VIVIENNE FELT THE edges of the eatery fade to fog. She felt a disjunction in her arms, a flash flood of energy. She pressed down harder on her husband’s neck. The jugglers had arrived. Behold the re-entrance of the jugglers. Who mock your tidied-up soul. Who arrive in big military vehicles bringing blackouts to your existence. She was in a blackout inside a blackout. She had come back from shooting with conflict-zone eyes, and she had kept her same outward face, and that was the lie. Her unharmed face had been a cover. She came back, and she did not recognize her own thoughts. She seemed, on so many days, to be speaking the implanted words of somebody else. Yes. Somebody timid, too polite, not even shy really, worse. Genteel. Her coarse war-weathered voice seeped in the smoke of the celest
