She fiddled at the dial. An American Negro solicitously asked her, by name, how she called her lover boy.

Where is the moment? Where is the elucidation of the ulterior landscape that we could all agree upon defining as the now? The now and the nevermore. Here in England, of all places? Here in the land of Donne, Blake, Shelley, and Auden. Here, good-self Sylvia was without father, mother, and husband, and Mother England was, by all evidence, without true offspring. Spiritual bombast is the first symptom of impending collapse. The fish rots first at the tongue. The last time she had heard Ted on the Beeb, he had gone out with a remote to Sheffield and had spoken for an hour with Dame Edith Sitwell. They talked of tea, migraine headaches, the Chinese quarters of various European cities, opium, society pajama parties under the raj, the Plantagenets, spinsterhood, and Anna Pavlova. Ted broke the news that Dame Edith had converted to Roman Catholicism. He asked if she, as a rule, patronized Sunday services. In her best Miss Haversham voice, she said, “Yes, but I rarely stay past the snack bar.”

Sylvia had once vowed that she would not speak to God ever again. But when did God ever, even once, speak to her? She could be resigned, for that matter, if He would grant some sign that He was at least tuning her in. God’s silence was at the root of her father’s. All men melt down into the same entity. She knew that God was male because every church she had ever been in had been designed to specifically suggest femininity. They all incorporated some impression of the colossus, the mill, and the mine of the female womb. God, Sylvia surmised, was inclined to configure the naves of His numerous residences in the shape of the uterus because the uterus was the one place in all of His creation that God the Father had never been. That meant that Sylvia was without a father and the Father of man was without a mother.

She tuned the radio back to the starting point of all of this futility. The bust sat there on its perch, vulture dull and heavy. But her father was smiling.

Daddy?

I should have known when you scrapped your foot first and just lay there smoking with the nebula gathering above your head. You were readying for the passage. You were suffering the sea change. You were shedding not only skin but parts as well. I would have to invent you from the stray extremities that you left behind, but this was nothing new for me even before you died.

I want to ask you something. Do you remember that hole in the wall of the basement where you stowed the firewood? You said that we would need the wood when the war began and the government repealed electricity, and cut off coal oil to the German-born. That black, dirt-bottomed bay? I slept in that box for three days. Three days, thirteen years after you left. I had grown so tired of looking for you that I decided that you could come looking for me, ready or not, now or never. I had a jug of water and a vial of Thorazine. I wasn’t afraid for one moment.