They looked at me and I at them. There were about twenty of them gathered in that damp basement room, sitting on card chairs and orange crates, smoking large fat pipes and thin black cigars. Half of them were black and half of them were white and one of them was Plum, and they represented the hard core of the MMM, which in Griggstown had nothing to do with Scotch tape and everything to do with revolution, and they wanted to bury me.

“The something I thought of,” I told them, “is that we could do all of this more directly. By skipping the whole burial process, that is. I could just removalize myself from here” – Karp’s affliction was contagious – “and, uh, get out of town. Just like that.”

“But you are under house arrest, Evan.”

“We’re all under house arrest,” I said. “All but what? Two or three of us? Yet you all managed to sneak out and come here tonight. For me, house arrest means that there’s a clown out front leaning up against a palm tree and looking at the front door every few hours. But nobody’s watching the back door, and-”

I broke off. No one was saying anything, but they were all looking at me very sadly.

Plum said, “You do not understand, Evan.”

“What don’t I understand?”

“About house arrest.” Plum was fifteen years old, slim-hipped and wide-eyed and the color of blond motel furniture. Her father had been a Welsh soldier of fortune and her mother had been, and still was, a native of Griggstown, and Pelham “Plum” Jenkins was a product of their ephemeral alliance. This sort of thing didn’t happen in Modonoland, where everything was black and white and there were no shades of yellow. Plum was nevertheless about as sane as anyone in the MMM.

I asked her to explain.

“We are all under house arrest,” she said, “and we all snuck out. But we can all sneak back in again and no one will know the difference, or if they do they won’t be too shirty about it. But if you snuck out, you wouldn’t come back and they would all know about it. And also you are a foreigner and there is talk about you being a spy and a secret agent and all sorts of things, and this would bother them. It would be all right for you, but we would be in trouble.”