Through the room’s window, towards the northwest, the shining opera house looked like a giant fossil stegosaur, horned and always hunkered at the waterside, and the water’s surface shuddered like a loosened skin that covers all its tranquil bones beneath.

Inside the room, the sculptures wrought in dark metal, meant to be human figures, were bent in all wrong proportions, not like the print in one of Gerald’s yellowing art books of The Pietà, with the woman’s face sunk in her grief, and the man’s face not older or younger than the woman’s face, but his long body like a clayey lunk spraddling her lap, or like something she had just birthed, but already grown correspondingly adult, though stillborn.