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We drew the curtains over the window and did not leave the room for three days. We hung our damp clothes from the shower curtain rod in the bathroom, and went naked for the rest of the time. The room immediately took on the smell of damp fur, and the smell got mustier and more mildewy over the course of the next three days. We ordered up food for ourselves from room service, always instructing the staff to leave the trays of food outside the door. We dined on steak. We dined on lobster. We ordered up bottles of wine. We dined on prosciutto and melons, chilled oysters, oxtail, salmon, duck, soft-boiled quail’s eggs and venison sausage, and ordered crème brûlée and chocolate mousse cake and sweet port wine for dessert. All of it went on Norm’s MasterCard. We let the dirty dishes stack up on the floors. We held on to one another for long hours. I gave Céleste whiskey and wine. I told her stories about my long adventure in human civilization, and she blinked dumbly at me, pursed her lips, and scratched her hairy protuberant belly. I tried to show her how to use the toilet, but she did not comprehend me. When she shat on the floor I dutifully picked it up in a wad of toilet paper and disposed of it. I read to her from the Bible we found in the drawer of the dresser: for idle entertainment I read her Genesis and Job and the Song of Solomon—and Céleste blinked dumbly at me, pursed her lips, and scratched her belly. On the first night we stripped the quilt and the tightly tucked crisp white sheets from the mattress and tore them into fine shreds, and we ripped open the plush pillows piled at the headboard, and we scattered all the tatters and soft feathery fluff around on the bed and wadded it into a warm fluffy nest on top of the mattress, in which we would lie together all day and all night, in our nest, in a lazy-limbed embrace, napping. Soon, having no clear use for them otherwise, we also shredded the various literatures provided in the room—the Bible, the phone book, and a copy of Be My Guest, the autobiography of Conrad Hilton (the room service menu we spared)—and we scattered the shredded pages all over the carpeted floor of the room. Sometimes, for recreation, we would jump up and down on the bed until we collapsed from exhaustion and mirth. At these times I could never help but to sing aloud: two little monkeys, jumping on the bed… and as I sang this song, this children’s song, Céleste would howl and pant-hoot and shriek along to the tune in very approximate accompaniment—no doubt causing much wonder as to the nature of our racket in the adjacent rooms. Other times, we would sit up on the bed in our fluffy nest and watch TV. We watched TV while Céleste sat behind me and went through the motions of grooming me, even though I had no fur, and then we would switch places, and I picked and combed my fingers through the fur on her back, just as we had done when we were children. So we sat on the bed and took turns grooming one another, with plates of gourmet food sitting before us in the nest of tatters and fluff on top of the mattress, and I cut her steaks into bite-size pieces for her, and she would daintily pinch up the little bits of meat in her long purple fingers and insert them between her wide pink lips and chew them, and we sipped our wine, and we watched TV. We watched soap operas. We watched sitcoms. We watched daytime talk shows. We watched late-night talk shows. We watched music videos. We watched old movies—the movies I used to watch with Leon: with Greta Garbo, the Marx Brothers, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Errol Flynn, Laurence Olivier, and Orson Welles. We also watched Sesame Street, so that Céleste too could know the joys of Bert and Ernie. We watched interesting pornographic films that we ordered to the room on Norm’s credit card. And—perhaps most important—we watched cartoons! We watched Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck! Goofy and Donald Duck! We watched the