over the swimming complex. Only it wasn't a palm tree but
a wafer-thin black man who stood leaning against the billboard, his dreadlocks sticking out in a frond of spikes.
    She was reminded of a children's perception game she used to like to play — Hidden Pictures. The goal was to find the incongruous
items hidden in a larger landscape. Find the barnyard animals drawn into a city street. Find the kitchen appliances in a forest.
    Find the vagrant
.
    It was as if humanity were hidden, masquerading as the inanimate, and unless viewers wanted to take the time and effort to
find it, they didn't have to.
    And I don't
.

Act 1, Scene 5
    I am a feather for each wind that blows.
    — L EONTES ,
The Winter's Tale
, 2.3.154
    By the time Katharine woke up Saturday morning, the flame that had burned since Tuesday had consumed the insides of this body.
The fury had turned her entrails to ash, and they swirled away in the hot summer breeze. Now there was nothing — no emotion,
no feeling — and she felt as calm and logical as a mentat. She could fill this body, this husk, with any emotions or feelings
she so chose.
I can be forgiving. I can be vindictive. I can be … Oh, the hell with this … I need to know what I'm going to do. I need a
Plan. I need a goal. A mission
.
    I need money and I need to know where I stand. With my family. With my husband
. Was she going to fight for her husband? Could she even win him back, if she wanted to? She did have some rights, some claim
to his affections. But whether she could wrest him from this Diana would have to be decided by trial. Did she want to do that?
Yes. Yes
. What else was there for her to