In retrospect, it might have been a bad idea. But Bo didn’t have the luxury of living retrospectively. He lived in the now. And what he’d done in the now, which is to say a month ago, was to buy his lover a coffee mug. On the otherwise white mug, in red letters decorated with tiny hearts, were the words Best. Mom. Ever. At first he wasn’t thrilled with the periods. Wouldn’t the message have been better without them? Best Mom Ever. Or even a full sentence: You are the best mom ever. But, as he thought about it, he began to like the periods. They made the message emphatic.

I escort my wife into the home of an old friend, one Percival Fisk, where we will stay for a few weeks or until our latest folly blows over. The Fisk household casts an idyll of domesticity that we enjoy. Framed pictures of the Fisks are scattered throughout, mostly of their children and erstwhile pets (eight dogs, one goldfish; the cat was never caught on film) along with watercolors of the seaside and novelty wooden placards: Welcome to the Fisk’s. We love our children equally, there is no need to ask. Please do not smoke in our bathrooms. A cable knit throw of a horse mounted cowboy dresses the couch. The living room keeps no television, nor tolerates any appliance more complex than the old tube radio.

A portal opens in everyone’s computer. My screen ripples in a round circle and the plastic seems to melt away as a passageway to another world opens. Chris watches slack jawed as Satan strolls right through the screen into her kitchen. Zven shrieks and falls from his chair as Satan walks into his home office. Tori smiles beatifically as Satan hops into his bedroom. In my own backyard, Satan arrives in a puff of smoke and the smell of sulfur. He winks at me and glances around. Everyone at the company has his own Satan.

The day we transported the British Museum, twenty thousand humans spilled out of the Underground and took to London’s streets in protest. In their hands—humans possess only two, but still manage to use them quite effectively—they carried all manner of inventive signs: “You Can’t Spell Earth Without Art,” “My Heart Belongs to the British Museum,” “Our History Should be Grounded in Our Soil,” and “Earth Should Brexit the Alien Pact.”

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