When Paul was a boy, he played God in the attic above his parents’ garage. That’s what his father called it, playing God, the day he found out. That’s what he called it the day he smashed it all down.

Paul built the cages out of discarded two-by-fours he’d found behind the garage, and quarter-inch mesh he bought from the local hardware store. While his father was away speaking at a scientific conference on divine cladistics, Paul began constructing his laboratory from plans he’d drawn during the last day of school.

Because he wasn’t old enough to use his father’s power tools, he had to use a handsaw to cut the wood for the cages. He used his mother’s sturdy black scissors to snip the wire mesh. He borrowed hinges from old cabinet doors, and he borrowed nails from the rusty coffee can that hung over his father’s unused workbench.

One evening his mother heard the hammering and came out to the garage. “What are you doing up there?” she asked, speaking in careful English, peering up at the rectangle of light that spilled down from the attic.

Paul stuck his head through the opening, all spiky black hair and sawdust. “I’m just playing around with some tools,” he said. Which was, in some sense, the truth. Because he couldn’t lie to his mother. Not directly.

“Which tools?” “Just a hammer and some nails.”

She stared up at him, her delicate face a broken Chinese doll—pieces of porcelain re-glued subtly out of alignment. “Be careful,” she said, and he understood she was talking both about the tools and about his father.

“I will.”

The days turned into weeks as Paul worked on the cages. Because the materials were big, he built the cages big—less cutting that way.