Now, I pull the shades in the bay windows and head to the back of the living room.

“Wow, this is like a really neat place… It looks bigger from the outside.”

“Yeah, funny how that happens.”

“Hey, you’ve got a door in your living room. What’s through there?”

“Oh, that. Just storage. A closet. Nothing to see. Want some wine?”

Well, what’s through there, Debby Sandra Susan Brenda, is where I’m headed right now. My real home. My Closet, I call it. It’s like a keep-that last defensible spot of a medieval castle-the sanctuary in the center. When all else failed, the king and his family would retreat to the keep.

I enter mine through that magic doorway. It actually is a closet, a walk-in, and inside you’ll see hanging clothes and shoe boxes. But push them aside and you’ll find a second door. It opens on to the rest of the house, which is far, far bigger than the façade’s horrifying blond Swedish minimalism.

My Closet…

I enter it now and lock the doors behind me and turn on the light.

Trying to relax. But after today, after the disaster, I’m having trouble shaking the edgy.

This isn’t good this isn’t good this…

I drop into my desk chair and boot up the computer as I stare at the Prescott painting in front of me, courtesy of Alice 3895. What a touch he had! The eyes of the family members are fascinating. Prescott managed to give each one a different gaze. It’s clear they’re all related; the expressions are similar in that way. Yet they’re also different, as if each is imagining a different aspect of life as a family: happy, troubled, angry, mystified, controlling, controlled.

It’s what a family is all about.

I suppose.

I open the backpack and take out the treasures I’ve acquired today. A tin canister, a pencil set, an old cheese grater. Why would somebody throw these away? I also unload some practical items I’ll use in the next few weeks: some preapproved credit mailings that people carelessly discarded, credit card vouchers, phone bills… Fools, I was saying.

There’s another item for my collection, of course, but I’ll get to the tape recorder later. It’s not as great a find as it could be, since Myra 9834’s throaty screams while I detached the fingernail had to be muted by duct tape (I was worried about passersby). Still, everything in a collection can’t be a crown jewel; you need the mundane to make the special soar.

I then wander through my Closet, depositing the treasures in the appropriate places.

It looks bigger from the outside…

As of today, I have 7,403 newspapers, 3,234 magazines (National Geographics being the cornerstone, of course), 4,235 matchbooks…and, for-going the numbers: coat hangers, kitchen utensils, lunch boxes, soda pop bottles, empty cereal boxes, scissors, shaving gear, shoe horns and trees, buttons, cuff links boxes, combs, wristwatches, clothes, tools useful and tools long outmoded. Phonograph records in colors, records in black. Bottles, toys, jam jars, candles and holders, candy dishes, weapons. It goes on and on and on.

The Closet consists of, what else? Sixteen galleries, like a museum’s, ranging from those holding cheerful toys (though that Howdy Doody is pretty damn scary) to rooms of some things that I treasure but most people would find, oh, unpleasant. Hair and nail clippings and some shriveled mementoes from various transactions. Like this afternoon’s. I deposit Myra 9834’s fingernail in a prominent spot. And while this would normally give me enough pleasure to make me hard again, now the moment is dark and spoiled.

I hate Them so much…

With quivering hands I close the cigar box, taking no pleasure from my treasures at the moment.

Hate hate hate…

Back at the computer, I’m reflecting: Maybe there’s no threat. Maybe it’s just an odd set of coincidences that led Them to DeLeon 6832’s house.

But I can’t take any chances.

The problem: The risk that my treasures will be taken from me, which is consuming me now.

The solution: To do what I started in Brooklyn. To fight back. To eliminate any threats.

What most sixteens, including my pursuers, don’t understand and what puts Them at a pathetic disadvantage is this: I believe in the immutable truth that there is absolutely nothing morally wrong with taking a life. Because I know that there is eternal existence completely independent of these bags of skin and organ we cart around temporarily. I have proof: Just look at the trove of data about your life, built up from the moment you’re born. It’s all permanent, stored in a thousand places, copied, backed up, invisible and indestructible. After the body goes, as all bodies must, the data survive forever.

And if that’s not the definition of an immortal soul, I don’t know what is.

Chapter Seventeen