When Maggie Fischer dances, her name is Jezebel. They mark it with her dance times up on the board, and it's what the customers call her when she makes her circuit for money, posing for grimy dollar bills, letting fat old flannel wearing bald headed cologne reeking men whisper hoarse perversions into her ear, pressing her breasts together around their fingers to grab onto it, a bill-feeder made from flesh, the very baseness of which is what she wants more than the money itself sometimes, she sometimes swears that's true. She's found she can grow hyper-aware of their eyes when she's writhing on the stage floor with the red and orange lights draping down and the tattooed guys draining drafts of domestic and goggling over her, wiping bearded chins with shirtsleeves, smiling gap-toothed grins at each other; she'll look at the glitter on herself, feel the cake of the sparkling purple eye liner, and the fast-food-warmer heat of the stage-lights, and feel like it's turned into public speaking, like they all expect more from her than she'd ever been prepared to provide. She used to suffer from bad nerves right before a dance, when it was crowded and she couldn't see everyone to make sure she didn't know any of them, and she imagined her father--back when he was sane and not dribbling from the mouth most of the time, sweating off the images he can't erase from his meaty hard disk--stepping into the club, maybe with a client or something, and sitting down at the bar right as her dance came up, just sitting there with the rest of the middle aged and van driving perverts like he was just like them in every way. She imagined not noticing him until she was nothing but bare flesh humping the pole, silently wrapped up in her own private orgy, then chancing a glance in his direction, finding him leering at her just like the rest of them, not realizing it was his daughter under all the makeup and glitter and shit, his very own daughter set out by his sweaty agency onto a path that would lead her here, to Muffy's Tail on Rt. 1 out by the car dealerships and fast food restaurants some of which don't even advertise--and then, at eye contact, all at once the ice pick in the forehead, the sudden heart attack of realization, the moment of panic on his face, the gunshots, the wailing, the burning.

Sometimes when she's dancing, though, when she's passed into the deep rhythm of distraction and motion that it brings along, it might transport her far away from that little dive bar dressed up kittenishly in pink neon, out to deep leviathan places that none of the customers could imagine or would want to see, to ruined chapels in the hollows of black forests hidden for centuries under silent crooked trees, to the runic tops of solitary towers alone on the edge of the world. There are a few things in those places she wants, things as profound as they are elusive, and which can only be found inside a trance or a dream similar to what the dance can bring her; and once near that place--the "dance hole" they call it at the club, so it's not an experience unique to anyone, just really cool--she fully becomes her body, and can only move in the right dimensions, cannot make any mistakes, and so forgets her body at the same time for it has ceased to resist her in any way--and she forgets the audience too, because it's irrelevant as soon as the spectacle of herself turns to face herself, and the stage becomes the dry woods of chill October evenings, the music a bath of livid fire, her memories crowds of pouting ghosts. Sometimes she doesn't realize the song has ended and her motion ceased, stands dazed on the stage or by the bar counter waiting to find out where to move next, or how to be now, waiting for the next revelation to pop out.

Maggie imagines that Fidget Ambrose likes to watch her dance. She'll linger by the door in case she needs to leave quickly, vaguely childish in a black dress and cloak. Fidget has these blue eyes that sparkle in the dark with white chunks of white that are less reflections from without than emanations from the glittering crystal inside her; Fidget has this pure white hair that hangs to her cheeks and is tied in the back; Fidget doesn't speak, but watches calmly, eerily; Fidget is Maggie's only friend now that Jasper has gone.

Once her shift ends, she flits through the back door and skips down the narrow block of concrete steps to the asphalt parkinglot of Muffy's Tail. It's cold out here, and she huddles down into her cloak and shivers as October wind like electrical current pulls strands of her hair up. Tiny specks of glitter still cling to her face--she can feel it when she blinks, like scabs on her eyelids. She is tired but alive again now, and smiles lightly looking up at nothing and everything, glides in wide loops around the pick-up trucks and service vans, freed now from the claustrophobic jails of loud men. Some of these, burly guys with beards and greasy fingers take quick notice and move on, silently disturbed by the strange girl gliding by. Wordlessly she crosses the pitted macadamized lot patterned by wide dirty swaths of tire tread and fading paint, splotch brown bursts of grass flaring from the cracks, shards of broken bottle and windshield glass sparkling in the low sun, mashed condoms like sullen latex strumae clinging to the charred surface, abandoned. Maggie skips over it all, face to the gray sky and line of trees, humming, grinning.

Through the trees and beyond several acres of undeveloped field, is the fluorescent glow of the strip mall and restaurants where Memorial Highway makes its closest pass to the trees. She still hears the background buzz of loud music carving its way through the road noise, and the shouts and laughter of the bikers and truckers echoing and clamoring up to the concrete sky. Impulsively, she takes aim across the field to the Texaco station lot next to where the Burger King used to be--now a charred hulk girded by yellow plastic caution strips--over the road, beaded with sweat, to the 7-11, green, white, and red like an Italian water ice container, three lots down from the decadent Las Vegas aurora of the McDonalds. She buys cigarettes from Tweak, who grins vacantly and stares at her well-covered breasts, then heads hurriedly back to the woods, sucking on the cigarettes to make her other impulses go away, the sick and deadly worst one to return to the 7-11 and buy all the snack cakes and potato chips on their shelves, buy all the week-old sandwiches and freezer-burned ice cream, or even race to the McDonalds, give in to the burning need, and buy cheeseburgers with ketchup, fries with lots of salt, a strawberry milkshake, and then just consume, and be happy and be miserable and have hope and have despair, but consume, and for a while not even know it. She lights cigarettes from the glowing butts of cigarettes as she pushes herself along the dim trail through the woods, moving by memory and the low haze of light that seeps up through the branches and desiccated leaves on the horizon.

Maybe it's just from pity or some sense of obligation, but Maggie still goes home once in awhile to see her wild-eyed mother and her isolated father. She'll spend as much time there as she can stand before running away in a panic of memories. Usually this stopover is on her way back to her apartment from work, since her parents' house is located about half way between the two, and she follows the trail through the woods most of the way. She usually doesn't intend to stop at the house, but when starting to pass by, she'll catch the familiar stained blue siding and the dirt brown covered pool collecting leaves, the rusted weather vane over the lawnmower shed, and she'll slow, deliberating and resisting, then reluctantly make the turn, pass over the chlorine splotched ground burned from pool filter backwash, past the rectangle of lawn where she lost her virginity to Jack Anner on a dirty blanket stinking of beer, up the creaking back stairs onto the gray weathered deck, through the storm door hanging from a single hinge now, frowning, and into the sullen gloom of her former home.

Maggie's father, the guy in the bubble on the couch in front of the TV, makes her sit next to him as usual, holds her hand through a thick rubber glove, and then just weeps quietly, also as usual. She has to sit there and wait for it to end. He never says anything anymore, doesn't feed himself, or clean himself up now, and there are tubes and catheters running across the carpet under duct tape from the couch to regions unknown. The room is kept dim due to his new intolerance for natural light: the shades are drawn, the doors shut, and the room lit by golden pools from beneath the hems of tattered lampshades, by the flickering aqueous glow from the television set, and by the bright nervous cigarette embers that make her mother's face redder than it used to be. Unable to pass up the opportunity, her mother has to join them, grasp her other hand and her father's other rubber glove, kneel on the carpet with bowed head, pray silently. Her father bows his head too, and so Maggie counts to ten--she's timed it several hundred times by now--and then her mother's hand frees itself from hers, reaches to Maggie's head and manually bows it into place. There's almost an audible click as the mechanism linking girl to God is engaged. Maggie tries to watch the silent television through the prison bars of her eyelids, watches the Wheel of Fortune spin around on its agonizingly fixed axis, but her mother's head is mostly in the way and she can only pick up numbers passing by in accelerated harmony with the rotation of earth and star and mindless galaxy. Maggie's certain it's deliberate.

The rite of absolution goes on from there, unchanging. It's like lead. It lasts longer than it did the last time, it always does. And just when she thinks they're both sleeping or dead, finally granted their prayers and her own at last, her mom will raise her face to the ceiling and intone something profound and religious and solemn and indecipherable, then bow it back down again, and it goes on from there, and Maggie prays too, that the internal voice whispering that the intonation had only marked the half-way point was just the voice of her death instinct speaking up again. This is the same voice that tries to compel her to jump into lapping waters from the side of a pier, the voice that insists the brief moment of pain in her chest is the sign of tobacco disease, that fold of flesh in her breast is a tumor, that wave of dizziness an acceptable sacrifice for losing another pound. Maggie hasn't eaten in three days now. The hunger has rent her into tears, broken her into a fetal husk, and then subsided to a dull constant throb like the bass from the bar on the walls of the dressing room at Muffy's Tail. Then raged for a minute, like the brief return to life of the horrid monster at the end of the movie, then died again. And it goes on from there.

She looks at her father dribbling and mouthing holy words and feels a brief pang of guilt--as she always does now, toward herself the "twirling trollop" and her sister the "the perverted pagan", for her father who is convinced he failed in raising them properly--but wonders where else his religion might have led him in response to his decadent daughters, if not from revulsion and retreat into the sanitary napkin of his portable enviro-suit, then where--under other circumstances--if not to Job, long suffering and befouled; because she cannot erase those Old Testament moral lessons he had been so quick to pronounce on her: if not to Job then to Abraham with his old-man's dagger poised to stab his restrained son at the command of the voice in his head; or to Lot, offering up his two virgin daughters to the mob of Sodomites outside to do with as they pleased as long as the sanctity of his house-guests were allowed to persist? She had never doubted he would sacrifice her if the code of his church required it; and that made her sacrifice of him less terrible to endure.

It's all moot now, though, history lessons for young conflicted girls, with uncertain results. All that remains are the redundant prayer sessions, and they are more like funerals for the living than earnest efforts for redemption, cast into ominous relief by the omnipresent light of the television screen, which, regardless of any eyes cast upon it, bears witness in return of all the things that have ever happened in their home. Eventually Maggie passes out, somewhere between a reddish orange light that could have been a sunset over a Maui beach and the pure white wave that could only have been from a commercial. And she dreams of occupying the dense center of a black hole, the twisted light and sludge of slowing matter frozen around her, encasing her. And there is nothing else in the dream but stillness, and no sensation but rest, and she smiles, although her lips do not move because nothing moves here, and nothing changes here, because time is dead here. She smiles inside, because she has embraced the sum of all gravity, the press of all pressure, and has finally collapsed from her own weight to become infinitely small.

One afternoon several months ago, before everything changed in her life, Maggie's father came home unexpectedly from work to find her and Jasper up in the master bedroom, sheets flying through the air, headboard banging into the wall, "Oooh! Ahhh! Oooh! Ahhh!", bliss of ignorance tight enough to keep her from noticing what she now recalls vividly somehow, daddy's car pulling into the driveway below, the rattle and bang of the front door, the jangle of keys and heavy thudding footsteps on the creaking stairs up to the rollicking bedroom.

Edvard Munch's "Scream" painted onto Charlie Fischer.

"Daddy, no! Oh God, no!", Maggie cried, sheet yanked up to her chin, fleeing past him, slamming doors. Jasper laughingly told her later that he'd grabbed his pants and gotten one leg in them before leaping through the bedroom window and sliding down the lower roof to topple clinging to a drainpipe, hanging, swinging, then dropping down to the lawn below. Charlie Fischer didn't even get a chance to speak (not that he could have--he was, at that moment, undergoing a supreme crisis of psychological upset).

Maggie, lying alone in bed later in the middle of that silent night, gave in to impulses she had never experienced before. She imagined pursuing the act uninterrupted, as some twisted part of her had unconsciously wanted to do, ignoring the alien spectation of her father standing by the bed--shouting, making demands, prodding angrily at sweaty naked shoulders--while she writhed more furiously on stage in front of him, louder, better, "Jasper, yes! Jasper, yes!" It was one of those fantasies she would never tell anyone about, because it was just weird, basically.

The next day her mother, red faced and raging, sent her to church to see the priests. It was an old, orthodox religion, housed in the kind of church where the priests dress like Rasputin, tap cruciform staves on the floor, chant in strange languages while swinging censors of burning incense around, and stranger things still, all grown from the unwritten praxis of closed doors and old methods. Deviant eighteen-year-old girls are sent to a panel of holy priests in order to confess their sins and show repentance (which is a valuable service for parents who wish to avoid enforcing punishments for their children, as it's a worse punishment than anything they themselves can devise), which is perhaps the most awkward thing anybody can endure, teenager or adult. (This service, incidentally, is only available for teenage girls. Teenage boys are just hit on the ass fifty times with a cane.)

So Maggie is sent to these priests two days after the terrible event; it's a Saturday, and the birds are chirping and the sky is blue, and she's sent into this dark, gothic church that smells like a museum. She's escorted to a back room by a ninety year old stern-faced nun who walks with a waddle (like a duck had swum up inside her and taken control of her body, Maggie thinks, and has to suppress a giggle because she's feeling like not taking this too seriously today), and she feels the heavy oak door of the office thud closed behind her in the same way a prisoner probably feels his cell door slam shut the first time.

The room is paneled in dark wood and is decorated with what are presumably antique or otherwise sacred religious artifacts: crucifixes, vestments, portraits of saints and sinners; in one corner, by a window of ancient glass streaked and running into brown translucency, stands a life-sized statue of an angel in armor--Gabriel or Michael or whichever the one with the sword is (it's that kind of church)--its paint faded with age, its metal armor flaking rust, but with stern vivid eyes that the priests must retouch every year (as the only really significant part of the statue); those eyes glare down directly at where she's being instructed to sit. It's an armless, cushionless wooden chair ideally suited for binding robbery victims and espionage interrogees; and as Maggie sits on it, she feels a multitude of splinters that join her at once to the multitude of sinners who have previously occupied her current place.

Facing the chair is a giant oak desk on the other side of which three priests are lined up, each almost identical looking to the next, with long gray curly beards, bushy eyebrows, and those round poofy Ukrainian hats that must be bolted onto their heads for all they move around up there. They each have a head that's about .5 times too large for his body, like those red Russian dolls they sell in mall kiosks, or the crudely drawn cartoon characters they show on MTV late at night.

The middle one, Father Boris Boriskov--Boris Badenov she thinks, little evil guy with black trench coat and spy hat who runs around with a bowling ball shaped bomb in his hand, sizzling fuse at the top, with the tall long-faced dark-haired woman who looks like Morticia Adams (Natasha Fatale, Natasha Fatale), chasing Moose and Squirrel--says, "Margaret, your parents expressed some concern about your recent behavior." Another priest--the one on the left--picks it up: "They thought it would be best if we were to council you today." Then the one on the right--and this becomes the pattern of blinking lights on the Super Simon game--says, "Would you like to tell us about it?"

The thing that freaks her out right away is that she can't see their hands; just straight rigid arms flush against their bodies in those billowy black frocks those guys wear, and none of them will take any notes or anything, or open books to read some foreign language she doesn't know before telling her it means whatever they say it means. They don't actually move at all, as far as she can tell; these guys might just sit there in the same place all day every day. They might be stuck there, or attached to the desk somehow, and she imagines them bobbing up and down like the little furry rodents in a Whack-A-Mole game, a giant mallet in her hand, trying bang one of them on the head to score points.

"Would you like to confess your sins before God, Margaret?"

She's actually played this game before, and it's not unlike Whack-A-Mole, really. "What's the worst thing you've ever done, the very worst thing, Margaret?" Truth or dare for juvenile delinquents and girls who tell lots of lies to be able to hang around with them. "I once let the air out of my dad's tires before he had to go to work, but then mom went into labor and they couldn't use the car, and while dad was calling for a ride she gave birth right there in the driveway with nobody to help her through it or even catch the baby, so my brother was born onto grass clippings and clods of dirt stuck to black asphalt."

Maggie shrugs and stares down at the beveled edge of the desk, which is lighter than the rest of it, runs her finger along the shallow groove there, feeling every scratch, every uneven layer of lacquer. Maybe she can plod through this dressed up in the classic outfit of sullen-little-girl, with sad frowning, one-word answers, shoulder shrugging (shrugging is good because it's a reply without an answer, a non-reply), and forlorn but contrite facial expressions. She senses she's too old for that now, though, which kind of makes her sad the way faded stuffed teddy bears can make you sad.

"Your boyfriend," says the middle guy, "he does not go to this church, am I correct in believing?" They all have Eastern European accents just like Boris Badenov, which might be funny under different circumstances.

"No," Maggie says.

"His name is," says the left guy.

"Jasper," Maggie says, and thinks Laughing Devil, Merry Trickster, Sweet Angel Eyes.

"This is okay," says the right guy, who looks exactly like the middle and left guy, and you can't ever see his hands, and his head is too damned big and his hat is always on so his hair must be completely Rastafied under there and crawling with bugs. "We do not expect you only to date boys of the church."

"For how long have you known Jasper?"

"A year. I guess," she says, mostly staring at her hands in her lap, and she thinks, I have always known him, since before any of you were born, since before your religion was started, since before the stars were hot.

"He goes to your school?"

"No," she says, but she almost said yes, and wonders what it would have felt like lying to God's very own representatives on Earth, wonders if one of them maybe has some divine gift to read and interpret biorhythms or voice stress, and would know that she was lying to them, or maybe there's a machine like that built into the desk, part of a cutting-edge collection of equipment donated by the KGB to their branch offices that masquerade as churches for the purpose of gathering intelligence on the sexual behavior of teenage American girls.

"A nearby school, then? A private school? A home for troubled teens?"

Maggie nearly laughs at that. Jasper troubled? Not at all and more than you can imagine, both teen and old, Jasper troubled. "No," she says. "He goes to... he goes to the park." And she doesn't need to look up to see them exchange glances and frowns and reams of associative inference.

"And in this time of knowing Jasper, Margaret, you and he have had, well, intimacies, am I correct in guessing?"

Maggie feels a flush of embarrassment rise to her cheeks and makes two fists in frustration. (Fidget Ambrose does not feel embarrassed--ever.)

"Margaret?"

"Yes," she mumbles to the beveled edge of the giant oak desk. It's one of these desks that old CEO types like her father keep in their offices, lots of drawers, lots of weight, lots of surface space to support all the important symbols that such men need to display to their secretaries and colleagues every day: the phone almost too modern looking to be a phone (for telling golf stories or chatting up the mistress), the flat-screen monitor angled in from one side (for displaying stock quotes and confusing graphs and for playing solitaire), the several billion dollar account portfolios in brown leather binders (updated duplicates of the working accounts in manila folders on the desks of their underlings), a desk meant to increase the size of its owner while diminishing the poor supplicant or suspect on the other side.

"Would you like to tell us what happened on this week's Thursday, Margaret?"

"...no..." she says, almost perplexed by the trippy butterflies fluttering around in her chest. Damn you, Jasper, she thinks. Sometimes his sense of play--and his weird sense of spectacle--could become agonizing, for this still felt too real to her. The world was a playground, according to Jasper, and these other people--their lives and their rules and their histories--just painted equipment, abstract means to concrete ends; even her father, who had received a call at work on Thursday instructing him to rush home at once; even herself, who had fallen victim to that particular stunt. Jasper had insisted it was coincidence, but she suspected he had arranged it. It was the kind of thing he would do, shock her into some slightly different world-view, force her to some conclusion he was convinced she would derive from it, coerce her into severing herself from her parents by severing herself from their church. It was, Jasper said, the service he provided her, and it was much of her reason for loving him, but it was hard sometimes. It was hard when she had to endure things like this inquisition.

"You parents would like you to tell us about this, so that we may, well, offer you our guidance," says one of them--she's lost track of which one--"And lead you to resolution," adds another one, "Favorable in God's eyes," says the last. "Where were you when your father found you?"

She scrapes one fingernail on the desk, wanting to apply more pressure to see if the lacquer would scar before her nail broke. "We were, I guess, in the bedroom. In their bedroom."

"In your parents' bedroom?"

"Yes."

"With this boy you mention, this Jasper?"

"Yes."

"And he led you there or you led him there?"

Maggie covertly rolls her eyes, which is more like widening her eyes than rolling them. She feels she should to take over this interview--at least feels it's Jasper's expectation--and tell them all the filthy details they secretly want to hear and then many more, keep talking until they really don't want to hear any more, give them images so raunchy and perverse they will need to make their own confessions afterwards; she senses she should deprive them of their fantasies by going phone-sex operator or street hooker right there in their hallowed office.

Jasper would never tell her what the rules of the game were. Every Spectacle has different rules, he would say. She had to determine them on her own. She wonders if this were how Fidget Ambrose would play this game, like a passive little girl? Or would she lie to them until they grew exhausted or enraged, force them to physically remove her, never pausing the stream of vulgar words, graphic images, depraved stories, pumping blood into their faces with her voice until their heads just popped right off. Even though there wasn't a camera on this, and nobody was watching, even though it would be lost afterwards like a beautiful accident on a beautiful day with nobody to see--a tree falls in a forest--and wasted on herself, like singing in the shower, like masturbating alone, it was the creation that mattered, the framing of the scene, the birthing of a Spectacle. That would be the point to Jasper of course; it had more value when it wasn't going to be recorded.

"I did, Father," she says quietly, demurely, haltingly, "I led him there."

"You had been, what, kissing, fondling downstairs?"

"On the living room couch?"

"After school?"

"Yes, Father."

"Yes, what?"

"We were on the couch and we started kissing. He put his hand..."

"Put his hand..."

"Put his hand on my..."

"Yes?"

"Put his hand on my, my breast," she says, and starts to actually cup it herself right there in the office as if to demonstrate and then stops herself, knowing immediately that the gesture was far more powerful that way than if she had actually done it--the unintended act, the impulse, the reflex of the ripe young girl. She represses a smile. She imagines them exchanging secretive glances over there across the desk, tiny beads of sweat forming on their brows, their hands where she isn't able to see them. It's somehow reassuring, that image, because it puts her above them, tugging on the strings attached to the most vulnerable parts of them.

"And what did you do, Margaret?"

"I, I let him. I let him touch me," she says.

"And then he...?"

"And then he touched me, on and, and under."

"Under your blouse?"

"Under my shirt, yes."

"And did he remove any articles of your clothing? Did you let him do that?"

She frowns and realizes she has been scraping at the desk, trying to scar it, but it hasn't been scarred, and she wonders how many other girls have sat in this chair and scraped away at this desk, how many have broken their index fingernails on it while leading questions led her under her shirt, under her bra, upstairs to her parents' bedroom. "He undid my bra, Father."

"In a smooth motion or, well, fumblingly?"

"Smoothly," she says, and nearly laughs, wondering why that detail was important. Yes, Father, a supple twist of the thumb, index finger pushing upward, the nearly audible twang of the bra strap unfastening, the sudden loss of support, the flooding sense of nudity. Very smooth, Father. Almost professional in fact.

"And then, Margaret? What did Jasper do then?"

"He took the, my shirt off. My bra off."

"And he kissed you...?"

"Kissed you there?"

"He kissed my breasts."

"He touched you there?"

"He kissed my chest and we kissed some more." She glances up at them for the first time since entering the office, and they're still in the same pose as before, three bushy faced guys with big heads and big hats and hidden hands, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, God's soldiers. She imagines them daisy chained over there behind the desk.

"I see," says Father Boris. "And what else happened before, well, before the two of you went, well, upstairs? To the bedroom?"

"Nothing, Father."

"You led him upstairs then?"

"Yes."

"And this was not your first time leading a boy to, harrumph, intimate encounters, am I correct in assuming?"

"No, Father," she says, and almost said, "No, Your Honor." Guess I'm just a whore, right, a Jezebel? Want to wash my feet, Your Honor?

"And you went into the bedroom...?"

"And you lay down on the bed...?"

"And you were kissing, and fondling...?"

"And you were removing garments of clothing...?"

"Yes, Father. Fathers."

"And what did he do? What garments of clothing did he remove? Where did he place his hands?"

"He put his hand on my, my stomach."

"And slid it under your skirt...?"

"And he slid it under my jeans, yes, Father." And he stood at the podium of Notre Dame de Paris during high Easter mass, arms outspread and face raised, and shouted "God is dead!" to ten thousand assembled worshippers, and the walls of the cathedral shook, and thunder broke the sky. But no, that wasn't the worst thing. That wasn't the worst thing at all.

"And what did he do then, Margaret?"

She notes that her heart is beating rapidly, that her palms are sweaty. She finds it so strange, almost surreal, like they belong to someone else. "He took his shirt off. And his pants." And he set fire to your nunnery to watch them run out without their frocks and habits like panicked chickens, and he's going to set fire to your rectory tonight and the doors will be barred from the outside, and he's going to enter your cathedral during high Easter mass and march down the aisle and push you from the alter and proclaim that you are dead; that you have died from waiting so long for something to happen, and now something has happened, something has finally happened, but it's not what you expected, is it, it's not what you wanted, is it?

"And you...?"

"And he took, he took himself out, Father."

"He took his penis out?"

"Yes, Father."

"And then did you kiss it, Margaret?"

Jesus, she thinks. "He rolled onto his back, and..."

"And then what, Margaret?"

"And then I... I..." She gulps, staring so hard at the desk that her eyes feel as though they will burst through her skull. She could tell them so many more interesting things than this, if only she were Fidget Ambrose and not Maggie Fischer. Oh God, if she were Fidget Ambrose, if she were Fidget Ambrose right now! What's the worst thing you've ever done, Margaret, the very worst thing? For the absolution of your soul, Margaret. For your forgiveness in God's eyes, Margaret. I started revolutions, Father, bought the deaths of countless thousands with promises I never intended to keep. I corrupted presidents by caressing one cheek, enraged wives into homicidal frenzies, ignited riots over fishnet stockings. And I laughed the whole time. Was that bad enough, Father?

"Yes Margaret?"

I hired prostitutes to join me in dark motel rooms where evil men were bound to armless wooden chairs, and coerced them into opening straight-edged razors with stories of what the men had done to other prostitutes, to children, to their own children, sweaty leers in dim locked bedrooms at two a.m., directed them to cut, and scar, and cut, and sever, and mark fat flesh with runes in blood.

"What did you do, Margaret?" They are growing impatient now, the pause lasting too long, slipping from enticed suspense to doubts over whether or not it would ever be satisfied. She closes her eyes and tries to focus on Maggie Fischer, naïve young high-school senior. I constructed love triangles with violent potential energy. I let him touch me here, and here. I lured him into a dark alley and shoved him against a graffiti scarred brick wall, took him by the hair and pulled his head back, slid my tongue along his neck from his shoulder to his ear, flesh glistening, carotid artery pulsing to the same beat that I felt against my groin pressed close against his, pressed my teeth against his neck, around the artery like a bear-trap set to spring with the slightest impulse. "I touched him, down there, Father."

"And you...?"

And I bit down and felt the pulse of blood enter me like no man ever could on his own, filling me with the copper bitterness of his life and his will and his lust and his ancestry. "And I, I stroked him, down there, Father. Up and down and up, and he was moaning, Father, and I put my mouth on him, and..."

"And what did he do, Margaret?" one of them practically shouts.

"He touched my breasts and caressed the side of my body, and he pulled at my jeans."

"While you were...?"

"Yes, Father! And I undid the button on my jeans and slid them down, and then I slid my under--my panties down around my ankles, and then I sat on top of him."

"You straddled him, Margaret?"

"Yes, I straddled him and he, he entered me, Father!"

"You engaged in intercourse with him, then, Margaret?"

"Yes!" There is a fine layer of dust clinging to the hollow groove in the bevel of the desk, and she works at it frantically with her finger, trying to wipe it away, but it doesn't come off, and she wonders if it's actually dust or just part of the fading lacquer. "We had intercourse, yes Father."

"The two if you naked at this point?"

"Mostly naked, Father." She is still breathing heavily, but she feels calmer now, more in control of her emotions.

"And this felt good for you, Margaret? You enjoyed this sensation of intercourse with Jasper?"

"Yes, Father. It felt like I was absorbing him into myself, devouring him. It felt like I could use him to become anything I wanted, and to do whatever I wanted." She gulps sour saliva, feeling as if she has detoured far away from what she would have said to them if not for Jasper and Fidget's influence. Maggie the naïve high-school girl doesn't know anything about the power a lover can provide, the great reserves of energy produced by the exhaustion of sexual union, or of the infinite potential of the audience of one. Was this the game, then? The game of becoming Fidget Ambrose?

"It was a sense of, well, of liberation for you then, Margaret?"

"As if you had passed into a new place," added another priest, "where much more was possible for you?"

"Now that you had crossed the line between permissible and forbidden behavior, Margaret?"

"Did you feel as if you had crossed the line, Margaret?"

"Yes," she says, as if admitting something grave and terrible. Yes, I crossed the line when I stole that box of Advil from the drugstore, yes, I crossed the line when I stole that stack of money from the cash register, yes, I crossed the line when I pointed the gun at the bank teller and threw the paper bag at the teller's face, yes, I crossed the line when I was a little girl and didn't know enough not to play silly games with the animals who were too weak and simple-minded to make any kind of defense, yes, I crossed the line when I grew older and learned about myself and learned about what I was and what I could do to you, all of you, who are so alienated by lust and greed and animosity and habit to notice me, or to guess that I could be the end of you, and the end of your suffocating world, and the end of your suffocating lifestyle. That I might one day engineer a cult so seductive that before it ended every person in the world would belong to it. "Yes, I felt like I crossed the line, Father."

"And it felt good, did it not?"

"Yes, Father, it felt good. It felt good, Fathers, and I want to do it again," she says, now eyeing them from her bowed head in that Clockwork Orange-Lucifer pose of threat, anger, and pride, that stance of defiance that frames the top of them with the bridge of her brow, glaring out at them, contemptuous of them. "I want to do it again right now," she says in a low sultry voice she must have picked up from a hundred movies, and her smile feels wicked and cruel and so perfectly natural, and it only expands when their faces pale, sudden surprise and alarm flaring in their eyes. She has the sense that they have been pushed--in that sudden instant--off the map and out of their range, beset by unknown forces in territory that was never hostile before.

"Margaret, well, that is, Margaret," one of them says, and the others echo in similar stuttering phrases, and she gets this movie image of the common, vain, greedy, little bad man's reaction when he's gone too far with the truly alpha-evil man, and tries to take it all back, tries to start the conversation over by backpedaling, but all the while knowing he can't, and that he's lost, and that he's now invited the attack of something from which he's not able to defend himself.

"What's the matter, boys?" she asks, and somehow her voice has that femme fatale cast she's practiced all her life but never thought she'd actually ever use; she is Catherine Deneuve, tiger-striped silk and feather boa, barefoot over jagged rock, severe; she is Marlene Dietrich, black gingham dress slit long up the side of the leg, cigarette like a casual dagger raised near the lips, deep black eye liner. "Cat got your tongue?" It doesn't have to make much sense to her; she can't imagine pulling back from it now. She is not Maggie Fischer for this moment. She is not Catherine Deneuve or Marlene Dietrich or Natasha Fatale either.

The priests make more spluttering sounds, and she has a moment to wonder what she's going to do as she rises from her chair and leans over the desk, steady hands planted firmly over the smooth beveled edge, leering down at them, each in turn, coldly hot, and feeling like her sex is a gun pointed at their heads. "Don't you want me, Fathers?" she asks, and her voice has grown all husky somehow, and she doesn't recognize it, it's Jean Harlow and Bette Davis and Lauren Bacall and Catherine Deneuve and Marlene Dietrich, and it's none of those because it's all of those, because it's Fidget Ambrose now, just for a moment. And just for a moment, Maggie is invincible and unafraid, incapable of being embarrassed.

She knows Jasper's game now, too, and almost laughs from the realization of it, how simple it is, how pure and perfect and natural, knows it by name. She turns and crosses the room, hauls open the heavy door, pulls it shut behind her, strolls through the musty, echoing church whistling the theme from some old cartoon, then down the front stairs to the quiet street outside.

Maggie awakens, weeks later, to feel her father's grip slackened, his head tilted into sleep, and she feels a moment of pity like that which had compelled her to come there and endure this in the first place. Her mother has finished praying for their souls and has gone to cook dinner. Before Mrs. Fischer has a chance to herd her to the dinner table, Maggie races through the back door, around the pool, and into the safety of the dark woods. Escaping.

She returns to the woods trail and follows its deep dark curve of trees around Memorial Park towards her apartment. And then that sensation is back, the one that's been assaulting her ever since she moved out and started dancing at Muffy's, every time she follows the trail in the dark returning from work or her parents' house, the sensation of someone following her on the trail, aping each of her footsteps only several yards behind. When she turns to look, there is just the dark idle woods in every direction, seeming full of potential terrible danger, but nothing moving. He's faded into the trees, grown branches. It's an uncomfortable sensation largely because she's usually the predator in these woods; they are her haunting grounds, not those of some invader. She knows the way well enough to abandon light, and can move quickly; she can move faster through here than any nutcase stalker if she has to, so--freaking out a little--she quickens her pace, skips over exposed roots and rocks by memory (she and Harry grew up running along this trail--it was her playground long before it became her commute), avoiding obstacles that should trip up anyone following.

Then when Maggie gets within sight of her apartment complex beyond the trees and a tangential trail, she loses it finally, freaks out fully and sprints up the brown path through the wild lawn toward the line of quiet porches, breathless, darting fierce eyes to the gaping black hole that's just disgorged her. A few little hopheads usually hang out on a second floor balcony here, gurgling on bongs and drinking beers, lounging lazily in yard sale furniture. There's usually a guy with a camcorder and a blinding spotlight too, who'll quickly up and point at the trailhead in the trees waiting to see what's been chasing her, a little fixed smile on his lips since he's done this a dozen times by now, and it's become a routine part of his smug little internet broadcast, "Who's Chasing Maggie Tonight?" She mutters something like, "Fuck you, Jimbo," when she passes beneath them, still twitching from adrenaline. That doesn't really work because then the whole balcony up there bursts into laughter that continues unabated even after she lets her door slam on the frame behind her.

Lyla is on the couch watching TV next to somebody she doesn't know--must be a new boyfriend, big ears, spooning spaghetti into his mouth while also talking on his cell phone in the dimly lit room. Everything is as normal as it's been for the last month here, which has been surprisingly normal despite the occasional freak-outs. It's become her chamber of pain though, in a way, because this is where she is hungriest, at night, waiting for something else to happen to her or for time itself to stop so that she won't have to fight it any longer. There is no food here though; she is safe for now. Safe for now.

Sometimes she can't take it anymore and practically runs to the McDonalds for cheeseburgers and fries and a strawberry milkshake and packs it all into a plain brown paper bag so nobody will know, and smuggles it home to her bedroom, past the darting hopheads with their stored camera faces, past Lyla stuck on Court TV and long distance telephone calls or comatose from pharm toxins. She remains casual in the kitchen, the refrigerator, ketchup, salt, lots of salt, hurrying now, aching now, though she really wants to take the bag and put it on the table and take the baseball bat from behind the door and pound the bag and the food into a mashed leaking smear of raw protein and grease and frozen strawberries, takes the bag into her bedroom, onto the bed, frantically searches for something on the TV, but there's never anything at four in the afternoon, nothing, but she needs something--it's part of the joy of the food, watching the TV, something she's watched before while eating this food, back when she had lapsed before and didn't care for awhile and didn't ever stand on the scale in the bathroom, and enjoyed her life for thirty minutes--McDonalds cheeseburgers and fries and a strawberry milkshake, chocolate peanut butter ice cream, bags of potato chips--tortilla chips with salsa--with nacho cheese dip, and then sleep, deep, uncomfortable sleep after ten minutes of dull quiet sobbing. She tosses the remote down to the folded white comforter at the foot of the bed, the TV on the Lifetime channel, first date and marriage home-videos with participant commentary, takes a cheeseburger from the bag, pries the lid of the bun off, tosses the pickles back into the bag, wipes fingers with a course white logo napkin--and even the napkins have that nostalgic voodoo about them, that resonance of joyful moments mixed with hours of self-loathing--shakes the ketchup squirt bottle, squirts ketchup onto the cheeseburger, smears the bun lid back, pours fries onto the wrapper, salts the fries, pauses.

Afterwards, the impulse--easily predicted and rarely avoided--the temptation to just make it go away, erase those thirty minutes of masochistic joy by taking that corporal stagger down the hall to the bathroom, under a degree of volitional willpower similar to that required to make the passage from dentist office waiting room to examination chair, but compelled to do it by the pain in the tooth, by the unaccustomed weight inside, the unnatural satiety produced by the food, like being pregnant she imagines. Close the door on the world outside, lift the toilet seat lid, clear the yellow carpet floor mat from the chipped white bathroom tiles, take the stance (compulsion of a police officer at the side of a highway), probe down, down, down--is it enough yet--rid herself of it, make it go away, take today's mistake away.

She promised herself not to do that again when she heard that a medical examiner at an autopsy could tell by looking, know just by looking, and she doesn't want to be that transparent, for somebody to be able to tell so much about her just by taking a single look, and wonders if people can tell even without cutting her open, using those daily scalpels they've all developed from high-school cafeteria tables and afternoon Oprah binges, and imagining people's questions or looks of disgust or probing questions, the new ways they'd look at her, the new reasons they'd have for judging her, evaluating her, knowing about her, which wouldn't be knowing her, just knowing about her, knowing her darkest secrets, and having control over her then, the way Fidget had control over Jasper.

She takes capsules of Phentermine and ephedra to curb the hunger, takes Zenical whenever she feels obliged to eat--if she's forced out to dinner or if she's at home and it's Thanksgiving or Christmas--which is supposed to absorb the fat. She drinks water all day to make her stomach feel full, and at some point stops having hunger pains, and the pills produce a mild amphetamine rush, but give her headaches too, and make her angry sometimes, and make her want to sleep sometimes in the afternoon and not get up until morning but prevent her from sleeping at all.

It used to be worse. When she didn't care it was worse, because she really did care but lied to herself, and suddenly realized she cared and needed to make it all go away as fast as it seemed to come, make it all vanish immediately, every pound, every ounce of fat, everything that was wrong with the person standing in the mirror staring back red wide eyed at her flinching. She would fast for three days then, and then break down again, go shopping for junk food, cry as she ate it in her bedroom alone with the crackling television the only source of light. She would eat more than she could ever really want to eat in order to exhaust her appetite for food and for the act of eating, because she would purge the next day and eat nothing, because there was always the chance to start over and try again, and the more she ate today, the less she would want to eat anything tomorrow, and maybe the next day, and maybe for three days. She would evade friends and stay home at night in order to avoid the opportunity and the obligation to eat, restaurants with paper placemats and long appetizer lists, when someone would order appetizers, nacho chips with cheese and sour cream and ground meat and jalapeno peppers, fried mozzarella sticks with marinara sauce, onion rings, french fries, fried balls of crab meat. She would say she had just eaten, was full, it was too late to eat, it was too early to eat, she had late dinner plans, she was diabetic, she was catatonic, she was schizophrenic, raging with crayons on white padded walls, she couldn't eat that day, she couldn't eat it. She would take diuretics and laxatives before stepping on the scale, would wait to grow dehydrated before stepping on it, naked over the cruel wavering needle, adjusting mentally for the last meal that must still be in there someplace. She knew every time she pulled the scale out that it was a mistake, and would only result in eating, because if she had gained, then she would despair and say to hell with it and stop caring for long enough to make the trip to McDonalds or the convenience store or the Chinese restaurant, and if she had lost then she would feel free to take a break finally, just a break for one day and binge a little and still take that same trip outside to food, and still find herself purging for the next three days. But she always stepped on it because she always had to know. Because it always felt so good when the needle didn't travel as far from zero as it had the last time.

Now she purges by changing into sweats and sneakers, vaulting from the apartment and running through the woods to work off the three thousand calories she'd just consumed, jog as far as JFK Drive and Vice Admiral Square sometimes, but usually to less populated areas, deeper woods and open fields, because she would rather nobody saw her doing this, it's as much of a private thing as the sad bow over the gaping toilet bowl used to be, or the ritual in the bedroom with the television and the cheeseburgers and fries and milkshake, and she rises into a pace that is always just a bit faster than she's comfortable with, just a bit into the area of punishment so that she'll remember it the next time she falls off the wagon--although when she does remember it, it seems an acceptable and obvious redemption for the act she's contemplating repeating--runs with heavy feet, heavy breathing, pushing her legs on while sweat builds and collects, falls from eyebrows, drenches hair, with her breathing in that familiar rhythmic pattern that seems so off but comes so naturally, a tattoo born of the rise and fall of her weight on her shoes over dirt and rocks, pavement and asphalt, crossing streets and jogging in place at intersections, thirst rising, coarseness at the back of her throat, difficulty swallowing, dizziness, gasping, then hands clutching knees, bent over in front of new homes in a part of town she's never seen before, and only standing upright through the force of inertia. She still takes the suppressants every day and worries that she's developing a heart condition because it beats so hard sometimes and skips a beat sometimes, and she smokes a pack of cigarettes a day even though it makes jogging harder and leaves her gasping for twenty minutes during crippled treks back home, and worries that her lungs are charring, and growing cancers. But it's something that's not eating. It's something to keep her from the food just a little bit longer.

It all goes away eventually, it always goes away.

Asleep in her bedroom, she dreams she can see who's following her, a figure in black with a black hat, bright green eyes glaring out from under its brim, Jasper Morrity finally returned for her, but sterner of face, somehow fiercer, older. She's hastening along the dark trail again with the echoes of his footfalls behind her. She runs and he runs and she can feel the air stirred by his fingers on the back of her neck. He wants to give her something in the dream, something she desperately wants but is too frightened to accept. She cries out, "What do you want? What do you want from me?" But he never answers. His voice is gone from her life, gone like the pounds shed over wavering bathroom scale needles, gone like the glint of humor that sometimes perched at the corner of her father's eye, gone like the moments she wanted to last forever but which never did. It all goes away eventually, it always goes away.