SHE'LL enter a black room she had been born into as she now thinks she’d been born here; she’ll come tonight, at seven. When Lisa was seven all the bedroom pillows in the other house to the left of this block in the low-cost housing city-subdivision were simply burned by so much of the blazing sun on the night. It was such a large meteorite that fell smack right into Cindy’s house, and alive their dog was seen running gray with burns. Today she’s eight, the 28th of December, unknown to her father who had died in the blast, unknown now to their mother who did later expire from excessive radiation sickness. (Honest). Now they’re under the protection of the national government, specimen to the scientific research’s observations, and this government thinking it’s best they forget a little about their parents without leaving the zone Cindy becomes Lisa, Antonio becoming Burton. But the scientific research has ignored a single yet very important point I’ve been insisting (though so much of it were anyway bound to fail in the bureau)— that some historical research, also, into what the name Lisa or the name Burton may have been to their past should have been requisite. If Burton happens to have been the name of Burton’s first dog then the name-change is futile in purpose, if not to be a trauma to the boy in future. Now,
    (The first thing Lisa sees upon entering her bedroom at seven are her pillows onto which she had asked the laboratory’s secretary to embroider some white butterflies. Next to the pillows, she sees the paint of the picture on the walls [this paint drawing green and black trees vertically stretching like crosses nine feet tall], and the gray-clad Fatima girl pasted to the ceiling. Is this now the beginning of something approaching, some final episode? Nobody knows, Lisa does not.)

SHE enters the room and lays a bunch of flowers on the table, and the door starts knocking but she doesn’t go to it, goes instead to a tree-green box to her left, takes out from it her doll and the doll’s feeding bottle, the knocking continuing faintly heard in the noise of the punk rock sound from the next glass room, and looks at the emerald flowers she brought with her and then toward the flowers on the window ledge and then back to the emerald flowers, and hears calls from the door (muffled voices, voice, as it’s a thick door, not to mention it is a noisy eve). Monkey-eating eagles fly across the window outside. And, not in fear, she opens the knocking door, quickly after running to the kitchen to the refrigerator to take milk from green-tinted bottles, to pour some of this milk into a glass, to drink from the glass and not touch the Kellogg’s, only to walk back through a white-painted corridor with glossy walls and so-white lighting that seems unreal in the sense that the camera cannot record such whiteness indoors—only to walk back through the corridor, back to her brother at her door. She and her brother then talk, no words in the noise, he nodding, she nodding too, after which she opens the door she leaves open for the boy, for him to follow her, for him to be able to receive the doll from her and nail it to the wall with the nail in his left hand and the hammer in his right hand, get him to be able to hammer on the nail on the doll and the wall beneath the doll, . . . in short, get him to be able to hammer on the doll. Now he starts giving the doll a flow of watergun spurts. When he came in he already had in his hands watergun, nail, and hammer. Knocking on the door, three objects were lying on the floor at his feet: later, Lisa came out and accidentally stepped on the watergun: Burton said "hey!" to her stepping on the gun, in American English.
    What do you think the sonofabitch is doing? Want me to kill him, want me to shove the gun into his mouth and then plug him with rubber to take the gun out, he’s crazy. One hour you leave them and he’s doing something to the girl’s toys, cutting them, dammit he’s crazy, ripping them, pouring milk on them, what bloody monster’s child this bastard monster is anyway, this son, of a bitch. Next thing you know he’d be socking that gun into my carburetor, and god help me I’ll sock him into the gas tank to end this . . . It’s always like that everyday, it’s fucking like that everyday, it’s bloody worse each day, even, he’s a bull’s sh—this kid’s my life’s bull’s sh—he’s a bull’s muck get him out of here.
    The reader may now here (truly) take time out and play awhile the music of Chopin, Etude in C minor Op. 10 No. 12 (Revolutionary), preferably in a rich man’s glass room, or an artist’s black room, and then to play a record of Chopin’s etude in g flat major op. 10 no. 5 while reading the below.

IN the previous year, it was terribly discreditable to the people involved in the final coating of the young woman’s—Lisa’s—bedroom walls and ceiling to be witnessing entente cordiale with the boy. He there gave them juvenile directions like pointing towards certain black spots not well sprayed within those almost invisible second layers. Soon, the two were moving in: Lisa jumping on the mattress, Antonio jumping on Cindy, even before gray-black paint could dry.