Yes, it’s worrisome when Eulalie professes a new fascination for the love suicide plays of Chikamatsu. Not because I think they’ll give her any ideas but because I can’t imagine Eulalie’s interest piqued by anything so tangible as ordinary words strung out crosswise on a piece of paper. Nothing you can hold in your hands, nothing you can peel the outsides off of the way you are compelled almost to take the clothes off a doll. But we shouldn’t put too great a burden on this observation as it is frail at the center like all observations, and therefore wont to buckle. And it is apt to make a noise when it does so that we will spend the next six months attempting to decipher, ignoring in the process those who would be willing to love us, even groom us in the old-fashioned way, despite our ungainly appearance. Our outsized ears. Our shuffling gait. Maybe Eulalie is trying to tell us something the only way she knows how – through extra sensory perception. And the language of the body which is a language everyone speaks in common even when we find we are no longer possessed of an actual body. We have relinquished it due to an unforeseen illness or an accident involving the railroad and our poor peripheral vision. This is the point at which, if we were adept at moving our puppets, we would have them move to the center of the arena and gaze intently into each other’s enormous eyes. We would wait breathlessly for the trumpets to play in unison off-stage, the agreed upon signal to proceed with the final act: the raising of the blades, the shaking of those empty heads, a shaking designed to signify either grief or the overwhelming anxiety one would, of course, expect when facing the termination of one type of existence and the consequent beginning of another. Not that I put too much credence in those doctrines that say we are going to recognize immediately and cleave to those who mean the most to us when we meet them on the other side. When you get right down to it, there probably aren’t any sides. No angles, no walls. And even if there are, you can all but guarantee that these things exist precisely to separate us from one another, to insure, for instance, that Eulalie will remain forever out of reach. Like a pomegranate in a locked cupboard. The kind of cupboard, say, with glass in the doors so that you can see what it is you are missing. You know you have merely to break the glass, to reach in and take the pomegranate, to make off with that which has tempted you so sorely. But you won’t. You are afraid of cutting your fingers. You are afraid of accidentally ingesting the microscopic shards of glass that will, no doubt, have lodged themselves in the meantime in the pomegranate’s otherwise flawless scarlet skin.