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emptiness of my eyes seemed hollow.
I looked like a very unflattering mug shot, the kind where the recently arrested is still
sobering up and trying to figure out what he did and how he got caught. I hoped it was not
an omen of what was to come.
In spite of an evening of nothing more strenuous than lounging on the couch and dozing, I
was nearly overwhelmed with sleepiness, and the teeth-brushing had taken the last of my
energy. Still, I made it all the way to the bed under my own power, and I flopped down onto
the pillows thinking that I would just drift off into slumberland and worry about everything
else in the morning. But alas, Rita had other plans.
After the hushed murmur of bedtime prayers had died away down the hall in the children's
room, I heard her come into the bathroom and run water for a while, and I had almost fallen
asleep when the sheets rustled and something that smelled like very aggressive orchids slid
into bed beside me.
 How do you feel? Rita said.
 Much better, I said, and giving credit where it was due I added,  The soup seemed to
help.
 Good, she whispered, and she put her head down on my chest.
For a while she just lay there, and I could feel her breath blowing across my chest and I
wondered if I could really get to sleep with the weight of her head pressed onto my ribs like
that. But then the pattern of her breathing changed, got slightly percussive, and I realized
she was crying.
There are few things in the world that make me feel more clueless than a woman's tears. I
know that I am supposed to do something comforting and then go slay whatever dragon
caused the crying fit, but it has been my experience, in my limited dealings with women,
that the tears never come when they should, and they are never about what you might think,
and consequently you are reduced to truly stupid options like patting her head and saying,
 There there in the hopes that at some point she will let you in on what the display is
actually about.
But Dexter is nothing if not a team player, and so I slid my arm up across her back, put the
palm of my hand on her head and patted.
 It's okay I said, and no matter how stupid that sounded I thought it was a tremendous
improvement over  there there'.
True to form, Rita's reply came out of absolutely nowhere that I could hope to predict. I
can't lose you she said.
I certainly had no plans to be lost, and I would gladly have told her so, but she was just
hitting her stride now, and the silent sobs were jerking her body and sending a small rivulet
of salt water rolling down my chest.
 Oh, Dexter she sobbed,  what would I do if I lost you, too? And now, with that word
 too', I had somehow joined a completely unexpected and unknown company, presumably
of people Rita had carelessly left lying around where they had been easily lost, and she had
given me no clue how I had managed to get a seat with that group, or even who they were.
Did she mean her first husband, the addict who had beaten and tormented her, Cody and
Astor, until they were traumatized into becoming my ideal family? He was in prison now,
and I certainly agreed that being lost that way was a bad idea. Or was there some other
string of misplaced persons who had slipped through the cracks of Rita's life and been
washed away by the rains of mischance?
Then, as if I needed further proof that her thoughts were being beamed to her from a mother
ship in orbit beyond Pluto, Rita began to slide her face down my chest, across my stomach
 still sobbing, you understand, and leaving a trail of tears that quickly turned cool.
 Just lie still she sniffled.  You shouldn't exert yourself with a concussion.
As I said, you never really know what the program is going to be when a woman switches on
the tears.
TWE TY-FOUR
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT I WOKE UP AND THOUGHT, BUT what does he
want? I don't know why I hadn't asked that question before, and I don't know why it came to
me now, lying in my comfy bed next to a gently snoring Rita. But there it was  it was
bobbling around on the surface of Lake Dexter now, and I had to do something with it. The
inside of my head still felt stiff, as if it was packed with wet sand, and for several minutes I
lay there unable to do anything with my thought except to repeat it: what does he want?
What did Weiss want? He was not simply feeding a Passenger of his own, I was reasonably
sure of that. I had felt no sympathy twinges from my own anywhere near either Weiss or his
handiwork, which ordinarily I would, in the presence of another Presence.
And the way he went about it, starting with already dead bodies instead of creating his own
 until he had killed Deutsch  argued that he was after something altogether different.
But what? He made videos of the bodies. He made videos of people looking at the bodies.
And he had made a video of me at play  unique footage, yes, but it all added up to nothing
that made any sense to me. Where was the fun in all that? I saw none and that made it
impossible for me to get inside Weiss's head and figure him out. With normal, well-adjusted
psychopaths who killed because they must and took a simple, honest pleasure from their
work, I never had that problem. I understood them all too well, since I was one. But with
Weiss, there was no point of contact, no place to feel empathy, and because of that I had no
idea of where he would go or what he would do next. I had a very bad feeling that whatever
it was, I would not like it  but I had no feeling at all of what it would be, and I didn't like
that at all.
I lay there in bed for a while thinking about it  or trying to think about it, since the good
ship Dexter was clearly not yet ready to raise full steam. Nothing came to me. I didn't know
what he wanted.
I didn't know what he would do next. Coulter was out to get me. So was Salguero, and of
course, Doakes had never given up. Debs was still in a coma.
On the plus side, Rita had made me some very good soup. She was really very good to me
 she deserved better, even though she clearly didn't know that. She thought she had
everything, apparently, between me, the children, and our recent trip to Paris. And although
she did, in fact, have these things, none of them remotely resembled what she thought they
were. She was like a mother lamb in a wolf pack, and she only saw white fluffy wool all
around her when in fact the pack was licking its lips and waiting for her to turn her back.
Dexter, Cody and Astor were monsters. And Paris  well, they did actually speak French
there, just as she had hoped. But Paris had proved to have its own unique kind of monster,
too, as our wonderful interval at the art gallery had proved. What was it called?  Jennifer's
Leg. Very interesting; after all my years of toiling in the fields it was still possible for me
to see something that surprised me, and for that reason I felt a certain warmth for Paris
nowadays.
Between Jennifer and her leg, and Rita's eccentric performance, and whatever it was that
Weiss was doing, life was just full of surprises lately, and they all boiled down to one thing:
people really deserve whatever happens to them, don't they?
It may not do me very much credit, but I found this thought very comforting, and I drifted
back to sleep soon after.
The next morning my head had cleared a great deal; whether it was from Rita's attentions or
just my naturally chipper metabolism, I couldn't say. In any case, I jumped out of bed with a
fully functioning and powerfully effective brain at my service once again, which was all to
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