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I stole closer to her, and then I said, “Boo!”

She jerked her head away from the eyepiece.

“Hello,” I said.

“You scared me to death,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said, and I laughed.

These ancient games go on and on. It’s nice they do.

• • •

“I can’t see anything,” she said. She was complaining about the microscope.

“Just squiggly little animals that want to kill and eat us,” I said. “You really want to see those?”

“I was looking at an opal,” she said. She had draped an opal and diamond bracelet over the stage of the microscope. She had a collection of precious stones which would have been worth millions of dollars in olden times. People gave her all the jewels they found, just as they gave me all the candlesticks.

• • •

Jewels were useless. So were candlesticks, since there weren’t such things on Manhattan as candles any more. People lit their homes at night with burning rags stuck in bowls of animal fat.

“There’s probably Green Death on the opal,” I said. “There’s probably Green Death on everything.”

The reason that we ourselves did not die of The Green Death, by the way, was that we took an antidote which was discovered by accident by Isadore’s family, the Raspberries.

We had only to withhold the antidote from a troublemaker, or from an army of troublemakers, for that matter, and he or she or they would be exiled quickly to the afterlife, to The Turkey Farm.

• • •

There weren’t any great scientists among the Raspberries, incidentally. They discovered the antidote through dumb luck. They ate fish without cleaning them, and the antidote, probably pollution left over from olden times, was somewhere in the guts of the fish they ate.

• • •

“Vera,” I said, “if you ever got that microscope to work, you would see something that would break your heart.”

“What would break my heart?” she said.

“You’d see the organisms that cause The Green Death,” I said.

“Why would that make me cry?” she said.

“Because you’re a woman of conscience,” I said. “Don’t you realize that we kill them by the trillions—every time we take our antidote?”

I laughed.

She did not laugh.

“The reason I am not laughing,” she said, “is that you, coming along so unexpectedly, have spoiled a surprise for your birthday.”

“How is that?” I said.

She spoke of one of her slaves. “Donna was going to make a present of this to you. Now you won’t be surprised.”

“Um,” I said.

“She thought it was an extra-fancy kind of candlestick.”

• • •

She confided to me that Melody and Isadore had paid her a call earlier in the week, had told her again how much they hoped to be her slaves someday.

“I tried to tell ’em that slavery wasn’t for everybody,” she said.

• • •

“Answer me this,” she went on, “What happens to all my slaves when I die?”

“‘Take no thought for the morrow,’” I told her, “‘for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’

“Amen,” I said.

44

OLD VERA AND I reminisced there on the townhouse steps about the Battle of Lake Maxinkuckee, in northern Indiana. I had seen it from a helicopter on my way to Urbana. Vera had been in the actual thick of it with her alcoholic husband, Lee Razorclam-13 Zappa. They were cooks in one of the King of Michigan’s field kitchens on the ground below.

“You all looked like ants to me down there,” I said, “or like germs under a microscope.” We didn’t dare come down close, for fear of being shot.

“That’s what we felt like, too,” she said.

“If I had known you then, I would have tried to rescue you,” I said.

“That would have been like trying to rescue a germ from a million other germs, Wilbur,” she said.

• • •

Not only did Vera have to put up with shells and bullets whistling over the kitchen tent. She had to defend herself against her husband, too, who was drunk. He beat her up in the midst of battle.

He blacked both her eyes and broke her jaw. He threw her out through the tent flaps. She landed on her back in the mud. Then he came out to explain to her how she could avoid similar beatings in the future.

He came out just in time to be skewered by