Mr. Ferreira Calls the Shark WANDVAC "Adequate"

The Twins Request Custody

By afternoon the parcel had moved. Ada and Felix appeared at the mailbox cluster with a form for Doris, who entered the loan in the Lending Ledger as number 1,203 with the care of a woman recording a treaty.

"It's a prototype for a, a bigger, for a hand-sized..." said Ada.

"Hypothesis!" said Felix. "It's light enough that a, that we could, if Mr. Ferreira holds the..."

Gus held the vacuum, because the twins do not operate anything electrical without a grown-up, and Gus is the grown-up who believes he is always right about tools. He weighed the WANDVAC in his palm. It weighs 1.4 pounds, which Gus says is not enough to be trusted, and which Felix says is the whole idea.

Ada ran the FurFins tool over the Menons' old sofa cushion, lent for the experiment. The tool is meant for pet hair on furniture and carpet, and the cushion produced a gray felt of it. Felix pressed the button on the dust cup and the lot dropped into the bin without anyone touching it. "No getting dirty," he said, and wrote it down as a patent.

It weighs 1.4 pounds, which Gus says is not enough to be trusted, and which Felix says is the whole idea.

Mr. Ferreira Takes Delivery

The second night the WANDVAC slept at No. 2. Gus said he was only holding it for safekeeping. At dawn I saw him through the window running the crevice tool along the baseboard behind his workbench, a spot he has not reached since the Carter administration of his own mind.

"I could build that," he told me through the screen, and then, noticing the LED on the panel, asked what the little light meant. I told him it shows the charge and how much battery is left. He nodded as if he had suspected.

He ran it eight minutes, which is what it gives you, and then it stopped, and he put it on its dock, which charges it in about three and a half hours. He said that was a reasonable amount of time to think about what he had just vacuumed.

The Caucus Does Outreach

Midday, a delegation arrived. The Caucus, whose members hold that living with a cat is the highest form of human existence, sent a delegation to Gus's porch to offer him a pamphlet on joining them, and Gus took it, thanked them, and asked if they wanted coffee.

They did not. They looked, I thought, a little unsettled by how well he was doing. Gus has no cat and has never wanted one, and he said so warmly, the way a man mentions he has no boat.

They left behind a fine coat of orange fur on his good chair. By the time the pamphlet was in use as a coaster, the FurFins tool had cleared the chair, and Gus had used up most of a second charge doing it. He did not mention that it worked. He mentioned only that it was adequate.

Admiral Biscuit was not present. He has never attended a Caucus event awake, and the fur appears to have gone in his place.

Memo 41 and the Return

The loan came due at the HOA meeting, which ran long. Mags's Memo 41 proposed that in all official business Brenda be called "the resident domesticated bear," and Doris objected that "resident" implied a lease, which Brenda has never been offered and would not sign. Gus suggested "the bear." Doris asked whether that made the others unbears. The vote was tied.

Then ORACLE asked to be placed on the agenda for a performance review, which it graded itself, and it awarded itself top marks in geography while describing Maple Lane as a coastal village in northern Norway. It also called me Wendall Pike of Portugal. Mags thanked it and placed the review in its folder.

Because of all this the vacuum did not move for three and a half hours, which suited the dock. When I came by at dusk it was full, and the light was steady. Ada carried it back to No. 11 in both hands, with Gus walking behind her in case of a curb.

Mags signed for it again. I will say only that the slip now has a smudge of orange on it, and that I have no idea how.