"What do you want me to do, Sax? Do you want me to go?"

She blinked and fingered the tablecloth. "You can do whatever you want, Thomas. I don't own you."

"No, please, come on. What do you want?"

"What do I want? Why are you asking me that kind of question now? I wanted you, Thomas. I still do want you. But does that make any difference at this point?"

"Do you want me to stay here with you?" I balled up my napkin and looked at it in my fist. Saxony loved using real linen napkins at every meal. She hand-washed and ironed them once a week. She had bought two green, two powder-blue, two brick-colored ones that she rotated constantly. I felt like a piece of shit.

I looked up and she was staring at me. Her eyes were full. A tear spilled up over the edge and moved down her pink cheek. She held her napkin to her face and looked at me again. I couldn't meet her eyes.

"I have no right to hold you to anything, Thomas." She was breathing deeply, irregularly. She began a sentence, stopped, and didn't try again. She looked at her lap and shook her head. She brought the napkin to her eyes and said, "Oh, shit!"

I unballed my napkin and tried to fold it very carefully along its original crease mark.

6

A woman met me at the door. She was smiling, and grabbing my hand, squeezed it tightly.

"Uh, hi, uh, how are you?"

"You don't know who I am, do you?" Her smile was a little crazy. I wondered where Anna was.

"No, I'm sorry, but I don't." I tried a winning smile and lost.

"Arf-arf. Bowwow." She grabbed my shoulders and hugged me.

"Petals?"

"Yes indeed, Petals! But a little different now, wouldn't you say?"

"My God! You mean you really…"

"Yes, Thomas, I told you that it was over. I'm back from that life and I'm me again. Me. Me. Me." She patted herself on her full chest. She couldn't stop beaming.

"I don't know… Jesus. I don't know what to say. I mean, uh, congratulations, I'm really happy for you. I just, uh…"

"I know, I know. Come on in. Anna is in the living room. She wanted me to meet you as a surprise."

I swallowed and tried to clear my throat. My voice sounded like chalk squeaking on a blackboard. "It's… it's, uh, some surprise."

Anna was sitting on the couch drinking coffee from a thick porcelain mug. She asked me if I wanted some, and when I said yes, she looked at Petals, or rather at Wilma, who danced out of the room to get another cup.

"Are you still upset about what I told you?"

"Saxony knows about us, Anna." I sat dawn in a chair facing her.

She picked up the cup again, and holding it in two hands, brought it to her mouth. She peeked at me over the rim. "How did she react?"

"I don't know. As you'd expect. Half-good, half-lousy. She started crying after a while, but it wasnt anything big and weepy. She's pretty tough, I guess."

"And how do you feel?" She sipped her coffee but kept her eyes on me. Thin smoke from the cup moved quickly out from beneath her breath.

"How do I feel? Shitty. How do you think I feel?"

"You're not married to her."

I grimaced and drummed my fingers on the arm of the chair. "Yes, I know – I'm not married to her, I've got no obligation to her, everybody around here is a free agent… I've gone through that whole spiel in my head a thousand times, but I still feel shitty."

She shrugged and licked the rim of her cup. "All right. I just wanted –"

"Look, Anna, don't worry about it, okay? It's my thing, and I've got to work it out."

"It is partly mine, Thomas."

"Yes, okay, fine, it's all of ours. But let's just sit on it and see what happens, okay? I just spent the whole night fighting, and I don't feel like talking any more about it this morning. Okay?"

"Okay."

Neither of us said anything until my coffee came. Then I remembered that the woman serving it to me had supposedly been a dog the night before. As she passed it to me, I secretly sniffed to see if she smelled like a dog.

Anna said something that I didn't catch. I stopped sniffing and looked at her. "Excuse me?"

She looked at the other woman. "Let us talk alone for a while, all right, Wilma?"

"Of course, Anna. I've got to get that casserole ready for dinner. I can't tell you how much fun it is to cook again. I never thought that I'd say that!" She left, but the click of her high heels going away made me think of dog's toenails skittering across wooden floors.

"Is it really true, Anna? About Wilma?"

"Yes. Father got mad at the Inklers years ago for mistreating their children. He couldn't stand any kind of child abuse. When he found out that they were beating their son, he changed them into dogs. Don't look so skeptical, Thomas. He created them – he could do whatever he wanted with them."

"So he turned them into bull terriers?"

"Yes, and they would stay that way until Gert Inkler died. Then Wilma would be changed back into a woman. Father didn't want them around together again as a human couple. If they stayed together as dogs, that didn't bother him. He hated dogs." She snickered and stretched her arms out luxuriantly to the sides.

"Then are all of the animals in Galen people?"

"Many of them. But Nails and Petals were the only ones who could speak. Father made them that way on purpose. Remember, dogs can go places and do things that people can't. That's one of the reasons why Nails was living at Goosey Fletcher's house when you came. Normally the two of them stayed here with me. You didn't know it, but Nails spent a lot of time spying on you two."

I remembered all of the times he had come in in the morning, or slept on the bed with us at night, been in the room when we had made love….

"All of the bull terriers in town are people. Father thought that they were the least offensive because they are so comical-looking. He said that they might as well be interesting to look at if we had to have them around."

I put my hand on my forehead. I was surprised to find it so cool. There were things that I wanted to say, but I had no way to say them then. I drank some coffee and it gave me back some voice.

"All right, if he didn't like them, then how come he didn't just erase them? Get out the old ink eradicator and finish them off? Christ, I don't know what the hell I'm saying here anymore. Why the fuck did you have a dog spying on me?" I wrenched up out of my chair and without looking at her walked over to the wmdow.

A little girl in a yellow rain slicker rode by on a wobbly and battered bicycle. I wondered what she had been – a canary? A carburetor? Or always just a kid?

"Thomas?"

The bicycle disappeared around a corner. I didn't feel like talking to her. I felt like taking a nap at the bottom of the ocean.

"Thomas, are you listening to me? Do you know why I'm letting you do this? Why I am letting you write this biography? Why I'm giving you all of this information on my father?"

I turned around and looked at her. The phone rang and brought its shrill curtain down between us. She didn't answer it. We waited five-six-seven rings for it to stop: it finally did. I wondered if it might have been Saxony.

"Over there on my desk is a black notebook. Pick it up and look at page 342."

The notebook was unlike the one I had seen the night before. It was gigantic. It must have been fourteen inches long and had five or six hundred pages in it. I leafed through from the very back, and all of the pages were filled with the France scribble. The pages under my left thumb leaped from page 363 to 302, so I had to stop and flip back.

The ink color changed throughout the book; 342 was written in a kind of violent green: "The great problem here is that whatever I have created in Galen may only be a figment of my imagination. If I die, is it then possible that they will die along with me because they have come from my imagination? An intriguing and horrible thought. I must look into this possibility and make provision for it. What an incredible waste that would be!"