The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Friday evening I was invited to a party at a colleague from work's house. The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it "the Riddle House," even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there. I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. This is the bright candlelit room where the lifetimers are stored - shelf upon shelf of them, squat hourglasses, one for every living person, pouring their fine sand from the future into the past. In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greates creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century. I'm thinking of asking the servants to wax my change before placing it in the Chinese tank I keep on my dresser. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going it, if you want to know the truth. Shadow had done three years in prison. I thought I saw a zebra today but it was a horse of a different color. Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. That summer was hot, hotter than the hobs of hell. Jonesy almost shot the guy when he came out of the woods. There is an L-shaped scar on the left side of my chin. I was on "Oprah" a while ago, talking about how I used to love too much. The flat afternoon sky spread over the black and gray mountains like a stage backdrop, the color of a dog's pale crazy eye. I had known him as a bulldozer, as a samurai, as an android programmed to kill, as Plastic Man and Titanium Man and Matter-Eater Lad, as a Buick Electra, as a Peterbilt truck, and even, for a week, as the Mackinac Bridge, but it was as a werewolf that Timothy Stokes finally went too far. It all began some time in the last century, in an age when lovers wrote letters to each other sealed up in enveleopes. I was stunned by Mary Karr's memoir, The Liars' Club.