The readout brought more light, more crepuscular light, into the room. She thought of how it is only in the discipline of modern poetry that brightness and merriment are considered evidence of sterility. She picked up her pen. She took a measured glance at her stone companion on its perch upon the marble-topped table. Etched in relief onto the rock were the features of her father. Bee King Otto.

She suspected that he must have spoken to her when she was a child. Else how could she have come to love him enough to repeatedly attempt to kill herself following his death? How, other than from him, could she have learned of the laborious miracle of honey making, hence her reverence for the stuff and her reluctance to butter her own children’s biscuits with it, as though it held the properties of morphia? But in memory, he proclaimed whatever it was that he proclaimed through the perforated domino of his bee man’s helmet. She couldn’t be sure of the main thrust of his instruction, but she attributed to Otto the side note admonishment tutoring her never to anticipate fulfillment, no matter what knowledge that she might master, and no matter what friends, or marital alliances, or offspring that she might win for herself. Who but him? She knew that his voice was fitful and Germanic in any of the several languages that he could speak, but she could not in memory hear that voice. Not for the love of him. Not for the life of her.

“Do you have a message?” she asked her father in stone.

This had always been the impasse. He could metamorphose himself beyond measure. He was the star, and she was the bit player. He refused to give her her cue. Or acknowledge paternity.

He stared back at her, through her, with the composure of a palisade. She looked to the Gaelic gibberish sparkling on the wall. Maybe he had never had a voice, or, more precisely, a voice independent of hers. His face seemed to be fading as well. Memory was a vital artery, expanding, then constricting.

Maybe Daddy is a concept much like Santa Claus, whose identity, intrinsic to certain delusions of self, becomes fathomable when one grows old enough not to care anymore. Maybe husband is just such a concept as well.

He would talk all right. Daddy would be sworn into testimony. Or face a second death. A martyr’s end this time. She crossed the room, hurry-scurry, catching herself in the chilled glass of the breakfront, her wireworked elbows rawboned and electric. She turned on Ted’s boyhood Philco, that pockmarked standing stone upon the mantel. The hooped banding glowed the color of cream. A chinook of static lariated into the air. She reined it in with the tuning dial. There was a panel from sundry universities deliberating on Minister Profumo’s dirty linen. Nöel Coward voices lamented that their security and way of life had been jeopardized by the fact that the queen’s minister of war had “been about” with a show-girl who had “been about” with Soviet agents.