“After all else, there’s more yet: I don’t know what, though.”

“Tell me—what wouldn’t you do for Violet, Captain Flint?”Flint didn’t yet know the answer to this. Though he was perhaps closer to knowing.“I haven’t yet been tested.”Lyon smiled slowly at this, and shook his head. “Ah. Clearly you haven’t a soul of a poet, then, sir. You cannot be lured into hyperbole: ‘There’s nothing I wouldn’t do! Nothing!’ And etcetera. I can. I like hyperbole. Don’t fear it, Flint! Believe me, there’s some truth to all the purple words that surround love, you know. When you love someone more than life—and it is indeed possible to love someone more than life, or otherwise poets wouldn’t have gone on and on about it over the centuries—and you know, you know, you were born for only one person…imagine you cannot have them without tearing everything else you know asunder. Without hurting and disappointing all the other people you love. What then would you do?”

“I always have someplace else I’d rather be, even if I don’t know where that is, yet.”

“I am about to impart to you the sacred words my father gave to me. It’s the five responses that will get you out of any female problem…I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t do it. Baby, there’s no one else in my world but you. Oops. And Jesus is Lord. Not to mention you can combine them. Such as – I don’t know what you’re talking about, I didn’t do it, or Jesus is Lord, baby, you know there’s no one else in my world but you. (Jesse)(Simone opens the bathroom door.)Oops, Jesus is Lord. (Xypher)”

“I don’t see why not,” I all but snapped at him. “His body was experimented upon, and there are records of it. What else would you call it?” “I don’t know. Necropsy?”

“No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!”