Imagine Me Gone

Alec

There were no shades on his windows. Lying on his bed I could see across the street to the roofs of the buildings opposite, to the water towers and stovepipes silhouetted against clouds backlit by the moon, a picture of some old New York, a movie-set picture, as if we’d met the old-fashioned way, in a bar, and were a couple of kids who’d wound up here on a drunken lark.

His bed was pressed into the corner, against the windowsill, leaving just enough room for the closet door to open. Above the Ikea dresser, postcards of minimalist paintings and geometric tiles were thumbtacked to the wall. He had gone into the only other room of the apartment to get his computer. It was already two in the morning. An hour earlier and I might have salvaged the following day, but it was close to shot now. Seth was his name.

“What are you doing?” I asked, when he climbed back onto the bed with his laptop.

“I want to play you a song,” he said.

A song? How credulous, I thought, at this stage. We’d kissed and helped each other come in the usual imitation of porn — a warming exercise of sorts, trying to clear away the awkwardness of anonymity to see if there might be conversation. We’d been lying in bed awhile now, chatting, which surprised me — that neither of us had balked yet.

His pics had deceived less than most. He’d said he was twenty-eight and he looked about that. For his face shot, he’d employed the standard attitudinal glare, meant to signal languid indifference, a mix of attempted intimidation and reassurance that hooking up would involve no entanglements because he didn’t need anything more than that, being otherwise self-contained and perhaps already boyfriended. It was the safest way to go about all of this, conceding nothing of your desire beyond the moment at hand. The jacked-up brain state of skimming pics and profiles and the eventual orgasm — with someone else, or alone if you bagged out and got off to a video clip instead — were narcotic enough to skip you over the grinding moments of outright deception, the encounters cut short at the front door.

“It’s a Vanessa Smythe song,” he said, scrolling through a playlist.

Sidelong, in the light of the screen, his face was gentler than the image that had got me to click on him. His eyes and mouth had an indefinite quality, a pliancy, which had distracted me as we were getting off. He wasn’t, in fact, intimidating. And for a moment I’d hated him for it, for being softer than his ad. Though at the same time it made me curious. His fine black hair needed a cut. He was unshaven, but not, it seemed, for fashion’s sake. There was something particular about him, a lack of the usual guardedness. Already I’d stayed longer than I’d intended, and still felt no urge to leave.

“Do you know her stuff?” he asked.

“No,” I said. My music had always come from Michael. I’d never developed my own habit of finding new things to listen to. If he didn’t share or mention something, it passed me by. For a long time that had meant being effortlessly ahead of the curve as he sent me tapes, then CDs, then audio files of what he was listening to, but he’d done less of that since the whole Bethany episode, which was already five years ago now, and my collection had grown dated.

“Take a listen,” Seth said.

The opening notes of a jazz standard filled the little room. A live recording of a piano ambling in a minor key, accompanied by a horn, summoning the ease of some velvet banquette in a ’40s nightclub. Then came a woman’s low, tentative voice, singing the occasional line slipped in between the motions of the players, as if hesitant to interrupt. I wasn’t a big jazz fan, but the tune was pleasantly melancholic. I was trying to let go of how late it was, to give up on tomorrow, and the music helped. A slow beat entered the mix, a snare, then a bass, and eventually a few strings, creating a swirling sound. It was the reworking of a standard, not a classic rendition. When the piano expanded its range the singer seemed to take it as permission to let in more feeling, in the last words of a line, swinging a note, holding it an instant longer than the line before.

Seth had put aside his computer and was lying next to me again. The song went on like this for a while, balancing between restraint and release. I’d expected either a trashy pop hit shared in irony or some aficionado’s serious band, but this was neither. The longer it went on, the more I thought Michael would like it. He didn’t care who made a thing if it had that particular ache to it. And this did. Whatever safe, old-world reference it had begun with was slipping away now. The opening shyness of the singer had been a feint. Her voice had power, and she knew it.

You’re not anywhere else, she seemed to be saying. You’re here now, with me, in this room.

As we lay there together listening, Seth, like a nervous kid on a first date, reached over and took my hand in his. It was so unexpected, and so tender, it caused me to shudder. A few minutes ago we’d had our dicks in each other’s mouths. We’d kissed and tongued. But all that had been routine. This was different, and riskier. It hinted at intimacy. He was actually touching me. And I was letting him do it.

The muscles of my neck let go, and my head sank deeper into the pillow.

Holding hands listening to a favorite song? As if we hadn’t met two hours ago? As if we hadn’t both got off like this with strangers who knew how many times before? Did he think he was a magician, that he could just wish the anonymity away?

Whatever the singer was doing now it wasn’t cool anymore. Her voice had opened wide, edging toward the point of failure, making it clear she wasn’t faking it, that the trouble in the song was her own, that she was in some kind of real danger, which no producer’s smoothing edits could save her from. Not that she was crazy. She wasn’t letting her audience off the hook that easily, by offering the safety of distance that would open up if she were just to make a spectacle of herself. She was staying close, continuing to bear the weight of herself.

Without thinking, I interlaced my fingers more tightly with Seth’s. As though I had traveled back into some younger, more trusting self. When he squeezed my hand, I fell into pure nostalgia. The keen memory of a thing I’d never had. A nostalgia for a moment just like this. As if back when I was a teenager and I’d wanted it so achingly bad, I had met a boy and we had fallen in love, and been together in private ecstasy. And as if, at last, I could mourn the loss of that imagined happiness.

The voice was in full flight now, skipping up and out of any world that could possibly last, into sheer bliss, giving me the ridiculous hope that Seth and I could be together. That he could give me back what I’d lost. Lying beside him, I prayed for it.

When I left the next morning, he gave me his number and e-mail and I gave him mine. I walked onto the street I had seen only in the darkness of the night before. Trash cans were lined up at the sidewalk and the cars were double-parked, the pavement wet from an early-winter snow. Men in suit pants and ski jackets with laptop bags over their shoulders and women in tailored suits and knee-length winter coats made their way in silence to the train. Like a college freshman who’d just had sex for the first time, I studied their faces to see if I could detect which of them had come from the warmth of a drowsy morning fuck, who among them were the elect, as Michael called them, and who had slept and eaten by themselves, their mornings spent in the little disciplines of solitude. An absurd perch for me to assume on the basis of one night, as if I were elect now, a giant presumption, but as I joined the sidewalk traffic, trailing with it down toward the subway, that was the difference: the spell of the night before seemed for once strong enough to countervail the evidence of the world unchanged.

I’d experienced this before, but only while still drunk. If my high happened to dissipate gently enough, I could sometimes make it back to my shower and bed before the soreness caught up with me. But hooking up most often meant knuckling through a contraction of hope the following morning. A rescission of the pleasures of a few hours earlier. It drew down my workaday armor — the belief in the worthwhileness of ordinary things — leaving me raw and tightened against the rawness. But not this morning. It seemed as if a glaze had been washed from my senses, brightening the sound of the traffic up ahead on the avenue, separating the bus’s pneumatic brakes from the bass chug of the delivery-truck engines and the whir and bump of gliding taxis.

I had nothing to read on the subway and I didn’t want to listen to music that would displace the echo of the song Seth had played me. I looked at my fellow passengers instead, taking in their shorn, wary affect, the aspiration to undisturbed nonpresence guarded by newspapers, gaming devices, books, and headsets. They avoided my open gaze as they would a beggar or lunatic. Normally, I would be full of tiny aversions, or avarice for other people’s lives. The absence of all that disoriented me. That I could stand there swaying with the motion of the train, badly late to work, in a state of such democratic calm, almost affectionate toward my fellow riders — how sappy! But even my cynicism didn’t last more than another stop. The heedless goodwill stayed with me all the way home.

By lunchtime, Seth had texted and we had made a plan for dinner the following night. I hadn’t dreamed it. Something had happened.

The next evening, he showed up at the restaurant dressed for a date. He had shaved and put on dark fitted jeans and a blue oxford shirt. I stood up from behind the table, and awkwardly put my hand out for him to shake. The obviousness of his nerves took the edge off mine. He clearly wanted to be here. And I wanted us to skip over comparing notes on life in the city and dive right back into where we had left off. But that would risk a look of incomprehension on his face, an indication that I had, in fact, been alone in the moment I thought we had shared. That I was the corny, besotted one who needed to grow up and take it easy. I had picked the restaurant because it was quiet, but I regretted that now, wishing for the distraction of voices and music and waiters squeezing past.

Soon I had fumbled into a question about what kinds of things he designed, falling right into the script of the Internet date I had wanted to avoid, that face-off across a table stripped of all context and fellow feeling, and supported by nothing more than the mutual assumption of loneliness, a social form that had always struck me as rigged to fail. It didn’t matter to me what he designed so long as he would go home with me after dinner.

He talked about graphics and websites. I wanted to stop him and say, Wait, not yet. But I said nothing, and he went on, about album covers, freelance work, and projects of his own. Caught in the train of it now, I asked more questions, realizing as I half listened to his replies that the relief his nervousness had allowed me was being replaced by a sense of deflation. He had put some kind of gel in his hair to keep its mildly disheveled look in place. His lightly freckled skin was scrubbed and moisturized. He had prepared for tonight, he had considered carefully what to wear, trying on different outfits, looking at himself in the mirror, keen to make a good impression. How could this person, who had seemed to have none of this self-consciousness before, take us back to where I thought we had been? Had he just accidentally opened a vein in me through which that song had entered? Did he even register the difference between this moment and that?

He asked if I’d like to share an appetizer, and what wine I preferred. He was tangled up in politeness, which by default I matched and parried, moving on to social autopilot.

I wanted the evening to start over. I wanted to whisper something suggestive in his ear as soon as he arrived, preserving the mystery by ushering us back through the curtain again into the vaguer, richer world of romance. None of this disastrous self-reporting, this checklist discovery of “things in common.”

He asked about my journalism, and I retailed a few stories about the more colorful characters, and the excesses of the political fund-raising I covered. It was easy to impress people from outside that world with the extremity of it, trading on the insiderism my reporting was meant to pierce.

The chitchat got us through our entrées, and I resigned myself to the idea that this would be it, another little shot of false hope, a perfectly decent date, followed by a dwindling e-mail thread. Then, out of nowhere, as we were sharing a piece of almond cake, with the date all but over, he said he liked the way I talked.

“The way you use words,” he said, “I like it.”

Thrown off, once again, by his guilelessness, I didn’t know how to respond.

His eyes were green. I rarely noticed the color of people’s eyes, and found it implausible when it came as one of the first descriptors of a person in an article, as if from yards away people picked up the color of two dots in the head. But our faces were only about two feet apart, and he was looking at me with unnerving directness, and I saw that his eyes were definitely dark green.

“Did I say something wrong?” he asked.

“No.”

He put down his fork and rested his elbows on the table. “I know it’s too early to ask this,” he said, “but do you have a boyfriend?”

Just like that the nattering in my head ceased. “Not at the moment,” I said, monitoring his expression, wondering if my nonchalance had hid well enough the full answer: that I had never really had one, not for more than a few months.

“What about you?” I asked.

“Not at the moment,” he repeated after me, smiling, as if maybe he had seen through me but didn’t care.

The last thing I wanted to do was lurch onto the subject of past relationships. So I don’t know why I said, “There’s been someone, though?”

“We were in grad school together,” he said.

What I detested most about my jealousy for other people’s pasts was how it yoked me to Michael. In the solitary years since Bethany, he’d edged toward bitterness. I was determined not to let myself do that. Still, I couldn’t help but picture Seth and his boyfriend drinking with friends in student apartments, sitting on the floor at parties holding hands, knowing without thinking about it that later they would be naked together in their bedroom, the flow of sex between them running into their work as well, which they would have shared, too. For Seth it was a memory now, and all the more glamorous for being just that — an assumption, like wealth to the heir.

“But that was a while ago,” he said. “What about you?”

“It’s been a while, too,” I said.

He smiled again, broadly this time, as if we were already coconspirators, as if my response were a seduction, not a cover. He was doing it again, making intimacy out of nothing more than his own passing pleasure. And just like that, he caught me up in it.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” I said, “but I downloaded that song you played me. And I probably shouldn’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to it, either.”

He blushed. “You can tell me that,” he said.

He slid his hand across the table and turned it open to me. The skin of his palm was damp.

“So,” I said. “I have an apartment…”

“Really? How unusual.”

“I mean—”

“Yes,” he said.

I had grown used to sex as a short burst, a onetime thing, the pleasure keyed to the danger, but leashed by fear. It was easy when everyone did the same, exposing themselves for the quick high. Like the occasional seizure of an otherwise controlled body, flagrant but brief. But there was nothing flagrant about standing perfectly still in my bedroom with the lights off, letting Seth, in no kind of rush, unbutton my shirt, or in feeling the warm contour of his ribs with the tips of my fingers. The script called for speed and gruffness, for the porn-like boasting and debasement of locker-room jocks getting off on themselves and each other, that fantasy toughness meant to ward off exactly the confusion I was in now, unsure what to do and trying not to shake.

Seth leaned in bravely and kissed me on the lips. I drew him closer, as if to shield him from his own frankness, until we were hugging. There was still nothing to this. He could be anyone at all, and gone tomorrow. I knew that I should probably play it cool. But he wasn’t playing it that way. For whatever unknowable and maybe even fucked-up reason, he wasn’t sticking to his side of the line. It was strange to realize that we were kissing and half undressed but hadn’t started the clock yet, hadn’t set the pace toward coming. When I touched him I actually experienced what I touched. For once, each of his features — the little curve at the base of his spine, the slope of his shoulders — wasn’t separated out by my camera’s eye, exported into pornography, and graded for hotness.

I kept motioning us to jump ahead, to speed up, and he kept letting me know it was okay, that we could go slowly. When he stopped my hand going into his jeans, I had the urge to say, All right, already, let’s not get reverential about it, but then his other hand brushed down my back, and I shivered.

It occurred to me that he might be less neurotic than I was. That he might know himself decently well. Which made me think that if we were going to fuck for the first time tonight, I should do the fucking, so things didn’t get too out of balance.

Eventually, he got us naked and under the sheets together. And still we just kept kissing and running our hands over each other. If only I’d had that third drink or a hit of pot, I might have been able to drift. But I was stuck in the moment. He began kneading my ass, but I leaned away from the touch and untangled myself, rolling onto my back.

He waited a few moments, then asked if I was okay.

“I’m great,” I said.

“We don’t have to do anything more. This is fine.”

“I just need to keep it together,” I whispered. I hadn’t meant to say it aloud. But I couldn’t reel it back in.

He turned onto his side, facing me, and rested a hand on my stomach. “What do you have to keep together?” he said.

He wasn’t my confidant. I couldn’t pretend we had any basis for that. “It’s nothing,” I said. “This is good.”

“Yeah. It is. So is talking with you…What’s up?”

“I’m usually not like this. Actually, I hate it when guys are like this.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m not used to the slow thing.”

“We can go faster,” he said. “I’m just enjoying the ride.”

A framed Ansel Adams poster hung on the otherwise bare wall facing my bed. I had tidied the dresser beneath it before going out, and my desk as well. This was the furniture I’d lived with since the year after college, and for all the years I had now managed to afford this apartment. Friends and dates had come and gone, admiring the light and the view. I had been glad for the security of their admiration. But seeing it through Seth’s eyes, I was reminded how little I had done to make it my own. I hadn’t wanted to interrupt the clean white lines or clutter the open space. Which had left it sterile. One of the thousands of adult dorm rooms in Manhattan, where credentialed children performed their idea of adult lives.

“It’s ridiculous,” I said. “To be telling you this. I don’t know you. But what the fuck? I haven’t felt normal since the other night. Since we met. You don’t know anything about me. But I have a brother — an older brother — and he hasn’t been with anyone for a really long time. It doesn’t usually hit me like this. But he’s alone — and I’m here. And I feel guilty. Really, though. I’m not usually like this. I don’t think about it all the time, I promise. I’m sorry. I’m fucking this up, aren’t I?”

“No,” Seth said. “Kind of the opposite, actually.”

I got hard again when he said that. I wasn’t thinking about sex, but I was as stiff as I’d been all night.

“It’s too early to say this, too,” he said. “But I think you’re beautiful.”

He reached across me, put a hand under my back, and pulled me on top of him until we were chest to chest.

“I want to keep talking,” he said. “But first I want to fuck you. Is that okay?”

For a moment I thought he was trying to divert us back into the safety of porn, putting on the uniform of machismo to get us out of this jam. But that would require speed — to gin up the scene and keep it moving — and he didn’t speed up. He went as slowly as before, kissing and massaging, as if he’d walked out of some Eden of time, where no one had thought to even measure the stuff. He took me on my back, kissing me as he went, moving at such a gentle pace it seemed to have nothing to do with domination or control, or even orgasm. There was just the sensation of it.

A sudden, fierce pain pulsed at my temples and then let go.

I almost always role-played it, acting the stud giving it to the boy, or playing the shameless boy myself. But Seth wasn’t playing. He didn’t mutter anything in my ear, he didn’t harden into self-regard. He kept his eyes open, his dick firm inside me, but the rest of his body almost lax, as if we were cuddling. It should have turned me off — neither of us being in charge — but the lack of a story set me afloat, leaving me light-headed and close to joy.

For the first few months we kept up the pretense of scheduling dates. It was a way to flirt, to be coy, as if one of us might say no. We’d choose a restaurant, or plan a meal, and at the end of the evening Seth would ask if I’d like to spend the night together, and I’d pretend to consider.

I kept waiting for him to disappoint me, by not calling or texting, or by calling or texting too much, but he didn’t. Which left me trying to disqualify him on other grounds: his apartment was too gayly neat; there weren’t enough books in it; he wasn’t a political junkie; his voice got queeny with his friends; he watched sitcoms, liked animated movies, owned a cat named Penelope. But I actually found the tidiness of his apartment reassuring, and he did in fact read the news, if not all the polls. And when he bantered with his friends he seemed to be having fun.

I’d always pictured myself with someone serious and austere. Someone preoccupied by serious work. His remoteness would captivate me. He’d be handsome, of course, but unselfconscious about it. And he’d love me undemonstratively, with the matter-of-factness of authority. And then there was Seth, who held my hand in public, kissed me in front of his friends, and thought I should wear brighter colors. I’d been looking for a suit who preferred men, not someone who enjoyed himself.

I decided the way we’d met would catch up with us. One of us would get bored on the Internet and decide to hook up with someone else, just for fun, and there would follow an awkward coffee date and that dwindling exchange of e-mails I’d anticipated the first night at the restaurant. It would have been a kind of relief. To get back to normal. But the months went by and it kept not happening.

The journalists and political staffers I spent my days with were mostly single or divorced. They either slept with each other or dragged around convoluted stories of people in other cities who they were trying to figure something out with. On the road, we drank together in hotel bars. It was the communion of diehards I’d dreamed of being invited into four years earlier, leading into the Bush and Gore campaigns, and now had the assignment to join just as the early positioning and fund-raising in advance of the primaries were getting started. And yet whenever I traveled, I found myself making excuses to go to my room early to call Seth.

“I think someone has a boyfriend,” he said when I phoned him for the third night in a row from Des Moines.

I could picture him sitting in bed watching a movie, under the clean pine shelves he’d built and installed himself, his knees raised up under the covers, laptop balanced on top of them, all his laundry folded and put away. I’d never been with a man long enough to yearn not just for sex, or not even for sex, but for the mere presence of him.

“I want to stop using condoms,” I said.

“You make it sound like a heart attack.”

“I’m serious,” I said.

“I can tell.”

Something about his even-tempered nature made me feel like a child, which infuriated me, and meant I had to stay with him to prove that I wasn’t.

“Are you alone?” I asked.

“No, my other boyfriend is here, but he’s very understanding.”

“What if I thought that I might love you?”

“Now there’s a question,” he said. “What if, hypothetically speaking, you thought there was some possibility that you might love me? That’s what you’re asking? Like, what would my advice be?”

“Sorry, that’s unfair.”

“It’s somewhere between unfair and charming, but we can go with charming.”

I didn’t know why I kept getting hard when he said things like that, but I did. I wanted to slap him.

“I think I love you,” I said.

“Are you drunk?”

“No! I’m not drunk. I love you.” Take that, I thought, waiting for his retort.

There was a pause, and then he said, “Can I ask a favor? Will you say that again when you get home?”

“Okay,” I replied, grudgingly.

“Good. Because I love you, too.”

I barely took in what he’d said, wanting so badly to keep going myself, to confess that this was the first time I had ever spoken these words to any man, that I was ashamed to be thirty-one and never have reached this point before, that I was afraid my loneliness was a leprosy, a disfigurement, which, if he ever saw it, would repulse him.

“Lucky me,” I said, instead. “How’s your other boyfriend going to take the news?”

“He’ll be all right. I’ll let him down easy.”

Such lightness. It left me giddy. But right there, riding up the back of that swell of happiness — the thought of Michael. I saw him at his computer, filling out another dating-site questionnaire, trying to choose a picture, disliking every one. My brother — the perfect kill switch. So very reliable. The same switch thrown every time I reached the point of stepping outside myself.

I hadn’t told Michael anything about Seth yet, though it had been six months already. Being single was something he and I had long had in common. Something to commiserate about. Celia was the one who’d been in relationships. Michael and I didn’t want each other to be alone, but the fact that we were had developed over the years into a kind of solidarity. It gave us a means to be close. And to remain loyal, somehow, to the past. Part of me knew that this was a racket, that it fed on gloom. But I didn’t know how to give it up. I could play down what was happening with Seth, suggest that it was still preliminary, and who knew what might come of it. I could even tell Michael that I was in love. He would listen to such a declaration with thirst, at least when he stopped talking about his own predicament long enough to hear it. But that Seth loved me back? That if anything he was the more affectionate? Of course Michael would never be less than polite about it. He’d say he was glad, and yet I would be cutting him off, leaving him more isolated than he already was. And what for, if I could just soft-pedal it, allowing him the sense that nothing had really changed?

One of the things that had recently made it easier to imagine telling Michael at least something about Seth was that after years of trying, he had finally gotten into graduate school. Albeit at the advanced age of thirty-six. We had thought it would never happen. My mother had fretted to Celia and me that he just made himself more miserable by applying fall after fall, only to reap another set of rejection letters each spring. But somehow he’d managed to persevere, and now he had done it. He said he didn’t care about an academic career, he just needed to do his work, and that he would be happy teaching high school if there were no college jobs. It was a plan, at least, a way he might eventually support himself. My mother still helped him with his rent, wrote checks for his therapy, and ran down what little savings she had. Here, at last, was a solution. Only it turned out his stipend didn’t cover everything. He would need to find work, and take out more loans. Because of his lousy credit he needed a co-signer.

“He’ll be the one paying them back,” my mother said when informing me she had already agreed.

“And if he doesn’t?” I asked.

“What am I supposed to do? Tell him he can’t go?”

She worried about him every day. Now, finally, he had good news. She couldn’t deny him the chance. This left only the question of how he would get from Boston to Michigan. Michael driving a U-Haul for two days by himself to an empty apartment in a town he’d never been to seemed like a bad idea to all of us.

“He would never ask you,” my mother said. “And obviously you’re busy…but it would be such a help.”

Before she suggested this, Seth had invited me to meet his family in Denver on the same August weekend that Michael was due in Lansing. I’d fantasized about having in-laws. A comfortable, accepting couple who would be delighted their son had found a clean-cut professional, and who wanted to welcome him into their family. Their comfortable, intact family. Seth’s older sister, Valerie, and her husband, Rick, lived with their infant son just a couple of streets away from Seth’s parents. Rick worked at the construction firm Seth’s father ran. They were all, apparently, keen to meet me. I wanted very much to go with him, but if I could get Michael set up in his apartment and settled there, he’d have his new start. When I mentioned to Seth what my mother had asked of me, he said he understood. There would be other times, he said. I should do what needed to be done.

Michael and I left Ben and Christine’s apartment on a sweltering day in the middle of August, the old Grand Am that I had given him years ago hitched to the back of the moving truck.

He was in bad shape. The preparations for moving and the prospect of leaving the place he’d lived most of his adult life had addled him. I had to repeat the simplest directions two or three times before he could process what I had said. Whatever meds he was taking weren’t doing a very good job. I’d lost track by then of all the combinations he had tried. He talked about them whenever we spoke, but they had blurred together in my mind.

On the highway I had to remind him to keep up his speed on the hills and when to use his blinkers. He’d always had a poor sense of direction but after we stopped for gas outside Albany, he couldn’t even find his way back to the thruway. I lost my patience then, and told him to pull over and let me drive.

It took us another five hours in occasional rain to reach Niagara Falls. The quickest route to Lansing was through southern Ontario and back across the border at Port Huron. Niagara was an obvious place to stop for the night, and neither of us had ever been. I found us a motel on the Canadian side with a parking lot large enough to accommodate the truck and hitch, and checked us in on my credit card. There wasn’t much daylight remaining, and I wanted to get down to the water to see about catching a boat out to the falls.

“I should stay here,” Michael said.

We were both frazzled from the drive, but I couldn’t stand the idea of not getting out for a walk.

“What if someone calls?” he said in a stricken voice. He sat perched on the edge of one of the beds, staring at the motel phone.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m not getting any signal,” he said. “They might try the landline.”

“They? Who’s they?”

He examined me in alarm, as if I were telling him to abandon a vigil for the missing.

“No one even knows we’re here,” I said. “No one has that number.”

He heard my words but didn’t seem to believe them. “You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll be here.”

“That phone isn’t going to ring,” I said. “Get your jacket.”

He hesitated a moment, tortured by the dilemma, and then he did as I said. I don’t know what I detested more: his reluctance or his capitulation. They both infuriated me.

Out on the street, he trailed a few feet behind me, and I had to slow up to keep him at my side. We passed through hordes of tourists milling at the bins of trinket shops and gazing like deer into the caverns of sports bars. I hadn’t expected much from the place, but I hadn’t realized how ugly it would be, either.

We reached the passageway leading under the road and down toward the water, and joined the other latecomers being funneled into the lines of metal stanchions. Before long, we were through the ticket booth and onto a boat.

As it eased away from the shore, we climbed onto the upper deck, and the cliff came into view, and behind that the high-rise hotels. I headed toward the front, glad for the cooler air. A few minutes later, as we neared the falls and the boat nosed its way into the mist, people donned their clear plastic ponchos and we bobbed back and forth at the edge of being enveloped by the spray. We had seen this sight at a distance crossing the bridge from the American side, and I had thought, Yes, there it is, as pictured. But without the perspective of distance it was suddenly unfamiliar. A white atmosphere billowed around us like the depthless, blank white that people claim to see as death approaches. And high above this cloud, the huge lip of water tumbled downward, a perfect disintegrating line against the waning sky.

I had heard someone describe seeing the Himalayas for the first time, how they appeared like the limit of the earth, an edge beyond which there could be nothing but the emptiness of space. I’d never understood what they were talking about until now. I knew what I was seeing — what I was supposed to be seeing — yet on that rocking deck, with the roar in my ears and the whiteness encompassing me, my points of reference fell away, and it seemed that I was gazing into the void.

It’s worth it, I thought. Just for this, for a few moments of the almost sublime, even if I had to half talk my way into it, and allow myself the cliché of being impressed by Niagara Falls. I was in awe. And the vastness washed the frustrations of the day away, and I forgave Michael his worry and his fear.

When I turned around, I spotted him at the stern, not glancing upward but off the side of the boat, his glasses beaded with water. Everyone had raised the hoods of their ponchos, but this somehow hadn’t occurred to him. His black hair was soaked flat against his scalp, and he was hunching his shoulders, as if that would protect him from the sky.

Just look, for Christ’s sake! Look! I wanted to shout, but he wouldn’t have heard me.

The boat began to chug in reverse, the prow reemerging from the mist. I walked back to join Michael. The other passengers were chatting with one another now, flipping through images on their cameras to see what they had captured.

“Amazing, right?” I said.

He nodded in a quick, automatic fashion, as if I had spoken in a foreign tongue and it was simplest for him just to agree.

“You’re soaked,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “I guess I am.”

We reached the border crossing at Port Huron by midmorning the next day, and East Lansing by early afternoon. His apartment was a few miles south of campus in one of the graduate-student housing blocks set along a wooded cul-de-sac. The building was a two-story stretch of concrete, from the early sixties by the look of it, with stairwells at either end of a wide, second-floor walkway. His unit had two rooms, a galley kitchen, and a bathroom, with white cinder-block walls and linoleum floors. Five hundred dollars a month, Internet and utilities included. Celia had done the research online, and she and I had agreed he wouldn’t get a better deal even if he made a trip in advance. It would be the first place he’d ever lived on his own. I wished it were nicer.

“It’s clean,” I said, and he agreed.

We needed to unload the boxes and get the truck returned before we were charged for another day. The records took nearly an hour, and the books that much again, despite his having left most of both collections in our mother’s basement. He had a futon, a chest of drawers, a desk, bookcases, a few lamps, and one of the old wingback chairs from the living room whose torn fabric my mother had pinned a cloth over. I asked him how he wanted the furniture arranged and he said he didn’t know. I suggested the desk by the front window, and the bookcases along the rear wall, and he agreed. The boxes we left in stacks by the door and in the bedroom. When we were done, I followed him in the Grand Am to the rental lot on the other side of town. I’d reminded him as we were leaving that we needed to fill the tank before returning the truck, but he passed one gas station after the next, until I called him on his cell and told him again.

He turned off into a Speedway, and I parked at the edge of the lot to wait for him. He struggled with the gas cap, unable to open it. A minute went by, and then another, and still he couldn’t manage the task. He didn’t kick the truck in frustration. He showed no signs of impatience at all. He just stood there, failing at it. Until eventually he turned around and scanned the lot. When he saw me, he didn’t wave me over or call my name. He remained by the capped tank, helpless and abdicating. Can’t you do it for me? his expression asked.

“I’m curious,” I said later, in a Thai restaurant in a strip mall near campus. “What would you have done if I hadn’t been there?”

“I guess I would have figured it out,” he said sheepishly.

“And if you’d been with Caleigh, you would have figured it out, right? You wouldn’t have just stopped. What is that? Why do you do that with me?” He’d passed beyond his hyperarticulate, racing worry into a kind of fugue state, scared of the menu and the waiter and the food. “Why should it be different?” I said, jabbing the question at him, willing him to do better than this.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

My phone rang — Seth calling from Denver. I told Michael I would be back, thankful for the excuse to get up and walk out, even if it was into the hot evening air.

“It’s like babysitting,” I said after Seth asked me how things were going. “Like taking care of an aging child.”

“He must be glad you’re there, though,” Seth said.

“I guess. That’s not how it comes out, but yeah.”

I asked about his visit home. He’d spent the morning playing video games, and the afternoon at the mall. When we’d first started dating, each new discovery — that I didn’t need to make weekend plans to fill empty evenings, that I had someone to talk to at the end of the day — had come as a revelation. The discoveries were different now. I could sense his mood in a phrase or two. I knew when he was worried about me, and felt guilty for it. These were their own kind of marvels, strangely reassuring as proof that Seth and I were, in fact, involved. Just hearing him describe his day with his family untensed me. Forty-eight hours with Michael and it was as if my own life had ceased. I hadn’t returned phone calls or even responded to my editor’s e-mails. Through the plate-glass window of the restaurant, I saw my brother waiting in front of the food that had now arrived. For a moment, I glimpsed him as a stranger might: a thin, unshaven man in black cotton work pants and a gray button-down shirt damp at the armpits. Pale-skinned, hair thinning, already middle-aged.

Seth was going on about a party he wanted us to go to the following weekend, and a friend he wanted me to meet, and I said it all sounded fine, without really listening, thinking instead of the picture of Bethany I’d seen on the desktop of Michael’s computer when he opened it at the apartment, still there after all these years.

“You had a long day,” Seth said. “I’ll let you go.”

“Can we talk before bed?”

“Yes, silly. Of course.”

As soon as I reached the table, Michael asked what was wrong.

“Nothing,” I said. “Why should anything be wrong?”

“I just thought something might be the matter.”

“No,” I said, scraping rice onto my plate, suddenly ravenous. “It was Seth. The guy I’m seeing. I’ve mentioned him to you.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

“You’re dating him.”

“Yes.”

“That’s good,” Michael said. “How is it going?”

“Actually,” I said, “it’s going really well.” I could have stopped there. But he’d asked. “To be honest, I think we might be in love.”

His head moved fractionally up and back, as if avoiding a punch. “That’s good,” he repeated, more gravely this time. “I’m amazed you haven’t been talking about it. I can’t imagine not needing to talk about it. Given how frightening it is. You must be afraid he’s going to leave you.”

“Not really. I think we’re good.”

He squinted at me, trying to make sense of what I was saying. “Where did you meet?”

“Online. Last winter. He’s from Colorado. His parents are still there, still married. Apparently they want to meet me, which I guess is a good sign.”

“Extraordinary,” Michael said. “Has he been in therapy?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What do you guys talk about?”

“Whatever comes up, I guess. He’s got good taste in music. You’d like some of the stuff he’s played me.”

More than telling him I was in love, it was telling him this that felt cruel. Michael’s crushes had always run through music. This would make it real for him.

“He understands my work, too,” I said. “When things come up last minute, or I have to leave town, he’s good about that. You should meet him sometime.”

“Sure,” Michael said, gazing at the curries, which he still hadn’t touched. He didn’t lack an appetite. He just seemed to have forgotten how to serve himself.

“Here,” I said, holding out a plate to him. “Eat.”

And so we did, in silence.

“What courses are you going to take?” I asked, eventually.

This he was able to answer at length, listing subjects and texts, going into the critical orientations of the various members of the faculty and how they did or didn’t comport with his own theoretical commitments. “I’ve read most of the first two years of the material before,” he said. “I’d start my dissertation tomorrow, if they’d let me.”

Seeing an opening, he started in on his perennial subject: slavery and trauma. I could never tell if he actually thought he was discoursing on all this to me for the first time, in which case the drugs had given him mild dementia, or if — and this seemed more likely — it didn’t matter a great deal whom he was describing it to, he just needed to narrate it, over and over.

Earlier that summer the magazine had run my first feature in months. I had written a story about Wall Street bundlers who had begun to favor Democrats. My editor had cut some of the color I’d worked hard to get into the piece but not, for once, the implied criticism. It had drawn a slew of comments on the website and been reposted all over, making the marketing department giddy with excitement. Michael was on the list of friends and family to whom I had sent a link, people who didn’t read the magazine and would otherwise never see my work. He’d been on that list for years. My mother subscribed, of course, wanting to see my articles in print. Celia usually sent a quick e-mail in response, as she had to this one. But from Michael, as usual, not a word. At home during Thanksgiving or Christmas, he would listen attentively enough if I was telling him about an assignment, but I had no sense if he ever read what I wrote, and, if he did, what he thought of it.

As the waiter arrived to clear our plates, I asked Michael about it. Maybe it was having finally told him about Seth. Or the fact that I had a flight back to New York in the morning, and didn’t know when I would see him next. Or simply that the two of us hadn’t spent this kind of time together in I couldn’t remember how long, and I wanted to know.

He appeared confused by my question, and took his time answering.

“You’ve had advantages,” he said. “The networks you’ve been a part of, the friends who’ve hired you.” How did he know friends had hired me? Had I told him that? Had Celia? “The kinds of advantages most black people don’t get,” he added.

I’d been leaning forward in my chair, keen for his response, but I sat back in wonder now. I didn’t think he had given my reporting a second thought. But no, he had it all worked out.

“And so that makes what I do illegitimate?”

“Not illegitimate. It’s just part of the context. Not many black women report on politics for national magazines.”

“Oh, come on. Is that really where we still are? Isn’t that what you called ‘bureaucratic multiculturalism’? Checking the box with a colored face?”

“That’s a danger, sure. But maybe what’s more telling is how you take the suggestion that the world isn’t a pure meritocracy. Like it’s an insult to your accomplishment.”

“And it isn’t?”

“Well. If it’s an insult, think what that means: all the qualified people just happen to be upper middle class and white. That’s a three-hundred-year coincidence.”

“I’m asking you about the work I do, and you’re giving me a lecture on affirmative action?”

His impassive eyes gave him the look of an ideologue trying not to sacrifice principle for sentiment.

“I read your piece,” he said. “It was well done.”

Maybe because I was tired, or because it had been so long since he’d offered me any praise, even this reluctant snippet caused my self-pity to well up in its warm, depressive sweetness. I worked as hard as I did, for so little pay, on articles and mini-articles and web teasers that passed into the ether almost as soon as they were published, ignored in favor of the cable-news bloviators, and yet still it turned out I was too privileged and establishment to satisfy my brother’s politics.

“Thanks,” I said, signaling the waiter for the check. “I’m glad you liked it.”

Back at the apartment, he helped me assemble his futon, and we opened the boxes with the sheets our mother had packed, along with the pillows and blankets. He made up the bed while I put away the plates and bowls, and rinsed off the silverware. Then we unpacked his suitcases and set up his closet. I wished we could play music, something to make the rooms a little familiar before I left, but he had forgotten his speaker cables, so we worked to the sound of the fan in the window.

By the time we’d sorted all his belongings except the books and records, it was nearly eleven. I had an early flight from Detroit, and it would take us an hour and a half to get to the airport in the morning. I had booked myself a motel, and I drove us there in the Grand Am, along the empty streets, wanting more than anything for him to say something funny as we passed the gas stations and the darkened malls, something absurd to lighten the moment and release us both.

In the parking lot, as I handed him the car key, it struck me that I should have booked us both at the motel, so he wouldn’t have to sleep in that apartment with no air-conditioning on his own. But it was late. It would take time for him to go back and get his pills, and I was exhausted.

Michael

I’d imagined it like the reading group with Caleigh and Myra: the camaraderie of a devotion to radical scholarship, an interrogation of the historical determinants of affect in black life, and perhaps some volunteers for the reparations movement. But to my shock it turned out that most of my fellow grad students subscribed to cable, went to the gym, and weren’t certain yet what interested them enough to write about. It’s not that they objected to my work, or didn’t want to hear about transgenerational haunting, but it didn’t move them. It was my thing, which was fine by them, though not a cause for urgency. Doubtless I came across as something of an odd quantity, being the only white man in the program and older than the junior faculty. Which isn’t to say anyone behaved in an unfriendly manner, just that if there was a potluck, I didn’t hear about it. No matter, I told myself, you’re here to do your work.

That might have been enough, if I’d been able to consume books and articles as fast as I had those many years ago during the first reprieve of Klonopin. But pages of text appeared waxed to me now, covered in a film of distraction. By noon I’d have only a paltry set of notes, and acid in my stomach at the horror of all that remained unread. I kept putting off the duller course work to try to do my own, only to fall behind on both. In the evenings, on the phone, Caleigh tried to convince me things would improve, that I simply needed to adjust, while Mom suggested I would sleep better if I turned down the heat.

It hadn’t occurred to me that living on my own would be different from living with Ben and Christine. I’d come to dread Ben reminding me IT’S THURSDAY, the day I spent in fear of forgetting to take out the garbage or properly clean the bathroom (I might use the wrong detergent and ruin the tile; I might miss a patch of mold and reap a silent resentment). There was none of that on my own now at Spartan Village. I took the trash out when so moved. Yet no one was in the other room watching 24, eating slow-cooked legumes. No one affectionately mocked my frozen-enchilada dinners, as Christine had for years. I hadn’t realized that her laughter was what made them honorable. I had lived most of my adult life with Ben, and later with him and Christine together, without noticing I was doing it, and yet I had never suspected that hearing the muffled edge of their conversations through closed doors and the toilet flushing upstairs had done so much to assure me that other people existed. In the new apartment the cinder-block walls cut off all sound of the neighbors.

Occasionally, on the walkway, I’d chat with the portly medical resident from next door, a soft-skinned, childlike man from Delaware who was doing a rotation at a pain clinic and complaining of having to treat nothing but refractory patients. Like the woman who’d gone to visit relatives in Chicago after her third spinal surgery only to be run down in the aisle of a Costco in a shopping-rage incident, requiring him, against his better judgment, to FedEx her a prescription for fentanyl patches, which she’d applied all in one go, causing her to miss the Detroit stop on her bus home, and sleep through to Toronto. They’re dumpster cases, he said, other services don’t want to deal with them, so they turf them over to us. Leading me, naturally, to wonder what kind of supplies he might keep in his own apartment.

As is the way of things, I was forced to take more Klonopin to get through the days. Dr. Bennet had written me for a decent supply to tide me over during the transition, but I’d run through it in a jiffy. Then I went through the batch that Dr. Greenman, my new shrink at the University Department of Mental Hygiene, had prescribed before a month had passed. The first time, she obliged me with an early refill, and she did it again a few weeks later, as any humanitarian would. But after my third request she began exhibiting signs of moralism, suggesting I needed to be more disciplined.

By then, the sweating had commenced. Night sweats were one thing. I was used to waking in soaked sheets; bedding could be laundered and the day needn’t be lost. But sweating through my shirt before making it to the bus stop was a real drag. The temperature had nothing to do with it. Wind could be blasting off the steppes of Michigan and still my pores ran like broken faucets, my skin as slick as a clapped donkey in July. In seminar, I hesitated to raise my hand lest the stench of my underarm waft across the table. But I’d waited a long time to get here and I wanted to contribute, so I started bringing a washcloth and an extra set of clothes with me onto campus each day, to towel off and change before class.

The program was affiliated with a mentoring scheme for minority high schoolers, and with Caleigh’s encouragement, I signed up to volunteer two afternoons a week. They paired me with a sophomore named Jaylen. Our first task was to work through a review book for the state English test. But after ten minutes muddling through a Marge Piercy poem, I commented on his Juicy J T-shirt, and we got sidetracked on a discussion of the Memphis origins of crunk. I concurred in his judgment that Three 6 Mafia’s “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” was a mainstreamed train wreck by an otherwise innovative crew, and that Juicy J himself bore much of the responsibility, given his brand-expansion ambitions. This was around the time that Oris Jay (aka Darqwan) finally got around to releasing another Sheffield bass record on his homegrown Texture label, and I suggested that if Jaylen really wanted to give his thorax a shake he check out some British dubstep. Which I’m happy to say he did. By our third meeting it was clear I had more in common with him than I did with my fellow grad students. For one thing, we were both fifteen (at the level of the psychic), we listened to inordinate quantities of dance music, and as far as I could tell, we were both attracted to his English teacher.

I did my best dragging him through Abigail Adams’s correspondence and Newsweek excerpts on paragliding, but at the bottom of the sessions we always circled back to what we were listening to. When I mentioned I had a subwoofer in the trunk of my car, he asked if he could hear it, and I ended up driving him home to the beat of a Torsten Pröfrock / Monolake workout from Berlin. Rolling through the streets of Lansing with him, I realized I hadn’t had anyone else in the car since arriving in Michigan, and certainly no one to listen to music with. I rather appreciated the company. Unlike my family, he never asked me to turn the volume down. And really, what would I have done all these years without a monster sound system in my car? Where else, beyond the walls of a club, can you experience bass loud enough to wipe your memory clean without complaint from the neighbors? Sound systems are what turn cars into escape vehicles, even if you’ve got nowhere to go. A drive to the convenience store is five minutes of that storm blowing in from paradise. I’ll take the sneers of oldsters at intersections expecting gunfire. The relief is too rare to give up for civility’s sake.

Jaylen was understandably wary of me, but excited to suddenly be a font of pre-releases for his friends, who couldn’t believe he’d got his hands on a bin full of screwed and chopped tracks they hadn’t even heard of. I didn’t review much anymore (not wanting to write about Moby turned out to be a real professional liability), but the records and press releases still arrived by the bushel, adding to the stacks Alec thought I should be putting up on eBay. I started giving most of the non-dross to Jaylen. I’d fill a bag with CDs and the odd twelve-inch, and offer it to him when I dropped him off. I’m sure I went on too long when we happened upon a snippet of Wordsworth or a James Baldwin quote in his review materials, but he didn’t seem to mind. You’re weird, he said. How come you’re not a professor? I told him that I was nominally in training to become one, but that I wasn’t sure if the modern academy was sufficiently politicized for me. You should meet my mom, he said, she always votes. I’d seen his mother in their driveway a few times, and she’d offered a wave. Luckily her looks were not of such force as to arrest me at first sight, but I certainly had no objection to his suggestion that I make her acquaintance.

I appreciate you helping Jaylen, she said, when I brought him home one afternoon. I hope he’s not asking you for all that merchandise you’re giving him. That child is spoiled enough. I get it for free, I said, it’s no trouble. So you’re over at MSU, she said. I’m still working on my bachelor’s over there. I keep saying I’ll finish in time so when he’s getting out of high school we can graduate together, but we’ll see if I make it.

Thank goodness that even at greater proximity she didn’t trigger in me the obsessional rush, tensing my gut or goading me into telling her that I loved her. The moment had a gentler aspect. I didn’t converse with many people outside of seminars. Weekends were empty — only phone calls, and always the apartment in silence when I hung up. Yet I didn’t feel the necessity to romance this woman. I only wanted to go into the house with the two of them and share a meal. But then I heard Caleigh’s voice saying, Flipper, don’t be a creep. So I kept it to pleasantries and took my leave.

When I raised my uncontrolled perspiration with Dr. Greenman, she asked if there was anything I was particularly anxious about at the moment. Like, say, the Feds trying to garnish my fellowship checks for back taxes? Or your refusing to write me a script for enough medicine to get by? Or that I waited so long for this chance to get everything down, from George Clinton to the Finland Station, from slave ships to Holocaust studies to the echo of loss in the speed of a high hat, only to find my concentration shot? But I didn’t want to be rude. She was a basically sympathetic woman, in her wide-wale cords and cable-knit seasonals. I believed her concern for my condition to be genuine, even if her rectitude about prescribing controlled substances blinded her to the fact that my need for them at this point was nothing more or less than a way to make it through the hour.

What could I do? I began trolling for benzo equivalents on the Internet, where people seemed to agree on the utility of kratom, a quasi-opioid tea drunk by Thai fieldworkers that apparently took the edge off in a serious way. The FDA hadn’t gotten around to banning it, so I ordered a pound and got started. It had no place in an aromatherapy regime, but neither did people with actual problems. Its effect was akin to strong coffee laced with high quantities of Benadryl. I consumed it every morning. That’s how my days began: more Klonopin than the doctor ordered, a thermos of coffee, a mug of kratom, three or four legacy meds, a few hundred milligrams of whatever Dr. Greenman was pushing, followed by a hot shower. By November, I’d largely given up on my course reading, let alone any assignments past due, which made attending my seminars less relevant and even inappropriate. My mother would only worry if I told her, as would Celia and Alec. I talked to Caleigh about it, but she chastised me, saying that even if I didn’t write brilliant essays, I needed to keep up with the work. This was my chance, she said. This was how I would find a job.

On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, I did my best to gather myself with a change of shirts and an extra cup of kratom before driving over to the school to pick up Jaylen. The idea was that we meet for the first month in the safe space of the school and then, once trust had been established, we could venture out on our own. Mentors were asked to keep tabs on their mentees’ academic progress, but we weren’t required to limit ourselves to that. Mostly Jaylen and I drove around Lansing with the subwoofer.

I’d started playing him old-school stuff I thought he should know, music I hadn’t listened to in years, Larry Levan garage mixes, Afrika Bambaataa, Neil Young, anything with an ache of the real. When I got to Donna Summer, though, he balked. You’re just trying to mess with me, he said. That’s fag music. To date, he’d struck me as a mild-mannered kid. As for his mother, on the spectrum of the politics of black respectability, she fell somewhere in the hesitant middle, of small enough means to preclude class pretensions but scared enough for her son to want him to toe a line she never had. Music seemed like their compromise, the thing she didn’t try to control. He could visit the imaginary power of making his white classmates fear a black planet, but still turn the music off and get on with the business of getting on. But that masculine fantasy left no room for Donna Summer or Diana Ross or, for that matter, Nina Simone or David Bowie. They queered the pitch. Telling him that my younger brother was a respectable, middle-class homosexual didn’t seem like it would do the trick. Instead, I played him the last twenty seconds of Summer and Moroder’s “Our Love,” where the synth begins to pulse and drip over the beat like chemicals made to dance, and I told him, There is no techno without this. It’s the genealogy of what you already love.

When we got to his house, his mother, Trish, was just pulling in. I could offer you some coffee, she said, if you like. They lived in a one-story brick house with a front sitting room used only in the event of company. The couch and chairs were covered in clear plastic to protect the fabric, which I was glad for, relieved that my dampness wouldn’t make a stain. On the glass-top coffee table was a bowl of dried flowers, russet and dusty pink. Jaylen sat uneasily on the far end of the couch from me, and rolled his eyes when his mother said she’d love for him to go to MSU when he graduated high school. He’s already a Spartans fan, she said, so why not? Because I don’t want to stay here, he said. She cast a chastising glance at him, then turned to smile at me.

Do you have your own kids, she asked, hopefully. Yes, I said, I have a son and a daughter. They’re six and eight. Oh, that’s just the best, she said, and laughed. By the time they get to this one’s age they’re nothing but trouble. Though he’s better than his sister. She’s already living at her boyfriend’s and there wasn’t no use trying to stop her. You must be run off your feet with those two, she said, and here you are taking time to help Jaylen.

They don’t live with me, I said, they’re with their mother in Chicago. I go there to visit them. I could feel Jaylen’s eyes on me, but he said nothing. Well, at least you do that, she said, philosophically, at least you do that. Sweat flowed down my torso and I could only hope she didn’t smell it. It’s Jaylen’s turn to make dinner, she said, he’s doing tacos. You’d be welcome to stay.

After a few extra Klonopin in the bathroom, the scene became quite ordinary: the overhead light in the kitchen, the shredded Kraft cheese, Jaylen’s dogging his mother for pestering him not to eat so fast. Even the conversation about what I studied, which usually confused people, seemed ordinary enough. When you live most days alone in a room with a tiger kept from pouncing on you by nothing more than your constant stare, being poured a cup of Pepsi can feel almost Christlike in its mercy. It seemed perfectly natural to tell his mother, when she asked, that I had grown up on the south side of Chicago in an extended, mixed-race family. Oh, Flipper, Caleigh would say later, and we would argue. But there I was, eating dinner with the two of them, and we were jovial.

Despite my repeated insistence, they wouldn’t let me wash the dishes. They mistook it for a chore. They didn’t know the pleasure it would give me, or what that pleasure would count for. But I was their guest, and so I desisted. It was already dark out, the early darkness of winter evenings, when six o’clock seems like midnight. Jaylen’s mother turned on the outside light, and I thanked her for the hospitality on the way out to my car. Be safe out there, she said.

Driving back to the apartment, I wondered if it was the anxiolytics that had padded my longing with enough cotton wool to allow for a bit of glancing human contact without injury or fever, or if letting go a bit of the truth is what had helped me to reach that clearing.

What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this would abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who’s ever known it knows that it has no components but is instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you can recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next. And yet I keep lying, by describing, because how else can I avoid this second, and the one after it? This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.

I woke the next morning at five in soaked sheets and a panic. With water from the bedside table, I took my last Klonopin and went straight to the stove to put the kettle on for kratom. I did the yoga stretches Celia had taught me, and after that I sat upright in a hard-backed chair for five minutes trying to breathe intentionally, as it said to do in the pamphlet she’d given me on self-soothing. For some reason, when I finished I was still thirty-six, single, and about to die. I called Dr. Greenman for a refill but the secretary in Mental Hygiene said she was out for the day. I had run the morning routine but still the terror reigned. It was then that I checked my e-mail and read the message from the university saying that pursuant to a letter from the Department of Education about a previously undisclosed episode of default, they were putting a hold on the loan disbursement I needed for my rent and food.

When I managed to focus again on the screen, I looked up Dr. Greenman’s home address, and drove to her house. It was a black-and-white Victorian with gingerbread trim and a bevy of shrubs clipped to the nines. She answered the door in a University of Wisconsin sweatshirt and a pair of burnt-orange wide-wales. The lenses of her glasses were big enough to serve demitasse off. Michael, she said, I don’t see patients at home. You need to make an appointment through the clinic. I just need a refill, I told her, then I can get through the weekend and come in next week. We’ve talked about this, she said. I can’t write prescriptions on demand, certainly not from my house. And if I’d taken a bullet to the groin, I wanted to say, you’d tell me to reschedule? Why don’t I just bleed out on your hedge, and we’ll call it a breakdown? But I couldn’t be rude or unkind to her. Her affect remained warm, even as she sawed at the rope I was hanging from. Are you thinking of hurting yourself? she asked. Because if you are you need to go to the ER and tell them that I sent you. It was thirty degrees out, but I might as well have been weight training in Lagos for the river of sweat running down my back. Michael, she said, putting her hand on my forearm, as if I were a person at that moment, rather than a nerve, I want to help you, but I can’t do it like this. If things get bad, she said. They are very bad, I said. I understand, she said. If things get worse, and you think you’re in danger, you need to go to the hospital. I can’t give you more of the drug, but I can meet you on Monday morning to discuss all this. We can come up with a plan. Right now I have my daughter with me, and I need to go back inside.

Caleigh was at work, and after half an hour of imploring me to just get in bed and watch X-Files reruns, she said she really, really had to get off the phone. Celia didn’t pick up. Nor did Alec. I got my mother’s machine but didn’t want to leave a message that might upset her.

I don’t know how long I stared at the picture of Bethany on my desktop screen before dialing her number. It might have been an hour. I examined the pixels of her teeth as I listened to her phone ring. Miraculously, after all her years of silence, she answered. She was saying hello, I was saying it’s Michael and asking how she was, we were conversing. At long, long last. She had moved to Houston and finished college there. She had a job at a health club. I couldn’t see her working at a health club, but she didn’t sound as if she were dissembling. She asked about me and I said things were going okay, that I’d finally got into grad school and was trying to write. Are you going out with anyone? I asked, which of course I shouldn’t have, period, let alone almost right away, but I had to know because if she was single and she had picked up the phone, then the vicious little engine in my chest idling at breakneck speeds might shut down long enough to let my eyes rest. You didn’t call to ask that, did you? she said. No, no, I said, I’m just curious, I just want to know how you’re doing. Okay, then, she said, if you say so. I’m engaged, actually. I think you’d like her.

The liquor store took my credit card with flying colors. Mostly the light amber of Cutty Sark and the shaking blue script of my signature. When I could be sure no one was looking, I sipped from the bottle in the parking lot, turning up the volume on Norma Fraser’s “The First Cut Is the Deepest” (is it self-pity when it provides no comfort?). Somehow I’d never become an alcoholic. Luck of the draw. But as a major CNS depressant, liquor has its advantages. It struck my reptile brain square on its diamond head. Booze — the ancient dimmer of fear and sorrow. The granny of all psychoactive meds, a blunt old hag toddling down out of the mountains with a demented smile and a club. World? she sneers. What world? And swings her cudgel at your skull.

Eventually a détente was achieved. The awful precision of things drifted off to one side. I drove around for a while, walled up in sound. About the music I had listened to since I was a child, my father had never said much. His own tastes were a mixed bag, baroque numbers he’d picked up in the Church of England, Elgar and the grand imperial fade-out, tossed in with Sinatra and Frankie Laine. But whenever “Bridge Over Troubled Water” came on the radio in the car, my mother would remind us that it had been one of his favorite songs, and it had often occurred to me that he had done something like that, laying himself down over the trouble he himself had become, so that we could pass on. I wondered how any of them — Celia or Alec or my mother — managed to live anywhere but on the lip of his grave, eyes pinned open, trying to look away. How were they not cold to the touch of anyone but those, like my father, like Bethany, who ended who you were by making you over again in their image?

There is just the one sequence: Stepping from the terminal at Logan into that furnace heat on the afternoon I arrived home from England with Peter Lorian, my undershirt soaking through before we crossed the parking lot, the glint of the sun on those car roofs, the blue sky and molten asphalt, all perfectly unreal and incredibly precise. Arriving at the house, seeing my mother with her arms open to hug me, her hugging me, my being impervious to her touch. Then watching the three of them cry in the living room, wanting to comfort them but not knowing how, sealed off and sure only of this: I left them here to suffer and now he is gone. The one sequence. Like a groove on a record cut too deep for the needle to climb out of. No matter what else is playing, this is always playing. That is the point of volume — to play something louder than this groove. The volume of speakers, or of obsession. The power of the sufficient dose.

The drizzle and headlights, the storefronts and street signs — they all ran into one another, softening things up. When I knocked on the front door of the house, it was Jaylen who answered. Hey, he said. We don’t have the program today, do we? No, we don’t, I said. And then, realizing I needed to say something more, I added, I just wanted to thank you for the meal last night, I was so glad to be here. No problem, he said, peering at me with some concern. My mom isn’t home yet, if that’s who you came for. No, no, I said, I just thought I’d drop by. Maybe it was true after all that I would never be with anyone romantically. That my anguish, which for a time had specialized in love, had once more become indivisible from the rest of life. In which case relief might come from elsewhere. Standing in front of me in the entrance, Jaylen was uncertain how to proceed. I’m sorry I don’t have any records for you today, I said. That’s all right, he said, you’ve given me a bunch. I can give you more, I said, many more. You need some kind of hood, he said. I looked up and felt the rain on my face. You’re right, I said, I do. Is it okay if I come in?

He had a Technics turntable in his room set up on milk crates filled with vinyl. There was the requisite Tupac poster, and the one that I’d given him from Run-D.M.C.’s first album, with Simmons and Smith in fedoras and tracksuits up against a brick wall. The bedsheets were still red Mickey Mouse. His schoolwork was piled on his dresser, his clothing on a beanbag, which he cleared for me to sit on. I picked something up yesterday you might like, you want to hear it? he asked. Please, I said, carry on. It was an Indochina remix of Kaci Brown’s “Unbelievable.” The original (hardly the right word) was a catchy, overproduced bit of Nashville hit-making, the kind of track that still gets called R&B though it’s sung by a white teen from Sulphur Springs, Texas, and has neither. But Indochina (aka Brian Morse and A. Fiend) had stripped away the lip-gloss piano and session-music guitar, laying the vocals down over a four-to-the-floor beat straight out of 1979, but quickened to the pace of a Rotterdam gay night. I couldn’t help but nod my head up and down, as Jaylen did, listening to this thoroughly unremarkable voice engineered to the vanishing point, and yet, when driven by the drum machine and lofted on waves of synth, still reaching the note that the heart pines for.

It’s unbelievable but I believed you

Unforgivable but I forgave you

Insane what love can do

That keeps me coming back to you.

It’s kind of gay, he said. I wouldn’t play it at school, but it’s got a kick, huh? Kind of gay? I wanted to say. Do you have any notion how many homosexuals sweated their asses off on the dance floor to make this soaring bit of derivative trash possible? How many died of AIDS, OD’d, or went broke on the way to that girl from Texas cutting a deal with Interscope to record a track that achieved its own unwitting ideal only when most of it was torn away by the people who really needed it? Any idea of how much eloquence was borrowed to pay that royalty? But it seemed like a lot to go into just now, and I felt as at rest as I had in a very long while, sitting in Jaylen’s room with him, with the turntable and the records, talking about music. As if he were my friend and I was his. Yeah, was all I said, it’s definitely got a kick.

He put on the Darqwan twelve-inch I’d suggested to him the day we met, “Rob One 7,” a cavern of distorted bass filled with an assaultive drum line and haunted now and then by a laserlike phrase of keyboard. As good a sonic portrait of postindustrialism — or at least of unemployment in Sheffield — as one was likely to come across. Knowing his speakers weren’t up to the task, Jaylen plugged in his headset and handed it to me while he flipped through a crate looking for what to play next. I slipped into the cavern and disappeared.

Here at last I could track the ghosts by ear, listening to them dance in the cut, the lost coming alive again in the vibrations of my skull, and through my whole body, which was free now to be nothing more than a tunnel, a passageway for the missing to travel back along, the music bringing them home.

Can I ask you a question? Jaylen said, when the track had ended. Sure, I replied. How come you told my mom you have kids? You don’t have kids, do you? No, I don’t, I said. I guess I just didn’t want to disappoint her, she seemed to like the idea. But don’t worry, I said, it’s nothing romantic toward your mom, I just felt at home. I’m sorry if I let you down. The wall of the booze was beginning to disintegrate. I could feel it washing away and the dread rolling in behind it, lapping at the tips of my nerves.

You’re strange, he said, cueing up another dubstep record, this one on a lower volume. He took a seat at his desk and scrolled through something on his phone. I should go, I thought. But the idea of getting up and leaving the house was terrifying. If I stayed here, in his company, I might knuckle through. They would cook dinner, I could eat with them. The overhead light, the grated cheese. It could be ordinary. My eyes started to twitch, as if I were caught in a waking dream. At the ER, they would think I was just a drug seeker.

The door opened and Jaylen’s mother appeared. She looked across the room at me, prone on the beanbag, my body beginning to shake, and I could tell by the alarm on her face that it was getting late, that things were already far along, and that I would need their help.

Margaret

It’s terrible how dry the ground has become. The brook is down to a trickle and the thistle and ferns along its banks look almost wintry. All of July and August it hardly rained, not even on the muggy days when thunderheads came through in the afternoon and lightning flashed in the distance. I had to water most evenings. It's the middle of October now and I’m still watering to keep the soil of the beds damp and the bushes from withering. Yet for all this, these last few weeks have been the most glorious weather, cloudless skies and temperate days, perfect for being out like this in the morning, and in the early evenings during the week, when I get home from work. The light is so clear in autumn.

In the meadow at the end of the street, the late-blooming asters have flourished despite the drought. The last snowy clusters run all the way up the slope to the verge of the woods. With your back to the road you get just a hint of wilderness, of what it would be like if none of us had ever come here. I used to avoid this section of my loop, it being the path John likely took. But eventually the avoidance became the reminder, and so for a long time now it has all been one, this place where he was, and I still am, the street and the field, alive with the change of seasons.

Around the yard lately I’ve been clipping back the red flowering branches of the euonymus, which was threatening to take over the driveway. There are bulbs to be planted, and beds to be re-soiled, along with the raking and mowing, which Michael has been such a help with. I don’t have to ask him, he offers. We’ve taken all sorts of things to the dump which I wouldn’t have been able to carry out of the bulkhead on my own: the tea chests in which we shipped our books back and forth across the Atlantic, full of old magazines; Alec’s and Celia’s high school belongings; a dorm room’s worth of furniture Caleigh left with us ages ago. All of it good to be clearing out, given the situation.

We have breakfast together most days. He goes upstairs to his computer while I’m at work, and he’s there at the house to greet me when I get home. I make supper, he does the dishes, often we watch a film before bed. The truth is I quite like having him with me again. He’s a considerate person and always has been. He does talk about his predicament and his ideas at never-ending length, which means he’s not always the best listener, but still, we’re company for each other.

It was my friend Suzanne who recommended the real estate agent. She said Veronica was very pleasant and down to earth, unlike most of them, and that if I wanted, she would come by and have a look, just to see what the possibilities might be. I wouldn’t be considering it if everything else I owe now didn’t make it so hard to keep up the mortgage. The hospital’s bill collectors are relentless. They call at all hours. They can be so unpleasant on the phone, as if we were criminals. And then with Michael not enrolled in his program, the loans I signed for him have come due, and there are those calls as well. I wish they would simply write. Then I could organize all the papers and take stock of them. I do hate not wanting to pick up my own phone when it rings.

I can’t tell Alec about Veronica, or about the listing contract on my desk that she’s waiting for me to sign. He’d stop me. And I don’t want to bother Celia with all of it, not yet. It seems there might be seventy thousand or so left after everything’s paid off, which is certainly more money than I’ve ever had at one time, and plenty to rent us an apartment. I would miss the garden, of course. That I can’t pretend.

It was almost ten months ago that I got a call from Michael’s doctor at the university. Michael had mentioned her to me, Dr. Greenman, and said that he found her sympathetic, which she certainly sounded on the phone. She said he had stopped a medicine too quickly, and that he’d been admitted to the hospital out there. It would be best if he took a leave of absence from school, she told me, and got transferred to a facility nearer home. Celia was the one who called her back and made the arrangements. Alec instructed me not to sign anything at the hospital here until he looked at the papers, but it all happened quickly, picking Michael up at the airport and driving him to that fortress of a building up on the North Shore. They wouldn’t admit him unless I signed, so I did, which is why the bills now come addressed to me.

I drove up there to visit him almost every day, bringing him bags of pistachios, which he’s always loved, and music magazines, and whatever toiletries he needed. His roommate was younger, in his early twenties, and pale as a sheet. He didn’t seem to have any visitors of his own, so I brought nuts for him too, and pears, which he thanked me for in a whisper. Where his parents were, I have no idea.

At times Michael would be asleep when I arrived, and I would sit by the window with the paper, not wanting to disturb his rest. He lay on his stomach and side, his shoulder rising slightly with each breath. I hadn’t watched him sleep since he was a boy. His hands and feet still had their little twitches about them, and he swallowed with a motion of his whole neck, and burrowed into his pillow. Before Celia and Alec were born, I used to stand over his bed and wonder at him: the mystery of his sleep, of his having a life separate from my own, sequestered in the privacy of dreams. A warm feeling, but lonely, too, because I loved him with more need than anyone I’d loved before, and when he slept I understood that he could leave me, and that eventually he would. At least in sleep he had a respite from bodily tension, the kind that had been with him from the very beginning, and which I had only ever been able to assuage briefly and in small measure.

I was younger then than he is now. Which makes the sequence wrong, being at his bedside like that.

None of the children, Michael least of all, would have wanted to hear that it happened to be almost forty-one years since I had taken the bus to Lambeth to visit their father in another north-facing hospital room. What do the dates matter? I could hear them asking, and I would have had no answer to satisfy them. They think it’s simple of me, to keep track of time this way. I don’t ascribe anything deep to it, I don’t say it means anything in particular, other than that I’m sure I spend too much time thinking about the past. But it is a way to remain connected. Like visiting each of them if they move, so I can picture exactly where they are, which I do every night as I’m going to sleep, the images bridging the distance. Dates do the same. If I measure off the months and years, it is to link me to them, and back to them when they were children, and earlier still to when John and I were together before we were married, when everything was just beginning.

The reason, it turned out, that Michael was sleeping so much in the hospital was the new drug he had been put on. I don’t remember the name of it; it begins with a Z. Dr. Bennet said it was an antipsychotic, but that I shouldn’t be alarmed. Michael wasn’t at all psychotic, he said, it was just that the medicine happened to be effective for anxiety as well.

When he first came back to the house, Michael did seem calmer. After a month or so I noticed he’d begun to put on weight. Good, I thought. He’d always been thin as a rake; it seemed a sign of health. But it kept going. He wasn’t eating vast amounts of food — I don’t cook vast amounts of food — but he got bigger by the week. In the last nine months, he’s put on forty pounds, at least. He didn’t remotely have a belly before but he does now. He’s gone from concave to nearly barrel-chested. Even his eyes are set farther back in his head, encased in an extra layer of flesh. It’s not right. His frame was never meant for it. This is the medicine they give to a man trying to regain his confidence? Together with all the other drugs, it’s slowed his mind. When he talks, he pauses and halts, gets lost and trails off.

I do my best to bring him walking with me, especially if he’s still in the house when I get back from work. Just fifteen or twenty minutes around the neighborhood at a decent pace to get him moving, not for the sake of his weight but because it’s not good to be so sedentary. He usually says he’d rather not, and then I have to convince him. And on top of that persuade him that he doesn’t need to bring his messenger bag, that black sack he can’t be without. He’s got half a pharmacy in there, along with books and papers. He treats it like a survival kit wrapped in a safety blanket. What if I need something while we’re out? he’ll say. On a walk? I ask. In the supermarket? It makes no sense. But each time I bring it up, it’s as if I’ve never mentioned it before, as though he’s never contemplated being without it and has to consider the risk anew. If I press, he relents, but I don’t always, and so sometimes he walks beside me with the overstuffed bag slung over his shoulder like a deliveryman taking a stroll, and I wonder what people think when they see the two of us go by.

When I arrive back at the house, Michael’s already made the coffee.

A few weeks after he left the hospital and moved in, I started having heart palpitations. I went to my doctor, assuming they were caused by the strain of his return. But the first question he asked was whether I’d been having more caffeine than usual. Unbeknownst to me, I had — triple the dose — drinking Michael’s brew. So now I take just a third of a mug and add water from the kettle.

I tell him I’m meeting Suzanne for lunch later. Because my car is in the shop, I need to borrow his. “I could give you a ride,” I add, hoping he’ll want to come into the city. He goes once a week or so, to see friends, I’d like to think, but I don’t interrogate him.

“Right,” he says, the idea at least registering.

As we’re finishing breakfast, Dorothy, from next door, appears on her front steps with her dog, Tilly, on the leash, which reminds me of the clippings from the paper I want to give her. She smiles and waves when she sees me coming across the yard with them.

“These are silly,” I say, “but I’ve been meaning to leave them on your doorstep. I thought they might amuse you.”

She thanks me, putting them in the pocket of her windbreaker, and we marvel at the glorious weather. I haven’t gotten around to mentioning anything to her about the possibility of my leaving the neighborhood. I don’t want to set everything in motion before I have to.

“How’s Michael?” she asks in her usual cheerful tone, giving me a chance to say whatever I want, but keeping it light enough that I don’t have to go into anything I’d rather not. I’ve always appreciated this about her, from the time she first moved into the neighborhood with her two children, soon after John died. She’s not afraid to talk about anything, but she isn’t insistent either.

After I tell her we’re going into the city for the afternoon, she asks if we’d like to come over for stew later. I’ve eaten at her house umpteen times, and she in mine, but for some reason this morning her offer of dinner thrills me.

“That sounds wonderful,” I say.

“Just knock, I’ll be here.”

As I turn back up the driveway, Michael’s dreadful bumper sticker confronts me: I HATE MY LIFE, printed in big black letters on a white rectangle. He has no other bumper stickers — no flags or political slogans — just the rusted Pontiac emblem and I HATE MY LIFE, ludicrous and stark, there for Dorothy and anyone else who passes by to cringe at. I sometimes reverse the direction of the car, so that the sticker faces the garage, which Michael never seems to notice, but I can’t do it every night.

I had to drive his car through the middle of town yesterday with that plastered on the back of it, everyone assuming the sentiment was mine. In the grocery-store lot, the bag boy could barely keep himself from laughing. It’s absurd. And now I’m supposed to drive all the way to Boston.

I’ve had it. I walk into the garage, find the least ancient ice scraper on the shelf, and set to work. It’s hard going, and I have to lean my weight into it, but the plastic edge does raise the sticker, bit by bit. I’m just about done with HATE when Michael sees me through the dining room window and steps out the front door to ask what I’m doing.

“What does it look like? I’m getting rid of this awful thing.”

“But it’s my car.”

“That may be, but I have to drive it. And I’m not driving it with this on it. It’s ridiculous, Michael. It’s so negative.”

“It’s a song. From the Pernice Brothers.”

“It’s perverse, that’s what it is. Why in the world would you want to advertise such a thing?”

“You’re worried about who’s going to see it?” he asks, as if that were a bizarre concern.

“You don’t hate your life, Michael. No one hates their entire life. It’s juvenile.”

He steps closer and glances down at the crinkled paper that hangs from the MY LIFE still adhered to the metal. Then, without a word, he takes the scraper from my hand.

I’m amazed by the assertion of his move. Shocked, even. I can barely believe it. He never does such things. I’m almost thankful. So what can I do but keep my sudden disappointment to myself when he steps past me and begins scraping away at what’s left.

Driving along the pike, he stays in the right-hand lane behind a Hood Milk truck going fifty miles an hour. Alec would be whipping along, as if enacting some espionage fantasy, leaving me to grip the door; Celia would be in the middle lane; and Michael a decade ago wouldn’t have realized how fast he was going, but now we remain stolidly behind the truck, and I say nothing.

We park on Boylston, near Copley, and he hands me the keys, saying he’ll take the T back and get a bus home from the station. I tell him that if he lets me know where he’s going to be, I can swing by when I’m through and give him a ride, if he’s ready. He says maybe the record shop on Mass. Ave., but that I shouldn’t worry about it, and then he walks off, the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head despite the plentiful sun.

At the restaurant, Suzanne is already installed in a booth, enjoying a glass of white wine. She’s wearing a scoop-neck blouse and her red jade necklace, with her voluminous, dyed-black hair down over her shoulders. In all the years we’ve worked together, she’s changed remarkably little. She’s still forever on the make.

She hands me the wine list as soon as I’m in my chair. “What are you having?” she says. “It’s on me today. I’m celebrating. Don’t ask me what, I’m just celebrating.”

The waiter, a conventionally handsome boy in his twenties, approaches.

“Do you ever do that?” she asks him. “Celebrate for no reason.”

“Sure,” he says, smiling gamely.

Right away, she starts in on gossip. The new library director’s salary is apparently out of all proportion to what the rest of the staff earns; a member of the board is suspected of philandering with the wife of an Argentinian businessman; and the boy caught vandalizing the men’s room turns out to be the younger brother of the previous vandal, which I’d already heard, but it serves up anew the question of the boys’ stupendously wealthy and neglectful parents. I’ve never had Suzanne’s talent for being scandalized. To be able to entertain oneself so fully is a skill of sorts. Particularly given the material at hand.

She’s on her second glass of wine by the time we finish our salads, while I’ve barely touched my first. At work she’s always whispering, her facial expressions tightly controlled, but in this half-empty restaurant, she gestures broadly, her eyes widening at the news she herself reports.

Eventually, in the lull of attending to her trout, she manages to inquire about Michael and the house sale, like small talk at an intermission. “What do his doctors say?”

“They hear about John, and that’s it. They’re convinced it’s in the genes. Which I’m sure is part of it. But they didn’t know them both. Michael’s not his father. His father didn’t spend so much of his time caught up with other people’s suffering, the way Michael does with everything he reads.”

“Misery loves company.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’m an alcoholic,” Suzanne says. “I suppose I’ve never said it to you flat out like that before, but it’s not a surprise, right? Some people take pills. Some people go to church. I drink. Everybody’s got something. I’ve known Michael a long time now. He’s a tense guy. Doesn’t have a lot of outlets. He suffers. What I’m saying is, it’s identification, all that reading he does. It’s what we tell the school groups when they read novels — see yourself in someone else’s shoes. Right? There’s nothing ambiguous about slavery. Plenty of misery there.”

And with that, she shrugs, as if to say, C’est la vie.

When the waiter appears to check on us, she puts her hand on his forearm and says, “Be a darling, won’t you, this Sancerre is just delicious.”

I was hungry when I sat down, but I’m not anymore. “The fact is,” I say, “I don’t need that whole house, and if we moved closer in it would be easier to get to things. And better than shouting with Alec about money, and Alec shouting at Michael, which is all some families do.”

“You’re a good mother,” she says. “Better than mine ever was. You’re devoted to those kids.”

“I’m not sure they see it that way.”

“They should. Are you kidding? You could have been a train wreck, and who would have blamed you?”

Despite my protest, she won’t let me split the bill. I’m still trying to give her cash as we walk back onto Dartmouth, where the wind has picked up.

“Don’t give me any money,” she says. “Just shop with me for a bit.”

I can hardly decline, and it will give Michael longer before I go looking for him. I have to fight off her suggestions for a half dozen dresses and little bits of jewelry, after which she finally settles down and shops for herself. When we eventually say good-bye at her car, she makes me swear she hasn’t been a bore, and that we’ll do it again.

“About all that other stuff, I always thought your house was a little drab,” she says, displaying her usual tact, her mouth still loose with wine. I shouldn’t be letting her drive. “So don’t worry about it. You’ll do the right thing.”

Leaves rain down across the wide path that stretches along the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. I pass women with strollers, and joggers out in the fine fall weather. Whenever it was pleasant out, this is where I came to read while John had his appointments with Dr. Gregory on Marlborough Street. In the cold or the rain, I would stay in the car, and wait. For someone else, besides me, to tell him that things couldn’t go on the way they were.

I ran into him once, Dr. Gregory. At the cinema with his wife, a few months after John died. I wanted to hurt him. But we shook hands and he asked politely how I had been. It wasn’t until much later that Michael began seeing him. I imagine he’s still there, in that grand office of his.

When I reach Mass. Ave., I turn left, looking for the door that opens onto the staircase to the little record shop. I’ve been here once but forget which entryway it is. Up the block is the Virgin Store at the top of Newbury, and there in front of it, to my surprise, is Michael. He’s standing on the corner, his messenger bag slung over his shoulder, handing out flyers to the people rushing by. He holds the papers out, forcing them to decline before passing. As if he’s been paid to advertise some suit sale, or attract converts to a religious cult. The sight of it makes me flinch. Something is the matter. He’s become confused somehow, unmoored.

I’m less than half a block away but still he hasn’t seen me. I start walking toward him, to help him out of whatever trouble this is, and then I remember the pamphlets — the ones he keeps in his bag, with the picture of the black farmer tilling a field. That’s what he’s doing. He is handing out his pamphlets on reparations. Little booklets on the history of the slave trade for these Saturday-afternoon shoppers, who think they’re being offered coupons and freely ignore him.

He’s smiling as he does it, at each person, trying to establish a second of rapport. It’s that deliberate, nodding politeness of his, apologizing for the inconvenience he’s putting them through while imposing himself nonetheless.

I can’t move. I want to stop him, to save him from being judged a kook, reduced to proselytizing on a street corner. But I’m the last person he wants to see. To be embarrassed by his mother fretting over him in public would only make it worse. I’m about to go, but he’s seen me now and appears frozen, his hands down at his sides, his smile suddenly gone. He looks fixedly at me, as if suddenly there were no one on the street but the two of us. I must not cry. It isn’t fair to him. I wave, and smile, and call out, “I’ll see you later, then, I’m off,” and I turn my back to him and retreat up the block.

Later, in the evening, after he has returned, the rain comes. It begins as a shower but soon the skies open and the drops drum fast against the roof and slap the windowpanes. I hurry around closing windows before the sills get soaked. Warm air floats through the screens of the vestibule and the back porch on this October night, as if carried in by a belated summer thunderstorm, one of those that never delivered its moisture back in August. On the dry ground, the water will run straight to the gutters, wasted. We need a soak, not a torrent. Twenty minutes later it is gone, swept away to the east, and there is only the sound of dripping branches, and the dark shining in the porch light.

One of the cable channels is showing The Philadelphia Story, which I haven’t seen in years. I ask Michael if he’d like to watch it with me but he declines, saying he’s going to head upstairs. It is such a pleasure of a movie, so stylish and light. You can’t help but cheer for the drunken Cary Grant to get Hepburn back. They are meant for each other. I watch a bit, then a bit more, and soon it has carried me off into its gentle absurdity. It’s already midnight when it ends. On my way to bed, I see Michael’s light on under his door. Best to leave him be, I think, which is what I do, walking past without saying good night, in case he’s fallen asleep reading.

It’s in the small hours of the morning that I’m startled awake by a knocking at my door, and then the door opens and Michael stands there silhouetted by the sudden glare of the hall bulb.

“What is it, what is it?”

“I can’t breathe,” he says. “I’m suffocating.”

My bedside lamp reveals a look of pure terror on his face. He comes to the foot of my bed, clutching his chest.

“Are you choking?”

“No, no, I just can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”

“Well, sit down,” I tell him. Which he does, perching by my legs, his whole torso heaving. “Is it the asthma? Do you have your inhaler?”

“I’m not wheezing. I have to go to the hospital, you have to call an ambulance.”

I get out of bed and put on my bathrobe. “It’s all right,” I say. “You’re having an attack, isn’t that right? You’re worried. It’s okay. Just keep breathing. Did you have a bath? I can run you a bath.”

“No!” he says. “You have to call an ambulance.”

“Michael! Come on now. You need to calm down. We’re not calling an ambulance in the middle of the night. We can try Dr. Bennet in the morning. You’re not going to the hospital.”

He stares at me as if I’m casting him adrift in a storm. But what in God’s name am I supposed to do? Drive him through the night? Or have sirens and lights in front of the house at four in the morning?

“There must be one of those pills that makes you sleep, surely. I can get it for you.”

He shakes his head, as desperate and miserable as I have ever seen him.

“Come here,” I say, sitting next to him on the bed, trying to hug him, though his body is stiff as a board.

“You’re not going to help?” he asks.

“I’m not saying that. Stand up. We’re going downstairs.”

He follows me down into the kitchen. I turn on the lights, and fill the kettle, and get out the lemon and the honey, and from the cabinet in the dining room I fetch the Scotch that I never drink.

“I’m being crushed,” he says.

I take a mug from the shelf above the sink, and make up the hot toddy.

“Why won’t you call an ambulance?” he says.

I set the mug down in front of him. And then I sit in the chair beside him and I lean over and try again to hold him, listening to him tell me why the drink will do no good. And I tell him to sip it anyway. He says that he is going to die. I tell him that he isn’t. Eventually, he picks up the mug.

He needs rest. A great deal of rest. And so do I.

Celia

On the way back up the hill, Paul walked ahead with Laura and the dog, and Kyle and I followed behind. The day was bright and clear. Through the gaps in the cypresses you could see across the mouth of the bay to the Golden Gate, and over the water to the slopes of the Marin Headlands. Little white sailboats crisscrossed the channel, and closer to the shore kayakers paddled, the waterway busy on a warm and pleasant Sunday.

Laura and Kyle had arrived Friday afternoon from LA. Her parents were taking care of their nine-month-old, giving them their first weekend off since her birth. They were appreciative guests, happy simply to be eating in restaurants or seeing a movie. The visit was good for Paul, too. They were his oldest friends, and a couple I knew well myself by now with all our visits back and forth, first to Boulder and then Southern California. It helped that neither of them had anything to do with the world of independent film, which meant Paul could share the vagaries of his periodic employment without the professional need to be relentlessly upbeat and bubbling with exciting projects. Once I had established my practice, he’d gone back to scriptwriting and line producing with enough success to keep at it, though still in a business that offered no security. In the presence of his college friends, the weight of all that lightened.

“I always forget how gorgeous it is here,” Kyle said, pausing at one of the overlooks that opened onto the headlands and the ocean beyond. In the decade I’d known him his appearance had changed little. He still wore ratty jeans, a faded T-shirt, and a baseball cap over a thicket of dirty-blond hair, as if he’d rolled out of a dorm room bed, slightly hazy but in good spirits. “I guess we live on the coast, too, but you wouldn’t know it.”

I didn’t much notice the landscape anymore. Or when I did, it was mostly to wonder how much longer we would be able to afford San Francisco. The tenuousness of remaining seemed the more present fact. But we were at least enjoying the outdoors more. It had been one of the reasons to get the dog, to spur us to take the hikes that we’d enjoyed when we first got here. We’d driven out of the city more in the last eight months, pressed by Wendell’s pleading, than we had in years. It did all three of us good. I got a different kind of release than I did from sprinting, and Paul came home more relaxed than he ever did from the gym. And more likely, I noticed, to have sex. Which was good for more than just our love life. It calmed the worry, which I’d never quite rid myself of, that there was something lacking between us. A missing ease born of an insufficient trust. It didn’t press on me the way it used to. But it was there still — the thought that we might not always be together. And that if it was going to end, I would be the one to end it. I knew it wasn’t that simple, and that this idea served its own function, to regulate an older, more basic fear of mine that one day Paul, like my father, would simply vanish. Sex banished those abstractions. At least for a time.

“How are the two of you?” I asked Kyle. “Since the baby.”

“We’re good,” he said. “I thought I’d hate having Laura’s parents so close, but it’s actually kind of great. Their whole freak-out mentality — the world as this ginormous danger, and how Laura would miscarry if she went jogging — they just dropped that stuff once the kid was born, which makes them a lot saner. And it’s great for us. We’re here, right?”

Saner. That was exactly how I thought of Kyle. He and Laura had married a few years after graduating with Paul. They’d moved to Colorado because they both loved to ski and hike. She’d helped to run a bakery for a few years, and he’d gone back to school for video-game design, which was what had eventually taken them to LA. Now he worked at a company where he smoked less pot than most of his colleagues and made enough of a salary that she could stay home, which she wanted to, at least for a while. I knew from Paul that they had their ups and downs, like anyone else, but their way of being in the world together was so full of ease, and so seemingly optimistic, I couldn’t imagine them apart. At dinner the night before, when Laura had asked me how my practice was going, Kyle listened to my response as if I were a zoologist describing the behavior of primates. Therapy had never even occurred to him. It existed in a parallel universe. Which might have been one of the reasons I laughed more with him than almost anyone else I knew. The things that preoccupied me didn’t enter his head, and that was permission enough to let go of them.

“What about you?” he said. “You still thinking about the kid thing?”

It seemed strange, in retrospect, that we had never told him or Laura about my abortion, given all our weekends together over the years, and how much else about our lives we tended to share with them. Paul and I had come back from that Bethany Christmas in Walcott still arguing about it, not because we disagreed about what should be done, but because I needed an acknowledgment from him, before I did it, of the depth of the inequity in what one contraceptive failure had cost my body as compared to his. A few weeks after I’d had the procedure, though, a kind of mutual forgetting settled over it, helped along by the fact that I told so few people, other than Alec and one or two friends. When the subject of children came up now, usually because of another couple having a baby, it was mostly an occasion to remind ourselves of how impractical it would be for us. And a reminder to me of how impossible it seemed that I should give that much more care than I already did to the people around me.

“I suppose we should try getting married first,” I said, to my own surprise.

“That’s not a requirement.”

“No, but maybe it would do us good, to clarify things.” Kyle turned back from the view over the water to face me with the kindly, open expression I always pictured him with, and which I found relieving, but also confusing, the way it offered no problem to hold on to. “I’m not complaining,” I said. “I don’t mean it to sound that way.”

“You can complain about Paul all you want. You’ve been with him long enough. He’s moody. I used to think he was going to stop hanging out with me because I was a ski bum and didn’t read enough. But he’s a loyal guy.”

“You’re right,” I said, as we started again up the path toward the parking lot. “He is.”

Next to the fountain that stood in front of the Legion of Honor, Paul was giving Wendell water from the little dish we kept in the trunk of our car. Laura stood beside them in her windbreaker, her hair tied in a ponytail, gazing contentedly over the city and the bay.

“Can’t we stay for a week?” she said, as Kyle and I approached.

Though she’d always evinced the same easygoingness as her husband, I’d sometimes wondered if being laid-back was more of an effort for her, a thing she’d found in Kyle and successfully emulated rather than having been born into it. Though at a certain point it didn’t matter. The emulation became the thing itself.

“Fine with us,” Paul said.

I leaned down to pick pieces of bark and grass from Wendell’s coat. He was a midsize black mutt, a collie mix, and rambunctious the way Kelsey had been, which had something to do with why I had favored him at the pound — that unaccustomed glee I’d felt as soon as we met him, a sense memory of Kelsey in the yard. He had that same eager spirit.

Once I had settled Wendell in the car, the four of us headed into the museum that stood in the middle of the park. I’d never liked museums on Sundays. They had a depressive air. Reminders of stultifying childhood outings, being told to keep quiet and stare at boring, supposedly important things. The strange loneliness of being together with your family. I had been saintlike in my patience compared to my brothers, who had quipped and mewled through those compulsory exercises like circus acts. At least as an adult, I’d shed the guilt I used to feel for not giving each and every work its earnest two-minute inspection, and allowed myself to roam freely.

I’d been through the collection before, and let Paul guide Laura and Kyle while I wandered into a visiting exhibition of an eighteenth-century German artist I’d never heard of. It began with a room of flouncy biblical scenes. Hovering cherubs and flowing gowns, a milk-white Christ at the tomb, surrounded by grieving women, God floating in the sky above the Annunciation. None drew me in. When my phone started bleating, a well-heeled older lady, the only other patron in the gallery, glanced at me in disgust before returning her attention to a friar bent in prayer.

Back in Massachusetts it was three o’clock. Sunday afternoon was not one of the many times that Michael usually tried me. I could do what, until the last seven or eight months, I’d always done. Interrupt anything I happened to be up to and respond to the latest emergency. Behaving otherwise still felt cruel. But in the spring I had flown back to see him in the hospital, canceling appointments with patients who needed their time with me, and whose fees I needed. I’d stayed two extra days to spell my mother’s daily visits, and returned with a cold that lasted for weeks. After that trip, the way I had always been toward Michael gave out like an exhausted muscle.

I told my own therapist. I told Paul and Alec and even my mother. I said I couldn’t do it anymore: talk to him two or three times a week for half an hour, about him and only him, a patient in all but name, listening to the deadening repetitions. Even if I understood, as he kept telling me, that being able to describe his state in the moment kept his panic at bay better than any drug.

I didn’t stop responding to his calls. I just started waiting a few days before returning them. I held a bit of myself back. Knowing well enough that he was at the lowest point in his life. But that was part of it. The extremity of his situation. Where did it end? What level of need couldn’t he surpass? However much his fate had weighed on me in the past, I’d never stopped to imagine that it wasn’t my responsibility. I encouraged my own patients to see the limits of their obligation to members of their own families, but not myself. I knew full well, too, that talking to him once a week or every ten days left a greater burden on my mother. Alec, who had stepped back as I had, and at around the same time, speaking to Michael less often, understood it as well. We’d made a great effort to give him the chance of graduate school. But it had only led him back to us, worse than before. No one’s capacity was infinite. I said that every week in my office. Now I believed it.

The next gallery was full of paintings on classical themes: robed gods in laurels arrayed in a tableau on Mount Parnassus; a nearly nude Perseus leading a horse; a scene of the School of Athens, with the brightly clad philosophers leaning over their books and tablets. I gazed blankly awhile at the last of these, attracted at least to the vivid colors. The show was hardly popular, even on a Sunday, and I could see why, given the stilted subjects and antique style. But it was enough for me, just then, that it didn’t require anything of me.

Portraits of princes and aristocrats hung in the final, smaller room. Men in bright silks and brocade with ruffled collars and pendants adorning their breasts. Complimentary pictures for the men who’d commissioned them.

I took a seat on the bench to rest before heading back to rejoin the others.

The portrait in front of me had a different aspect from the rest: a man in his early fifties, simply dressed in a russet coat with a plain black collar and brown neckerchief. His wavy black hair hung down to his shoulders, with no wig or jeweled clasp to hold it in place. There were no tapestries or upholstered furniture in the background, just a featureless gray-brown, which focused all the viewer’s attention on the face itself. It seemed to be by a different artist altogether. Not because of its darker palette and lack of finery, and not because it possessed any greater degree of realism. It was something more ineffable. I had the sense that this person had been alive. Not merely historically, like the other personages here, but alive in the way of experience. He’d been present to things which had marked him, and which were registered in the image. Despondency, I might have said, given the dark cast of the eyes and the unsmiling lips, but that didn’t suffice. It hadn’t been that simple. Haunted, I thought, but that wasn’t right either. Occupied was more like it, inhabited by a thought not his own, a force not of his choosing, something he had endured over the course of years. When I stood for a closer look, I saw the label SELF-PORTRAIT.

The light in the picture fell on his wide forehead and across his nose, casting the right side of his face in partial shadow. His eyebrows were just fractionally lifted, not in surprise but in a kind of openness. As if the tension of anticipation had passed out of him. He was not an old man, yet no longer young. The eyes themselves were large, and black, and dead calm. They peered into me and into the past, to whatever it was that had brought him to such an unsentimental understanding of himself. An undeluded apprehension of things as they were. He was neither afraid nor heroic.

The longer I gazed, the more familiar he seemed: the brow, the full lips, the double chin. I saw it most in the expression itself, in that particular stamp of an inescapable fate. Some essence of my father was embedded in the painting, beholding me and seemingly on the verge of speech, the words already formed in the figure’s slightly open mouth. I was listening as much as looking now. The utterance wasn’t coming from any motion of the image, filmlike, but directly from him into me. He and I were together again, the facts, at last, irrelevant: that we hadn’t saved him, that he hadn’t saved us. He knew that it hadn’t ended, that he still lived in Michael. I could say nothing in return. His presence was all there was.

We drove down through the Presidio to the marina, and found a restaurant with seating outdoors, and Kyle ordered us a pitcher of margaritas. I drank one before the food arrived, and another with my meal. Across the table, Kyle draped his arm over Laura’s shoulders, and she rested her head against him, gazing through her sunglasses at the water. Apparently taken by the mood — the sun and the drink — Paul shifted his chair closer to mine and did the same, as coupley as he ever got in public. I drifted awhile in the comfort of the four of us there together, unoccupied.

Afterward we ambled across the road to the trail that ran along the back of the beach. This time when my phone rang it was Alec. I told the rest of them to go ahead with Wendell.

“Hey,” he said, tight-voiced, yanking me in close right away. He told me how Mom had called him that morning in a state, how she’d been up in the middle of the night with Michael, how he’d wanted to call an ambulance, and how she’d had to talk him down. “And you know what else?” he said. “She’s had a real estate agent in there. She’s trying to sell the house. She says she doesn’t know what else to do.”

No space existed between the events and Alec’s reaction to them. They were welded together.

“You agree we can’t let that happen, right?” he said, sounding like a gambler in the hole with a weak hand. “We can’t let her do that.”

There had been an episode. This is why Michael had called. And now the charge of anxiety it had sparked was completing the family circuit.

“Well,” I said, “you could start by separating your worries about money from Mom’s.”

“Wow,” he said. “Okay, then. I guess you can pay for her nursing-home care out of your trust fund. Did you notice that I work in print media? From which, FYI, I’m about to be furloughed. So sure — we can separate out my worries about money, but you really think she should sell the house to keep funding Michael?”

The high school dramatist in him was alive and well. It’s what had drawn him to politics in the first place, the performance and the rhetoric, an elaboration of the childish enthusiasm Michael and I used to mock him for. The deep familiarity of it collapsed the distance of the phone. He might as well have been standing next to me.

“We need to talk to her,” I said. “You just told me. I don’t know what I think yet.”

“Fine,” he said. “Talk to her. But you know as well as I do that it’s not just about the house. The situation has to change. He’s got to come off the meds. It’s the only solution. He’s got to get back to some kind of baseline, or he’s never going to get better, he’s never going to be able to take care of himself. He’s drowning in that stuff.”

Alec and I had debated this before, sometimes with Michael. When did the weight of all that medicine become worse than whatever lay beneath it? I didn’t disagree with Alec that it might have already. But Michael had never seen it that way.

“I’ve been thinking about it all day,” Alec said. “I called Bill Mitchell—”

“Bill Mitchell?”

“Yeah, about the cabin in Maine. I didn’t even know if they still owned the place, but Mom gave me his number. It was a little weird, obviously, but fuck it. It’s a place to go. I think he was sort of amazed I asked, but I didn’t go into all the details. I made it sound softer, I guess, more Magic Mountain, but he got the gist. He stalled for a bit, but eventually he said that no one was using the place. The island house is all closed up, but the cabin’s there. And he was okay with it. He just said fill the propane before we leave.”

“Okay with what? What are you talking about?”

I’d come to a halt on the path, watching the three of them and Wendell step off the trail onto the sand and head diagonally toward the water.

“I’m talking about getting him off the drugs,” he said. “Going up there with him. Getting him out of his room, out of that house. Clearing his brain. What else are we going to do? What’s the alternative? Just let her go bankrupt?”

I’d listened to plenty of his tirades about our mother and money, but this was different. His exasperation had a tender edge. More than angry, he sounded upset.

“Besides,” he said, “I miss him. The way he used to be. Don’t you?”

“You can’t do it in a weekend,” I said. “You can’t just yank him off everything. It takes time.”

“I know that. Which is why it has to happen soon. I’m getting this involuntary month of vacation. They’re furloughing half the reporting staff. It’s terrifying, actually. But there it is — time off, plus all the vacation I never took. When am I going to have that kind of time again?”

A handsome couple in Lycra shorts and matching tank tops jogged past me, earbuds in, hair nearly perfectly in place, muscles toned and slick. The kind of people whom Michael, in his bitterness, would despise.

“What if he doesn’t want to?” I asked, beginning to picture it.

“I think he actually does — part of him. He’s just afraid.”

I knew what he meant. And he was right. I wished I had the money to send Michael off to some leafy clinic campus with nurses and massage and gentle yoga. The kind of program I sometimes daydreamed of sending my own clients to. Maine in the off-season was hardly that. But it was time away. A step out of his immediate life, out of the constant emergency.

Maybe it was the looseness from the drinks at lunch, or the unusual course of the day, or even just my desire at that moment to be again with Paul and Kyle and Laura with their pants rolled up, playing in the shallows with the dog, but something allowed me to imagine what Alec was proposing actually coming to pass, and to sense what a relief that would be.

That evening, after we’d folded out the couch in Paul’s office for our guests and said good night, the two of us got into bed, and Paul rolled up behind me, his chest to my back, snuggling as he didn’t often do.

“They enjoyed themselves,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

I rested my neck in the crease of his shoulder and held his arms around me. “It’s good having them here,” I said. “I like how we are with them.”

“As opposed to how we are without them?”

“You know what I mean,” I said, squeezing him closer.

Wendell, the perfectly unconflicted hedonist, detected our affection from across the room and toddled over to get some for himself. He climbed onto the bed and tried to insert himself between us, and we chuckled and squirmed to fend him off with our knees, only to have him breach our defense, force his front legs into Paul’s crotch, and collapse on top of us with a whimper. He settled at last for a spot beside me, where I could pet his flank, and there he quieted down.

“Did you always think you’d get married?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

I waited for him to roll away onto his back, but he didn’t. “Didn’t you just assume it would happen?”

“Are you going to propose to me?”

“Don’t tease.”

“I’m not,” he said, running his hand down onto my thigh.

“Yes you are.”

“You don’t want to get hitched,” he said. “We discuss it every time we go to a wedding, and you talk about your patients’ disastrous relationships, and how we still need to work on things. And then we go to Christmas at your family’s, and Michael quotes us Kafka on marriage.”

“Is that why you never proposed?”

“Says the feminist.”

“Don’t be mean.”

He touched his lips to my neck, and then reached over me to pat Wendell on the snout. “I never thought you’d say yes,” he said. “And I suppose it doesn’t matter as much to me as it does to some people, the way it doesn’t matter as much to you.”

“I love you,” I said.

“Likewise. Do you want to get married?”

“You’re teasing again,” I said.

He burrowed his head further down against my shoulder, burying his face in my back. And then, barely audible, he whispered, “No, I’m not.”

Michael

REQUEST FOR FORBEARANCE

Dear Borrower:

If you are having difficulty making your loan payments and you have exhausted all periods of deferment and grace, you may be able to receive relief through the process of forbearance. In forbearance, your loan payments are temporarily postponed. Please note, however, that all unpaid interest will be capitalized, adding to your outstanding balance. If you are currently past due, submit this form as soon as possible, understanding that submission alone is no guarantee of approval.

Part I. Borrower

I request a forbearance to cover my outstanding balance of:

$68,281.11

To begin:

twelve years ago

To end:

upon the death of my successors

I am temporarily unable to make payments because:

“I had learned that a death had occurred that day which distressed me greatly — that of Bergotte. It was known that he had been ill for a long time past. Not, of course, with the illness from which he had suffered originally and which was natural. Nature scarcely seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has developed the art of prolonging them. Remedies, the respite that they procure, the relapses that a temporary cessation of them provokes, produce a simulacrum of illness to which the patient grows so accustomed that he ends by stabilising it, stylising it, just as children have regular fits of coughing long after they have been cured of the whooping cough. Then the remedies begin to have less effect, the doses are increased, they cease to do any good, but they have begun to do harm thanks to this lasting indisposition. Nature would not have offered them so long a tenure. It is a great wonder that medicine can almost rival nature in forcing a man to remain in bed, to continue taking some drug on pain of death. From then on, the artificially grafted illness has taken root, has become a secondary but a genuine illness, with this difference only, that natural illnesses are cured, but never those which medicine creates, for it does not know the secret of their cure.”

— M. Proust, vol. 5, The Captive

My plan for the resumption of payments is:

As you well know from our correspondence, after years of training in the ’90s, I was selected by the Department of Education to voyage on their first Student Loan Probe to Jupiter, as one of four debitnauts. We traveled for years, passing through nebulae of internships and retail, through the wake of an imploding technology boom, and on through the outer rings of bankruptcy, before finally reaching the planet’s gaseous surface. Our hope was to make contact with the lost colony of the underemployed. What we found was distressing. In the early years, they had kept up their bonhomie, relying on peer counseling and the nostalgic rebranding of American canned beer. But their birthrate had dropped, and a persistent anxiety storm beginning in the early aughts had killed off the slackers, their priestly class, leaving them without a cosmology. Hopes of ever getting off-planet had dwindled, and the colony had renamed itself Fools of the Humanities. Our greatest surprise, however, concerned their weight. We’d expected a diet of burritos and helium. But to our astonishment, one provisioner, Eli Lilly, had remained in radio contact with them all along, and had been sending pallets of the atypical antipsychotic Zyprexa from a rocket pad in Kazakhstan. The colonists had been taking the drug for years. Their average weight was up to 280. Diabetes and dyskinesia were endemic. As one art history BA put it to me, When Christ asked for water on the cross, they gave him vinegar (whereupon, she might have added, he gave up the ghost). But really, another colonist asked, who wouldn’t want major weight gain and a facial tic while aging and single? He spoke, I must confess, with some anger. He had been thin once, and even then had struggled to see himself as attractive. There seemed little hope of that now. Apparently, the company’s shipments of the drug had ramped up not long before its patent was due to expire. Their representatives had begun pressing it on doctors as an off-label cure for everything from war trauma to stuttering, and it wasn’t until several years later that its disastrous side effects were fully appreciated. Several colonists wanted to join the class-action lawsuit, but the rocket traffic was one-way. Empathizing with them as I did, I wished I could do something to help, yet all we had been given to distribute to them were forbearance request forms, which they quickly burned for heat. I returned an unchanged man.

In addition to the above-referenced loans, I owe:

The inalienable privilege of my race to the victims of the Middle Passage, a debt whose repayment has proven tricky to schedule, given the endless deferments, if not forbearances, and the way that the blood of slavery tends to run clear in the tears of liberals.

The sum total of my current assets is:

The knowledge that the psychotic violence of making black people black so that white people can be white runs through me as surely as it does through the bodies of all the jailers and the jailed.

Part II. Terms & Conditions

I understand (1) that I live with my mother; (2) that she is on the verge of selling her home to pay my debts; and (3) that my request for forbearance will never be approved.

I further understand: (a) That in the fall of 1803, along the coast of Mozambique, a Portuguese frigate named the Joaquin loaded 300 abducted Africans into its hold and headed south toward the Cape of Good Hope. (b) That a few days after departure, the people held belowdecks began to die. They died slowly at first, at an unremarkable rate of one a day, but after a month and a half, as the ship rounded the tip of the continent and began its Atlantic crossing, death became more frequent. For the next four months, the captives lay shackled in an airless dark, pressed against one another on a bed of their own excrement, vomit, pus, and blood, their bodies slick with waste putrefying in the equatorial heat as they woke chained to the corpses of strangers or parents or children, whom the crew eventually removed and threw overboard to the trailing sharks. (c) That by the time the Joaquin reached the Spanish port of Montevideo, 270 of the original 300 had died. Fearing contagion, the city surgeon ordered the ship back out to sea. With a storm blowing in off the pampas, the captain at first refused. But when the harbormaster threatened him with arrest and seizure of his ship, he relented and made for open water. Fierce winds quickly shattered the frigate’s three masts and the ship nearly sank. Attempting to make it back to port, it was beached in the shallows of the Río de la Plata, where it remained for several more weeks while its fate was decided. (d) That the Spanish merchant who owned the ship wanted to auction the survivors to offset his losses, and sued the port surgeon for incompetence, demanding that his cargo be allowed to disembark. To resolve the dispute, city officials set up a commission of inquiry, and appointed five doctors experienced in the treatment of ailing slaves. (e) That observing that none of the officers or sailors of the Joaquin had died, the commission concluded, to most everyone’s surprise, that the slaves had not died of infection. They had died from dehydration, and from what the doctors called melancolía. In the words of Carlos Joseph Guezzi, a Swiss-Italian physician, the loss of their homes and families, together with the conditions of their transit, had induced a “total indifference to life,” “a cisma,” or schism, that amounted to “an abandonment of the self.” (f) That because this condition was deemed noncommunicable, the merchant was free to bring his chattel ashore and sell them on the open market. And finally, (g) that during their passage, the captives aboard the Joaquin were often heard to sing.

Finally, I hereby certify that I don’t pretend to know with any certainty why it is that I keep coming back to these scenes, to imagining these men and women and children chained in the rocking dark. While it would be most legible, and even palatable, to chalk it up to the theft of four hundred years of labor, to the profits of the trade that extend by corporate succession right up through to the bank that lent me the money to study the history of their own barbarism, it isn’t economic reasoning or public justice that won’t let me go. It’s the withered bodies, the cries of the dying, the blood-soaked decks, that carnival of evil that each morning I try to medicate into the floor. The fact is that when I read the story of the Joaquin, I feel understood. Not in any literal sense — the comparison of my dread to theirs would be grotesque — but in the unrelenting terror, in that schism of the mind. Which is how I know now that the dead generations don’t haunt down tidy racial lines, as if there were such a thing. The psychosis is shared. I was born into the fantasy of its supremacy. Others are born into the fantasy’s cost. But the source of the violence is the same. The work I do is for no one’s sake but my own.

Alec

The Mitchells’ cabin overlooked an inlet at the bottom of St. George a half mile past Port Clyde, the last village on the peninsula. My brother couldn’t believe I remembered how to get there without a map: right at the Baptist church, then out the little road that hugged the shoreline, dipping alongside a rocky beach and rising again onto higher ground, where the houses thinned out.

It wasn’t the blue I remembered, but a light gray with white trim. The rest appeared more or less as I’d pictured it: the sloping yard, snow-covered now, the mound of boulders by the path, the aluminum gangplank that led down to the little dock, the flagpole and the blueberry bushes.

Across the street, farther up the slope from the water, stood a white Cape with a stack of lobster traps in the yard. There were a few more houses up ahead in the distance before the road vanished into the woods.

In the quickly fading light we carried the groceries we’d bought on the way up into the kitchen along with our luggage. Michael stood in the middle of the room, holding his messenger bag to his chest, while I went looking for the valves to turn on the water and gas. When I returned he hadn’t moved, as if we were here on an errand, to drop a few things off, and would be getting back into the car. Asking him if he’d mind putting the food in the fridge seemed to break the spell, and he unpacked the bags while I carried wood in from the shed.

“You know how to light a fire?” he asked.

“Yeah, so do you. You’ve done it a hundred times.”

“Have I?”

On the drive up I’d made a passing reference to some future point when it would be just the three of us, once Mom was gone, and he had looked at me in shock, as if the idea that he might survive her had never occurred to him. I nearly stopped the car to yell at him for being so out of it, for clinging to such a distorted view of reality, but I didn’t want to start things out that way and I held my tongue, as I did now.

The cabin hadn’t been renovated as far as I could tell, just well maintained. The dark wood floors were uneven but polished, the old floral-print furniture replaced with solid whites and tans. On the bookcases on either side of the fireplace were Mitchell family photographs: their two daughters at the ages we had been when we first came here, in bathing suits and life preservers, squinting in the sun, and later as teenagers and adults with boyfriends or husbands.

I told Michael to take the largest of the three eaved bedrooms upstairs, the one Mom and Dad had used, to give him the extra space, and I said he should go ahead and unpack his things, to settle in.

Over the last few weeks, Michael had agreed, reluctantly, to try what I’d suggested, but he drew the line at stopping the Klonopin, saying he would go off everything except that. Caleigh had encouraged him, which helped. So had my mother, who more than anyone else wanted for this to work but feared the difficulty of it for Michael. She had baked ginger cookies for our trip, and sent us off with apples and peanut butter and a bag of Michael’s favorite potato chips, which he finished off with a beer as I made us dinner.

The night before, Seth and I had got into our first serious argument. We’d been seeing each other for a year and a half and through all that time had remained polite with each other, careful not to offend or disturb. It seemed like mutual care, mostly, a desire to protect what we’d begun.

He had put up with my travel schedule, right through to the election’s dismal end. I’d been gone for weeks at a time and he hadn’t complained. And when he needed to work on projects over the weekends that I did make it back, I didn’t get after him about it. He even took in stride the news of my being furloughed by the magazine, hinting that we should talk about moving in together. And when my mother had called and told me about the real estate agent and the listing contract, and I said to Seth almost as soon as I hung up with her that Michael and I needed to go away, he said, Of course, I get it.

But when I was gathering my things in the apartment, getting ready to leave once more, and asked if he would do me a favor by booking me a ticket online for the train to Boston, he looked up from his computer, incredulous.

In a tone I’d never heard before, he said, “Do you have any memory at all how many times you said we’d take a trip together this week? After you were finally done. Does it even matter to you that you’re going to use practically your whole time off with Michael, and none of it with me?”

“You think I should just cancel,” I said. “After I arranged the place and persuaded him to do it?” He slammed his computer shut and walked into the bedroom. But I followed him, demanding an answer. “Is that really what you think? That I should just call Michael and tell him I decided to go on vacation with my boyfriend instead?”

“God forbid,” he said. “But don’t worry, I get it — no one has problems more important than yours. You’ve made that clear. And now you’re going up there into the woods, all Robert Bly, to save him all by yourself. You’re not as smart as you think you are.”

Later, in the bathroom, passing the toothpaste, we slunk back toward each other. After turning out the lights, without saying a word, he fucked me quite hard, both of us knowing it would be bad to part for this long without touching. In the morning I promised to call him.

As I had suspected, we got no cell reception at the cabin. But the Mitchells had a working landline, which is what my mother called us on after supper, saying she just wanted to make sure we’d arrived safely and that the heat worked. She spoke to Michael briefly and then wished us a good night’s sleep.

Along with the heap of books he’d stuffed in his messenger bag, Michael had brought a bunch of DVDs. We sat through two episodes of 24 together, a distraction I was glad for. He’d lost patience for anything slower than a Bruce Willis movie. It had to be action: car chases, galactic warfare, gangland slaughter. Luckily, next to the supermarket back on Route 1, I’d spotted a place that still rented videos, so I knew we wouldn’t run out.

Before going to bed I told him he should do what we had discussed. He went upstairs and returned with his toiletry bag to the living room couch, where he rummaged through it and removed the orange prescription bottles, lining them up on the coffee table in what seemed an act of determined resignation. He set down five in all, plus the jar of kratom tea.

For years he’d insisted, like a child, that eventually a doctor would prescribe a pill which would give him the same relief he’d experienced the first time he had taken a drug. We had chastised him for believing this, for demanding such a purely external fix, and yet all the while we had wished for exactly that, for our sake as much as for his. To make the problem simply go away. That fantasy was over. That cure didn’t exist. Every therapy, every drug, all the help we’d given — none of it had worked. So now there was no other choice. He had to be able to take care of himself. He had to get better. When my mother had called on that Sunday last month and told me she needed to sell the house, she had to have known that I wouldn’t let her do it. Telling me was as good as saying she wanted to be stopped. And so I had stopped her.

“It’s the right thing,” I said, picking up his bottles with both hands.

“I’m not sure,” he said, “I’m not sure.”

For the first couple of days the hardest part for either of us was the lack of Internet. I hadn’t been away from it that long in years. Nor had Michael. The absence of distraction left us irritable and bored. But that had been part of my idea for coming here, to disenthrall him from that constant, goading semi-stimulation which only fed his anxiety. To help bring him back to some kind of present.

After the countless hours I’d gorged on polling data and campaign gossip, scraping for angles in all that trash of information, I wanted to purge myself of it, too. Still, the first two evenings I couldn’t help walking up the road to the one spot where I got a signal and standing there, shivering, as the headlines loaded. Michael had brought his laptop, but without new messages or updates from his myriad listservs to constantly anticipate and check, he hardly bothered opening it.

On our third morning I woke more rested than I had in a long time. Michael hadn’t stirred yet. I dressed and went out into the yard, into the freezing air, and walked down the jetty to the dock from which we used to set out for the island.

Beyond the few boats still on their moorings, a bank of fog was moving in off the sea. I watched it slowly cover the spit of land at the mouth of the inlet, shrouding the fir trees and the granite shore, and then the whole end of the bay, covering the barnacled outcroppings where the cormorants landed and seals basked in summer, rolling slowly toward me over the water until I saw that it wasn’t fog but snow, the flakes tumbling thick and silent out of the encompassing cloud, and I remembered that was how it had been up here when we were kids, seeing weather approach from a distance, a thunderstorm on the horizon, rain sweeping toward us like a curtain across the water, and how it had thrilled me, that enormity and power, how oblivious it was of us. I had an inkling of that again now, of that state of being wide open to time, not as a thing to use or waste, but as a motion of its own, an invisible wholeness made apparent by the motion of the world.

By the time the snow reached me, I couldn’t see more than twenty yards, the rocks and the water and the boats all gone. When I went back into the cabin and saw my phone on the counter, I powered it off and stowed it in a kitchen drawer.

After breakfast with Michael, I made him walk the half mile with me to the general store. This became our routine, which he consented to more readily once he knew they sold doughnuts. In the afternoons we spent longer than necessary up on Route 1 restocking our food supplies and browsing every aisle of the video store, and in the evenings we watched one action movie after the next. Still, there were plenty of idle hours, and when Michael started having trouble sleeping, in what seemed the first sign of withdrawal, those hours began to gnaw at him.

“When is he going to stop that?” he asked me late one afternoon at the end of our first week, standing by the window in the dining room, peering over the embroidered half curtain.

All morning the lobsterman across the road had been chopping wood in his yard. He worked at a methodical pace, each gap long enough to make you think he was done. Until you heard another thwack of the ax, and the splintering of a log.

“When he’s through, I guess.”

“How old do you think he is?”

A loaded question, coming from Michael, who considered himself so ancient. He’d begun referring to these as “the winter years” of his life. Absurd on its face for a thirty-seven-year-old, droll, even, as a complaint about early middle age, though not the way he said it, with grim conviction.

As for the guy across the street, I’d noticed him a few times coming home in the late afternoons, and had watched him switch out the damaged lobster traps in the bed of his truck with replacements from the stack in the yard. He was some fisherman’s son, not the old man himself. Thirty, maybe, with a build you could see through his thermal work shirts, and a dirty-blond crew cut. In the absence of Seth and pornography, I’d closed my eyes the night before and imagined him bending me over the hood of his Ford.

“I don’t know, forty?” I said, for Michael’s sake.

“No, no. He’s not that old.”

“Thirty-eight?”

Michael shook his head dismissively. “I always imagined I was younger than men like him. The way you imagine you’re younger than your dentist. But I’m not anymore. He’s married to that woman who drives the Bronco. She could be in her late twenties. They live in that house. It’s amazing.”

“It’s a pretty ordinary house, actually.”

“I don’t mean the building. I mean he lives here in this polar vortex, surrounded by nothing but deer and a smattering of white people, and he’s found a sexually attractive woman to live with him year-round. I find that shocking.”

I couldn’t help but smile. His voice was back. The speed of it, the acumen. He hadn’t noticed it. But his halting forgetfulness was gone. He sounded almost like himself again. He even seemed to have more color in his face.

“I do give him credit for the bumper sticker, though,” he said. “‘They call it tourist season. So why can’t we shoot them?’ I like that. No doubt he spends his spare time lobbying for an expansion of the welfare state, as well he should. But I wish he’d put a stop to that manual labor. The sound is harrowing.”

He paced back into the living room, where I was reading an old copy of Vanity Fair, and scanned the room as if for intruders.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Wretched,” he said.

With no private clinic spa to help take the edge off, I started driving us to a gym I’d seen a little ways past the supermarket. It occupied a defunct car dealership, three walls of glass and a concrete backdrop enclosing a small field of secondhand Nautilus equipment. Up here in the off season it was as close as we were going to get to a regimen of something other than television.

Surveying the scene on our first visit — a woman in a terry-cloth tracksuit reading US Weekly on a StairMaster and a teen waif loitering by the free weights — Michael asked, “Where are all the muscle queens?”

Through music he had learned gay culture long before I had. The meaning of the Village People may have eluded me as a child, but it had never eluded him. I hadn’t delayed coming out to him from any fear of rejection. If anything, being gay improved me in his eyes, placing me at least one step off the throne of patriarchy that he himself had so effectively abdicated. I just hadn’t wanted to face the awkwardness of discussing sex with my brother.

Back then he had dressed so immaculately. All those English designer shirts of his, and the peg-legged trousers, and the dark suit jackets that hung so well on him, like a young Jeremy Irons done up to New Wave perfection. Once he returned from London, I’d never been able to keep up.

Now here he was on the treadmill in ancient gym shorts and a V-neck undershirt stained at the pits, straining under the weight he’d put on. He hadn’t complained about his weight to me. He’d just commented in a way he never had before about how thin I looked, and I sensed his embarrassment at having had one kind of body his whole life, worrying he was too thin, and then suddenly having another, heavy not with muscle but fat. There was a perversity to it. Watching him struggle on the machine seemed like watching myself age in a sickly fashion. But at least here we could burn off a few calories, and another hour of the otherwise empty days.

Michael, however, was resolute that the workouts did him no good.

“No,” he said flatly, when I asked him on the way back from one of our outings if he didn’t feel just a bit more relaxed.

“Okay,” I said. “But what is true is that you’re taking one pill, not six. And you’re not drinking the tea. The fact is, you’re better than when we got here. You’re more alive.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. Everything’s shaky.”

“Sure it is. You’re waking up.”

“You know it’s not that simple. It doesn’t change my situation.”

“You don’t have to think about that right now. We’re stepping out of that for a while. Things’ll look different when your mind’s clearer. Which is why I think you should come off the Klonopin, too.”

“I can’t do that,” he said.

“Yes you can.”

“It’s not what we agreed.”

“It’s what you want, though. When it comes down to it, right? You’ve said so yourself.”

“Coming off that’s what put me in the hospital.”

“You were alone then. You’re not now.”

We were doing the right thing. He just needed to take off the last bandage. Like Celia said, the sedatives had walled his feelings in. And the higher the walls got, the more he feared what they protected him from.

But I didn’t press the idea further right then. I needed to let it settle. I waited, instead, until we were eating supper that evening.

“It would take months,” he said.

“I get that it’s frightening — the idea of not having that particular drug anymore.”

“It’s not the idea, it’s the chemistry.”

When we’d arrived, he wouldn’t have been able to even consider this. But here he was, considering it.

“Are you better now than the day you first took it?”

“Of course not,” he said. His face was rigid with apprehension. But there was a pleading in his eyes. “You really think I could do it?”

“Yes. I think you can.”

I’d bought us ice cream for dessert. We ate it in front of The Bourne Identity. In the final sequence, Matt Damon hunted snipers in the woods and fields around the country house where he’d fled with the woman from Run Lola Run. The Mitchells had installed a flat-screen television with excellent speakers, and the crack of the rifle as Damon shot his attackers satisfied us both. Michael even smiled.

The next morning he asked if we should get rid of the booze in the house. He was afraid that he would resort to it if he tried coming off his last medication.

Without answering, I emptied the fridge of the beer and wine we had brought with us and poured each bottle down the kitchen sink as he watched. I rinsed them and took them out to the bins, and then I found a cardboard box and loaded the Mitchells’ own liquor cabinet into it, and brought that to the sink as well. I was about to start pouring their bottles down the drain when it occurred to me it would probably be several hundred dollars’ worth of alcohol to replace. Michael was still at the kitchen table, watching me.

“I’ll take care of the rest of this,” I said. “You should go listen to some music. You haven’t been doing much of that.”

I waited until I heard him open his laptop, followed by the tinny sound of synthesizers coming from his headset. Then I carried the box of bottles out to the shed and set it down behind the folded lawn chairs.

“We’re clear,” I said when I came back in. “You can give me the pills.”

“You know I take them for a reason,” he said. “I’m not an addict. It’s not like I was fine before.”

“I know.”

“It’s an illness,” he said. “I’m not malingering.”

“I never said you were.”

“Dr. Bennet said he thinks I’d qualify for disability. He said he doesn’t support it for most of his patients, but that he would for me — that my condition is that severe.”

“That’s what you want? To make it permanent like that? To get a subsidy for it? If you wanted that, why come this far? If it’s all insulin for the diabetic, why even agree to come up here?”

“You told me I had to.”

“No. I offered. And you agreed.”

“You don’t want Mom to sell the house. You think she should stop supporting me.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But do you really think I don’t want to help you? You always say talking about the anxiety takes the edge off, and that’s why you’re on the phone with Caleigh so much. Well, I’m here. You don’t need a phone, you can talk as much as you need to. I’m not going anywhere.”

He was trying his best to believe me.

My mother had promised to refrain from calling too often, but when the phone rang just then I knew it would be her.

“It’s very cold up there,” she said. “And you’re getting another four inches of snow tonight.”

Wherever I went, she knew more about the weather than I did.

“I’m mailing you some cranberry bread today, and I’m going to put in some cranberry sauce as well. I know you said you weren’t doing a whole Thanksgiving dinner, but just in case. You might change your mind. How much longer do you think you’ll be?”

She wanted me to assure her that Michael was all right. Whatever the content of her questions that was their purpose. I told her, as I had from the beginning, that I didn’t know how much time it would take, but that she could go ahead and send her package.

Michael stayed on the line with her longer, describing his fitful sleep and his morning nausea, but telling her not to worry. He’d been freer of her at nineteen, living in Britain, than ever since. Sharing every step of this with her wasn’t going to help, but I couldn’t control them both.

Before Michael went to bed that night, I gave him three-quarters of his usual evening dose of Klonopin, which was two pills. I knew this drug was different. To come off it too quickly could be dangerous. It would take time. But we didn’t have months to work with, which meant we just had to do the best that we could.

“It’s all right if you need to wake me up,” I said. “Just knock on my door.”

He swallowed the tablet and a half in front of me and held his hand flat against his sternum, as if monitoring his breath.

I half expected him to revolt right away and demand the pills back, but his sleep didn’t worsen that night, or the next few nights, through the end of our second week in the cabin, and so he agreed reluctantly to my suggestion that we cut back his morning dose, too. I kept the medicine bottle in my room and doled the tablets out to him like a nurse.

Usually when I traveled, Seth and I spoke every evening, but I had called him only twice thus far, which had pissed him off. Given how we’d parted, though, he wasn’t going to offer me the satisfaction of showing it. The third time I called him, the night before he flew to Denver for Thanksgiving, he was as remote as ever, asking me civil questions and listening to my civil replies. And yet even this much contact with him made me bristle. I’d sequestered Michael and myself for a reason. It’s how it had to be.

“I just need time,” I said. “It won’t last forever.”

“You’re the one who called,” he said.

“I want to go away with you, and I want to meet your family. But I have to do this first.”

“I know.”

I couldn’t blame him for his flat tone, or his disappointment. I asked dutifully about his week and who else would be coming for the holiday, but when our conversation petered out neither of us tried to revive it.

That night I heard Michael get up to use the bathroom several times, and when I went myself, the light was on under his door. He had to have heard me, to have known I was awake, but he didn’t call out and I didn’t knock. The next morning he was in a panic. He’d barely slept, and said his heart was beating like a jackrabbit’s.

“You need to give me the pills,” he said.

I didn’t shout at him, I didn’t tell him he was being irrational, I just said that the beginning would be the toughest, mentally, and that if he didn’t sleep at night he could take as many naps during the day as he needed. He wasn’t listening to me, though. He was too far inside himself. I handed him his coat and told him to come with me out of the cabin right away, before breakfast, knowing the cold would at least distract him.

It was on that walk that I noticed I didn’t have to slow down anymore for him to keep up. I was the one trying to keep up with him.

The general store hadn’t changed. It was a barn of a place, drafty, with high ceilings and creaking floors, built out onto the pier. Nearby was the dock where we used to tie our boat up to buy gas and supplies before setting out for the island, and opposite that a jetty where the lobstermen kept their skiffs. What had disappeared was the diner and fish fry next door, replaced by a pricier restaurant advertising “the Real Maine Experience,” closed till spring.

I got us coffee and doughnuts and suggested we eat them at the counter. The longer we were out, the better. When we finished I convinced him to walk with me past the harbor to the other end of the village, and from there we went out the lane to the point, with its war memorial and the plaque to fishermen lost at sea. On the unprotected side of this spit of land the tide had washed the snow off the rocks, leaving visible clumps of gray-green seaweed.

Standing in the wind, looking out across the frigid water, I thought, This is absurd, our being up here alone in the cold. It’s romantic nonsense. I’m probably about to lose my job. I need to be back in the city, hustling. And if I’m unemployed, how long will it take before I lose the apartment? Then what? Force a move with Seth before it’s right? What good would all this be if it left me that far in a hole?

“We had a picnic here,” Michael said. “Do you remember? Kelsey killed a lamed seagull. She finished it off. Strange. This is the first place up here I even recognize.”

“She killed a seagull?”

“Well, Dad wrung its neck when she was through with it, but I think it was fairly dead. Celia objected on procedural grounds — that we hadn’t taken it to a vet. It was definitely right here. It’s vivid as all get-out, actually. Like it was a minute ago. I can almost hear it. Maybe this is what it’s like taking hallucinogens.”

“No, that’s different.”

“You’ve taken them?”

“In high school.”

He nodded slowly, as if to say, That makes sense, though it still seemed to surprise him. That he had been oblivious to this episode in my social life.

“I guess we didn’t talk much then, while I was away.”

He said it as if it had never occurred to him before. It was a simple enough statement, an obvious fact, and yet I found myself, without warning, close to tears. I’d always wanted to hear from him. To know what he was doing in London, or just to hear him talk. But whenever he called it was to speak to Mom or Dad about school or money, and we didn’t say more than hello. He sent cassettes in the mail a few times, but the only words that came with them were the track listings and Post-it notes warning This will slay you! or Beware!

“You liked it there, didn’t you?” I said, as we crossed back over the empty parking lot toward the village.

“I did. I fell in love with a woman named Angie. That was the beginning. It’s odd, but when I say that, I can smell the perfume she wore. I can smell it in my head.”

I smiled to myself. When had I ever taken a stroll with Michael and heard him reminisce? The veil between himself and the past was lifting.

At half his usual dose his sleep got worse. By the end of our third week he couldn’t concentrate long enough to make it past the first few scenes of a movie, or even to pick out a DVD in the first place. He became fixated on the sound of the guy across the street chopping wood, asking me every few minutes, “Why does he go so slowly?”

But the bursts of memory kept coming. He had always said he had difficulty picturing our father, or much of his childhood at all. But now, along with his monologues about how he couldn’t go through with our plan, how he would never be able to do his real work again, how he had failed and had no prospects, there were these fragments of the years gone by, which descended out of nowhere. They were questions, mostly.

“Mom and Dad never drank much, did they?” he asked, as if suddenly recalling a detail of an otherwise elusive dream.

They were just single moments at first. He asked if it was true that I had broken my arm falling out of a tree in the garden in Oxfordshire, and I said, Of course, amazed each time that he could have forgotten such familiar stories.

“And I drove with you and Dad to the doctor, right?”

“Yes.”

“At the octagonal house — Dad, he told us stories.”

“Yes” was all I could think to keep saying.

By the time I had lowered him to a quarter ration, his body began to ache. His muscles were seizing up from the loss of the drug’s relaxant effects. I bought him Tylenol and a heating pad at the drugstore. And when he had a particular spot that was killing him, I kneaded his back with my knuckles through his hoodie, which he kept on no matter how far I turned up the heat.

I was working a kink in his shoulder blade as he stood braced against the frame of the kitchen door when he said, “You let the snake into my room, didn’t you?”

I stopped rubbing. This wasn’t just his voice returning. He was going all the way back now. As if he were a teenager again, talking to his younger sibling. The immediacy of the tone, the urgency of the question, as if it had happened only minutes ago, took me right back there with him, outside the door of his bedroom in Samoset, there on the landing.

“That night the snake got into my room, you let it out, didn’t you?”

He had lavished so much of his attention on that creature. I had been forbidden by our mother to touch it. No matter how many times I asked. I was too young, she said. Michael would sit with it on the back steps, wearing one of Mom’s tennis visors and a pair of her giant sunglasses, the snake coiled on the cutting board on his lap. “It’s basking,” he would say, “as we all deserve to bask.” Kelsey would stand vigil with me, intent on the serpent creature, its scales glistening like polished tiles, its forked tongue darting out to test the air, its lidless black eyes milky calm.

“It was after we went to the landing with Dad,” Michael said now. “After you jumped in the mud.”

That day, the one he meant, I had asked on our way home from church if we could take the Sunfish out on the bay, but everyone in the car had claimed it was too cold and too late in the year. Except Dad, who said, “Why not?”

“Then take Michael with you,” my mother said.

But Dad didn’t check the tide schedule before we left, and when we got to the landing the boats lay tilted on their sides across the mudflats. It had always looked like ordinary mud to me, but we’d been told it was dangerous, a deep silt that a man had drowned in once. We stood directly over it, at the end of the stranded jetty. Dad was already drifting off, beginning to think about other things. If we went home, he would read the paper, there would be Sunday lunch, and then he would nap and I would see no more of him.

I don’t remember thinking about it much. I just stepped off the edge, threw my arms up, and called out to him. He swung around in an instant and leaned down to catch my hand just as the slime reached my neck, saving me with a sudden strength.

When we got home, Michael wouldn’t stop saying that I had done it on purpose, that it wasn’t an accident.

And Michael’s memory was correct. It was that night I waited until everyone’s light was out, then snuck down the back stairs into the playroom and let the snake rush into the mesh bag Michael used to transport it. I carried it up and unleashed it through the crack of his door, watching it slither toward his bed.

“Why did you do it?” Michael asked now. “You little wheezer.”

I nearly punched him in the neck right then, to punish him at last for all his mockery of me. But the urge broke almost at once into sadness, a sense of the utter goneness of that time. And then that, too, faded, leaving in its wake a wholly unfamiliar gratitude. For the fact that he had been my brother, and had let me hate him. For the fact that the five of us had been a family at all. And that Michael himself wasn’t gone. He was coming back now, here with me, piece by piece.

As the drug left his system entirely, he began to hear things. He would come into the kitchen and put his ear to the speaker of the radio, bewildered to discover that it was turned off. He heard drums and synthesizers, he said, and the lyrics of entire songs. They went on for minutes at a time.

I found him in the living room examining the Mitchells’ stereo, and later watched him listening at the window for a singing he heard coming from outdoors. I told him not to worry, that it was just a phase, his mind readjusting.

Then came the sound of buses, and doors closing somewhere in the house, and loud static. He stopped sleeping altogether. I kept expecting him to rest on the couch during the day, but his pacing became more relentless. He begged off going to the gym, saying he was too fatigued, and I couldn’t contradict him.

There was no elegant way to do this. He was going to suffer.

He stayed in the living room mostly, and I stayed with him. I brought him food that he wolfed the first few bites of, as if starved, only to leave the rest untouched. More than panic, he seemed in the grip of fever. He begged me to give him back the pills. What point could there be in telling him that I had already thrown the rest away? It would only make him more frightened still.

I kept forcing him to take walks in the mornings, and again in the late afternoons, when the agitation was at its worst. I convinced him a few times to take off his hoodie and lie facedown on the couch, and for half an hour or more I rubbed his back and neck, telling him over and over to breathe. After a while his shoulder blades would unclench and his head would sink deeper into the cushion, and I’d think that he might at least doze off from exhaustion. But as soon as I stopped, he got up and paced again, asking if I heard what he heard, driven from room to room by something close to delirium.

It seemed as if whatever anxiety the drug had kept in check over the years had been stored up rather than eliminated, pooling like a dammed river in his head, and now the gates were open and the flood had arrived. There was nothing to do but wait for it to run its course. Eventually, his body had to tire.

By this time the rest of the world seemed distant. I had phoned Seth only once since our last conversation, and I’d done it in the middle of his workday, when I knew he wasn’t likely to pick up, leaving a message rather than fully accounting for myself. I’d begun to let Celia’s calls go to the answering machine, and my mother’s as well. But then one evening Celia tried the cabin number again and again until I picked up.

“You promised,” she said. “You said you’d stay in touch. Mom’s been calling me every day.”

I’d stopped giving them updates because I knew what would happen. Michael would tell them he couldn’t keep going, and not being here to understand the progress we had made, they would decide to call a halt to it. Celia would shut it down.

“There’s not a lot to report,” I said. “It’s hard. We didn’t expect it to be easy, right? But you should hear his voice. You wouldn’t believe it. He sounds ten years younger. He sounds alive.”

When she asked to talk with him I could have made an excuse. That he was in the shower, or finally getting some sleep. We had come this far. What good could there be in going backward, in losing the ground he’d suffered to gain? But I hadn’t slept much myself in the last few days, listening for him in the night, worrying as soon as I closed my eyes that the whole effort had been a mistake. At least if he spoke to Celia, the decision to keep going wouldn’t be mine alone.

I went into the living room and handed Michael the phone, thinking, This is it, we tried.

He heard Celia out on whatever she had to say for a minute or two, then replied, “I just need to sleep. That’s the thing. It’s brutal, not sleeping. But Alec’s here. He’s trying to help me.” Again he listened, and again he deflected her. “You shouldn’t worry anymore,” he said. “Any of you.”

He could have ended it right then by complaining enough to her that she would command me to stop. But he didn’t. He chose not to.

“He sounds like a wreck,” she said, once Michael had handed the phone back.

“He’s started remembering,” I replied, going upstairs, out of earshot. “You always said that’s what he needed to do, isn’t it?”

“Alec, you’re not going to solve his life for him in a month. This has to be the beginning.”

“I know. That’s what it is. But I have to see it through. Will you call Mom for me? Just tell her it’s okay, please.”

It snowed again the next morning, blanketing the road and the car and our footprints on the path. When the sky cleared and the sun came out, I told Michael we were going to walk in the opposite direction this time, away from the village.

There were only three more houses beyond the Mitchells’ along this stretch, all closed for winter, their driveways blocked by the snowbanks the plow had left behind, their yards smooth white planes sloping toward the water. We followed the road into the woods, where the sunlight barely penetrated and the quiet was nearly complete. Michael hadn’t been out of the house in two days, since he’d stopped sleeping altogether, and he seemed discombobulated by his surroundings. He neither lagged behind me nor sped ahead. Finally, his vigilance had ebbed, his attention growing softer. More than anything else, he seemed to be trying to find his bearings.

After a half mile or so, the road climbed into a rocky field that overlooked the bottom of the inlet. From here we could see across the open water to the island, a mound of dark green ringed by snow-covered boulders and a strip of granite at the waterline.

“That’s the house,” I said. “On the bluff.” I had remembered the island as being much farther out, in a great expanse of sea, but in truth the distance was only a mile or two. “Do you see it?”

Michael squinted. “Where is it?” he said.

I pointed, guiding his head. His eyes were puffy, and practically drooping shut, even out here in the cold. He’ll sleep now, I thought. I’ll give him food and hot tea, and he’ll sleep.

But he didn’t. Not that night, and not the next, and not the night after that. On his sixth sleepless night I got up in the small hours of the morning to take a piss, and as I padded toward the bathroom, I heard the back door open downstairs, and then footsteps on the kitchen floor.

“Michael?” I called.

The footsteps stopped.

“Yeah?” he said, after a moment.

“What are you doing?”

When he gave no response, I turned on the hall light and went down.

He had taken a seat in the dark at the dining room table. I switched on the lamp on the sideboard and saw in front of him a juice glass and a bottle of Scotch.

“There’s a song,” he said. “It won’t stop.”

He tore the seal, uncorked the bottle, and, using both hands to steady it, poured himself a drink.

“Where did you get that?”

“You put it in the shed.”

“But we agreed. You asked me to get rid of it.”

He lifted the glass to his lips and took a large swallow. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said. “You should go back to bed.”

I put on a sweatshirt that I’d left on one of the dining chairs, and sat at the table opposite him. Had he watched me take the box of booze outside? Or had he just figured I was too much of a skinflint to throw it away? It didn’t matter now. One drink wouldn’t hurt him.

We sat for a minute or two as he finished what he’d poured.

“Do you know?” he said. “I haven’t had sex in six years. Six years ago — and that was just twice, with Bethany. Before that it was two years. Twice in eight years. I started writing pornography. Back in Michigan. Just for myself. So at least there would be something besides the Internet.”

I didn’t need to know this, I didn’t want to know it. But I had said that I would listen, and so I did.

“It helped, actually,” he said. “Making it personal like that. It was surprisingly effective. Just the writing of it.”

“That makes sense. I guess.”

“The good thing about some of the drugs — they amputated my libido. Which made it easier. It was a blessing, it really was.”

“You said there was a song in your head, what song?”

“‘Temptation,’ New Order. Just one line on a loop: Up, down, turn around, please don’t let me hit the ground / Tonight I think I’ll walk alone, I’ll find my soul as I go home. Their lyrics were never great. But that melody played on the bass line…”

“It’s not going to keep going like this,” I said. “It can’t go on like this forever.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because you’re off it now. All of it. This is the trailing stuff. You’ve done it.”

He rested his forearms on the table and leaned forward, lowering his head. “There’s a limit, Alec. You don’t want to think about it, but there’s an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure. You can’t just negate that with sentimentality. With the idea of some indomitable spirit. That’s a fairy tale. It’s what people say about other people, to avoid the wretchedness. It’s just cruelty by other means. Requiring a person to stay alive. For you. Dad, for instance. I never blamed him. I never did. He reached his limit.”

“You’re hearing music, Michael. It’s going to pass. I can put on other music. We should have been doing that, we should have been listening to more music together.”

“It’s not that,” he said. “I understand now why they deny people sleep to torture them. That’s what it is — torture.”

“You’ve had a drink. It’ll take the edge off. You should lie down and close your eyes. The exhaustion’s going to catch up with you.”

He seemed to be laboring for each breath, his lungs trying to stretch the skin tightened over his chest. Again using both hands to steady the bottle, he filled the glass three-quarters full.

“That’s not a good idea,” I said.

He gazed at the plastic juice glass with its checkered print. “I shouldn’t have gone back to England,” he said. “I should never have left you all there in that house. Not that I could have stopped him. But I could have warned you. I could have been there.”

“You wanted to be with your friends,” I said. “You were in the middle of school. We got it, Celia and me, we understood.”

“I couldn’t stand being there. I had to leave. But that’s the thing, that’s the thing — I still dread it. It’s already happened, but I still dread that it’s about to happen — soon, right now…I haven’t been a good brother,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He reached across the table and took hold of my upper arm, squeezing it tight, as he used to when I was little.

“Yes you have,” I said.

I had never seen Michael cry. Not even when we were children. The muscles of his face unlocked. His whole jaw seemed to loosen, his mouth came open, his lips shook. In his glistening eyes there was a brightness. He looked new again. New and terribly sad. And I cried with him.

“I didn’t know what to say when I came back that summer,” he said. “You were all so upset. But I didn’t feel anything. Nothing. I was blank. I kept trying, I knew I was supposed to feel something, and to help you, but I couldn’t. And it was so hot. You remember? It was stifling. For weeks. And I just stayed in my room playing records because I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You were wearing wool,” I said, and laughed. “You had on those gray wool pants and a blazer when you came in. You looked so different. Like a grown-up.”

“I despise that house in summer.”

“Celia and I — we were there together when Dad was sick. We saw everything, and I guess we — her, mostly — we made up some way of talking about it. But you were gone. I thought you’d been talking with Dad on the phone, that somehow you knew him better. I didn’t know what to say, either. It wasn’t your fault.”

To have ever been impatient with Michael’s suffering seemed suddenly callous. All the effort I had expended pretending our lives weren’t much different, so that he wouldn’t have to feel lonelier than he already did — it hadn’t been for him, but for me. Because I had wanted so fiercely not to pity my brother. Not to pity him as I did now.

It occurred to me that I could kiss him. I could take him in my arms. He hadn’t been touched like that in so long. I could help him. Not with the love he wanted, but with the love that was here. What harm could there be in that?

I handed him a paper napkin and he blew his nose. He took another sip of his drink. I just smiled. It didn’t matter now that he’d begun to cry. He was finally opening, and letting go.

“Do you remember being up here in the summer?” I said. “Playing on the rocks, out on the island?”

“I think I read Death in Venice,” he said. “Which Mom approved of for some reason. The poet of all those who labor on the brink of exhaustion.”

“Those phrases of yours — the ones you read aloud — that’s why I started writing. I probably never told you that. It was because of you reading me those lines.”

He sat up in his chair, confused by what I’d said, straining to understand it.

“You were so excited by the sentences, they were so satisfying to you. It was like listening to someone preach, the way you read them. I didn’t know what most of them meant, I just heard your rhythm. And I wanted to be part of it.”

“Really?”

“I tried to sound like that, whatever it was. To write something you might want to read aloud like that. It’s not what I do anymore, obviously. But yeah, at the beginning.”

“The miracle of an analogy,” he said, using the napkin now to pat the sweat from his forehead. “That’s what Proust calls it. On those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. That’s the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you’re alive — the backward ache. That’s what music is. The trouble — for me — is that at some stage I realized those miracles, those aches, they have a history. They’re not private. The music’s always about what someone’s lost. That’s what you hear, when it’s good: the worlds people lost, the ones they want back. And once you hear it that way, you can’t avoid it — that it’s somehow about justice.”

He emptied his glass a second time and placed it on the table.

“It’s like water,” he said. “I don’t feel a thing.”

“I never wanted to say this to you, it seemed too harsh,” I said. “But whenever you started talking about all that reparations stuff, I kept thinking, The only reparations getting paid are from Mom to you. Like you were demanding she give you another childhood. For her to take care of you that much. Because you were angry about the way things went for you. And it just didn’t seem fair. To her. And it still doesn’t.”

The freshness of his sadness had begun to recede, his expression becoming more distant. I couldn’t tell if he was considering my words, or if he simply hadn’t taken them in.

“You want me to have a life like yours,” he said. “Like yours or Celia’s. Someone to be domestic with, a profession, so that I’ll be taken care of. Mom wants it too — for me. But that’s what I mean about sentimentality, how cruel it can be. Because how can I ever not want those things when you all want them for me? And yet it’s never going to happen. I don’t mean that in a self-pitying way, even if I do pity myself sometimes. I just mean that isn’t my life. People don’t want to be loved the way I love them. They get suffocated. It isn’t their fault. But it isn’t mine, either.”

“You can let go of that now, though,” I said. “The childish, obsessive stuff. That’s part of what you’ve been holding on to.”

“You’re not listening,” he said, and lifted the bottle again, filling his glass almost to the brim.

“Why don’t you take it easy,” I said, and reached over to slide the glass away from him, off to my right. “I’m here, I’m listening. Finish what you were saying.”

He stood slowly from the table, walked into the kitchen, and returned with another glass, which he filled and began to drink from. “I told you,” he said, in a voice I didn’t recognize, low and determined. “I have to sleep now.”

The countless times he’d said this before, I’d heard it as a complaint. To be sympathized with, yes, but not so much as to alter my plan. But this sounded different. There was no more pleading. Instead, he was doing what he never did — asserting himself. I could have stopped him. I could have taken the bottle away, and the second one he had carried in and placed on the floor beside his chair, and poured them both down the sink as I had the others. But I didn’t. I watched him drink that third glass of Scotch to the bottom, and another after it.

Did I know then what would happen — know without knowing?

At some point I stood up from that table and walked into the living room, where I scrolled through the music on Michael’s laptop, and found one of the albums I remembered him playing for me over and over. “Come here,” I called to him as Donna Summer’s “On the Radio” began to fill the air of the cabin.

Michael didn’t move at first and I called out to him again. Finally he raised himself and came in to perch unsteadily on the arm of the couch.

“Why are you playing this?” he asked.

What he had said to me a moment ago was true. I hadn’t been listening to him, not for years. I’d wanted him to be better for so long that I had stopped hearing him tell me he was sick. For the first time I saw him now as a man, not a member of a family. A separate person, who had been trying as hard as he could for most of his life simply to get by.

I took both his hands, interlacing our fingers, and I swayed to the beat, which had kicked in now beneath Summer’s pining voice. “Come on,” I said, encouraging Michael with the motion of my arms to sway with me, and after a moment he did, to my surprise, reluctantly rocking his head from side to side, woozy and out of time but responsive nonetheless, his knees bouncing just a little to the beat.

How long had we both been ashamed? How long had he suffered alone?

I stepped in closer and, taking his wrist in my hand, guided his arm around onto my waist, and put my own on his, holding him to me. Gently, I pressed his head down onto my shoulder. And then the two of us leaned against each other, and danced.

I remember seeing the taillights of the lobsterman’s pickup come on in the dark, and listening to the chug of its aging muffler as he backed onto the road and pulled away toward the harbor. That’s how I know it was still nighttime when, instead of remaining awake with him, I left Michael downstairs on his own.

I saw that other bottle of booze on the floor beside his chair. And I must have seen the bottles of Tylenol, too. He had placed them on the dining table, next to the salt and pepper. I saw, and yet I didn’t see.

I didn’t mean to wake you. You should go back to bed.

That’s what he had said to me when I came down. I knew he wasn’t going to stop drinking. Not until he slept, no matter what it took, or how long. But still I left him there on his own and went back up to my room and turned out the light.

I slept until midmorning, later than I ever usually did, a thick, dreamless sleep. I woke calmly to the sound of dripping and saw icicles outside my window melting in the sun. Lying there in the bed awhile, I listened for the sound of Michael in the house but heard nothing other than the trickling noises of the thaw out in the yard.

I got dressed and was halfway down the stairs when I saw him. He lay on the couch, eyes closed, head tilted back, his legs stretched toward me. Below the edge of the blanket covering his legs, his splayed feet were visible. A dried streak of vomit ran from the corner of his pale mouth, down his cheek and onto his shoulder. The empty bottles stood on the coffee table beside him.

I knew right away that he was dead. And that I had failed him.

Yet still I hurried to the couch and knelt beside him, as if I could shake his body back to life. His hands were cold to my touch, his chin jutting upward at an unnatural angle, as if he were gasping for breath. Lifting his head off the pillow, I gathered it into my arms, and clasped it against my chest, rocking back and forth, weeping into his hair. Wake up, I kept whispering, please, please wake up.

I have no memory of how long I held him. Or of how long afterward I remained in the chair opposite, beholding his body, the brow furrowed, the eyes resting like stones in their sockets. Long enough to observe a square of sun creep down the wall, across a map of the bay, and onto his glowing form, before it slid onto the rug and vanished.

I had never understood before the invisibility of a human. How what we take to be a person is in fact a spirit we can never see. Not until I sat in that room, with the dead vehicle that had carried my brother through his life, and for which I had always mistaken him.

I knew that as soon as I stood up, I would have to act. I would have to go into the world and seek help. But as long as I remained in the chair, in the silence, none of that could begin.

Celia

I didn’t believe it. You never do, at first. The force of the need for it not to be true blots the truth out. Afterwards, there is a daze.

I remember, once Alec had reached me and I had left work, lying on the floor in our living room, with the green fronds of the palm tree out on the sidewalk swaying against the white of the clouds through the top pane of the window and the telephone wires sagging gently across the view, and not thinking of Michael, not yet.

Strangely, what played itself over and over in my mind wasn’t Alec and Michael in the cabin and what could have happened between them, but a night almost two decades ago, back in Walcott. I had been out drinking with Jason and his friends in the field at the end of the brook path, sitting in the dark out in the meadow. Jason and I were still dating, despite my mother’s worry that we did drugs together, and despite my having lied to my father, on the last day of his life, about breaking up with him. I had told my father that because I thought it would make things easier for him, to be able to tell my mother that he had succeeded, knowing I could hide the truth from them easily enough.

Jason had been awkward around me for weeks. He didn’t know what to say about my father’s death. That night he kept slipping his hand out of mine. He joked restlessly with his friends and the girls they had brought with them, even as they paired off and began making out on the grass. When the banter died down, I nudged him onto his feet and we walked up the slope toward the woods, where we lay down and began kissing. I wanted to feel his weight on top of me, but he stayed up on his elbows, letting only our lips touch. The hours with him that summer were the only hours in which I didn’t feel drowned. I couldn’t tell him that, though. He wouldn’t have wanted to hear it.

I willed him to put his hand on my stomach, to nuzzle his face against my chest, taking us farther away. Instead, when he heard the voices of the others starting up again, he rose and sauntered back down the hill. I didn’t follow right away. I lay there taking in the stars in the clear night sky, listening to the voices trail off, telling myself that what my father had done wasn’t easy for Jason either. I needed to be patient.

When I got up and returned to where we had first gathered, they were gone — all of them. I crossed the meadow back and forth calling out to Jason in a stage whisper, as if I might wake someone. But they had departed, he and his friends, off to drink at someone’s house.

It was as I walked home alone through the warm darkness of that summer night, in the nearly perfect quiet of our neighborhood, that I vowed never to let that happen again. Never to put myself in a position to be left by a man. It was one of those youthful promises you make to yourself and keep long after you stop recognizing what you are doing, or how it is distorting your life.

That’s what kept coming back to me in the numbness of the afternoon after Alec’s call: how deeply I had made that promise, and how long I had kept it, never being with a man who might leave me. Always maintaining that control.

A promise to oneself never to be left. What sleight of mind.

The radio station at BC, where Michael had DJ’d, aired a tribute show, playing the music he had championed. Alec, my mother, Caleigh, and I listened to it together in the living room in Walcott. Caleigh had come to stay with us at the house for a couple of days before the memorial. There were a hundred things to do, and Alec and I did more or less all of them, working together like the well-honed team we sometimes were. My mother, who never got sick, came down with a heavy cold. Her friends Suzanne and Dorothy brought meals to the house for us, and arranged the food for after the service.

It seemed to me the wrong time to announce my own news that Paul and I had decided to get married, which I’d been waiting to tell my mother in person at Christmas, but Paul disagreed and said she would want to know, which once I reflected on it seemed right — to give her that. The morning before we flew back to California, I found her upstairs in her bedroom, writing thank-you notes to the people who had sent their condolences. She cried again when I told her — for me, and for Michael — but I was glad that I had done it.

I gave myself a few days back at home before going in to see my clients again. It was hard at first. And it stayed hard for months. To sit there quietly, hands folded in my lap, listening to them elaborate on their troubles. An old impatience returned, the kind I had experienced when I started as a therapist: the urge to search for the moments in their past that contained the key to liberating them in the present. That’s what I used to do, press for more and more family history, excusing it to myself as interest and attention, when really it was a distraction from the suffering in front of me, a desire to find the passage of experience that would explain their pain away. What good plot didn’t offer that? A meaning sufficient to account for the events. But as time went on, I realized that my clients’ lives weren’t works of art. They told themselves stories all the time, but the stories trailed off, got forgotten, and then repeated — distractions themselves, oftentimes, from the feelings they were somewhere taught would damn them or wreck them.

It had taken me a long time to see how strong this desire for an answer was. I had to train myself to notice how it arose, and how to put it aside. Because if all I did was scour what a person said to me each week for clues, I wouldn’t do her much good. I had to give up my own need to cure if I was going to stand any chance of shepherding her toward acceptance of who she already was.

I never did that for Michael. I never gave up my belief in a secret, a truth lodged in the past, which if he could only experience and accept would release him. I thought of it as that moment of his in the woods with my father and Kelsey and me. An awkward teenager living in a town he loathed, on a walk he didn’t want to take, trudging through his unhappiness as adolescents do. And then through no will of his own, as we came to that clearing and paused, sensing all around him a malignancy he couldn’t name, a violence he had to escape. A vision of evil.

When Alec told me what Michael had said to him on their last night, about feeling guilty for going back to England without somehow warning us, I thought to myself: Yes, that was it, the moment he needed to confess and let go of. As if it were that simple.

He’d sounded so desperate on the phone from Maine. And yet I hadn’t said what I should have to Alec — that it had gone too far, too quickly, and that he had to stop it. I’d kept believing in the one catharsis. As Alec did, and my mother, in her own manner, and even Michael, who never stopped trying to want what we wanted for him. How could he? We’re not individuals. We’re haunted by the living as well as the dead. I believed that before. But now I know it’s true. It’s what he kept trying to tell us.

Alec

Seth’s sister, Valerie, picked us up at the airport. I greeted her from the backseat as the two of us piled in with our luggage.

“So you exist,” she said. “Welcome.” She had the same fine black hair as her brother, only longer and with a slight wave to it, and the same dark green eyes. “Don’t worry about Luke there,” she said, “he’s out cold.” The head of the toddler strapped into the safety seat beside me rested back and away from his little body, a clear streak of drool leaking from the corner of his mouth.

Beyond the terminal and the car-rental lots, the view opened onto a flat and nearly empty plain, an expanse of scrub brush stretching either side of the highway. The low clouds of a winter sky met the outline of foothills on the far horizon. Valerie sped down the passing lane, cruising by trucks and utility vans as she and Seth chatted over the sound of hit radio turned low. After a while billboards appeared, followed by gasworks and factories, and mile after mile of single-story warehouses built along empty access roads. Eventually I could see trees and the beginnings of neighborhoods, the Denver skyscrapers still off in the distance.

Seth’s parents lived in a large ranch house on a street of ranch houses set back on one-acre lots lined with cottonwoods. His mother met us at the door wearing a white blouse and a necklace of braided pink coral.

“There now,” she said, placing her hand gently on my arm. “I finally get to lay eyes on you.”

I’d expected a friendly reception from her, in particular, given what Seth had told me, but the warmth of it came as a surprise. She led us onto the sunporch, where she’d put out cookies and iced tea. In the yard beyond, a blue tarpaulin sagging with unmelted snow covered a swimming pool rimmed in white concrete. There were well-tended juniper hedges and a flagstone path leading down the middle of the lawn to a creek. All of it appeared to me as most everything had for the last many weeks, as a still photograph of a place now vanished.

Seth’s mother and sister asked me anodyne questions about what parts of Colorado I had visited, and about the winter weather in New York, any topic other than my family. I answered politely, watching Luke roll on the floor with his grandmother’s terrier.

Since Seth and I had met, I had wanted to come here and meet his family, but for the last two months it had been hard to want anything. It will be good for us, Seth had said, encouraging me. It’s time. And so I had come.

After our snack, I went to nap in the room we’d been given on the opposite end of the house from his parents’ room. It wasn’t Seth’s. He hadn’t grown up in the house. It was a room meant for guests. Plush beige carpet, a chaise longue under the window, two sinks at a double vanity between two sets of louvered closet doors. I fell asleep as soon as I laid my head on the pillow.

An hour or more later, Seth woke me with a kiss on the forehead. He rubbed my chest and kissed me again on the lips.

“They want to take you to the mall without me. Is that awful?”

I had been terrified that I would lose him. That Michael’s death and the blank state it had delivered me into would annul what we had begun. But he had helped me as no one else could have by insisting we go forward with finding a place to live together, even when it seemed for a few weeks that I might not get my job back. At my weakest moment, he had refused to doubt us.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”

His mother and sister and I drove for twenty minutes in his mother’s ample Lincoln, through a wide grid of commercial strips whose intersections had long lights and generous turning lanes, the late-afternoon sun glinting off the columns of windshields.

“We didn’t mean to kidnap you,” his mother said. “But he’s kept you to himself long enough, and I have to ask somebody what he likes to wear these days.”

“You’re earning major points,” Valerie half whispered to me as we crossed the parking lot. “This is what she does with people she likes.”

It was Saturday and the mall was full. Parents herded small children through crowds of dashing teens. Seniors ambled along the promenade. Salespeople in chinos and polo shirts smiled vaguely from the stools of jewelry carts. A janitor mopped orange soda from the white tile floor, while above and through it all played “Friday I’m in Love,” one of the Cure’s lighter pop ballads.

“I just want to know if he’s as much of a neat freak with you as he is with us,” Seth’s mother said. “He practically alphabetizes his shirts.”

In the Brooks Brothers, I limited myself to recommending mediums over larges and suggested Seth would probably want to purchase his own jeans. When his mother pressed me to let her buy me a tie, I fended her off with Valerie’s help.

We kept at it for an hour or so, through several stores, and then sat together at a Starbucks. They asked me more questions, venturing now onto the subject of my mother, and of Celia and Paul. I did my best to reciprocate, inquiring about where in Denver they had lived when Seth was a kid, and about Valerie’s work as a guidance counselor. It was kind of them to be doing this with me, and I wanted them to know that I was glad for it.

By the time we got back to the house Seth’s father and Valerie’s husband, Rick, had arrived and were in the sprawling kitchen with Seth unloading meat from a cooler. His father was an older, rougher version of Seth, taller by a few inches, with a larger jaw and broader shoulders, and the mottled skin of a man who’d spent his life working outdoors. He had the same upright posture, the same way of gesturing with his shoulders, and he spoke in that clipped rhythm of Seth’s, flat and quick. Their resemblance was uncanny.

He gave my hand a firm shake, introduced his son-in-law, and then asked me if I liked to grill. Rick stood a few feet off holding a platter of marinated steak.

“Alec wants to talk to us,” Seth’s mother said as she leaned down beside her husband to rummage through the vegetable drawers of the fridge.

“You’re saying he can’t make up his own mind?” his father retorted, as though I were not in the room. Seth smiled at me in mock apology but remained conveniently silent. Rick’s expression suggested the better choice was to join them. Reaching over his wife’s back, Seth’s father grabbed me a beer from the top shelf, and the three of us walked out onto the patio together.

They had come from a meeting with a developer. A set of permits for a condominium on the outskirts of downtown had been delayed, costing their firm thousands of dollars. They included me in their talk of the minutiae of contracting as though I were an old pro.

“I’ve been telling Seth for a couple years we need a designer,” his father said. “He’s got a job here anytime he wants it.”

The burnished gold of his father’s wedding ring and the gold face of his watch caught the light of the flames. I found it hard not to keep staring at him, the way he had planted himself in front of the grill, moving only his hands and arms as he flipped the slabs of meat with a fork, addressing his comments to the fire. I wondered how he saw me. What did he think of the man who slept with his son? Did my presence force him to imagine it? Had his wife instructed him to accept me? Had he ever desired another man himself?

At the dinner table he stood at the head and carved the steak into strips, arranging them on the plates his wife held out for him, making sure everyone had been served before sitting. As we ate, Seth reported on our plans for a trip up to the mountains early the following week, and Valerie and her mother made suggestions for places we should stop along the way. When Rick asked me what kind of work I did, Seth’s mother answered for me, informing him that I wrote about politics. At that point a quiet descended on the table.

“If those congressmen sell themselves any faster,” Seth’s father said, “they’ll be shipping their own jobs to China.”

I laughed. And soon everyone was laughing, nervously relieved, Seth most of all. He slid a hand onto my knee under the table and squeezed it. I couldn’t remember the last time I had let go even this much. His father, delighted with the response to his quip, began to opine on government corruption and shoddy foreign building materials, and the uncertainties of interest rates, until eventually his wife told him he was boring us and announced there was pie.

I imagined Celia rolling her eyes at the scene of Valerie and her mother clearing the dishes and disappearing into the kitchen to tidy and wash while the four men kept their seats. But then Seth got up to help them, leaving the three of us alone once again.

“Let’s fix you a drink,” his father said, signaling with a tilt of his head for Rick and me to go through with him into the den. There a leather-topped bar with brass edging and a mirrored shelf stood against a paneled wall. Darkwood beams ran the length of the ceiling. There were birch logs stacked in the grate of a raised hearth. At the far end of the room a brown leather sofa and chairs faced a flat-screen lit up by the vivid colors of a basketball game playing out in silence.

“Rick here is bourbon, and I think tonight I am too — what can I get you, Alec?” He rested his hand on the amber bottle as he awaited my answer, the underside of his link bracelet touching the leather of the bar’s surface.

“Bourbon’s fine,” I said.

He palmed ice into the tumblers and poured three generous drinks.

“Cheers,” he said, looking me in the eye for the first time, just for an instant, and offering a small nod of the head, as if allowing me still further into the circle of his acknowledgment. Rick did the same when I glanced at him, and the three of us clinked glasses. It was a simple, male gesture, this little close-lipped dip of the chin, the eyes meeting ever so briefly. I’d given and received the nod a thousand times. It was what remained, I suppose, of tipping your hat. But I’d always experienced it as more than that. As a forswearing of an implicit threat of violence. A sign, between men, of disarmament.

“Cheers,” I replied, aware of the closeness of their bodies to mine — Seth’s father’s big frame, Rick’s barrel chest and thick legs. These two men I had only just met were granting me an unspoken acceptance, giving me that minimal respect of belonging with them. But only in the narrowest sense. I’d earned the right in their eyes to be treated as a man. As a participant in the basic competition among all men.

Just noticing this, not letting it pass as an ordinary fact of meeting strangers, unclenched something in me. A fist in my gut. A bracing against attack.

I tried listening to their talk about suppliers and the housing market but I couldn’t focus on their words. I saw their lips and eyes move, their weight shift, and as I watched them I understood clearly and for the first time that this was the reason part of me had come to loathe Michael. His refusal to be like other men. His refusal to compete. To live in the grip of that fist, the way I always had, and the way these men did. And I glimpsed what I had never allowed myself to admit before, which is that somewhere in me lay a hatred of my father, too, though for the opposite reason — for playing the game but being too weak to win it. A hatred I’d kept hidden from myself as a boy but never let go of, and which his death and my pity for him had prevented me from owning up to all these years.

“But on the whole,” Seth’s father was saying, “it’s not a bad life.”

Rick, as seemed to be his role, agreed with his father-in-law.

Behind me I heard Seth’s footsteps and a moment later he was standing next to me, our circle widening to admit him.

“Sethy,” his father said. “Get yourself a glass.” He topped off all of our drinks and poured one for his son.

As the four of us raised our glasses, his father once again gave me that quick nod. But I didn’t play my part this time. Returning the gesture seemed too small a response, and too cold. It was a kind of acting — a kind of life — that had led me, without my realizing it, to despise the men I loved.

Instead, I put my arm over Seth’s shoulder and said to his father, “I want to thank you for having me here. I love your son very much.”

Margaret

I find it remarkable how time works its way into a place. And thus how blank of time new places can be. This ceiling, for instance, here in my bedroom in the morning light of September. It means almost nothing. It is new, like the light fixture at its center, and the double-glazed window that the light comes through, and the louvered closets either side, which have so much less in them than the ones in Walcott ever did. All of which is right, and really as it should be.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes—

Those quotes Michael carried with him everywhere on sheaves of paper in his messenger bag turned out to be declamations, mostly, about the lasting evils of slavery. But there were others, too, on music and art, and life more generally. A few of which have stuck with me since I read through them last winter, in the months after he died. They were like notes to us that he had written but never delivered. Or delivered by speaking them only after I had stopped listening.

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—

That is how it was for a time: abstract. Moving through tasks at a great remove. Meeting with Veronica, the real estate agent. Tidying the house for the prospective buyers she brought around to view it. The hardest, of course, was going through Michael’s things. Discovering from the pile of correspondence with his creditors, and his handwritten lists of the status of each loan and the amount outstanding, how he had tried right up to the end to manage his debts.

It took Alec less than a day to dispense with them all, except the one that I had cosigned. It required nothing more than a death certificate.

And then there were his records, in the gray milk crates along his walls, in boxes in the study and Alec’s old room, all around the edges of the basement, too — thousands of them. I have no room for them here in the new place, but we weren’t about to throw them away, so they sit in storage until we find them a home, where hopefully they can be kept together, and played.

In the new bathroom, the tiles are grouted a perfect white. The medicine cabinet is a perfect mirrored rectangle reflecting the snowy-white walls. I took baths before, but now there is only this glass stall shower, which the water beads on, catching any light in the room.

Are you sure you want to move? Alec asked, over and over.

I did consider staying, a while longer at least, mostly for his sake. Because he tried so hard to allow me to keep it. But I couldn’t live in those rooms anymore.

Here, I walk to do my shopping, or along the wooded path around the reservoir. The neighbors have had me in for meals. I’m getting to know the mail lady. Best of all, Dorothy is only five minutes away. A few months after I moved, she told me she’d had enough of the suburbs and wanted to be closer to Boston, for concerts and museums. We see each other at least twice a week, for which I couldn’t be more grateful.

After showering and dressing, I tiptoe past the guest room and hear Celia and Paul beginning to stir. Paul could have stayed with his mother on the night before his wedding, but he and Celia wanted to be here together. I cross the dining room and close the French doors quietly so Alec and Seth can keep sleeping there on the foldout.

I baked the muffins yesterday afternoon, I just need to warm them in the oven, slice up the fruit, and start the eggs. I offered to do a larger breakfast, at least for their friends Laura and Kyle and for Paul’s parents, but Celia said there was no need. Once my sister arrives from her hotel, the six of us will eat around the old dining room table that I brought with me, along with most of the other furniture that would fit. (Alec wheezes here as well, and says maybe it wasn’t the mold in the basement that forced him to wear a mask, after all, but something in the rugs.)

“Let me do some of this,” Paul says, coming into the kitchen in sweatpants and a T-shirt. He takes a melon from the counter, and a knife from the block.

“It’s all right,” I tell him, “I’ve got it.” But he’s found a cutting board already and starts in.

Despite the many Christmases he has spent with us, I’ve rarely spoken to him on his own, Celia or the others always being around. We did talk more when they had me out to San Francisco back in March. He was as attentive as I’ve ever seen him, to me and to Celia, making meals and arranging outings. I suppose some parents would worry about their daughter marrying him, given the financial instability of the sort of work he does, but I could never drum that up in myself, and I certainly can’t now. I’m just glad for the fact that the two of them have decided to make the commitment, and glad to remember how well he got along with Michael, how he always laughed at Michael’s antics.

On one of those outings, walking on Stinson Beach while Celia played with the dog ahead of us, I found myself telling Paul how I wanted Dr. Gregory and Dr. Bennet and Dr. Greenman, and the people who’d invented all those drugs, imprisoned for what they had done. I hadn’t said it like that to anyone before. Even to myself. And he took it in stride, saying that he understood.

He hands me the melon and I slide it into the bowl with the apple and the berries. “Really,” I say, “you should go and do whatever you need to, I’m fine.”

Seeing me infrequently, he is still solicitous of the grieving mother in a way that those nearer by no longer are, now that it’s getting on toward a year. For them, Michael’s death has been absorbed into the everyday.

I listen to the four of them moving about the house as I set the table and get started on the eggs. It’s the first time they have all been here together. I’ve been looking at the forecast all week, keeping my fingers crossed, and so far the prediction of a clear day is holding.

After Penny finally appears, we gather, and I wait until everyone has been served before helping myself to a little fruit. When Alec instructs me to eat more, Seth glances at me almost beseechingly, as if trying to apologize for my son. Until a few months ago, I’d never met a companion of Alec’s. He’s been unfailingly polite, and, like Paul lately, speaks to me as if I’m in imminent danger of falling apart. He seems terribly young, though he is only a few years younger than Alec. His mother sent the nicest card about Michael, which, having never met me, she certainly didn’t need to do, and I wrote her back, saying I hoped we would meet one day.

For so long I worried Alec would never find anyone, given the difficulties of that world, and how tightly wound he is. Perhaps if he’d had his father’s acceptance it would have calmed him. I’m just his mother. I can’t pick and choose among his qualities, which he has always known, and so my acceptance means less. But he and Seth have moved into a new apartment together now, and I think he is happier than he wants to admit.

He is so committed to his guilt. He needs Michael’s death to be his fault. It’s what keeps his brother alive for him — that connection. As though, as long as he still has a confession to make, Michael will be forced one day to return in order to hear it. Without that prospect, there is only an ending.

This is the thing I have discovered: Michael’s being gone doesn’t mean we stop trying to save him. The strain is less but it doesn’t vanish. It becomes part of our bewilderment, a kind of activity without motive, which provides its own strange continuity.

Penny and I listen as the four of them chat away about who’s coming this afternoon, about the music for the ceremony and their plans to go out with the friends who will still be in town tomorrow night. My wedding was more formal, of course. My mother composing and sending out the invitations, most of them to my parents’ friends. The formal dinner a week in advance for John’s parents to meet mine. Fittings with the dressmaker, a meeting with the minister, the rehearsal at the church. John was patient with all of it, and bristled less than I did at the strictures of the costumes and the production. But none of that is necessary today, and it would make no sense for Celia.

When the vans arrive, they all help unload things into the little backyard that I share with the condominium on the other side of the building. Luckily, the couple who live there don’t have much interest in gardening and were happy to hear that I did. There’s been only one growing season so far, but I have cleared a few things out and planted a bit. I wish it were bigger, especially today. I did offer to pay for something larger, but Celia said no, this was fine, just family and a few close friends, not a year of planning and expense. She did at least let me buy her dress, a knee-length, powder-blue silk with a white collar and cuffs, and a pair of shoes to match.

And the flowers — I was permitted to organize the flowers, which Penny helps me arrange on a table by the back fence and down along the four short rows of folding chairs. There should be more for me to do besides this, but it seems they have thought of everything.

Around noon Caleigh appears with rented speakers and a stereo, which she sets up on the little screened-in porch off the kitchen. She’s helped by Ben and Christine, with whom it’s been such a comfort to me to remain in touch this year. Caleigh wouldn’t let me pay for her ticket from Chicago, where she lives now, though I suppose there is no reason I should have, besides how glad I was when I heard Celia had invited her and that she would be coming. She looks much as she always has, elegant and slender, and as shy as ever. She said she would stay on with me for a few days, so we can go to the storage unit and sort through some of Michael’s records (she knows more about them than any of us). I’ve put aside whatever papers he had with her name on them, and a stack of their reparations pamphlets as well, for her to keep. She smiles her way nervously through introductions to the other guests as they gather in the yard.

In their one feint to tradition, Paul is kept from my bedroom while Celia puts on her dress and arranges her hair. I do what I can to help, buttoning her up from the back, fixing the clasp of her necklace, things I haven’t done for her since she was a child.

She is thirty-six, my daughter. By her age, I had given birth to all three of them. They were already running across the yard in Samoset. It’s not that I want that for her, or even that I want grandchildren, necessarily, though all my friends do have them by now. I simply want her to be happy.

“Do the earrings go?” she asks.

They are little pendants of blue glass suspended in silver wire, and I tell her they are perfect with her dress.

She looks not at me but at herself in the mirror.

“If your father were here, he’d know what to say. I’m sure I should be saying something to you — on a day like this. I should have said all sorts of things, over the years.”

She glances at me, then back to the glass. “There are probably things you could have said,” she allows.

Though she never wears makeup, today she’s decided to apply a pale lipstick, which she does slowly and exactly, before dabbing her lips with a tissue.

“You know what I used to hate?” she says. “The stockings at Christmas. I didn’t hate them. But they aggravated me. And the Advent calendar. All those little rituals, no matter how old we got. It seemed like you were avoiding reality, just being naive.”

“I’m sure I was, I—”

“Mom — listen: I don’t think that anymore. I see these women and their partners or husbands, people with kids. They’re falling apart — money, or mental health, or whatever it is — and they don’t know what to do. They’re desperate. You were trying to keep our world together. To keep things the same. I get that now.”

“It’s incredible how you take care of all those people. I don’t know how you do it.”

“You took care of us,” she says. “You did your best.”

I hug her, so as not to cry. “Well, Paul’s very fortunate. I do know that.”

She lets herself be hugged. “I envy you sometimes,” she says over my shoulder, “with the weather and all those dates you remember, enjoying all of that, those little things. I thought that was naive, too. But you’re lucky. It’s good you can enjoy it.”

Before I can take in what she’s saying, the door opens and Alec saunters in, half displacing us from in front of the mirror in order to adjust his tie.

“The crowds have gathered,” he says. “They await you with bated breath.”

I don’t know what is funny about this, except it’s the sort of thing Michael would say, parodying the moment. And that, perhaps more than anything, is what makes me laugh, which causes the two of them to smile, and then start laughing themselves, about nothing at all, it seems.

Soon I have to wipe my eyes, I’m laughing so hard, and I tell them, “Oh, come on now, we have to hold ourselves together.”

“Why?” Alec says.

The service itself is brief. I walk Celia down the narrow aisle. Two of their friends read short poems. Kyle leads them through their vows. At the end, everyone claps and the newlyweds point their guests to a long table, where champagne glasses have been set out. The white tablecloth is bright in the full sun. The light dazzles the wine as it’s poured. Ben and Laura and Caleigh make sure everyone has a drink in hand. After a while, Alec taps his glass, the conversation quiets, and he gives his sister a toast their father would have been proud of.

It is quite warm and people begin to sweat, their foreheads glistening as they chatter and laugh, enjoying themselves on a beautiful afternoon. And though I know I shouldn’t be looking backwards, that I should be here in this moment, I can’t help it that all of this — the garden with the drinks, and the sun, and the people in a buoyant mood — carries me back to the day I went to the house on Slaidburn Street, off the King’s Road, taken along to a party by a friend, through a low-ceilinged hallway and onto the little square of lawn at the back, where I saw John for the first time, standing in his pin-striped pants and shirtsleeves behind the dining room table they had carried out onto the grass and covered with what looked like a folded bedsheet. He was mixing gin and tonics, and after he had made me one, he stepped around that table to drink his own with me. To begin our first conversation. With such politeness and such care.

It’s a day I recall not in sadness, but in wonder at all that followed.