The chapter opens with a soliloquy in which the narrator laments the deaths of the two men. He asks the audience not to think that he and the other men have disappeared. He tells them that he represents the government, not his employer, and that he is leaving for Europe in three hours. The narrator then tells the audience that the mother of the dead man has come to see him, and she threatens to kill him if he does not tell her what has happened. He says that he has told her that they know that her son has been taken into the custody of "the covert American government agency" known as "the shades." She asks if there is anything he can do for her, and he says that before he left, he was instructed to extend "every courtesy to you." The narrator says that the "best part of her" was already dead. He explains that he gave her money every time she needed it, but that he did not want her to go near the "scumbag dealers" who sold her drugs. The day she died, an anonymous call came to him, telling him to go to "the studio." He says the ambulance had already been there, and a limo was already there. He guesses that he was watching her too, and says that "Omni" tells him that there is "universal access to" everything in his head. The file in the narrator's head is named "poison candy," and the narrator describes it as a "hole in his heart" where "the pain gets in" and where dreams begin. He is on his way to the candy house, and the only way to get there is through "the wrinkled hand