None of this was very easy. Coffins, after all, are designed with the law of inertia in mind; their dimensions are founded on the assumption that bodies at rest tend to remain at rest. There is thus rather little room to move around in.

But the human body contends throughout life with the task of fitting itself into and through impossibly narrow apertures. But for this propensity, we would none of us be born. Or, come to think of it, conceived.

I did everything I could think of to the coffin, and while I worked Plum prattled on and on about her father and her mother and the problems of being neither black nor white in a country where everyone else was one or the other. I suspect that much of what she had to say was very interesting, but I was in no position to pay any attention to it. I was glad she was talking; it was a sort of verbal Muzak, and now and then I would grunt something at her so that she would know I was still alive.

I’m sure I didn’t use all sixteen of those blades. I don’t remember cutting anything with the scissors, for example, and I can’t recall lifting any caps or opening any cans. But I cut and I twisted and I pried and I poked and I probed and I filed and I unscrewed and I got the hinges off on one side and worked the lid up on the other side and loosened the nails and got them out and finally, incredibly, the cover was off.

“Hey!” I said. “It’s off.”

There was no answer.

“The cover,” I said. “It’s loose. It’s off, I got it off, your father’s knife, it did the job. God bless the Swiss Army. We did it. Hey-”

The drums began.

They seemed to be everywhere. It was the unusual acoustics of my little pied à terre that was responsible for the effect, no doubt, but what an effect it was.