"I want more pie. Where's Bangy?" He looks at his watch, anxious for her, caught in doctor/patient, knowing she doesn't want his pity and knowing he can't give it. Prepares to run. Late for an appointment.

Aren't doctors always late for appointments? She smiles, her hands reaching toward him to keep him there, with her, in her little glass world. It's not a medical appointment, his deck is cleared: He's meeting a realtor. Cathy's eyes light up; her voice asks before her words do.

"You're going house hunting? I love house hunting!" Because it's voyeuristic, she says. Other people's lives. Did they cry? It's crossing a line, he starts to waver, and she fans out the cash once again.

"Look, I will pay you $800." He barks at her; this is inappropriate. For Bangy, for him, for Cathy Jamison. Her face goes sad and young; Cathy Jamison stoops, for a moment, to conquer. "So you'll take me for free?" Only to keep an eye on her, he lies, in her mania. She hands him the keys to the car she can't drive, tells him to pull around, offers him a scandalous last chance at a urine sample, heads to the bathroom.

Outside, she's not alone: Chased by Bangy, lobster in hand, clawing at the air. They speed away. Amanda Montgomery.

David Foster Wallace's 2005 book of essays takes its name from an essay within, "Consider The Lobster." It concerns itself with the ethics of lobster: Catching, live boiling, delicious meat cracked from its hard skeleton and dipped in butter. The question he asks regards the ethics of boiling something alive, just to enhance our own pleasure. The implicit entertainment of watching something slowly die. No matter how delicious.

Did you tell anyone they were dying today? Did they cry? House hunting is so voyeuristic! He'd sit in front of that tank and just smile like some retarded kid. Stupid things died about as fast as he could get them in there.

And hanging over all of it, dark as a storm cloud, effortless and beautiful and maddening: The glass walls of Cathy's Jamison's little prison, that you are looking through. This story is only beginning. Summer in Minneapolis is only the beginning.

Adam quivers, jumps about like a chimp, a ninja, growling onto the porch. Hopping with joy. "Dude, this is so cool! I read online about this lady who had an infected tooth and a handgun, and she shot it out." Sean leans back in a rattan chair. "You want cool? I once saw a guy amping on meth cut off his toes, because he thought they were eating his feet."