I’m in my very large chair, not drinking a cup of tea which my daughter brought to me a few hours ago. I do not like tea, but it’s her Job to bring me tea at 10:00, and she is very proud of her handiwork. When she is old enough we will switch to coffee. I prefer coffee. With milk and sugar. And a small cracker. Not a cookie—I do not mix sweet with sweet.

I can see the street from my window, although my chair has its back to the window so I have to crane. Otherwise the chair is in a widened area between where the living room wanders off to the right towards my office doorway, and to the left, what a hallway would be without walls, with a staircase going up, a doorway leading to a dining room which connects with a kitchen. Next to the stairs is a legitimate hallway and another door to the kitchen and a door to the cellar and a door to what was probably a servant’s quarters but is now a make-shift playroom for our daughter.

Our daughter is four years old and I think she has been four years old for many years now. We celebrate birthdays with a cake that’s really too large for the three of us but somehow it’s gone the next day and a year later there’s another one. Sometimes white, sometimes chocolate. But always with four candles. My daughter has extremely red hair and nearly freckles on her nose. We chose her name from a collection of middle-eastern words that mean “princess,” and I use the rest of them as nick-names, and I’m fairly certain she doesn’t know which was one of them is on her birth certificate.

My wife also manages to have naturally flaming red hair but does so without being at all Irish. She wears cable-knit sweaters and floor-length skirts and is pretty good at bustling. I’ve seen her bustle about for hours. Or, rather, heard her. At night she wears neck-to-toes flannel night gowns that are utterly shapeless and so soft that sometimes I have difficulty controlling myself. When the lights are low and we are under several blankets and comforters, she doesn’t seem to mind.

I have never seen my wife one hundred percent in the nude. I have seen her parts, all of them, but owing to a sheet here or a piece of lingerie there or the way she holds the wash cloth in the shower, and I have never seen the whole which I’m assuming is greater than the sum of her parts.

Actually that’s not technically true.

There’s been a murder down the street in another house that’s entirely unlike ours. It’s more of a southern California home, on a street where it never rains. All of it bright, airy, wide open, clean lines, not a hint of clutter. This house is the scene of a murder, and I am a suspect in the case, which is entirely appropriate, since I did it, although no one knows this, not even the victim, least of all myself.

Love? Money? Revenge? I know all of the motives for murder, as I looked them up in Pianoforte’s Police Procedurals, a reference guide. I had my daughter fetch it for me. We have, in this house, more or less, every book ever written. I have confirmed this many times. Other than her Job, one of my daughter’s favorite games is to hunt for things. I print out lists of books, from the internet, such as “100 books You Must Read Before You Die,” or “250 Books They Should Have Made You Read In Graduate School But Didn’t” or even “1001 Books That Are Better Than The Books The Authors Claim Were Inspirational.” Then I send my daughter off to find them all. On a lazy Sunday morning or a Saturday she comes back to me after several hours with the list, each book designated with its coordinates in our house. The coordinate system is one of my daughter’s own invention, and uses a crayon-color-code that I find not indecipherable but somewhat redundant.

Everywhere you look in our house there’s books, although not untidily so. I’ve checked, too, and rarely are any of them dusty. Someone is reading these books. I asked my wife, who is having an affair, incidentally, if she remembers there always being books here, such as when we first moved in. She claims that the books sort of starting accumulating themselves after we moved in, right as our daughter was born. But I don’t think she really remembers any of this—I truly do not—and I only think to ask her about it when we are in bed and by the time she’s answered I’ve worked my way through her nightgown and don’t really much care about the book question anymore.

And yes, we do own a copy of The Library of Babel, although I don’t know where it is and I am afraid to open it. I asked my daughter to find it, but not tell me where it is located—just tell me how many copies we have. It was an experiment. While she was gone, I wrote down the number 13 on a piece of paper. When she came back, she told me we had 31 copies. This disturbed me a great deal.

I am also having an affair. Once or twice a week I leave our home through the door in my office. I wear a disguise, and I go to a cheap motel that’s located on the outskirts of what might be Chicago. I check in under a pseudonym, always a different one. I leave the lights off, but I can still see by the street light coming through the ineffectual blinds. Then my wife comes in, also in disguise. These are the only times I see her one-hundred percent in the nude. And this is how she is having an affair as well, since neither of us acknowledges what is going on. We are strangers to each other, and we even like to think our strangers are strangers as well.

I have confirmed this in our secret red book. I write down whatever details we need to maintains our affairs in the secret red book. I am writing in it right now. My wife also writes in it. We never, ever, speak of the secret red book. I leave it hidden someplace in our house—but never my office—and she finds it and re-hides it and then I find it. This occurs about once or twice a week. As a test, I have asked our daughter to find the book, and she never has, which frustrates her greatly so I do not ask her to look for it very often.

And now I will tell you about the murder.

One day I created a list of books that don’t really exist. These are books mentioned in works of fiction. I gave the list to my daughter and told her that when she was done, she should bring one of the books to me. This was on a Sunday morning, or a Saturday, and I didn’t see her again until 10 am, when she brought me my tea. I asked about her progress. She pulled the list out of the pocket on her apron—through the back, I could see some red crayon in various places. She acknowledged that things were going well, but she still had not found the book that she was supposed to bring to me. I asked her how she had decided which one that would be, ahead of time. She gave me a funny look, like I was daft. She told me she would bring me the one she was supposed to bring. Then she went off again.

I listened to cars drive by on the wet asphalt for about an hour, and then she came back. At first I was very disturbed, because she was carrying what appeared to be the secret red book. She crawled into my lap, like she does when she brings me a book I’ve asked for, and I was afraid I didn’t know how to avoid opening it in front of her. I hoped she’d get bored with our almost illegible handwriting. But when I opened the book, I was relieved to see that most of the pages were blank.

She was silent for a moment, looking at the pages as I riffled them. Then she hopped off my lap and started to walk away towards her playroom. Wait, I said, which book on the list is this, I asked her. She gave me that funny look again and then left.

So I started writing all of this down, in this book. I wrote down where we lived, and found that it was so, and described our home, which turned out to be true. I mentioned my wife, who is real now, and our daughter, and how’s she stuck at being four. I casually mentioned the murder I had committed. I wrote about all of the books we have, wrote about the affair my wife and I are having together, wrote about the secret red book, which this book I am writing in has become. I wrote down lots of other details as well, throughout it all, and then I wrote down a summary of everything I had written.

But before I could get caught in an infinite loop of writing down that I had written that I had written that I had written, I murdered the author, so I could finish this and publish it and find out what people think about it. I am especially intrigued to find out what my wife thinks about it, since she’s married to the author and probably has something to say about my killing him. I’ll ask her to write down her thoughts in our secret red book.