The taxi drove right past his place and that gave Alan a much-needed distraction, directing the cabbie through the maze of Kensington Market's one-way streets back around to his front door. He tipped the cabbie a couple of bucks over his customary ten percent and bummed a cigarette off him, realizing that Mimi had asked him for a butt but never returned the pack. He puffed and shook his head and stared up the street at the distant lights of College Street, then turned back to his porch. "Hello, Albert," two voices said in unison, speaking from the shadows on his porch. "Jesus," he said, and hit the remote on his keyring that switched on the porch light. It was his brother Edward, the eldest of the nesting dolls, the bark of their trinity, coarse and tough and hollow. He was even fatter than he'd been as a little boy, fat enough that his arms and legs appeared vestigial and unjointed. He struggled, panting, to his tiny feet -- feet like undersized exclamation points beneath the tapered Oh of his body. His face, though doughy, had not gone to undefined softness. Rather, every feature had acquired its own rolls of fat, rolls that warred with one another to define his appearance -- nose and cheekbones and brow and lips all grotesque and inflated and blubbery. "Eugene," Alan said. "It's been a very long time." Edward cocked his head. "It has, indeed, big brother. I've got bad news." "What?" Edward leaned to the left, the top half of his body tipping over completely, splitting at his narrow leather belt, so that his trunk, neck, and head hung upside down beside his short, cylindrical legs and tiny feet. Inside of him was Frederick, the perennial middle child. Frederick planted his palms on the dry, smooth edges of his older brother's waist and levered himself up, stepping out of Ed's legs with the unconscious ease of a lifetime's practice. "It's good to see you, Andy," he said. He was pale and wore his habitual owlish expression of surprise at seeing the world without looking through his older brother's eyes. "It's nice to see you, too, Frederick," Alan said. He'd always gotten along with Frederick, always liked his ability to play peacemaker and to lend a listening ear. Frederick helped Edward upright, methodically circumnavigating his huge belly, retucking his grimy white shirt. Then he hitched up his sweatshirt over the hairy pale expanse of his own belly and tipped to one side. Alan had been expecting to see Gregory, the core, but instead, there was nothing inside Frederick. The Gregory-shaped void was empty. Frederick righted himself and hitched up his belt. "We think he's dead," Edward said, his rubbery features distorted into a Greek tragedy mask. "We think that Doug killed him." He pinwheeled his round arms and then clapped his hands to his face, sobbing. Frederick put a hand on his arm. He, too, was crying. #