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the saltwater pond, one stepping-stone at a time, then leaned toward the mangrove’s trunk. I froze. A chuffing reached my ears, low and coarse, like the sound of a passing steamboat as apprehended by an eel. Counterpointing Proserpine’s breaths was a second cadence: the thump of the sap pulsing through her xylem.
    â€œShe’s breathing,” I said. “Her heart is beating.”
    â€œVestigial reflexes,” Edwina said. “She’s no longer sentient, I promise you.”
    For a moment I considered reneging on my contract and going back to Boston. Yes, I needed the money, but did I really want to spend a year among people who routinely fashioned mutant lobsters and breathing trees and God knew what other sorts of biological surrealism?
    â€œâ€˜No growth of moor or coppice,’” Edwina quoted as I returned to my seat, “‘No heather-flower or vine, but bloomless buds of poppies, green grapes of Proserpine.’” She extended her arm and harvested one of the mangrove’s fruits. “The world has never met with my approval.”
    â€œYou’re an idealist,” I said.
    â€œOr a cynic.”
    â€œThe same thing.”
    It was a glib answer, and we both knew it. Although her polarized lenses mitigated Edwina’s scowl, I still felt its impact.
    â€œIn any event,” she said, “from the moment of my daughter’s birth, I contrived to give her a sheltered existence, educating her entirely at home. Her father would not have assented, but he died before she was born, pancreatic cancer, a banal end for a remarkable man.” She took my hand and pressed the strange fruit into my palm. “Javier calls them ‘rococonuts.’ Charnock prefers the term ‘mummy kumquats’—‘mumquats’—for they can make the consumer imagine he’s immortal. Be careful where you eat your mumquat, Mason. Avoid precipices and quicksand bogs.”
    â€œThanks for the warning,” I said, nesting the fruit in my shirt pocket.
    Edwina raised her hand in a halfhearted attempt to conceal a yawn. “By age six Londa was an expert swimmer. On the morning of her seventeenth birthday, she dove into a lagoon and struck her head on a rock. Javier fished her out before she could drown. Londa’s first trip to the mainland occurred in a medevac chopper. The blow left no scar, but the resultant memory loss remains one of the severest in the annals of amnesia.” She swallowed some coffee. “Gradually it became clear that Londa’s childhood recollections weren’t the only casualty—she’d also lost her ability to distinguish right from wrong. Depravity is not a diagnosis one makes lightly, but the evidence seems unequivocal.”
    For the next fifteen minutes, Edwina expounded upon the sorrycondition of Londa’s conscience. The feral adolescent had recently set fire to the rug in the east parlor, stolen cash from Javier’s wallet, smashed the dinnerware on the kitchen floor, thrown rocks through the windows of Dr. Charnock’s laboratory, eaten mumquats against her mother’s orders—the list went on and on.
    â€œIn undertaking Londa’s cure, you will have one great asset,” Edwina said. “She has retained her ability to pick up any book and absorb its contents at an astonishing speed, a genetic endowment from her maternal grandfather. By devouring most of the Faustino library, she has succeeded in reorienting herself to Western civilization and its cultural norms. As for reality per se, she prefers to account for it in reference to the capricious Yahweh of prerabbinical Judaism. Not the deity I would have picked for her, but probably better than no deity at all, given her present stage of development.”
    A disturbing image flitted through my imagination. I was in Sinuhe’s surgical theater, Londa lying before me on an operating table. I had scrolled her scalp away from her