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Dr. Mott looked at his watch. “Since about forty-two minutes ago,” he said.

“You don’t seem in the least surprised,” said Father.

Dr. Mott appeared to think this over, then he shrugged. “I’m certainly very happy for everybody,” he said.

I think it was the fact that Dr. Mott himself did not look at all happy when he said that which caused Eliza and me to put our heads together again. Something very queer was going on that we badly needed to understand.

• • •

Our genius did not fail us. It allowed us to understand the truth of the situation—that we were somehow more tragic than ever.

But our genius, like all geniuses, suffered periodic fits of monumental naïveté. It did so now. It told us that all we had to do to make everything all right again was to return to idiocy.

“Buh,” said Eliza.

“Duh,” I said.

I farted.

Eliza drooled.

I picked up a buttered scone and threw it at the head of Oveta Cooper.

Eliza turned to Father. “Bluth-luh!” she said.

“Fuff-bay!” I cried.

Father cried.

13

SIX DAYS HAVE PASSED since I began to write this memoir. On four of the days, the gravity was medium—what it used to be in olden times. It was so heavy yesterday, that I could hardly get out of bed, out of my nest of rags in the lobby of the Empire State Building. When I had to go to the elevator shaft we use for a toilet, making my way through the thicket of candlesticks I own, I crawled on all fours.

Hi ho.

Well—the gravity was light on the first day, and it is light again today. I have an erection again, and so does Isadore, the lover of my granddaughter Melody. So does every male on the island.

• • •

Yes, and Melody and Isadore have packed a picnic lunch, and have gone bounding up to the intersection of Broadway and Forty-second Street, where, on days of light gravity, they are building a rustic pyramid.

They do not shape the slabs and chunks and boulders they put into it, and neither do they limit their materials to masonry. They throw in I-beams and oil drums and tires and automobile parts and office furniture and theater seats, too, and all manner of junk. But I have seen the results, and what they are building will not be an amorphous trash-pile when it is done. It will clearly be a pyramid.

• • •

Yes, and if archaeologists of the future find this book of mine, they will be spared the fruitless labor of digging through the pyramid in search of its meaning. There are no secret treasure rooms in there, no chambers of any kind.

Its meaning, which is minuscule in any event, lies beneath the manhole cover over which the pyramid is constructed. It is the body of a stillborn male.

The infant is enclosed in an ornate box which was once a humidor for fine cigars. That box was placed on the floor of the manhole four years ago, amid all the cables and pipes down there—by Melody, who was its mother at the age of twelve, and by me, who was its great-grandfather, and by our nearest neighbor and dearest friend, Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa.

The pyramid itself is entirely the idea of Melody and Isadore, who became her lover later on. It is a monument to a life that was never lived—to a person who was never named.

Hi ho.

• • •

It is not necessary to dig through the pyramid to reach the box. It can be reached through other manholes.

Beware of rats.

• • •

Since the infant was an heir of mine, the pyramid might be called this: “The Tomb of the Prince of Candlesticks.”

• • •

The name of the father of the Prince of Candlesticks is unknown. He forced his attentions on Melody on the outskirts of Schenectady. She was on her way from Detroit, in the Kingdom of Michigan, to the Island of Death, where she hoped to find her grandfather, who was the legendary Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain.

• • •

Melody is pregnant again—this time by Isadore. She is a bow-legged little thing, rickety and snaggle-toothed, but cheerful. She ate very badly as a child—as an orphan in the harem of the King of Michigan.

Melody sometimes looks to me like a merry old Chinese woman, although