Summary

In Chapter III, “Won’t You Bring In The Birds?,” the narrator started writing “a story about a man named Tarquin Superbus” when she was in her twenties (53). Superbus lived “long ago” in a “European city” (53). She was unsure about the era in which the story was set or the city in which Superbus lived. She guesses he lived in Venice. Whenever she imagined his space, she pictured aubergines. She used to want aubergines hanging from a light fixture in her own London apartment when she was a student. She would take baths here, as the communal showers reminded her “of the death camps” (56). Lying in the bath, she often imagined herself as someone else.

The narrator guesses Superbus lived in Venice because he was always “irate with paranoia” and perpetually disoriented (58). His “only ally” was the Doctor, who she supposed...