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Why had I been put inside this cage that I describe? For three reasons: (one) I admit, for my own safety, as my life was believed to be in danger; (two) I suppose, for the safety of others, for I will own that on that evening I did do a good deal of weeping and gnashing of teeth, and of flailing, of spitting, of howling, of shrieking, of screaming, and I shall even humbly admit that my behavior disquieted and disturbed the humans who were then in my presence—that I was showing myself, despite my articulation and erudition, to be unfit—at least temporarily—for the freedom of unrestricted social congress with and within human (and please, Gwen, make sure to seal this next word in a bitterly mocking envelope of quotation marks) “civilization”; and (three) for transport. For I was set to be forcibly relocated. Whither? Eastward. Why? For my imprisonment.

It happened like this. We were back in the hospital. This place where we had been spending a lot of unhappy time lately. The same giant university hospital as before: the bubble-belching water cooler, the fish tank, the pink-upholstered chairs in the waiting room, the coffee tables littered with bright crinkling magazines, the pervasive odor of antiseptic fluids. I rode with Tal in the back of the ambulance, with Lydia supine on a gurney. Bumpy ride, thankfully brief in duration. The banshee howl of the siren over our heads, transparent plastic bags dangling from hooks in the ceiling, tubes, machines, equipment. Lydia unconscious, covered in blood. First the paramedics snipped the umbilical cord that still connected her to our dead son, untimely ripped from her womb. Dark medical words and phrases floated around above my head, among them: “massive hemorrhaging,” “blood loss,” “forced abortion.” The back doors of the vehicle banged apart and we tumbled out. They took Lydia away on the gurney, wheeling and whanging her into a secret part of the hospital’s labyrinth, to which Tal was permitted to come, but not I, search me why. I was left alone in the waiting room, kept company only by the lady at the ER desk and the tank full of fucking fish. This was when all the sweetness and light of my learned humanity temporarily escaped my soul, leaving only the confusion of the animal.

Then two large and forceful men in turquoise onesies emerged from some hidden location, chased me down until they had me seized by the arms, and one of them produced a long hypodermic needle. They wore white latex gloves. The one with the needle pressed the button of it and made whatever was the vile liquid contained inside its chute squirt slightly from the point of the long fierce needle, and tapped it twice with his finger. He slid the needle into a vein in my arm and pushed the poison inside me. Admittedly, I may have been causing a ruckus. Admittedly, when left alone by my humans, I may have begun to scream. Admittedly, I may have torn around the room in a crazed apoplexy of fury. Admittedly, I may have been overturning tables and chairs. Admittedly, I may have bitten some woman, a total stranger, how deeply I do not know, on the leg. Admittedly, I may have tasted the warm coppery tang of blood on my tongue. Admittedly, I may have—for some reason that may or may not have made sense to me at the time—yanked out the leg of the piece of furniture that supported the fish tank, and, admittedly, the fish tank may have fallen, and may even have smashed upon the floor of the ER waiting room with catastrophic violence and noise, and the water in it may have whooshed swiftly across the room and gone spilling down the steps leading into the lobby from the door, and it may have smelled putridly, and the flat translucent triangular bodies of the angelfish may have lain, gaping, slapping, dying on the waiting room floor amid a crunchy scattering of slime-coated pink gravel and broken glass and the broken chunks of a ceramic deep-sea diver with a ceramic chest of sunken treasure. Admittedly, I may also