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the football man's scalp. Curly, coppery hair.
Gray eyes inflate within each socket. Even his uniform weaves itself whole from
the scraps and threads scattered around his cell floor. Printed across the back
of his jersey is a big number 54 and the name Patterson. To me, the football
man says, "I had a part of my foot over the scrimmage line when the ref
blew his whistle to signal the start of play. That's 'offsides.'"
    I ask, 'And that's in the Bible?"
    With all his hair and skin replaced, you can tell the football man is
only a high schooler. Sixteen, maybe seventeen years old. Even as he talks,
little silver wires weave themselves between his teeth, becoming a mouthful of
braces. "Two minutes into the second quarter," he says, "I
intercepted a pass and got sacked by a defensive tackle—pow! Now, I'm
here."
    Again, Leonard shouts, "But why am I here?"
    "Because you don't believe in the one true God," says
Patterson, the football player. Now that he's covered in skin again, his new
eyes keep glancing over at Babette.
    She doesn't look up from her little mirror, but Babette makes faces,
pursing her lips and tossing her hair, fluttering her eyelashes, fast. As my
mom would tell you, "Nobody stands that straight when she's not on
camera." Meaning: Babette loves the attention.
    No, it's not fair. From within their respective cages, Patterson and
Leonard both stare at Babette locked within hers. No one looks at me. If I
wanted to be ignored I'd have stayed on earth as a ghost, watching my mom and
dad walk around naked, opening the drapes and chilling rooms as I bully them to
put on some clothes. Even that Ahriman demon showing up to tear me apart and
devour me would be better than getting no attention whatsoever.
    There it is, again—that nagging tendency to hope. My addiction.
    While Patterson and Leonard ogle Babette, and Babette ogles herself, I
pretend to watch the vampire bats flit around. I watch the surf crest and break
in rolling brown waves on Shit Lake. I pretend to scratch the make-believe
psoriasis on my face. In the neighboring cages, sinners huddle, weeping out of
old habit. A damned soul dressed in the uniform of a Nazi soldier smashes his
face, again and again, into the stone floor of his cell, crushing and
collapsing his nose and forehead as if he were tapping a hard-boiled egg
against a plate in order to shatter the shell. In the pause between each impact
on the stone, his crushed nose and features inflate to their normal appearance.
In another cell, a teenage kid wears a black leather biker jacket, an oversize
safety pin piercing his cheek, his head shaved except for a stripe of hair,
dyed blue and gelled to stand in a spiky Mohawk which runs from his forehead to
the nape of his neck. As I watch, the leather-jacket punk reaches up to his
cheek and flicks open the safety pin. He draws it out from the holes in his
skin, then reaches through the bars of his cage and pokes the point of the open
pin into the lock of his cell door, working the point around within the
keyhole.
    Still gazing at herself in her compact mirror, Babette asks of no one
in particular, "What day is it?"
    Leonard's arm crooks, instantly, and he looks at his diver's
chronograph watch, saying, "It's Thursday. Three-oh-nine p.m." A beat
later, he says, "No, wait... now it's three ten."
    In the middle distance, a looming giant with the head of a lion, shaggy
with black fur, with cat claws instead of hands, reaches into a cage and plucks
out a wailing, flailing sinner, dangling him by his hair. In the same manner
you might nibble grapes from a bunch, the demon's lips close around the man's
leg. The demon's furry lion cheeks sink inward, hollowed, and the man's screams
grow louder as the meat is sucked from the living bone. With one leg reduced to
hanging bone, the demon begins to suck the meat from the second leg.
    Despite all of this ruckus, Leonard and Patterson continue to watch
Babette, who watches herself. The Ice Age of Dumbness.
    With a