And Oliphant backs away a couple steps before he breaks eye contact and heads toward Special Features. I'm counting 542, counting 543 ...

On my way to the real estate office, I ask the cab to wait in front of my apartment building while I run upstairs.

The brown stain on my ceiling is bigger. It's maybe as big around as a tire, only now the stain has arms and legs.

Back in the cab, I try to buckle my seat belt, but it's adjusted too small. It cuts into me, my gut riding on top of it, and I hear Helen Hoover Boyle saying, "Middle-aged. Five-ten, maybe one hundred seventy pounds. Caucasian. Brown, green." I see her under her bubble of pink hair, winking at me.

I tell the driver the address for the real estate office, and I tell him that he can drive as fast as he wants, but just not to piss me off.

The details about the cab are it stinks. The seat is black and sticky. It's a cab.

I say, I have a little problem with anger.

The driver looks at me in his rearview mirror and says, "You should maybe get some anger management classes."

And I'm counting 578, counting 579, counting 580 ...

Chapter 14

According to Architectural Digest, big mansions surrounded by vast estate gardens and thoroughbred horse farms are really good places to live. According to Town & Country, strands of fat pearls are lustrous. According to Travel & Leisure, a private yacht anchored in the sunny Mediterranean is relaxing.

In the waiting room of the Helen Boyle Real Estate Agency, this is what passes as a big news flash. A real scoop.

On the coffee table, there's copies of all these high-end magazines. There's a humpbacked Chesterfield couch upholstered in striped pink silk. The sofa table behind it has long lion legs, their claws gripping glass balls. You have to wonder how much of this furniture came here stripped of its hardware, its drawer pulls and metal details. Sold as junk, it came here and Helen Hoover Boyle put it back together.

A young woman, half my age, sits behind a carved Louis XIV desk, staring at a clock radio on the desk. Her desk plate says, Mona Sabbat. Next to the clock radio is a police scanner crackling with static.

On the clock radio, an older woman is yelling at a younger woman. It seems the younger woman has gotten pregnant out of wedlock so the older woman is calling her a slut and a whore. A stupid whore, the older woman says, since the slut spread her legs without even getting paid.

The woman at the desk, this Mona person, turns off the police scanner and says, "I hope you don't mind. I love this show."

These media-holies. These quiet-ophobics.

On the clock radio, the older woman tells the slut to give her baby up for adoption unless she wants to ruin its future. She tells the slut to grow up and finish her degree in microbiology, then get married, but not have any more sex until then.

Mona Sabbat takes a brown paper bag from under the desk and takes out something wrapped in foil. She picks the foil open at one end and you can smell garlic and marigolds.

On the clock radio, the pregnant slut just cries and cries.

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can hurt like hell.

According to an article in Town & Country, beautifully handwritten personal correspondence on luxurious stationery is once again very in, in, in. In a copy of Estate magazine, there's an advertisement that says:

Attention Patrons of the Bridle Mountain Riding and Polo Club

It says: "Have you contracted a parasitic skin infection from a mount?"

The phone number is one I haven't seen before. The radio woman tells the slut to stop crying.

Here's Big Brother, singing and dancing, force-feeding you so your mind never gets hungry enough to think.

Mona Sabbat puts both elbows on her desk, and cradles her lunch in her hands, leaning close to the radio. The phone rings, and she answers it, saying, "Helen Boyle Realty. The Right Home Every Time." She says, "Sorry, Oyster, Dr. Sara's on." She says, "I'll see you at the ritual."

The radio woman calls the crying slut a bitch.

The cover of First Class magazine says: "Sable, the Justifiable Homicide."

And fast as a hiccup, me only half listening to the radio, me half reading, the culling song goes through my head.

From the clock radio, all you can hear is the slut sobbing and sobbing.

Instead of the older woman, there's silence. Sweet, golden silence. Too perfect to be anyone left alive.

The slut draws a long breath and asks, "Dr. Sara?" She says, "Dr. Sara, are you still there?"

And a deep voice comes on, saying the Dr. Sara Lowenstein Show is temporarily experiencing some technical difficulties. The deep voice apologizes. A moment later, dance music starts up.

The cover of Manor-Born magazine says: "Diamonds Go Casual!"

I put my face in my hands and groan.

The Mona person peels the foil back from her lunch and takes another bite. She turns off the radio and says, "Bummer."

On the backs of her hands, rusty brown henna designs trail down her fingers, her fingers and thumbs lumpy with silver rings. A lot of silver chains loop around her neck and disappear into her orange dress. On her chest, the crinkled orange fabric of her dress is bumpy from all the pendants hanging underneath. Her hair is a thousand coils and dreadlocks of red and black pinned up over silver filigree earrings. Her eyes look amber. Her fingernails, black.

I ask if she's worked here long.

"You mean," she says, "in earth time?" And she takes a paperback from a drawer in her desk. She uncaps a bright yellow highlighter and opens the book.

I ask if Mrs. Boyle ever talks about poetry.

And Mona says, "You mean Helen?"

Yeah, does she ever recite poetry? In her office, does she ever call people on the phone and read any poems to them?

"Don't get me wrong," Mona says, "but Mrs. Boyle's way too much into the money side of everything. You know?"

I have to start counting 1, counting 2 ...

"It's like this," she says. "When traffic's bad, Mrs. Boyle makes me drive home with her—just so's she can use the car-pool lane. Then I have to take three buses to get home myself. You know?"

I'm counting 4, counting 5 ...

She says, "One time, we had this great sharing about the power of crystal. It's like we were finally connecting on some level, only it turns out we were talking about two totally different realities."

Then I'm on my feet. Unfolding a sheet of paper from my back pocket, I show her the poem and ask if it looks familiar.

Highlighted in the book on her desk, it says: Magic is the tuning of needed energy for natural change.

Her amber eyes move back and forth in front of the poem. Just above the orange neckline of her dress, above her right collarbone, she has tattooed three tiny black stars. She's sitting cross-legged in her swivel chair. Her feet are bare and dirty, with silver rings around each big toe.

"I know what this is," she says, and her hand comes up.

Before her fingers close around it, I fold the paper and tuck it into my back pocket.

Her hand still in the air, she points an index finger at me and says, "I've heard of those. It's a culling spell, right?"

Highlighted in the book on her desk, it says: The ultimate product of death is invoking rebirth.

Across the polished cherry top of the desk is a long deep gouge.

I ask, what can she tell me about culling spells?

"All the literature mentions them," she says, and shrugs, "but they're supposed to be lost." She holds her hand out palm-up and says, "Let me see again."

And I say, how do they work?

And she wiggles her fingers.

And I shake my head no. I ask, how come it kills other people, but not the person who says it?