He dressed for work, made coffee, and sat in his suit and tie and watched the morning cartoons on television.
He didn't trust himself to think about his about his children, but he could see what they were seeing.
Drawn figures where only the mouths moved.
A kind of computerized running.
Very detailed sound explosions.
It interested him that something so untrue to life could be life.
Like Moche head pots: Moche pots were fashioned as human heads, and the features were painted, and the handles were the ears. The Moche had portrayed one another with these pots.
Morgan knew this in his capacity as assistant curator of pre-Columbian art at the Museum of the Under Americas in New York City.
On the four walls of his office were metal shelves stacked with head pots, items of ceramic erotica, and decorated vessels of the Mochica, Chimu, Chanca, Lupaca, and late Ancon civilizations.
Every few weeks another shipment would come in and he would fall further behind in his cataloging.
These lost peoples were obsessed with their sexual organs.
They ceramicized the organs of sex, and depicted the positions of fornication and the variations on it, including cunnilingus, sodomy, and bestiality.
Their sex organs were the biggest thing about the ancient peoples of Peru. Their legs, trunks, and heads and thus, inescapably, their brains, were much smaller.
That is how the Incas were able to wipe them out, who were themselves not that smart, having then laid down their arms when the conquistadores came along and asked them to.
One of the captured Inca kings had offered to fill a room with gold and silver if the Spaniards would let him go. The Spaniards accepted his offer. When his subjects had filled the room with gold and silver the Spaniards thanked the king and slit his throat.
Morgan turned off the television.
He went upstairs and adjusted the shades on the bedroom windows to suggest ongoing life.
He set a clock timer in each room upstairs and down so that lamps would go on and off by themselves.
He sincerely believed that his house was not lived in and that it needed to appear otherwise to passers by.
Through the dining room window he saw a late model white Cadillac pulling up at the curb in front of his house.
He stood quite still trying to think of someone he knew who drove a Cadillac.
No one got out of the car.
He ran upstairs. From his daughter's bedroom he saw, partially obscured by branches of the maple tree, a man and woman sitting in the car.
The man was wearing a blue blazer and gray slacks. He sat with the back of his shoulder against the passenger door. His graying head of hair was well groomed, with the tracks of the comb quite visible.
Morgan could not see the woman's face but a slender young arm lay at rest on the steering wheel. The woman was sitting with her legs raised, and her ankles in the man's lap.
She had kicked off her shoes. Her billowy skirt had ridden up her legs.
Her stockinged feet turned outward. The toes curled.
They're not people I know, Morgan thought. They have parked her Cadillac in a neighborhood where nobody knows them.
I am the lucky one chosen for my lack of consequence.
The woman clamped her knees together, then jerked them apart. She did this several times.
The man put his hand on her thigh. Then he removed his hand from her thigh and held both hands palms up, as if appealing to reason.
The woman abruptly withdrew her legs and a moment later the engine started. The man lunged forward and turned off the ignition.
They were arguing now. Morgan went downstairs, out the rear door, which he locked after him, and he backed his own car down the driveway to the street. He wanted to see what they looked like.
The Cadillac was gone.