poked an eyehole. I hope to try again with your next book.
The book really didn't help Charlie much, except to instill in him a new paranoia about plastic bags.
Over the next few months he read: The Egyptian Book of the Dead, from which he learned how to pull someone's brain out through his nostril with a buttonhook, which he was sure would come in handy someday; a dozen books on dealing with death, grief, burial rituals, and myths of the Underworld, from which he learned that there had been personifications of Death since the dawn of time, and none of them looked like him; and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, from which he learned that bardo, the transition between this life and the next, was forty-nine days long, and that during the process you would be met by about thirty thousand demons, all of which were described in intricate detail, none of which looked like the sewer harpies, and all of which you were supposed to ignore and not be afraid of because they weren't real because they were of the material world.
"Strange," Charlie said to Sophie, "how all of these books talk about how the material world isn't significant, yet I have to retrieve people's souls, which are attached to material objects. It would appear that death, if nothing else, is ironic, don't you think?"
"No," Sophie said.
At eighteen months Sophie answered all questions either "No," "Cookie," or "like Bear" - the last Charlie attributed to leaving his daughter too often in the care of Mrs. Korjev. After the turtles, two more hamsters, a hermit crab, an iguana, and two widemouthed frogs passed on to the great wok in the sky (or, more accurately, on the third floor), Charlie finally acquiesced and brought home a three-inch-long Madagascar hissing cockroach that he named Bear, just so his daughter wouldn't go through life talking total nonsense.
"Like Bear," Sophie said.
"She's talking about the bug," Charlie said, one night when Jane stopped by.
"She's not talking about the bug," Jane said. "What kind of father buys a cockroach for a little girl anyway? That's disgusting."
"Nothing's supposed to be able to kill them. They've been around for like a hundred million years. It was that or a white shark, and they're supposed to be hard to keep."
"Why don't you give up, Charlie? Just let her get by with stuffed animals."
"A little kid should have a pet. Especially a little kid growing up in the city."
"We grew up in the city and we didn't have any pets."
"I know, and look how we turned out," Charlie said, gesturing back and forth between the two of them, one who dealt in death and had a giant cockroach named Bear, and the other who was on her third yoga-instructor girlfriend in six months and was wearing his newest Harris tweed suit.
"We turned out great, or at least one of us did," Jane said, gesturing to the splendor of her suit, like she was a game-show model giving the big prize package on Let's Get Androgynous, "You have got to gain some weight. This is tailored way too tight in the butt," she said, lapsing once again into self-obsession. "Am I camel-toeing?"
"I am not looking, not looking, not looking," Charlie chanted.
"She wouldn't need pets if she ever saw the outside of this apartment," Jane said, pulling down on the crotch of her trousers to counteract the dreaded dromedary-digit effect. "Take her to the zoo, Charlie. Let her see something besides this apartment. Take her out."
"I will, tomorrow. I'll take her out and show her the city," Charlie said. And he would have, too, except he woke to find the name Madeline Alby written on his day planner, and next to her name, the number one.
Oh yeah, and the cockroach was dead.
I will take you out," Charlie said as he put Sophie in her high chair for breakfast. "I will, honey. I promise. Can you believe that they'd only give me one day?"
"No," Sophie said. "Juice," she added, because she was in her chair and this was juice time.
"I'm sorry about Bear, honey," Charlie said, brushing her hair this way, then that, then giving up. "He was a good bug, but he is no more. Mrs. Ling will bury him. That window box of hers must be getting pretty crowded." He didn't remember there being a window box in Mrs. Ling's window, but who was he to question?
Charlie threw open the phone book and, mercifully, found an M. Alby with an