The Privileges

4

THERE WAS THIS CAFETERIA-STYLE restaurant on South Woodlawn called Mandel’s; in the window underneath the awning hung a small square neon sign that read, SEE YOUR FOOD! Jonas couldn’t get over it. Like only a sucker would agree to pay for food without seeing it first. He added it to a sort of honor roll he kept in his head of ill-advised, unappetizing restaurant names: Hot and Crusty, Something Fishy, A Taste of Greece, a Chinese restaurant he’d once seen from a moving car called Lung Fat, though he wasn’t sure that counted because it was obviously more a translation issue than a case of simple cluelessness. It was a list kept for his own amusement, though whenever he found a new one he couldn’t help mentioning it to Nikki, who understood why Lung Fat was funny but not why it was still just as funny the twentieth time you said it. He just had this strange, campy affection for people and places that tried hard to sell themselves but couldn’t get it right. He even ate at Mandel’s a few times during his first exam week, and thereafter as a kind of exam-week tradition, wanting to do his part to keep them going despite their entrepreneurial tin ear. The food wasn’t terrible. Filling, for damn sure. And you did, in fact, get to see it there on the steam table before you ordered it.

Mandel’s was dirt cheap and near campus and so it wasn’t like other UChicago students didn’t eat there too, but Jonas never told any of his friends about it or invited anyone along with him because he thought it would probably come off as slumming, even though it wasn’t. As if he should have been eating at Morton’s every night, as an undergraduate, just because he could afford to. People had weird ideas about money. Like not spending it was condescending somehow. Like being rich meant acting rich, whatever that entailed, and if you didn’t live the way you could live every moment of the day, you were displaying a kind of reverse pretension. Or trying to pass as normal when you weren’t. He wasn’t trying to pass as anything. It was probably true that he’d been naïve about the degree to which he could reinvent himself by leaving home and going away to school. It wasn’t like he’d changed his name or anything. People started to figure out who he was within about the first week; after that, it wasn’t so much that they treated him differently, it was that they made a great point of not treating him differently. Occasionally someone would want to pick some sort of Marxist fight with him, but it didn’t interest him because he wasn’t even involved enough to feel guilty about it. He and his father had never in their lives had one single conversation about, say, derivatives. It was unthinkable. No one could help what they were born into. You just had to start from zero and not let it determine who you were.

He lived off campus, but not in any great splendor or anything. A lot of undergrads lived off campus, just because the on-campus options were so dismal. When Nikki’s parents came to see the place for the first time, you could tell they were a little puzzled that it wasn’t nicer. Kind of mercenary of them, he mused later-out loud, unfortunately; he and Nikki had a fight over that remark that nearly undid the whole arrangement. She was four years older than Jonas-already in grad school-and he supposed that in the absence of any obvious gold-digging motive, her folks couldn’t figure out what she saw in him. It was pretty disgusting, actually. Not least because they were so pleased to refer to themselves as a couple of old hippies.

He and Nikki met at the Art Institute, though it wasn’t quite as cute as it sounded, since Jonas was there on a field trip. Actually, it was more like an anti-field trip, for a course on Art Brut taught by Lawrence Agnew, a famously charismatic lunatic at UChicago whose intensity Jonas at that point still considered mostly laughable, but with whom he’d since taken three other courses, every undergraduate course Agnew offered. Nikki was a TA in that Art Brut course; he’d seen her before, in the darkened lecture hall where Agnew worked himself into a frenzy over slide projections (the informal record between slide changes was thirty-two minutes), but he’d never spoken to her until that day. She was the subject of a lot of male speculation in that class, with a face made up of perfectly harmonized eccentricities: freckles, an overbite, a mannish brow, long black hair that was never held back in any way, so that whenever she leaned forward to take a note, her face disappeared from view. That day at the Institute was freezing, and her strategy in response was to wear two sweaters and three shirts and a gigantic scarf and no coat. Jonas knew it was fashion at work rather than modesty but still liked to imagine the magnificence of the body that had to be buried under so many layers in order for her to be taken seriously and not incite a museum or lecture hall full of undergraduate boys. Agnew, who was only about five feet six, was lecturing invisibly from the center of a circle of about forty students, in front of a roomful of Monets.

“Was this shit ever good?” Agnew said. Not for him the reverent whisper one usually slipped into in museum galleries; where he went, the dynamics of the lecture hall went with him. “Well, it had to have something going on, because believe it or not, Monet offended people mightily in his day, at least for five minutes or so, but believe me, offending people even for five minutes is pretty damn hard to do. Harder today than it was then, but still. They literally wouldn’t let his work into the museum. And now if you go over to the gift shop which is the raison d’être of ridiculous graveyards like this one, his work is on every desk calendar and coffee mug and golf-club-head cover you see. So what is the lesson there? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not a lesson about Monet. It’s a lesson about what happens to the new in this world.”

Jonas saw Nikki standing by herself on the edge of the circle, holding a notebook but not writing in it; from where she was positioned, she could see through the doorway to the next gallery, and something in there had caught her eye. Without giving it enough thought to lose his nerve, he walked quietly over to where she stood and looked straight over her shoulder, his face quite close to her hair, to see what she saw. It was a little girl, maybe three or four, who had somehow slipped under the rope and was reaching out with her fingertips toward one of the Seurats. She didn’t touch it, though she was close enough. Some part of her was sensing the trouble she would get into. She was torturing herself. Her hand was held out in front of her in a position almost as if she were painting the picture. Jonas could feel Nikki holding her breath. Finally the girl’s mother, or teacher, or nanny, grabbed her by the collar of her coat and yanked her back outside the ropes. Far from being upset, the little girl looked almost relieved. Jonas, who’d had a fair amount of success with women in his young life even though he never really knew what to say, felt the touch of inspiration.

“I bet that was you,” he said. Startled, Nikki turned around, and then fought unsuccessfully to keep the smile off her face before finally turning back toward the invisible Agnew and pretending she had been listening to him all along.

“The Impressionists were outsiders,” Agnew said, “but they wanted in. They wanted in more than anything. This is what drove Dubuffet crazy, that kind of aspiration. He didn’t want the self-conscious new, the ambitious new. He wanted the untouched, the uninfluenced. He wanted to go back. He wanted the outsider who didn’t care-who didn’t even know-that he was an outsider. Was this a vain hope? In his own case, probably. But art history is in a lot of ways the history of failure. It takes a genius to find something truly worth failing at.”

She appeared to be paying attention, but she did not move away from Jonas, not even when the group shuffled into the next gallery and Agnew began laying into Picasso. There were probably fifteen fewer students in the group than they’d started out with; nobody cared about that, though-this wasn’t high school, you could cut whatever you felt like cutting, it was presumed to be your loss. Other than the Art Brut class, it was mostly old people in the Institute on a Tuesday morning. They glared menacingly at the point from which Agnew’s heedlessly loud opinions seemed to emanate, but they couldn’t make eye contact with him, because he was too short.

The Institute had a few Dubuffets, and they went and stared dutifully at them. Jonas didn’t find them all that convincing, but that was the really electric thing about this class: the professor was so rough on the defenseless dead artists that you wound up feeling a little sorry for them and would look more actively for some aspect of their work to like. “You can feel the effort in his effortlessness,” Agnew said, “the technique in the absence of technique. And though he’s trying to chasten or alienate or ignore his audience, he still has an audience, which is to say an anticipated reaction, and that makes all the difference. You cannot, as the expression goes, get the toothpaste back into the tube. That state of pristine ignorance Dubuffet wants to go back to? Forget it, you can never go back to it. But does that mean it doesn’t exist?”

They spent ten minutes max in the room full of Dubuffets, and then came the moment that turned Jonas from a student into an acolyte. “Now follow me,” Agnew said, and he walked back through the museum the way they had come, into the entrance gallery, and, incredibly, out the front door onto the sidewalk. The group of students and TAs, now down to about twenty in total, followed him wide-eyed into the freezing sunshine and instead of turning left toward their chartered bus, followed Agnew to the right, in the direction of a group of artists who sold their work to tourists from card tables on the sidewalk. Mostly it was cheaply framed photos or pen-and-ink sketches of Chicago landmarks, including the Institute itself. There were some Seurat knockoffs that were pretty good too. Agnew stopped in front of one particular table where a young man sat drawing on a sketch pad held down on his crossed knees. A group of pages evidently ripped from that pad was held face down on the table by a rock; their frayed edges rustled in the breeze off the lake. Agnew leaned over and rapped with his knuckles on the table; the artist looked up at him, nodded just slightly in recognition, and went back to his drawing.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Agnew said, “this is Martin Strauss. Martin lives on the South Side with his parents, and he comes here every day unless it’s raining.”

Strauss stopped drawing, but not at the mention of his name. He looked at the pad in front of him for no more than a second or two, tore the page off from the spiral binding, lifted the rock, put the page face down on top of the pile, and placed the rock on top again.

“Though Martin has no particular notion of privacy,” Agnew said, “I will honor his privacy by not discussing the specific ways in which he has been diagnosed by society as outside its norms. As a human being, we have marginalized him, but as an artist, he has no sense of himself as an outsider, or an insider for that matter, because he has no sense of what these categories mean. He has no sense of an audience at all, critical or otherwise. He simply needs to express something. Compulsion without ambition. Not only can this not be faked, it cannot be willed either. He could not stop what he is doing, or change it, or tailor it to someone else’s expectations, if he wanted to. If you are enticed by the Art Brut ideal, you have to be willing to follow it where it takes you. This is not as simple as it may sound.”

By now Jonas had made his way to the front of the pack and could see the sketches, which someone-Strauss’s mother?-had stuck in cardboard matte frames and wrapped in cellophane to protect them from the elements, that were pinned to an easel behind Strauss’s card table. They were fantastically detailed black-and-white cityscapes, but the city was not Chicago. Every inch of every sheet was filled. The details, particularly the repetitive arcs of imaginary Art Deco-style masonry on the buildings, were so hypnotic that Jonas felt, before he figured out, what was missing from each picture as a whole: a sense of perspective. There was no shade or depth to it, no vanishing point of the sort even a grade-school art class would have taught him. But it wasn’t just some technique that Strauss didn’t know. It wasn’t a picture of something, Jonas realized with a kind of shiver. It was just a picture.

Raindrops started to fall. “Nikki?” Jonas heard Agnew say, and he looked up. “How much time?”

Nikki pushed up her many sleeves to look at her watch. “None,” she said.

“Okay then,” said Agnew, “take a good look, everyone, and then meet back at the bus, please, in five minutes.” Nearly everyone headed back to the bus immediately. Other than a haircut that looked as if maybe he had done it himself in front of a mirror, and a somewhat intimidating focus, nothing about Strauss appeared all that unusual. Jonas saw Agnew fishing for his wallet in his jacket pocket. He took out a twenty and put it in a shoebox full of pens that sat on the card table not far from Strauss’s elbow. Then he lifted the rock, took the entire sheaf of face-down drawings without looking at them, and headed back to the bus. Strauss didn’t even raise his head; he just kept working.

On the bus Jonas realized that since Nikki was a TA he must already have her campus email somewhere; when he got back to his apartment he found it on the syllabus and emailed her to ask her out. Almost twenty-four hours later-which meant either a certain reluctance to cross that boundary or just that she didn’t check her email that often-she wrote back yes. It didn’t take too long before someone spotted them having lunch together somewhere, and then it was all over campus like wildfire. Undergrads who dated TAs were like rock stars, at least if the TA was as beautiful as Nikki was. It made things awkward for her in Agnew’s class, all those bold eyes on her, but by then the semester was nearly over anyway.

As the spring wound down, and the coffee shops and libraries emptied, and station wagons full of sagging boxes and laundry bags started crawling around campus, Jonas, who was falling in love a little with Nikki, or at least thought he might be, found himself resisting the idea of going back to New York that summer at all. For what? Everyone he knew would be somewhere else anyway, and if he went out to Amagansett instead, where he’d find a decent sampling of them, there was nothing there but decadence and narcissism, drugs and money and entitlement and waiting petulantly for the night. Worst of all was when people like his mother referred to it as “the country,” as in, “We can’t see you Friday night, we’re driving out to the country.” It wasn’t the fucking country. It was a game preserve for rich people. But no one would acknowledge that: they all wanted to talk about this great farm stand they’d found, or how the guy who fixed their gutters came from an old whaling family. As for his parents, Jonas had nothing against seeing them, but the reality was that he probably wouldn’t see them that much anyway: ever since they’d set up the foundation, the seam between the business day and the rest of their time had become pretty much undetectable. Evenings and weekends were always taken up with some kind of dinner or fund-raiser or ribbon cutting or whatever. Which, you know, bully for them. He just didn’t want it to turn into another summer where he watched movies all day. That was for kids; and now he had a kind of life within his reach that promised something more adult and substantial, while his peers were still mired in the habits of adolescence, mastering video games and illegally downloading movies and trying to figure out where drunk women were likely to congregate.

What he would really have liked, actually, was to keep studying. One of the things he envied about Nikki was that while he was still fulfilling various diploma requirements, she had worked hard to narrow her interests down to the point where she got to spend her whole day thinking about one thing. She’d have her master’s by the end of the upcoming year, and she was already gathering herself, psychologically at least, for the big push of her doctoral thesis, which would be about Donald Judd. During evenings spent in restaurants-nicer ones, now that school was out and Nikki was less uptight about being seen and he was more eager to impress her-Jonas learned more about boxes than he ever would have thought possible. It could get pretty rarefied, to the point of absurdity sometimes, but that only made it more admirable, like she was some sort of nun with no choice but to accept her own estrangement from the world. Also he knew that her excitement-about the art, about her work on it, about the future that work might bring-would generalize into an excitement that she would want to work off sexually once they got back home. When she really got going she would start telling him what to do to her, which aroused him almost past the point where he could stand it. He didn’t know it was possible to feel so well suited to another person, no matter how odd a match they might have looked like to others. The future, as his dad liked to say, was now.

Nikki had a research fellowship with Agnew that defrayed the cost of her tuition, and the terms of that fellowship, which were basically those of Agnew’s cheerfully expressed but iron whims, were what kept her in Chicago over the summer. Her lease, though, like a lot of student leases, ran only through June. One morning at his place Jonas inexpertly scrambled some eggs and, as he watched her eat them in the summertime light with his bedsheet wrapped around her shoulders, he suggested, a little less blithely than he meant to, that she should move in with him.

He tried to hold on to this feeling of precocious maturity when his mother took the news that he wasn’t coming home that summer rather harder than he’d expected. She even sounded like she might have been crying a little bit. Jonas wound up agreeing to let her send the jet for him so he could at least spend a week at home. It was a little jarring to be reminded how much bigger the townhouse was than the apartment where he and Nikki now chose to live. He said he was tired of going out so he and his mother sat at the dining room table and the cook, whom Jonas hadn’t met before, brought them skate in a kind of clam broth that was probably the best meal he’d had in a year. “Home cooking,” he said, and Cynthia laughed. There was something different about her appearance. At first he thought maybe she’d had some work done, but it wasn’t anything as radical as that. Probably just Botox or whatever was the equivalent du jour. He didn’t know why she thought she needed it, but he didn’t say so. She liked to say that he could talk about anything with her, but it was an expression of his love for her that he would treat a subject like growing older as off-limits. She had a lot of questions for him about Nikki, which Jonas did his best to answer without answering.

His father came in when they were eating dessert. “Look, darling, it’s our son, home from college,” she said, as she’d been saying all week every time Adam walked into a room. “You saw the OneWorld Health people today?”

“I did. For about two minutes. I really prefer it when they don’t try to be charming, actually. They’re like, we’re busy saving lives around here, just leave the money on the table and let us get back to it.”

“Really,” she said, standing up and putting her arms around him. “Personally I’m a sucker for a well-planned charm offensive.”

They kissed. “Nick and Nora up in here,” Jonas said.

April wasn’t home; she was spending the week out at the beach. Not surprising. Her boredom threshold was very low these days. He noticed that his mother would get a call on the cell every evening that wasn’t from April but seemed to be about her. Maybe a driver or one of the other Amagansett staff charged with making sure that his sister wasn’t letting anything get out of hand. He was disappointed to miss her; but it didn’t last long, because the week after he got back to Chicago she called and surprised him with the news that she was coming out there to visit.

He didn’t meet her at the airport-it hadn’t been that long since they’d seen each other, Christmas probably, though it felt like longer than that-but he waited by the window with a cup of coffee for her car to arrive. He’d called the service himself and given the driver his address, so he didn’t have to worry that she wouldn’t be able to find the place; but there was an element of uncertainty that accompanied April whenever other agendas, like airline schedules, intersected with hers. It was not unheard of for her to express her disdain for flying commercial by skipping the flight entirely in favor of another few hours in the first-class lounge. Jonas and their parents actually preferred it when she went to the lounges, though, not because they wanted to encourage her to fly drunk but because at least there were paid employees there who might help ensure that April actually boarded the plane.

When the town car rolled to a stop in front of their building’s awning a few minutes later, he was a little shocked at how she looked: almost junkie-skinny, though her eyes and her skin were pretty clear and he had warned himself not to exaggerate or overreact. She set down her bag and you could tell right away, from the gimlet eye she passed around the apartment, what she was thinking.

“Be it ever so humble,” he said.

April shrugged. “Whatever you’re into, Gandhi,” she said. “So where’s the wife?”

Jonas scowled at her as Nikki emerged from the kitchen. Nikki was blushing and her voice was pitched unnaturally high; in truth she was a little intimidated by the image of Jonas’s family and though she had professed to look forward to April’s visit, at the last moment she seemed to have lost her nerve. She carried April’s bag into the study that had been temporarily cleaned out to serve as a guest room. When she returned, she apologized for having to leave but she had a departmental conference with Agnew that started in half an hour. Jonas didn’t recall her having mentioned it before. He and April watched the door close behind her.

“I am not at all sure,” April said, “that chick likes me.”

“I think,” said Jonas, on whom this was just dawning, “she’s a little anxious that you not get the wrong idea about her.”

“What idea is that?”

“About why she’s dating me.”

“Ah. Well,” April said, leaping onto the couch, “it’s true that she’s a little young to be doing the cougar thing. Also a little hot for you. Nerd-hot, I mean. No offense.”

“You’ve never really understood that expression,” Jonas said.

“But hey, one look around this garret is enough to quell any suspicions that she’s a gold digger. Or else she’s into the long con. I’ll sit her down and ask her what her intentions are when she comes back.”

She needed a nap, she said, and then she wanted to go exploring, which he knew meant shopping; they made a plan whereby he would meet her at Roberto Cavalli at six and then take her to Frontera Grill for dinner. It was the trendiest place he could think of and he imagined Nikki might even be pleased about that but instead she texted him to say that she was feeling sick and would skip it.

“Maybe she’s afraid I’ll carry her over to the Dark Side,” April said.

“The dark side of what?”

She shrugged. “The dark side where people have fun and act their age. I’ve never in my life seen a chick as ready to get married as that one is.”

“You’re wrong,” Jonas said, blushing. “You really think she’d be dating a junior in college if she was looking for a husband?”

“Well, not your average junior. But a forty-year-old junior like yourself? Perfect. She’s in on the ground floor.” She saw the look of grim defensiveness on his face and laughed. “Dude, you remain an enigma to me. For instance that apartment. What is up with that?”

“What do you mean?”

She put her drink down disgustedly but still carefully. “Come on,” she said. “Knock it off. You know what I mean.”

She was really the only one he could talk about this with, but somehow that only made him more uncomfortable talking about it. “Why is it necessary,” he said, “to make a show of it? It’s not like I’ve taken a vow of poverty. I live a lot better than most of my friends here do. Just because I have the means to live in some penthouse, does that mean I should do it?”

“Well, yeah, it does mean that, if the alternative is pretending, even to someone you’re supposedly in love with, that you’re somebody you’re not. What, you don’t think she would like it? Don’t kid yourself.”

“Mom and Dad’s money,” he said, “is not who I am.”

“Except why shouldn’t it be? In the sense that you are one of a handful of people to whom certain experiences are open, and not taking advantage of that isn’t noble, it’s just a pose. And anyway, who are you being modest for? Who is impressed by you? It’s crazy. For instance, you’re into art now, I understand. Why don’t I see any art hanging on the walls at your place? Can’t afford it?”

“Excuse me,” he said, “if I’m trying to live a life that’s more authentic than just buying whatever catches my eye, hanging out in clubs and getting high and showing up on Page Six.”

“Please, let’s not exaggerate, I have never been on Page Six. But that’s your problem, right there, what you said. Who told you you were inauthentic? Where do you think this authenticity is waiting to be found, exactly?”

He rolled his eyes and said nothing.

“So come out with me tonight. Fuck eight hours of sleep for once in your life. Life has given you the gift of possibility, and the real arrogance is wasting it so that you can condescend to everyone else by calling them authentic. Do you even know where people go out in this so-called city?”

“No,” he said, “actually, I don’t. I have no idea. Can we talk about something else, please? How do Mom and Dad seem to you?”

She sighed; then she reached across the table and took his unfinished martini. “Mom is all up in my shit, as usual,” she said. “To be honest, they seem really happy with the whole Robin Hood gig they have going. Totally uninhibited about it. Let me tell you, there are two people with no guilt. None. I don’t know where you got it from, is my point. Maybe Dad is not your real father. Maybe Mom was having an affair with Che Guevara or something.” She pushed some food around on her plate. “Who eats dinner this early?” she said.

She was supposed to stay a week, but the next morning she was on the cell with friends in New York trying unsuccessfully to get them to come to Chicago and hang out with her, and that night she called their mother for the jet and flew home. She was very friendly and apologetic about it, and she and Nikki were actually quite sweet with each other by the time it was all over. The next morning, a delivery van buzzed them from downstairs: it turned out that before she left, April had gone to a gallery on Michigan Avenue and bought them a Picasso. It was a simple sketch of a bull’s head; when Nikki was out of earshot, Jonas idly asked one of the delivery guys if he had a receipt for it, and the amount on the receipt was sixteen thousand dollars. When they were alone again, Jonas hammered a nail into the wall above their couch and they hung the frame there and gazed at it. Nikki shook her head. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I really thought she hated me.”

The research Nikki was doing for Agnew lost what little structure it had when summer came; by the end of August their scheduled conferences in his office had devolved into meetings for lunch or coffee or even just a standing invitation to show up at his apartment on South Blackstone and have a glass of wine. It was all well above board, though; Agnew was one of the few cult professors who had no reputation for trying to get over on his grad students, and in any case Nikki never once knocked on his apartment door without finding at least two or three others, usually more-grad students, faculty colleagues, friends of mysterious art-world provenance-already lounging inside. Jonas was curious about these salons but also too self-conscious about his own youth and ignorance to want to go with her. But before long Agnew himself made a point of asking Nikki where her boyfriend-“child bride,” actually, was the expression he used-spent these afternoons and evenings while his paramour drank cheap wine and talked about art. Surely not home alone? When the teasing got to be too much for her, Nikki asked Jonas again if he would please reconsider, just for her sake, and he said yes.

The apartment itself was scruffy but large with, as Agnew said, a great view of the lake if you were willing to let someone hang you out the living room window by your ankles. Nikki came bearing a CD full of images Agnew needed to copy for one reason or another and so the two of them went straight into his study. Jonas felt like people were smirking at him a little bit and so rather than try to horn in on a conversation he acted as if he were in a museum, touring the perimeter of each room, on whose walls hung dozens of small-scale artworks in cheap stationery-store frames. He didn’t recognize any of it. Many of the drawings and paintings (anyone who’d taken Agnew’s Intro to Seeing knew his dismissive views on photography) were unsigned. In the kitchen, an odorous thicket of old wine bottles and impromptu ashtrays, Jonas got to staring at one particular sketch, framed so that the frayed edge from the spiral notebook binding was still visible, of some kind of industrial landscape that kept yielding details that made less and less sense. The sky was filled with numbers, written very carefully as if in a sequence. Just a few feet from the walls of a mysterious factory or plant-which had no doors or windows, only smokestacks-there was a scaled-down forest about the size of a traffic island, with a lake or pond in it in which birds flew underwater.

“Recognize it?” a voice said; Jonas turned, embarrassed by how close his face was to the drawing itself, and saw Agnew. And though he hadn’t recognized anything until that moment, now he did.

“It’s the guy from outside the Institute,” he said.

Agnew clapped him on the shoulder. “Good eye,” he said. “Actually, I have to ask you not to mention to any of your art-world friends that you saw this here. I am in serious Dutch with Mr. Strauss’s gallery over having this piece.”

“I have no art-world friends,” Jonas said. “What do you mean, his gallery? He has a gallery?”

Agnew explained to him, while opening another bottle of wine, that Martin Strauss, far from being Agnew’s secret, was actually quite a name in outsider-art circles, a phrase that was accompanied by a roll of Agnew’s eyes. Strauss was showing in New York and in Miami; though he was somewhere in his thirties, money from the sales of his work, which Agnew guessed might have been as much as thirty or forty thousand dollars a year, went straight to his elderly parents in their capacity as his guardians. Strauss himself had certain needs that had to be met but beyond that he had no use for the money at all. Agnew technically had given him money in exchange for this drawing-“I give him something every time I see him”-but the gallery owner considered this thievery because, he said, the artist had no way of properly valuing his own work. “You can imagine,” Agnew said, “how provocative I find that idea. So I torture this guy a little by maintaining the friendship with his client, even though I am, I suppose, legally speaking, in the wrong.”

Jonas was conscious that he was actually hunched over a little in order not to look down on his host. So-called outsider art, Agnew went on, was nowadays pretty much the sole focus of his own research, and for that matter of his interest in art, period. “And not ‘outsider’ as in ‘self-taught,’ either,” he said. “That’s one of the many problems with the influx of people like this schmuck with his gallery-in an effort to maximize their own exploitation, they broaden the definition until it becomes meaningless. So no, none of that condescending Grandma Moses folk-art bullshit. I’m interested only in the artistic expression of those whose mental or psychological circumstances lie outside what society has defined as acceptable.”

“The insane?” Jonas asked. Agnew frowned. “I try not to romanticize them,” he said, “for good or bad. Whatever they may have done to marginalize themselves is immaterial. As artists, they sit down to engage their art with absolutely no sense of a viewer, of history, of an outside world. Does that make them insane? You look at what they produce and the only proper answer to that question becomes, What’s the difference?”

Jonas had many more questions, but just then Nikki walked in and stopped short in surprise. “There you are,” she said uncertainly.

“Ah,” Agnew said, “the power couple. Listen, Nikki, there’s one of those-God, it makes my mouth hurt just having to say it-‘outsider art fair’ fiascoes in town next month, and I was going to ask if you’d go. Larry Masters will have a little booth there-Larry, that’s the dealer I was telling you about, Jonas, the one who accuses me of devaluing Martin Strauss-and so I can’t go, he hates me, he probably has some kind of court order waiting for me, actually. But why don’t the two of you go? There should actually be some great stuff there, some Wölfli, I think, some Ramirez, some Dadd. You’ll do it?”

They glanced wide-eyed at each other; then Jonas turned back to Agnew and nodded.

“Excellent. About time we got young Mr. Morey here on the payroll. Just an expression, Jonas, don’t look like that. Not that you need it, like most of these indigents. In fact, maybe you can put us on the payroll, right?”

Jonas smiled nervously. He was surprised to learn that Agnew knew who he was.

“Seriously,” Agnew said, “you’d be doing me a real favor if you’d return this. I love it, but I don’t feel like getting sued over it. Tell him who it’s from.” He took the framed Strauss down from the kitchen wall and handed it to Jonas.

“You can’t,” Jonas said without thinking. It was too extraordinary; he didn’t want to be the one to hand it over. “It’s like-I don’t know. It’s like putting a kid into foster care. There has to be some other way.”

Agnew’s eyebrows were up, though not, it seemed, in a bad way. “Well, I’m glad you like it,” he said. “But, like it or not, it is in the world, and has been assigned a value in that world, quite independent of what you or I or the artist think about that. Or can do to stop it, for that matter. Outsider art is very hot right now. I’ve been happy to hang this piece here but now it’s time for it to go, as they say, into the system.”

Jonas looked at it again. He was flushed with the awareness of Agnew’s interest in him, in what he was going to do; he wasn’t courting that interest, but still, he could feel it. Something about the drawing was too compelling to just let go of like that. It wasn’t like it spoke to him or anything. It resisted all that-you could admire it, but you had no real hope of interpreting it. It was an artifact of an unimaginable state of mind. There was no dialogue going on there, no puzzle to solve, no meaning to extract. Or, if it had a meaning, it was a meaning he had no hope of understanding.

“How much do you think he wants for it?” Jonas said.

Clubs were over, there weren’t any good ones anymore, and anyway a key component of the usual club high-getting in when you weren’t supposed to, when it was technically illegal for them to serve you, but they would serve you anyway and for free because of how you looked and because they knew who you were-was gone now that April was of age. Yet at a certain point the night always took a certain turn and the next thing you knew you were sitting in some VIP room with a bunch of people who said they were with you, paying five hundred bucks for a bottle of Ketel One while the bass throb reached you through the walls. The reason this was a bad development was that the disgust and contempt it engendered in her, directed at those around her but at herself too, left her open to longing for stronger intoxicants. And little men, older men, would pop up in her field of vision at the very moment this desire started making itself felt in her mind-as if she were tripping already, as if the world itself were some sort of Second Life dreamscape programmed to tempt her with her own wants-and once you reached that point, bitch, you were finished.

When the speed kicked in, the music dropped out of the mix for a moment and she heard as clear as a bell the voice of her friend Katie, her best friend Katie whose last name April couldn’t remember but whom she’d known and hung out with when they were in middle school. Katie went to Spence. The two girls made eye contact and screamed. “You went to Spence!” April shouted over the music, which was loud again, as if Katie might have forgotten. “Yes!” Katie said. “Yes! Six years ago!” Her math seemed wrong, but her eyes were like pinpricks and she was so happy to see April that she was crying. Where had she come from? The world got so small when you were out at night. In the shadows over Katie’s shoulder, as they hugged again, April could make out two very sketchy-looking guys sitting on the arms of Katie’s vacated chair, older guys, though they were hard to reckon in the way of shaven-headed men. The world was full of these guys, who were waiting, always waiting. Waiting for what? Well, she wasn’t an idiot, they were waiting to fuck Katie, Katie and her; they were pathetic and old and degenerate but April liked having them around for a couple of reasons, one being that the nauseating prospect of one of them being there to catch you when you fell was the only thing that kept you vigilant, and the other was that their gaze reminded you where you were, which was basically at the exact center of the fucking universe, young, hot women of privilege at the very peak of everything that was desirable, the very apex of all in life that was worth coveting. And who the hell wanted to sleep through that?

“Katie,” she said to Katie, who was talking at the same time, “that guy over there, his head looks like a fucking turtle. Who is that guy?”

“I don’t know,” Katie said. “He’s not American, though. He wants to fuck me.”

“Well we cannot let that happen!”

“I know.” Katie turned and looked right at him. “He has the best drugs, though. He likes my tattoos. He has his uses.”

The guy’s stare was reptilian. He would sit there for thirty years if he had to. “Look,” April said. “Look look look. He is a goblin. I was sent here to earth to save you from him, you fucking stoned bitch.” They hugged again. “How are we going to throw these guys off the trail?”

The answer was to pile into April’s car and have the driver take them to Scores. She called ahead for a room and set them up with lap dance after lap dance. While this one completely amazing Amazon was rubbing her tits on the turtle’s head, April and Katie motioned that they were going to the bathroom, and once they were out of there they ran stumbling out the door and piled back into April’s limo and told the driver to hit it.

They laughed and got up on their knees in the back seat to look out the rear window but then it was just the two of them in the car, and they realized they didn’t know each other particularly well and the speed was wearing off. The driver hadn’t even asked them where they were going, because he was waiting for them to figure it out. Waiting while driving. April couldn’t remember his name, but he was the best. Katie said she knew where she could get some Adder-all; probably from her own bathroom cabinet, April thought, and anyway, Adderall seemed a little low-stakes right now. “I know a guy we can call,” she said. “And he owes me a favor.” If you made a lot of friends when you went out then there was always somebody who owed you a favor. The guy’s name was Dmitri and when he called back he was, where else, in a club, so she told the nice driver to take Canal almost all the way over to the highway, and he nodded without turning around.

That was where they started in on the meth. Then it was some time later and they were on the sidewalk in the hostile sunlight and “they” no longer included Katie, whom April hadn’t seen in a while. Dmitri was there, and three other sketchy guys with accents, and two women whose job, it seemed, was to make out with each other once an hour or so to keep the others from losing interest in everything. That may not have been a joke; it wouldn’t be unlike Dmitri to have actually paid them to do it. They found a diner and ate without tasting anything, while the sketchy guys glared menacingly, to zero effect, at the disgusted cashier. April felt ashamed to be with these people she didn’t know, but they were like vampires, she was one of them now, she couldn’t just go back to the living. She looked out the window and there at the curb, unbelievably, was her driver, leaning against the side of his car, looking exhausted. She had to let him go. She wanted to tip him a few hundred bucks, but when she looked in her bag she saw that she had like thirty dollars in there, which was fucked up but true. So she called him on her cell, watching his angry face through the window, and sent him home.

Her cell had a bunch of voice mails on it but she didn’t bother with them. Some were from her mother, but she was out of town herself, so there was no stress there. Everyone was arguing over the check like a bunch of losers, not because they particularly cared but just as a symptom of their panic over coming down. “Where can we go, my love?” Dmitri said to her. One of the chicks was trying to reapply her makeup.

“Your place?” April said. “I mean, you must live somewhere, right?”

He shook his head. “Not with these pigs,” he said. “If we go there, it is just you and me. Is that what you want?”

No, it was not. “I want the festivities to go on,” she said.

“Brava. Well, in that case we need someplace big. Big and empty. Private.”

And then April had what she knew right away was a terrible idea.

“Hey,” she said loudly to the group. They were like rats, red-eyed and squabbling. “Does one of you lowlifes have a car?”

One of the lowlifes did indeed have a car; it was in Queens, though, so he and Dmitri went to get it. The others went somewhere to steal cigarettes and take a shower. April waited more than an hour for them in a Starbucks on Varick Street. Dmitri texted her every few minutes. She didn’t know what time it was, or what day it was, but the Starbucks was packed. And the strange thing, even though she wasn’t high anymore, was that the people in this fake space exhibited the most terrible intimacies-yelling into their cell phones, popping zits, putting on makeup, talking to themselves like maniacs-six inches from your face. Their conviction that you could not see or hear them was so strong that, in fact, you usually did not see or hear them. Sitting across the tiny table from April, picking at some kind of muffin, was a woman about April’s mother’s age who had unmistakably, some time in the last day or two, been punched in the eye.

They all got high in the car again and two hours later they were in Amagansett. April hit the security code and they were in. The streets were empty and when the sky darkened they didn’t see lights coming on in any of the neighboring houses.

There was a lot of alcohol in the house, which helped them avoid peaking too drastically. Their only foray outside was down to the beach at night, just to listen to the receding water and watch the stars. April felt very happy. Like being a kid: finding a hiding place in your own home. They all got briefly excited when they saw, way way down the beach, a bonfire burning in the sand; but it was freezing and they weren’t really dressed right so they didn’t go check it out. At one point April and one of the Russians-they were Russian, she’d decided-were alone in the pool house, and they decided to try to have sex, but it was pretty much a nonstarter.

When they left to drive back to the city, the last few bottles in hand, April turned to look at the place one last time and consoled herself that not a lot had gotten damaged or broken, though the whole first floor just looked vaguely grimy. Even the walls. Someone would come and clean it, though. Dmitri drove while the others tried not to fall asleep; they were still on Route 15 when Dmitri, who was trying to text someone with one hand while passing another car, hit a van traveling in the other direction. The van managed to turn a little so they didn’t hit head-on; it skidded over to the shoulder and then fell lazily and loudly onto its side.

None of them was wearing a seat belt, but Dmitri was the one who was truly fucked up. Somehow the rest of them were standing outside the ruined car now-the two chicks were wailing-and looking curiously through the driver’s-side window at Dmitri, whose head rested on the steering wheel and was turned so that you couldn’t see his face, which was probably just as well. No sirens yet. Where were they? April started to get scared. She had lots of shameful thoughts in succession: Thank God it wasn’t her car. Thank God she wasn’t driving. Still, this was not going to be good. It was all going to fall on her, because they’d all been at her place, and because who were these people, really? Hers was the only name that was going to give anybody anything to latch on to. She looked again at the door to the van, which had not moved. It said Sagaponack Nursery on it. Nursery like trees, she told herself. Not like nursery school. Suddenly she wanted so badly to be ten years old again. No more pretending now. Her own phone had been dead for days. “Who has a phone?” she asked the others, but they were like statues, like garden gnomes. “A phone!” Finally, desperate and shaking, she took two steps forward and, holding her breath, reached through the shattered window, pulled the cell phone out of Dmitri’s clenched hand, wiped it on her jacket, and called her mother.

The fair was held in the McCormick Place convention center just off Lake Shore Drive; Jonas and Nikki had to pay thirty-five bucks each just to get in. A number of galleries from all over the Midwest, and four or five from New York, had paid for and staked out square footage inside. Little pamphlets on draped card tables held one-page biographies of the artists, like trading cards for mental illness; Jonas picked up as many of them as he could find. The rule of thumb seemed to be that the farther a particular artist’s own mind had pushed him toward society’s border, the more you could charge for his work. It was somehow revolting and thrilling at the same time. A few dead outsiders had become stars, like Henry Darger or Martin Ramirez. Maybe this was no different, Jonas thought, from the way the art establishment had processed, say, Van Gogh. But everyone moving through the building’s vast warren of temporary drywall seemed so loathsome to him that it was hard to judge. He was surprised how old they were, ten or twenty years older than him at least, if you discounted the occasional baby in a stroller-smug bohemian speculators, praising everything noisily in overcompensation for the fact that they were no match for the magnificent strangeness of what hung right in front of their eyes.

He and Nikki caught a break when they stopped at Larry Masters’s booth and found that Masters himself had gone to lunch; they left the framed Strauss sketch with an indifferent gallery assistant and hurried away. Nikki had a list on an index card of particular artists Agnew wanted her to look for; he wanted to know what their work was selling for and also, more problematically, camera-phone shots of the work itself, but there were security guards here and there and Nikki, who was afraid of cops even of the rental variety, could sneak a shot only occasionally. She took copious notes, though, and collected all the pamphlets and price lists. It wasn’t really a two-person job, so Jonas just walked around following whatever caught his eye. He squeezed through a pack of reverent yuppies for a look at those great iconic deer in the work of Martin Ramirez, who had lived on the streets of LA apparently incapable of so much as a conversation and whose asylum warders at first tried to stop him from drawing on the grounds that it was unhealthy. That stuff was going for tens of thousands now. There were diagrams of nonexistent machines, maps of nonexistent places, ferociously detailed charts filled with dates and numbers in an order that you were never, ever going to divine. There was a grown man named Morton Bartlett who had spent decades photographing his own doll collection. Jonas was just about to start looking for Nikki again when he saw a group of charcoal portraits, if you could call them portraits, of people screaming. Were they screaming, though? Their mouths were open. Maybe they were just trying to speak. Their eyes were always neutral, and their necks were thin and cylindrical, like plant stalks almost. Sometimes there was a background, slight variations on what Jonas ultimately decided was a gas station, or at least looked like one; there were also some simply drawn dogs, and boxlike forms that may have been televisions, though, if so, they were never turned on. But it was the faces, the upturned open mouths, that were most ambiguous and obsessive.

The number written on a sticker beside the portraits was 12; Jonas checked the gallery pamphlet and saw prices listed but no biography of the artist, who was named Joseph Novak. When he asked the stout, short-haired woman at the card table if she could tell him anything more, she sized him up and smiled with a touch too much patience, probably, he realized, because his youth and appearance didn’t suggest that he was in a position to buy anything.

“Joseph is new to us,” said the woman; she didn’t introduce herself, but she seemed to Jonas like the gallery owner, in which case her name was Margo. “He-well, I don’t want to get into specifics, but he was in an institution for several years, in the wake of a crime he admitted to committing as a minor; like a lot of artists he really only began drawing when his freedom was taken away, but he has kept up the pace since his release.”

“So he’s still working on this series?” Jonas asked.

Margo considered how to answer. “Presumably,” she said. “I mean, ‘series’ is a word you could use. I’ve only met Joseph one time myself. These drawings came to me via a brother of his in Kenosha who had a suspicion they might be worth something. Joseph himself is-well, communication is difficult, let’s say that.”

Jonas stared at the drawings for a while longer. They had a broken, smudged line, like if you extracted the lead from a pencil and just tried to hold it in your hand. They were figurative and thus a little less grotesquely original than some of the other stuff there; still, the longer he stared at the faces, the more excitement he felt, like what he was seeing was something that had never even been looked at before. He tried to forget what little Margo had just told him about the artist himself, but that was difficult to do. A while later Nikki was walking past and spotted him. He asked her right away if the name Joseph Novak was on Agnew’s list and felt a small thrill when the answer was no. “How about you?” he said. “See anything interesting?”

“Kind of,” Nikki said. She beckoned him around the corner with one finger, to the exhibition stall right behind Margo’s. There was a good crowd there. On the wall hung an array of large, photorealistic oil portraits of an iconic-looking family, most often standing in front of what was probably their own house, staring right back at the viewer, happy and stiff-in fact, it was almost as if the paintings were portraits not of the people themselves but of photographs of them. It was easy to spot the dealer, who wore a tweed jacket and a name tag and kept touching everyone who spoke to him on the shoulder. And after a moment Jonas realized that the proud-looking family standing with their backs to the artwork, accepting the occasional congratulations-a father, a mother, and a boy who looked like he was maybe in eighth grade, wearing a DePaul University sweatshirt-was the same family represented in the paintings.

“No,” Nikki said, taking his hand. “Over there.” Jonas looked to the right of the exhibition stall, where there was a little recessed area beneath a fire-door sign, and saw a man who looked just about his age, wearing a crewneck sweater with a name tag on it and jeans and unlaced snow boots, sitting lotus-style on the floor; beside him was a worn stack of khaki-colored loose-leaf notebooks that said DePaul University on them. He had his head down and his eyes closed, and his index fingers stuck inside his ears, and his lips pressed together, as he rocked very slightly but rhythmically forward and back. “Who is that?” Jonas asked, though he saw the family resemblance right away.

April was still sound asleep when Cynthia left the house to meet with their lawyers at Debevoise. From Debevoise she went straight downtown to Marietta ’s office; Adam couldn’t get away to meet her there but they had him on speaker. It was chastening how long these meetings took-how much more there was to take into account than she’d even realized. She’d never seen Marietta so businesslike. By the time Cynthia got back home it was nearly three, and Dawn, her assistant, met her at the front door to let her know that April was still not up. God bless Dawn: even though she and April had barely met, she’d done what Edina, the housekeeper, was too scared to do and opened up April’s bedroom door every twenty minutes or so just to make sure she was still breathing, because she knew that was going to be Cynthia’s first question whether Cynthia actually asked it or not.

Her eyes adapted to the dark inside her daughter’s room and she saw April’s legs twitch in her sleep. There were snoring noises, sick-sounding but still reassuring. She closed the door again and went back to sit in the solarium. Her daughter had been sleeping for about fifteen straight hours but in a way it played into Cynthia’s desire to be able to put off talking to her until Adam was home from work. Not that she wanted April to think it was some kind of intervention or something. Hard to get up on any kind of moral high horse when she’d spent the last thirty-six hours involuntarily remembering all the times she herself had been high and in a car, as a passenger or, God help her, behind the wheel, back when she was April’s age. She wasn’t about to deliver a lecture on the subject when the fact that she was here at all was nothing more than evidence of a charmed life.

Two hours with the lawyers this morning, two hours to go over the ways in which April’s name could be kept out of any court papers and then, as a separate issue, out of the press as well. They didn’t pretend it wasn’t a crisis atmosphere; there were faces around that conference table she’d never even seen before. That was okay. That was why you kept them on retainer: for emergencies. She felt worse about all the lying she’d asked poor Dawn to do in the course of canceling all the appointments originally scheduled for today; probably some of those people hadn’t bought it and were offended now. But family trumped all other considerations. All she dared to want from this day was for her daughter to end it in better shape than she’d started it. It was beyond Cynthia, and probably beyond Adam too, to express or even to feel privately any real disappointment in either of their children. But the hard fact to get used to-the thing that Marietta kept harping on-was that the Morey family existed now on a public plane as well as a private one, and in that light something had to happen to make sure this kind of incident never took place again.

“It’s nice,” Marietta had said to her, “to have done so many favors for people in influential positions, so that they will then do this favor for you. But I’m telling you, you can go back to that well only so many times before people start to feel taken advantage of. And then the dam bursts in terms of curiosity about the Morey family, in terms of the desire to see the high brought low; and then the foundation’s work is hurt, and your name starts to get associated with things other than the good work you and Adam have started to do. People want that bubble popped, believe me. People would love nothing better than for you to turn out to be hypocrites and scumbags instead of the generous, caring family that you are. Far be it from me, as a friend or as someone technically on your payroll, to give you parenting advice. But just as a professional matter, this is something you and Adam need to get out in front of.”

Then a frightened-looking Edina was in the doorway mouthing the words “She’s up,” and a few moments later April walked heavily into the living room, in a t-shirt and Adam’s pajama bottoms, her hair everywhere, her face bloated, her eyes nearly closed. You had to see her looking her worst, Cynthia thought, in order to understand how irreducibly gorgeous she was. Cynthia didn’t stand up. “My head is pounding,” April said hoarsely. “Will you tell whats-herface to get me some Advil?” Cynthia leaned over and typed something onto the laptop on the coffee table in front of her; communication like that was all done wirelessly now. April made her way over to the couch and curled up against the arm farthest from her mother.

“Do you want anything to drink?” Cynthia said politely. “Or eat?”

“Oh my God no,” April mumbled.

Maybe it was selfish of her, but what Cynthia most wanted to hear right now was the same note of pleading, childish belief in her that she’d heard in that first phone call from the shoulder of Route 15, just to reassure her that it hadn’t all been an act, that it wasn’t just a matter of April’s knowing how to play her in order to get what she wanted: Mommy-I’m-scared, Mommy-I-need-your-help. “Dad will be home in a little while,” Cynthia said. “I spent this morning with our lawyers and basically, as it concerns you at least, in legal terms, the whole thing never happened.”

April’s face was hidden behind her hair. “Of course it didn’t,” she said weakly. “Um, is there any word on Dmitri?” Before Cynthia could ask who the hell Dmitri was, April added, “And the guy driving the van?”

Cynthia sighed. “They’re not dead,” she said, which sounded harsh but was all she really knew. “Nobody’s dead.”

“Okay,” April said.

She’d always been precocious, she’d always set herself apart. Sometime in the last couple of years she seemed to have run up against some kind of interior wall and now she spent her days and nights running into that same wall over and over again. Cynthia believed that there had to be a kind of key to the adult April somewhere, and that it was her fault for not having found it. If you were the mother it was always your fault. But it’s not too late, Cynthia told herself. There’s still time. She tried to be calm and unprovocative, but she couldn’t help herself.

“How did we get here?” she said. “I mean, I try to sort of look back and find out where I made the mistake, but I can’t.” And then, frustratingly, she started to cry-like she was the daughter, like she was the one who had been through something and needed to be comforted. “I feel like I’m losing you. How can I keep that from happening?”

“Mom, you are not going to lose me,” April said, not particularly kindly. “Please. Like there’s not enough drama here already.”

“I’m sorry, but you cannot just scare the shit out of me like that and expect me to be cool about it. I do not want that to happen again.”

“I don’t want it to happen again either,” April said.

Edina came in with the Advil and a glass of water on a tray; she placed it on the far edge of the glass-topped table and withdrew.

“That’s what gets me, actually,” April said, in a voice that wasn’t quite as sharp. “I’m pretty sure it will. Happen again. Even though I don’t want it to. I can feel myself forgetting what it feels like to feel this way.” She snorted. “Another few days and I’ll be hanging out with the same people doing the same stupid shit even though I don’t really want to. Why is that? I mean, what am I supposed to do with all my time?”

Cynthia reached out and tried to stroke April’s tangled hair, but April pulled her head away. Her kids’ moods had always had a way of swamping hers and so after ten minutes of sitting at the opposite end of the couch staring at nothing, she found herself feeling just as mad and hopeless as April did, just as stonewalled and estranged, even though in truth, outside the confines of this moment, she had never in her life felt closer to the heart of things than she did right now. She was chair of one of the top ten fastest growing charitable foundations in New York. The foundation, at Adam’s insistence, had her name on it. People brought her antipoverty initiatives of all kinds and her interest made them real, not just at home but overseas, in countries she had never seen. No more intermediaries between her desire for a better world and the world itself; all she had to do was imagine it. But even these triumphs receded like moons into a distant orbit of the fact of her child’s unhappiness. She laid her cheek on the arm of the couch and waited.

Adam found the two of them still in that position, like listing bookends, when he came home half an hour later; their expressions made it appear as if they’d fought more than they actually had. He sat down across from them and took a silent minute to try to focus. It was much harder than it should have been to stop thinking about work. The problem was that everything seemed rooted in work these days. Day and night. Everywhere he went, people begged him to take them on as investors in his hedge fund, which over the four years of its existence had put up numbers that pushed him into shamanistic territory, where people earnestly believed that he was performing a kind of magic. Old friends, total strangers-they treated even finding themselves in the same room with him as the portent of a lifetime, and some of them were the type who prided themselves on not taking no for an answer. They would lose their manners completely. Some of Adam’s junior partners tried to tell him he was insane for not traveling with security just to keep the wannabes at a respectful distance from him, but he really did not want to go that route, especially not at what were nominally social occasions. Now the fund was filing for its own IPO and that meant the news was about to break that one of its nonvoting stakeholders was the Chinese government. There was nothing wrong or underhanded about it; still, when it came to money, there was a certain threshold of size past which outsiders just reacted irrationally. But that particular freakout was still a few weeks away. He and Cyn had spoken at least ten times that day already, so there was nothing on which he needed to be brought up to date. They had a plan and now just needed to draw from each other the resolve to go through with it. He waited for April to meet his eyes.

“First of all,” he said, “Mom and I want you to know that this isn’t about the drugs. We are not going to be hypocrites about that.”

“Is it the drugs, though?” Cynthia said. “I mean, I think it has to be asked. Are you an addict, do you think?”

“Jesus,” April said. “If you had ever in your life seen an actual addict, you would know better than to ask that. I love how you guys always want to establish your street cred.”

“Okay,” Cynthia said. “It just had to be asked.”

No one said anything. Adam’s phone vibrated; after a second’s deliberation, he looked at the screen and saw that it was a call from Devon. Six months ago he’d put Devon in charge of the fund’s nascent commercial-realty speculation arm; it was the only aspect of the fund that might be said to be underperforming right now, but that would turn around. The more immediate problem was that in terms of decision-making Devon wasn’t quite the self-starter Adam had hoped and so he was getting these phone calls seven times a day. He let this one bounce to voice mail. Somewhere upstairs they heard a door open and close.

“It’s true that I would like to do less drugs than I currently do,” April said. “But that’s not the same thing.”

“I think even you have to admit,” Cynthia said, “that this was a close one. You get that, right? I mean, you have to admit that yesterday could easily have ended in some way very much worse than you sitting on the couch in your own living room getting lectured by your parents. It’s not exactly a big stretch to imagine it ending with you dead or in jail.”

“Or dead and in jail,” April said.

“Please don’t be smart,” Adam said. “There is a point to this conversation. We spent a lot of time today talking to Marietta, and what she kept stressing is that we all have to get used to a new way of thinking around here. Like it or not, this family has a name now, a profile. We have been fortunate enough to make a lot of money, which is fascinating to people, and we are in a position to use some of that money to try to do some good. Which, oddly enough, makes us all a target. There are a lot of people who do not want people like us to succeed, even when our success benefits them. Like the scorpion and the frog. They would rather see us brought down. But we are not going to be brought down. We’ve done what we can to keep the media in particular off the scent of what happened yesterday, but information like this is like water, if you’re not ultracareful it’s going to find a way out, and in order to protect both you and the good work that this family wants to continue to do, we have to take some steps. We have to be proactive.”

April started to look worried. “If you say the word ‘rehab,’” she said, “I swear to God I am going to fucking lose it.”

“Nope,” Adam said. “Better. This was Marietta ’s idea, actually. I have to go to China for ten days or so, for business and also for a little foundation work, and we have moved up that trip so that it starts the day after tomorrow. You’re coming with me. That’ll be enough time for your buddies who trashed our country place to go through the system and for us to settle with the van driver on their behalf.”

“What?” April said. “ China? Wait. If you want to just stash me somewhere, can’t I at least pick where?”

“Sorry, no. No St. Barts, no Chateau Marmont, none of your usual haunts. None of your usual friends. The whole point is to be somewhere where nobody has any idea who you are.”

“I can’t believe this,” April said. She was struggling not to cry. “You’re trying to disappear me.”

“Au contraire,” Adam said. “You will never be out of my sight. It’ll be a little father-daughter time.” His phone vibrated again. “And I’m pretty sure you will see some things you’ve never seen before. Travel broadens the mind. Anyway, it is not negotiable. Cyn, could you maybe have Dawn help with calling the consulate and all that?”

“Already taken care of,” Cynthia said.

“Mommy?” April said.

Cynthia put her palm gently underneath her daughter’s chin. “Oh, my sweetheart,” she said. “Ten days. It’s not that long.”

April stood up, stomped back into her bedroom, and slammed the door. Adam and Cynthia exchanged a look that made it permissible for them both to laugh, just for a second. “Déjà vu, or what?” Adam said.

“All of a sudden I feel ten years younger,” Cynthia smiled. But then she lost herself in staring at the closed door, and when she looked back at him she was crying again. “Seriously,” she said. “I don’t understand it. What did I do wrong?”

His cell phone vibrated again; he stood to leave the room. “You didn’t do anything wrong, my love,” he said. “She’ll figure it out. The way you grow up is you find your thing to struggle against, and, I mean, look around.” He kissed her forehead on his way past the couch. “Whatever it is, we’ve hidden it pretty well.”

The image of the presumably autistic young artist rocking on the floor with his fingers in his ears imprinted itself on Jonas, and when, a few days later, he and Nikki met Agnew in his office on campus to deliver their informal report on the fair, that, rather than the art, was the thing he found himself describing. Agnew had a way of leaning backward when he felt something interesting was being said-usually by himself-and so Jonas could tell he had not miscalculated in telling the story.

“So what do you imagine this guy was shutting out?” Agnew said.

“The whole condescending circus. The whole glorified Tupper-ware party they’re basically making out of his attempts to communicate. The profiteers. The charlatans.”

“Wrong,” Agnew said. “He would have had his hands over his ears if it was Mother Teresa talking too loud for him, or Rembrandt, or Clement Greenberg. Or his family. You’re the one making the value judgments for him. To him, noise is noise.”

Jonas nodded submissively. He felt a little naïve for romanticizing it like that.

“And as far as charlatanism goes, you’re right: outsider art is overrun by thieves and hacks and opportunists and corrupters. Which makes the difference between it and any other type of art exactly nil. Forget about them. They’re not worth getting mad at. The difference here is that the artists themselves can’t be corrupted by it. Nor can they be uncorrupted, for that matter. It’s not in them. If they’re really outsider, that is. There’s a tremendous amount of bullshit involved.”

“How do you tell what’s real and what’s not?”

“Well, anything can be forged in this world, but the total absence of self-consciousness turns out to be pretty damn hard to fake.” This for some reason made Agnew bark with laughter. “But often you just need to meet the artist. Simple as that. It’s like being one of those psychiatrists for the prosecution. I spend a lot of my time doing that now.”

On the walls of Agnew’s dark office there was no art, nor any reproductions. Instead there hung framed photographs of artists: Duchamp, Pollock, Warhol, and many others whose faces Jonas didn’t recognize. Nikki had told him about this. Apparently Agnew found actual works of art too distracting; he became so lost in staring at them, even in reproduction, that he couldn’t get done whatever work he had shut himself in his office to do. So he displayed the artists themselves, because, he liked to say, they were much easier for him to ignore.

“You could make the case,” Agnew said, “that the history of modern art is the history of artists trying to unlearn what they know. To them, the world that is made is really the only world that matters. You can work all your life to break all those connections to the known world and re-form them, but it’s never the same as not having had those connections in the first place. So in that sense it’s not hard to tell when someone’s a true artist, whether or not he considers himself one at all.”

“You have a budget,” Jonas asked, “from the department for the research you’re doing for your book? To pay for graduate assistants?” Nikki, still holding in her lap all the one-sheet artist bios from the fair she had assembled for Agnew, turned and looked at Jonas in budding surprise.

“Yes and no. The department basically lowers the tuition of the students I have working for me. It’s not like I have actual cash to distribute. But, in any case, I’ve used up my allotment and then some.”

“Would you be willing to take on another one? Off the books? I don’t mean ‘off the books,’ sorry, I just mean that no one would have to pay me anything. It’s not necessary.”

Agnew leaned back. “Well aren’t you the young man on the go,” he said.

“I could do some of this research for you. Check out some of these artists. Maybe even find new ones. I wouldn’t presume to offer you my opinion or anything, like your grad students do, but just legwork. However I could be useful to the project.”

“Why?”

Jonas cursed his own blush, just at the moment he was trying to seem a little older than he was. He was trying not to look at Nikki, whose mouth was hanging open. “Why? I just… All my requirements are done, or just about, and I haven’t found anything that interests me as much as this. It’s like something I’ve been looking for, if that makes any sense. To be honest, I’m already thinking ahead to what I want to do after next year. I think I could get a jump on a thesis this way, not that it would intersect with your work at all, I’d keep that totally separate. But it is a huge field.”

Agnew rocked in his desk chair and drummed his fingertips together in the air for what seemed to Jonas like a minute. “Can I ask you a personal question?” Agnew said.

Jonas nodded.

“I read in the paper, a few months ago, about a guy named Morey, one of those hedge-fund guys, who threw a birthday party for his wife. Rented out the New York Public Library for it. Wyclef Jean played. Those are your parents, aren’t they?”

Jonas nodded again, fidgeting a little.

“Did you go?”

“Sure. It was their anniversary, actually, not her birthday.”

“Some big one, right? Like their twenty-fifth or something?”

“Twenty-third,” Jonas said, and laughed grudgingly. “He does kind of jump the gun sometimes.”

“I have to admit,” Agnew said, “I read about how guys like that make their money, what they do all day, and I don’t grasp it at all. Alternative assets or whatever they’re called, it just bounces right off my brain. And I’m presumably not a dumb guy. But hey-people think what I do for a living is arcane.”

Jonas didn’t smile. “I know what people think about throwing a party like that,” he said, “but the thing is, all the display wasn’t for anybody else’s benefit. It was for her. That’s the way my dad thinks. They are just really in love with each other, in this kind of epic way. So I just try to focus on that. That’s the real context of everything they do-each other. The other stuff is just kind of outside the walls. Every family is bizarre from the outside in some way, right?”

But Agnew shook his head. He looked at Nikki and pointed back at Jonas with his thumb. “That’s some end-times shit, your boyfriend’s family,” he said. “That’s okay, though. It’s not possible to hold it against him, and anyway I wouldn’t, because it just makes it more interesting that he’s in here. Because this is some end-times shit too, what we’re doing. I mean, what we’re studying here, what comes after it? That desire to feed on every new expression of what it is to suffer and be human, that need to seek out what’s unfamiliar and make it familiar, it’s like a goddamn fox hunt, and over the centuries it has narrowed down to this. Should we call off the hunt? Probably, but the question is moot anyway, because the world is incapable of leaving art alone. And après nous, what? I don’t know what comes after, what kind of art, what kind of artist. I really don’t. But after all these years, you and I will be there at the end. It’s kind of thrilling, isn’t it?”

Cynthia had learned the hard way to be vigilant about giving out her cell number, but she wound up having to change it every six or eight months anyway. No matter how careful you were, inevitably you were going to start getting calls from total strangers-charities legit and otherwise, journalists, angry socialist crackpots-all of them wanting something, because when you were giving money away, people were terrifically inventive about finding you. At which point it was time to change phones again. Sometimes she’d find herself in the embarrassing position of not knowing her own contact information, but Dawn was always on top of it.

Dawn was in charge of the home phone as well. Though they’d unlisted it, that number had stayed the same for years; Cynthia just never answered it anymore. At the end of the day Dawn gave her a typed list of whatever messages had been left. They were about 95 percent junk, but Cynthia couldn’t bring herself to just change the number or disconnect it; it was too much like telling people who used to know you that they didn’t know you anymore. Adam wouldn’t have minded. The cache of things capable of troubling Adam seemed to clear itself every week or so. She was shocked, sometimes, by the things she had to remind him of, the people they’d met and places they’d visited and times they’d had together that produced a blank, apologetic look on his face when she brought them up.

On Friday afternoon, with Adam and April still in the air on their way to Shanghai, Dawn handed Cynthia the day’s list of home-phone calls and then, unusually, lingered in the door to her office while she read it. Dawn had come to work for her with the announced goal of saving up money to apply to business school; Cynthia had grown to depend on her to such a degree that she now paid her not just enough for business school but so much that business school itself would seem like too big a sacrifice. She was twenty-four, just a couple of years older than April, and scary-competent, and if she’d wanted to she could have found myriad ways to manipulate Cynthia’s obvious affection for her, but she wasn’t that type of person. Boundaries were never an issue. They talked about everything. The poor girl’s taste in men was even worse than a twenty-four-year-old’s should be, and with Dawn’s mother living with a new boyfriend in Queens and functionally out of the picture, Cynthia suffered through Dawn’s nonworking hours imagining all the mistakes a beautiful young girl like that might make.

“What?” Cynthia said quietly, looking over the list.

Dawn shook her head. “Nothing. Just wanted to see if you recognized that last name. I wasn’t sure if it was on the level. But I guess not. Sorry not to catch it.”

Cynthia’s gaze hadn’t actually made it all the way to the bottom of the page. She looked down again and saw the name Irene Ball.

“Nope,” she said. “A name like that I’d remember. Why?”

Dawn shrugged. “She said she was calling on behalf of your father. She wouldn’t say why, though. I kind of had a feeling it was bogus. She actually called three times.”

Cynthia looked down at the name again.

“I mean, this is totally something I should know, but didn’t you tell me that your father had passed away?”

“That was my stepfather.”

Dawn blanched. “I’m sorry. Oh my God. Teach me to ask personal questions.”

Cynthia glanced up at her, then reached out and squeezed her hand. “Please,” she said. “It’s me.”

Saturday morning Cynthia sat in the dining room drinking a protein shake the weekend cook had made, languishing over the paper, and staring out the window at the boat traffic on the churning East River. It was a novelty to have the house all to herself. Not that she was completely alone; there was a housekeeper moving around audibly in the master bedroom above her head, and the cook was on until four, doing prep work for a cocktail reception Cynthia was hosting the next night. It would be strange to host anything without Adam there too, but that kind of thing was happening more and more, as they had to split up to accommodate the foundation’s reach. She was about to go downstairs and read through a few grant proposals on the StairMaster when the home phone rang on the sideboard behind her. She turned to look at the caller ID, which read only, PRIVATE NAME, PRIVATE NUMBER. She pursed her lips. No one else was going to pick it up. Just before the fourth ring, which would send it to voice mail, she answered.

Irene Ball was a real person, all right. She had been keeping company-that was the expression she used-with Cynthia’s father for the last four years. Her thin, formal voice suggested she’d be about his age, at least, even if her name sounded like that of a stripper.

“Irene Ball,” Cynthia said. “And my father gave you this number?”

There was a pause. “Yes, of course,” Irene Ball said. “I wouldn’t just call out of the blue. I understand this is an awkward conversation for us to be having.”

She had stayed with him even through his illness-

“Illness?” Cynthia said. There was another pause, either shocked or decorous, but either way Cynthia, who was becoming flushed, didn’t have the patience for it. “Look, Irene,” she said, “just please go on the assumption that I don’t know what you’re talking about, all right?”

Cynthia had last seen him more than a year ago, when, unusually, he’d turned up in New York. She knew he’d been living in Florida; once or twice a year she’d transfer some money to a bank account in Naples, and at some point he would thank her politely with a note. It was hard to know how much to send him. She could have made him a millionaire if she felt like it, but since he never asked her for anything, she didn’t really know what he needed, nor what he might take offense at. When he called to say he was in the city she invited him to stay with them for a few days at least but he said he couldn’t, he said he had business to attend to. So they wound up having him over for dinner. The kids sat at the table mute and amazed. He told them stories about her childhood, and hugged them all warmly, and left, and shortly afterward, Irene now said-or maybe, it occurred to Cynthia, shortly before-he was diagnosed with liver cancer. The chemo weakened his immune system, he got pneumonia, he had a heart attack while in the hospital, the cancer turned up in his pancreas as well… long story short (there’s an expression, Cynthia thought), he had not been out of the hospital for the last month and felt quite sure he was never going to get out again at all, and in light of this, he had made a decision.

“He’s asked his doctors to stop treating him,” Irene said, “and they’ve agreed to honor that request. He’s still lucid enough to know what he’s doing, except when the pain medication kind of overwhelms him.” She was weeping now, which was moving but also confusing and inappropriate, like weeping from a TV newscaster. “I don’t think he should do it. I want him to keep fighting. He’s a wonderful man. He talks about you all the time. When he sees your name in the paper he always cuts it out and shows it to me.”

What was there to say to that? Instead of calling his child for help, he clipped her name out of the newspaper and showed it to people. “So he’s in the hospital right now, or out of it, or what?”

“There’s a hospice down here that has an opening. It’s such a nice place. It’s-”

“Where?”

“Sorry?”

“Where,” Cynthia said, her face heating up, “is here? Where is my father? I mean, like on a map?”

“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. I just assumed… My apologies. We’re in Fort Myers, Florida. I have a-”

“Is he there with you right now?”

“No,” Irene said. “He’s still in the hospital. They can’t move him until they have somewhere to move him to. I’m in our home.”

Our home! She tried to keep her emotions moored in the practical. “What’s the name of the hospital?” she asked.

“They probably won’t let you talk to him, I’m afraid. Not on the phone. He’s just awake too little of the time.”

“Why is he still there, if he doesn’t want to be there anymore?”

Irene cleared her throat. “This is a part,” she said, “a very small part, of why I’m calling. This place, it’s called Silverberg Hospice of South Florida, it’s… it’s an expensive facility.”

“Aha,” Cynthia said. She halted in her pacing and stared out the window past the Triborough, over the level expanse of Queens. When it was clear, you could stand at that window and count a dozen airplanes stratified in the sky. “Well, Irene Ball, you’ve come to the right place. It’s called Silverberg?” The cook came in the door; Cynthia made a furious scribbling motion in the air and then snapped her fingers at her, which surprised the woman visibly. “And it’s in Fort Myers. Well then. You’ve been a great help. Many thanks. Best of luck to you.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I can take over from here,” Cynthia said, leaning her forehead against the glass. “Thank you, Irene. I’m very grateful to you. I mean it.”

More dead air. “I thought,” Irene began. “I mean, maybe I didn’t explain it right. You are coming down to see him, right?”

“Of course. It’s just-well, look, I have no desire to hurt anybody’s feelings here, but since my father has never mentioned you to me, I just didn’t want to take anything for granted. I don’t want you to think that I expect there’s any obligation on your part. I’m happy to take care of whatever needs to be taken care of. That’s all I meant.”

The cook appeared with a pad and pen. Cynthia sat back down at the table and wrote the word “Silverberg,” and closed her eyes.

“Your father and I,” Irene said, sounding quite confused, “are in love with each other.”

These long silences; was this how other people, people who didn’t live in New York maybe, conducted themselves on the phone? It was harder to be polite now that there were all these arrangements to be made, so Cynthia said, “Well, I imagine we’ll see each other soon, then. Goodbye,” and hung up. Irene Ball, she thought. What a name. She was shaking so hard she had to light up a cigarette in the house. At least no one was around to scold her for it. She called Lee Memorial in Fort Myers and asked to speak to the head of the cardiac-care unit there, and while she was waiting for a call back she spoke to the director of the Silverberg Hospice, who told her that she was very sorry but there were no beds currently available. She ended the call politely but without ever quite accepting that answer, and then she ran into the living room, grabbed her laptop, found Silverberg’s annual report online, and scrolled all the way to the end of it. It was run, as she’d guessed, as a charity, and though it was a local one, the board included a couple of names she knew. She called one of them-even though it was still early, even though it was Saturday-and said as plainly as she could that she needed a favor. There was always, when it came to getting things done, a level above your level. There was always that next level to acknowledge, and to aspire to.

By the end of the afternoon her father had been transferred to the hospice by ambulance. Since Adam and April had taken the jet, she left Dawn a voice mail asking her to book a charter to Florida Monday night; there was a foundation board meeting first thing Monday at which she had to present, and anyway, she figured, why not give him a chance to settle in a little bit, get comfortable, maybe give Irene and her long silences a chance to say a private goodbye.

He was an exceptionally proud man. He’d never asked her for anything and he wasn’t about to start now that he was at his weakest. She was proud of him for that and frustrated at the same time. Why would he risk having some need of his go unmet rather than ask her to meet it? Surely there was no question in his mind that she might say no. Maybe he felt guilty. Or maybe he thought it was more considerate to spare her the facts of his weakness.

She put off trying to reach Adam because she was worried that he would want to turn right around and fly home. Too grueling, and also pointless, since the cardiac-care doc she’d spoken to estimated that her father still had several weeks to go. Jonas was in Chicago and there didn’t seem much point in pulling him away from his studies to sit at the deathbed of a man he hardly knew.

The next night was the cocktail reception, for a children’s charity the foundation had just gotten involved with called Little Red Wagon. A small affair for a few influential donors, maybe twenty people altogether. She spent a lot of time apologizing for Adam’s absence. It was depressing, working the room alone, even though this wasn’t the first time she’d done it, even though the room in question was in her own home. She felt liberated and sad at the same time. Always the same faces at these events.

Toward the end of the evening, one of the cooks came all the way into the doorway of the solarium and discreetly caught Cynthia’s eye. There was a phone call for her, which had for some reason been transferred to the kitchen; she took it in there, while all the servers turned their backs and acted soundlessly busy. Remarkably, it was Irene calling again; but before Cynthia could politely defer her, she interrupted to say that her father’s health, now that he was comfortably installed in the hospice, had taken a precipitous turn, such that rather than wait until later in the week as planned, Cynthia had better fly down there as soon as she possibly could.

There was no way, not even after Jonas shamelessly dragged his parents’ name into it, that Margo the gallery owner was going to give up any contact information for Joseph Novak. She kept telling Jonas that she had been in the business for thirty years, as if that explained anything. But then Jonas had a brainstorm: he recalled Margo’s mention, at the art fair, of the brother in Kenosha. There were a lot of Novaks in Kenosha, as it turned out, but he finally dialed the one he was looking for, and after that it was a simple negotiation. Arthur Novak didn’t care who the money came from. You could tell from the merriness in his voice that he just couldn’t have been more tickled to have stumbled into this world of rich idiots who forever needed new things to waste their money on.

When Jonas asked for his brother’s address, though, Arthur hesitated a moment. “You do know what he was locked up for, right?” he said.

The sudden caution in Arthur’s voice spooked Jonas into fearing that he might change his mind about the whole thing. “Sure,” Jonas said, “I know all about that.”

“Well then,” Arthur said, and he gave Jonas the address. Jonas didn’t mention the jail business to Nikki-she was freaked out enough as it was by his “infatuation” with Agnew and this whole notion of making him a gift, in effect, of an artist so far out on the margins that even Agnew had never heard of him.

“I’m thinking ahead,” Jonas said. “I mean I’m genuinely interested in the subject, and I’m sort of in Agnew’s favor right now for whatever reason and I want to capitalize on that. I can get a jump on a master’s thesis this way.”

“What the hell difference does it make,” she said, “how fast you do it?”

He shrugged. Maybe it was a way of closing the gap between him and her. But in the end the impulse was so strong that it didn’t really matter to him what the reason was. Two days later he rented a car and drove into Wisconsin. Nothing but brown fields and broken stalks surrounded the highway, until some strange concern would rear up out of nowhere-a liquor wholesaler, a John Deere dealership, a Church of Latter-day Saints-and then disappear in his mirror. When it got to be a reasonable hour he started dialing Novak’s phone number, but Arthur Novak had told him not to expect his brother to answer necessarily, and he didn’t. Jonas never let it go past five or six rings for fear of antagonizing him. He held the printed directions against the steering wheel with his thumb as he drove.

He was almost there-going too slowly, bent over the steering wheel to stare up at the street signs as he passed them-when his cell phone rang. “Who is this,” the voice on the other end said, “why do you keep calling me and hanging up?” and Jonas felt a chill go through him. “Your brother gave me your number,” he said. “I’m sorry to have called you so many times, I was just trying to get a hold of you. My name is-”

“Why don’t you just leave a damn message?”

A perfectly sensible question, and it both relaxed Jonas and disappointed him a little to think that he was dealing with someone a little more reasonable than he’d imagined. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. Anyway, I called because”-he saw the sign for Novak’s street out the window, but decided to circle the block a few times and keep talking-“I called because I’m, I’m someone who’s interested in art, and I’ve seen some of your drawings and I think they’re really great. And I just happen to be in town today-I live in Chicago-and I was hoping I could meet you and maybe see some more of your, of your work.”

There was a very long pause.

“Joseph?” Jonas said finally. “Are you there?”

Nothing. No way the call could have been dropped-he was only circling the block. Jonas saw the number 236 on a tattered-looking row house and realized he was right outside Novak’s door. He was starting to think he’d made a terrible mistake-not in seeking out Novak in the first place, but in the impetuous way he’d handled it. Strange to feel yourself the object of someone else’s paranoia. And here he was, staring at the artist’s windows.

“I’m hungry,” Novak said.

“What? You’re hungry? I’m kind of hungry too. Do you want to go out and eat something?”

Silence.

“Or do you want me to bring some food,” Jonas said, “when I come over?”

“Arby’s?” Novak said-a little softly, but sounding more interested now.

“Sure,” Jonas said. “I’ll get some stuff from Arby’s and come over. Is there an Arby’s near where you live?”

Novak hung up. Jonas rolled his window down, looking for someone on the street he could ask where the Arby’s was. But the streets were pretty empty this time of day, unless maybe they were like this all day. He could sort of see it from Novak’s point of view: if the voice knows where I live, then why wouldn’t it know where the Arby’s is?

Dawn chartered a plane from Teterboro and rode along in the limo; poor thing, she was constantly tearing up-mostly out of a kind of terrified remorse that she had almost screened out a call that came from her boss’s father’s deathbed, but also because she had lost her own father to cancer when she was in high school. In the limo she asked, in a tone that was businesslike yet tinged with hope, whether Cynthia needed her to come to Florida. Cynthia put her hand on Dawn’s discomposed face and told her that her only job, for the next day or two or however long it would be, was to apologize convincingly on her boss’s behalf to the dozens of people whose appointments to see her would now have to be postponed indefinitely-an easy enough job if Dawn had been free to explain what it was that had called her away, but Cynthia, for privacy’s sake, had asked her to please come up with a different story.

The plane was still being fueled when they got there, so the limo sat on the tarmac for a while. The horizon was just starting to lighten. Dawn fell asleep against her shoulder. Cynthia saw the pilot pass bleary-eyed in front of their windshield, trying to button down his collar with one hand while holding a Diet Coke.

It would have been nice to have her family around her now, but their pursuits were spread all over the world, and so she sat in the main cabin alone, save for an attendant who mostly tried to stay out of her sightline behind the bulkhead. Jonas wasn’t answering his cell. Maybe he was in class; anyway, she could certainly send the plane up to Chicago for him if there was any need. She’d spoken to Adam while she was packing-too emotional to calculate the time difference-and just as she’d expected he offered to fly back right away, but there was no point. The work he was doing was too important. And it sounded like her father might be dead anyway by the time Adam could get to Fort Myers from Shanghai; but she knew that if she said that out loud she would burst into tears that would cause him to fly back immediately anyway, so she settled for telling him that she loved him and would keep him posted.

She hadn’t brought anything to read, and there was too much cloud cover even for a look out the window. She supposed that this was a time when one might naturally think about the past. Up to now she’d been able to keep herself moving and thus hover above whatever it was that she should be feeling. But going over her father’s failings, their little moments of disconnected joy-this seemed too much like eulogizing him, hurrying him into the grave, and she resisted it. Instead she found herself wondering what was the last really great advance, in terms of speed, in human transportation. The jet engine? What was that, a hundred years ago? Why did it take just as long to get from New York to Florida now as it had before she was born? What kind of sense did that make? But if she was thinking of it now, chances were excellent others had already been thinking about it for a while: work was being done somewhere, somebody needed an angel.

Dawn had found her a decent hotel in Fort Myers, and Cynthia went there first to drop her bags and take a quick shower. She tried not to hurry, because hurrying seemed like bad luck somehow, or an absence of faith; her cell sat on the dresser as she changed, and she avoided staring at it just as she might have if someone were watching her. She called the concierge up to her room to tell him that she would need a car and driver on call at all times during her stay, which would be indefinite; but it turned out Dawn had called ahead and arranged for all that too. Cynthia’s driver was a man as old as her father, a Cuban named Herman with a crewcut and a neck whose folds were unevenly browned. Herman was unfailingly polite but he had a real meanness in his eye. She thought he was probably ex-military. He never spoke first. He wore a suit jacket over a short-sleeved shirt, and she imagined that when he got home after work every day, the first thing he did was throw that jacket on the floor, and his wife would pick it up and hang it for him.

Florida. It really was a blight. Maybe that’s why old people assembled here-having to leave it behind wouldn’t seem like such a bad deal. She stared out the back of the limo at the six-lane roads and the shopping plazas, the endless construction, the high walls and dimly visible golf courses, as if life on a golf course were so desirable that too direct a look at it would sear your eyes somehow. They were still in the middle of the whole car-infested hellscape-somehow she’d imagined they wouldn’t be-when she felt Herman slow down, and they turned left past a gas station with a Krispy Kreme inside it, and another two hundred yards past that was the Silverberg Hospice of South Florida.

She’d never had any reason to see the inside of a hospice before and had only a dim idea what went on in there. Partly in fear, partly out of a superstition that it was important to continue acting as if she had all the time in the world, she walked in a sort of dream languor down the long corridor to the nurses’ desk, her heart banging, and from what she could observe it was basically a hospital that didn’t smell like a hospital. Also it was quiet, and less crowded, and only one story high. Also it was staffed by people who were clearly angels of some sort, drably luminous avatars of selflessness. She was ambivalent about this. She could not be expected to integrate with these people. She was hoping that at least one of them would feel as scared and selfish and inadequate as she did, that maybe there was someone who was only working here as a condition of his community-service sentence and would form a bond with her and maybe give her a slug from the bottle he kept in his locker just to get through the day without freaking out completely. But no. Some stout woman in a nurse’s outfit that could almost have been worn as a Hawaiian shirt actually came out from behind the desk to greet her before she’d even reached the end of the hallway. Somehow the woman’s very informality was scary too, as if civility were one of the pretentious earthly comforts Cynthia was apparently supposed to have checked at the door.

“You’re Charlie’s daughter,” she said. “I could see it a mile away. I’m Marilyn.”

“Hello,” Cynthia said. She wanted to turn and run back up the hallway to Herman, to jump in the back seat of his car and see, in the rearview mirror, his disappointed frown.

“Your dad’s sleeping at the moment,” Marilyn said, “but I’ll take you in to see him. He is a charmer, that one.”

She took Cynthia’s hand and led her down the hallway; and Cynthia, a grown woman, a woman who ran a major philanthropic foundation, with a staff for both business and household, a woman who had dedicated her life to good causes all over the world, actually caught herself pulling backward slightly, like a child, on that hand as they walked through her father’s door. It was like a fantasy hospital room, like the secret room deep within a normal hospital that only the man who’d endowed it would ever be allowed to use. It was huge and well furnished, with a high, gabled ceiling where a large fan turned slowly and noiselessly. The lights were off, and the blinds were about three-quarters shut; the walls had a bluish tinge but it was too dark for her to tell whether they were actually painted blue or not. There was a dresser along one wall, on top of which was a portable stereo and a stack of CDs. At the room’s far end, in the soothing gloom that was like the gloom not deep underwater but just a foot or two below the surface, there were some monitors on either side of the bed. All of them were turned off. The bed itself seemed gigantic, proportioned like a regular-size bed would be to a child. After a minute she could make out his head lying on the pillow. There were railings on either side, and a mountainous comforter that certainly didn’t look like hospital-issue. It might have been something he’d brought from home. She wouldn’t know. It was so quiet that suddenly it struck her, as in a dream, that everyone else was just waiting for her to realize what they knew, that her father had already died. She turned around but Marilyn had left the room.

In the darkness she would have to get quite close to his face to really see it and she wasn’t prepared to do that yet. Through the blinds to the left of the bed she could just make out a small lake: plainly man-made and perfunctory-seeming, a kind of trope of serenity, in spite of which a few ducks had come to paddle in its shallows, and on a rock on its far bank a cormorant held its wings spread to dry them. The lake’s symmetry was unlovely and it seemed squeezed into a space too small for it, like the fruit of some design compromise or maybe the sentimental whim of whoever endowed this place, which the contractors had no choice but to shrug their shoulders and carry out. Marilyn came back into the room behind her carrying a jar of moisturizer and a Snapple iced tea with a straw in it.

“So that’s the last thing a lot of people see,” Cynthia whispered to her, still looking out the window.

“Who knows what they see,” she said kindly. “Anyway, your father’s friend spends a lot of time looking at it.”

And only then did Cynthia notice that to the left of the dresser there was a door-oversize, so that through it could pass a wheelchair or maybe even the great bed itself-that led to an enclosed veranda, where it would be possible, at least, to feel the breeze and the sun, and to hear something, even if it was very likely just the sound of traffic and construction. Sitting in one of the two chairs out there, smoking a cigarette, was Irene Ball. Cynthia couldn’t see much more than the back of her head, which was coiffed and blond almost to the point of whiteness. Her legs were crossed, and a huarache hung as still as an icicle from her toes.

Beyond the lake was a strip of trees probably meant to hint at forestlike depths, even though the highway was just on the other side of it. Or maybe a golf course. She thought it was the highway, though. She’d lost her bearings a little bit when they turned into the driveway.

As quietly as possible-not wanting to wake him, she told herself-Cynthia sat down in one of the chairs that had been pulled up near the head of the huge bed. It was probably there because that’s where Irene liked to sit. Her father’s mouth hung open, and when she tilted her head forward a bit she could hear the arrhythmic catch of his breath. She started to cry when she saw how he looked: starving, thin-haired, his skin spotted. But she also felt she would be happy to stay like this for a while, if not indefinitely. She wasn’t ready to let him go, but she didn’t exactly want him to wake up either, because anyone as weak as this was very likely to need something, and how would she know what he needed? How would she know how to give it to him? She’d come all the way down here and all she was really good for was to ask for help from someone else. She wished the bed, or the room, or the place itself, was unsatisfactory in some way she could see, so that she could inquire nicely or pitch a fit or even just donate some money and cause it to be improved. But everything here seemed perfectly suited to its purpose. His old head was like some vandalized monument and she resisted the urge to reach out and stroke it. I’m here, she said silently to him. I made it in time. Outside, the smoke from Irene’s cigarette rose and rose until it blunted itself on the roof of the veranda. She hadn’t lifted it to her mouth in a while.

Holding the grease-spotted bags and balancing a stiff cardboard drink holder with several types of soda in it, Jonas rang the bell at 236 with his elbow, then rang it again, but no one came to the door and he couldn’t hear anyone moving around inside. The street behind him was narrowed by two lines of parked cars but nothing anywhere seemed to be moving. When he walked around to the side of the house to see if there was a window he might discreetly look through, he noticed a flight of exterior stairs that led to an entrance on the second floor. That had to be it, he thought; he climbed the stairs and, rather than knock with his foot, called through the door that he had brought the Arby’s. A second later the door opened inward and Jonas stepped inside.

No one was there in front of him, but he was aware of being peeked at through the wedge of space between the open door and its hinges. He took another step or two forward. Though he could see opposite him a tiny hallway that must have led to a bedroom and a bathroom, Novak’s home was mostly one square living room, which would have been dark, since it faced alleys on two sides, were it not for the fact that there were at least twice as many lamps as were necessary for a room that size. All of them were turned on. The effect was compounded by the fact that the walls were freshly painted in a kind of skull-frying white. Pieces of paper were taped over the windows. The odor inside the room was such that Jonas had to make an effort not to flinch.

Novak closed the door behind him and grabbed the food out of his hands. There was a small, grimy-looking kitchenette off to their right and Novak emptied out the bag on the counter in there, unwrapping each item and checking carefully, in the case of the sandwiches, underneath the bun. He lifted the cover off each soda, stuck his finger in it, and then poured it down the sink. Jonas cleared his throat.

“Joseph?” he said. “I’m Jonas.”

“That’s going to be confusing,” Novak said, and started eating a roast beef sandwich with some kind of cheese on it. Jonas felt his own surprise reflected in Novak’s stare and realized that each was taken aback to see how young the other one was. Novak, though he was well on his way to baldness, still looked no older than about twenty-five.

“Why did you bring all this food?” Novak said. “This is way too much. Nobody else is coming, right?”

“Just me. I just wasn’t sure what you liked, so I got a sampling.”

“A what?” Novak said. He scowled. “You’re here to steal from me.”

“No. Absolutely not. Like I said on the phone, I’m kind of a fan of yours. I went to a fair in Chicago and some of your drawings were hanging on the wall there. I thought they were really beautiful. Did you know that people as far away as Chicago think you’re a great artist?” He could hear himself talking as if Novak were a child, but how else was he supposed to handle it? How did you know what aspect of him you were speaking to?

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Novak said.

“I will pay you a lot of money for your art, if you’re willing to sell it. But I’m not going to steal anything from you. I promise. Why, do you think other people have been stealing from you?”

“Do you think other people have been stealing from you?” Novak repeated, licking his fingers.

“Like your brother, maybe?”

“Like your brother, maybe?”

He said these things that seemed sarcastic or childish or angry but the tone of his voice didn’t really change significantly, nor did the look on his face. The sandwich got the lion’s share of his attention. He wore glasses with clear plastic frames, and what hair he had was so fair as to be almost invisible, like a baby’s hair; his pale skin was still touched by acne. Most remarkably, though Jonas was uncomfortable even noticing it, was that these features sat on a head that was so small he thought he could have palmed it like a cantaloupe. Novak put a handful of french fries in his mouth and then went over to the door and locked it.

“I don’t like other people seeing my drawings,” he said.

That’s what makes them so worth seeing, Jonas thought, but instead he said, “I can understand that. It’s private. What do you usually do with a drawing after you finish it?”

“I don’t know.”

“How often does your brother come to visit?”

“I don’t know.”

Jonas stopped trying to make eye contact with him; he felt the need to make his own presence less provocative somehow. As his eyes grew used to the overpowering lighting, he thought he picked something up from the walls themselves, something other than just the shocking white. He took a few steps forward and saw, or thought he saw, the ghost of a face.

“Do you draw on the walls sometimes?” he asked. Novak reacted as if he’d been poked, jumping up and walking toward the papered-over window, lacing his fingers on top of his head. “Only sometimes,” he said. “Not that much. She just painted again. She was really mad. I only do it if I’m out of paper and can’t go out, when I’m not feeling good.”

“When you’re not feeling good?” Jonas said. No reply. “Does drawing make you feel better?” No reply. He felt like he was burying himself deeper but he had to keep going until he hit on the right question to ask. “What makes you feel like doing it?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Novak said, pacing now.

The wall drawings were an interesting idea but Jonas’s first thought was that of course there would be no way to get them out of the apartment itself. Unless he came back with a camera. But right now it was hard to imagine Novak ever letting him back in here again. “Joseph,” he said, “you know, if you like, I would be happy to give you some more paper so you don’t run out. I could buy a lot of it for you. Is that something you’d like?”

“I don’t know,” Novak said.

“You don’t know? But then you could draw all you wanted, and you wouldn’t have to worry about her”-he didn’t know who he was referring to: Novak’s landlord, he assumed, unless it was his mother-“getting mad about the walls.”

“She said she’d throw me out,” Novak said.

“Right, so this way you could keep drawing and not have to worry about that. What do you like to draw with most?”

“Sharpies,” Novak said miserably. He stopped pacing in front of the papered-over window, with his back to Jonas.

“Sharpies cost money too, right? I could get you all of those you wanted. You could draw whenever you felt like it without getting into trouble. Wouldn’t you like that?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

It could have been the “I don’t know” of a three-year-old, just a conversation stopper; anyway, Jonas chose not to hear it. “Really?” he said. “Then why do you do it?”

“I don’t know,” Novak said, and turned around, and started walking forward; and Jonas, when he saw the expression on his face, took a step back toward where he thought the door was. “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.” Their eyes met, and for one incredible moment he knew they were wishing the exact same thing at the same time, which was that Jonas had never come here; and then Jonas started a little too casually toward Novak’s front door, but before he could figure which of the two locks to unlock, something hard, harder than a fist anyway, connected with the back of his head. He had never really been hit before, not ever, his whole life long. Everything went white, as if his eyes had rolled all the way around, and it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds later that he opened his eyes and was looking up at Novak sitting on a stool in the kitchenette, eating another one of the cold Arby’s sandwiches, and looking very worried.

Time, of course, would not stand still in the way Cynthia wished it to, and so eventually the door to the veranda opened and Irene came back squinting into the darkened room. The change in light was such that Irene didn’t seem to see her right away. Cynthia didn’t say anything for fear of waking her father, though she was unsure why, when she had rushed down here precisely because his death was imminent, she should now be placing such value on his sleep. Then Irene began gesturing with her thumb, like a hitchhiker, and Cynthia understood that she was suggesting the two of them go out into the hallway.

They shook hands. Cynthia put her age at about sixty; she appeared younger than that, but she had the look of a woman who was older than she looked. She smelled like cigarettes. Her hair had that sculpted sexagenarian appearance Cynthia had become familiar with through her time on the charity circuit. She was almost a head shorter too. Her skin was amazingly fair; how could you live in Florida, Cynthia wondered, and have skin that looked like that? Did she never go outside?

“Oh, I’m so excited to finally meet you,” Irene said. “Charlie talks about you all the time. He’s so proud of you and your husband, and all the success you’ve had.” Cynthia, with no similar civility to offer in return because she had had no notion of this person’s existence until a few days ago, smiled weakly. She could see already that Irene was the sort of woman who wore every emotion, no matter how fleeting, on her face, and so it became clear that she had been anticipating a more expansive Cynthia, as if there were already a bond there, as if this were a long-awaited reunion rather than a meeting of total strangers. “Anyway,” she said, “part of the reason I wanted to talk to you out of the room is that there are some things you may want to be prepared for before Charlie wakes up.”

“What is that?” Cynthia said. There was something about this moment, about Irene’s status as an intermediary between Cynthia and what was happening to her, about the spectacular presumption of her kindness, that was threatening to reveal itself as unbearable. Irene closed her big eyes, giving Cynthia a look at her horrifying blue eye shadow, and sighed.

“So at Charlie’s request they’ve taken him off every type of medication except pain management. One of the side effects of that is that his blood pressure has dropped so low that it’s affecting the blood flow to his brain, and so he’s showing some signs of dementia. Nothing big-sometimes he doesn’t know where he is, and sometimes he thinks he’s somewhere else-but he’s in and out of it, and it can be kind of scary, especially if you’re not expecting it. He’s been sick a long time but still, it’s happened so fast. Part of it is going off the medication but really it’s amazing how fast he slipped physically once he’d made the decision to let go. Amazing to me, at least. Marilyn says that it happens that way all the time.”

She finally found the Kleenex she’d been fishing around for in her bag. Nurses and other personnel moved around them with perfect impassive grace as Irene stood there crying in the middle of the hallway. The fact that you never saw them look the least bit disconcerted or surprised should have been soothing but instead Cynthia felt a little undermined by it.

“Anyway,” Irene went on, “I’m sorry to drop that on you first thing, but when I saw you sitting there beside the bed, I didn’t want you to be too upset if it happened, or if he didn’t know right away who you were. I’m sorry for the circumstances but it really is such a privilege to meet you. I’m really looking forward to us getting to know each other. It’s never too late, right?”

“What have you signed?” Cynthia said. Her sudden curiosity about this surely could have waited, but Cynthia felt a strong, almost fearful impulse to keep things on a certain officious level. “Here at the hospice, I mean. If he’s not sure where he is they must have needed somebody to sign some consent for this or that.”

“Charlie signed everything. He was still perfectly lucid. They only stopped the medication after he was admitted.”

“It’s not that I don’t take your word for all this,” Cynthia said. “But are there any actual doctors here during the day? Or is it all just nurses and priests and whatnot? Because I wouldn’t mind speaking to an actual medical professional at this-”

But then, she saw, or rather felt, that one of the nurses who slid so unobtrusively behind her back had gone into her father’s room. “Good afternoon, Charlie,” Cynthia heard her say. “You have some visitors here. Is it okay if I turn a light on?”

Cynthia spun and hurried back through the door, just as the nurse snapped on the lamp beside the bed. She had implored herself over and over not to let herself be shocked, for her own sake and for his, but it was no use. His face was like a skull. He was wearing some kind of nightshirt, much nicer than the standard-issue hospital gown but antiquated and ridiculous all the same. His neck throbbed perceptibly, like a frog’s, and his mouth still hung open. His eyes seemed almost to protrude from his head, but then Cynthia caught on that, unlike the rest of his face, the eyes were actually expressing something; they were especially wide right now because he was trying to figure out where he was. He was staring right at her but he couldn’t figure it out.

“Your daughter is here,” the nurse said softly to him. She didn’t make it into a question, like she was trying to reorient him; it wasn’t condescending in that way. There was no more progress or recovery, in that sense, to be made. It was just about making him less terrified.

Incrementally, the light came back into his eyes. From that terrible leveling impersonality, he returned to occupy his own face, and where a minute ago he hadn’t really seemed in the room at all, now he dominated it again. He struggled to raise himself up on the pillows, and his hand started vainly toward his hair before falling back on the comforter. He licked his lips. “Hello, Sinbad,” he said hoarsely. “What do you make of all this?”

The nurse was already backing away discreetly from the head of the bed before Cynthia even realized she was moving toward it. She hadn’t heard herself called Sinbad in about thirty-five years.

There was no getting around it: he felt like a total pussy for having been taken out and disoriented so completely by one blow to the head. One’s head, he felt, should be tougher than that. He didn’t see any blunt object around and so was thinking that maybe it was only Novak’s fist after all. And Novak was a figure whom he would have naïvely estimated, as recently as a couple of hours ago, that he could take. Fear and heedlessness were all the guy was really armed with, and it turned out to be enough.

He was still a little in and out, maybe just from the shock of it all. He was sitting on Novak’s rancid couch, at the end of the living room farthest from the door. He had to squint a bit against the blazing lights. He could see that a lot of the furniture in the room had been pushed around so that it was no longer in the configuration he remembered from when he first walked through the door. Most of it was now in front of him, and one wall, the wall directly across from him, was cleared away. Novak wasn’t in the room but Jonas could hear him moving around somewhere-maybe around the corner in the kitchenette. Then he heard something else-a ringing phone-and he recognized the ring as his own, though it was coming not from his pocket where his cell phone belonged but from somewhere else in the apartment.

Novak came around the corner from the kitchenette, holding Jonas’s cell phone in front of him like a compact mirror. “Stop it,” he said. After the fourth ring it stopped. Novak put it back in his own pants pocket and left the room again.

What the fuck is happening? Jonas asked himself. He couldn’t make sense of it. He wasn’t restrained or tied down in any way. It was possible to get up, and yet he couldn’t, and he realized that what was really going on was that he was frightened, almost to the point of paralysis. The series of events that had led to his being here in this room at all was so bizarre and arbitrary that it seemed to him like if he thought about it logically enough, he could actually undo it, like snapping himself out of a dream-prove to himself that he wasn’t here, but somewhere else much more familiar.

He felt like he might throw up, but instead he went to sleep again, and when he woke up, a good portion of that blank white wall in front of him-the upper third of it or so-was covered with a picture. The whole place now smelled like Sharpies, which was sickening but still something of a blessing considering the other smells the Sharpies were masking. The picture itself was fantastically detailed, full of dogs and cats and televisions and those signature open-mouthed faces, like a Brueghel almost but without the technique, an unpatterned riot of primary industrial color, and it might have been beautiful, but Jonas really couldn’t see it.

Cynthia asked Dawn to fax her whatever she could find on the Silverberg Hospice and learned that it was one of the most popular, high-profile charities in the city, well run and financed to the gills. She was secretly hoping for a different answer because she had conceived this fantasy that she would just buy the place. It’s not like there was anything she could have improved about it. She would have given everyone there an immediate raise but she also just wanted to be able to succumb to the illusion that every single professional in the building was working for nobody else but her-the sort of selfish emotional fancy anyone with a sick parent or child might have had, the difference being that Cynthia had the resources to make such fancies real every once in a while. She wondered if her father was in the best-appointed room available and though she could have learned the answer to this question in five minutes just by walking up and down the hall-there were only about eight other rooms, and the apparent custom was for the doors to stand open-who knew what you were liable to see when you poked your head in one of them. She finally got up the nerve to ask one of the nurses; the answer was that the rooms differed only in whether or not they had the lake view. No one there ever looked at her strangely when she had a question like that.

The hospice really only employed one doctor. He made the rounds twice a day, and he did almost nothing, which Cynthia had to keep reminding herself was the goal. She overheard an exchange at the nurses’ station between the doctor and Marilyn that suggested they both belonged to the same church: that explained a lot, she said to herself, though in truth she wasn’t sure what it explained at all.

It was particularly hard to watch when they would change the sheets in her father’s bed with him still in it, the gentle but practiced way they rolled the wisp of his body from side to side, the passivity outside the reach of shame with which he submitted to it. He was similarly receptive to being shaved, though it was easier for Cynthia to understand the sensual appeal involved there. Knowing him, he’d probably splurged on the occasional professional shave back in the day. She wished she could do it for him, but there was no way she could trust herself to stay calm enough; shaving someone’s face with a razor would have been nerve-racking even under better circumstances. When watching this kind of upkeep got to be too much for her, she stood out on the veranda and stared at the artificial lake. It was easier to look at somehow when the birds were around; they didn’t seem on any kind of schedule, though. Irene didn’t join her out there, because Cynthia had told her she was allergic to cigarette smoke-a lie Irene likely recognized, but there were moments when Cynthia found she just couldn’t bear anyone’s company.

She would have brought him anything at all to eat, and they encouraged her to do that, within certain limits; his systems were closing down, and so anything too hard to digest might not bring him as much pleasure as she expected. But he had very little interest in food. Once he asked for ice cream, which was brought to him immediately, but after Cynthia fed him one spoonful, he declared himself full. He had always had a terrible sweet tooth, so maybe the whole ice cream thing was more memory than desire anyway.

“Would whipped cream help?” Irene asked him, too loudly, from over Cynthia’s shoulder. “Do you remember how I used to put whipped cream on it for you?” She spoke to him in a tone of dramatic simplicity, like she was sitting at a Ouija board. It wasn’t long before he was asleep again, his mouth open, his breaths arrhythmic. The two of them sat on opposite sides of the great bed and talked in hushed tones when they talked at all. The nurses brought them meals, after a fashion; Irene kept suggesting they give themselves a break and go out somewhere for a lunch or dinner where they could, she said earnestly, stop whispering, but Cynthia declined. Her excuse was that she was too afraid that her father would wake up and ask for her and she wouldn’t be there, which was true though not comprehensively so: whatever it was that Irene was so eager to talk about, Cynthia felt pretty certain she did not want to talk about it. Disillusionment was too bitter a prospect.

It wasn’t hard to outlast Irene: around dinnertime she would start to yawn, and a few minutes later she drove home to sleep in her own bed. Visiting hours were technically unlimited, but the nurses kept suggesting, in their seen-it-all way, that Cynthia go back to the hotel and get some real sleep too. She’d seen the nurses wheeling some kind of cot down to the far end of the corridor, for a guy she’d bumped into a few times at the nurses’ station or the soda machine who was there waiting for his wife to die of leukemia. His eyes were always red. He looked about forty and had a bald spot that was so sunburned it was peeling. He gave off absolutely no vibe that suggested he wanted to talk to Cynthia about anything, which was great, because Cynthia had no desire to talk to him either. They scared each other a little bit. If your experience was too similar to someone else’s then maybe it wasn’t worth all that you felt it was.

When she was too tired to stay awake, or when she needed a change of clothes so badly she could smell herself, she would give in and call Herman and have him drive her back to the hotel. But she couldn’t really sleep there either: it engendered despair even more quickly than the hospice, she found, because it was nowhere, and she had no one. She would turn the TV on, mute it, try to figure out what time it was in China, and then call Adam anyway.

“He’s not dead yet,” is how she would begin these calls.

“Is he comfortable?” Adam said. “I actually don’t know what I even mean by that. What about you? How are you doing?”

“I don’t know. It’s rough. Sometimes he’s fine, sometimes he’s agitated and it’s pretty hard to know what to say to him. I just want to be some kind of comfort to him but it’s all so deep inside him at this point that you can’t get at it.”

“What about this Irene? Is she any help at all? I mean presumably she’s been with him the whole time he was sick, so maybe she’s more used to the signs or whatever?”

References to the past, even the recent past, made her instantly tense, or maybe it was just lack of sleep. “You’d think,” she said. “But actually she tends to fall apart every time his condition slips the least little bit. It’s almost like she expects me to help her get through this, which is so not what I signed on for.”

“So what other-”

“I mean she’s not exactly a complex figure,” Cynthia said. “You can look at her and pretty much imagine what that whole relationship was like. You can see what a good audience she must have made. She’s like a dog. One bit of kindness and she’s so grateful she forgets about whatever happened a minute ago.”

She squeezed her eyes shut to keep from crying.

“What about the nurses, though,” Adam said. She loved him for changing the subject. “You’re getting some help from them at least, right?”

“The nurses are basically unicorns,” Cynthia said. “I feel like I should photograph them to prove that I’m not insane.”

He laughed. There followed one of those silences the presumed awkwardness of which was the difference between a conversation on the telephone and a real one. “Listen,” he said. “This may sound weird, but one thing I keep thinking about, which may or may not make you feel any better: you will not have to go through this yourself.”

“I thought I was going through this myself,” Cynthia said.

“No, I mean… I’m sorry I’m so far away. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. But what I mean is that you and I pretty much had to start over in terms of family, and we did it. We succeeded. We’re Year Zero. Those things can’t ever be taken away from you again. Who knows why he chose to live like he did, but you will never be alone in that way. Just in case you were looking at him and wondering that.”

That he would even try to articulate something like that meant more to her than whatever he was actually saying. “Baby, we didn’t just succeed, we’re a fucking multinational,” she laughed, wiping her eyes. “We’ve trademarked ourselves. It doesn’t get any more solid than us. Anyway, I am madly in love with you. Do you ever wonder what would have become of us if we hadn’t found each other?”

“Never.”

“Yeah, me neither. Listen, have you been able to get a hold of Jonas?”

“No. I left messages. You mean he doesn’t even know you’re down there?”

“Maybe not. I mean definitely not, or else he would have called. How about April? Is she right there?”

“Next door. Still sleeping. It’s not quite six A.M. here. I’ll send her your love.”

Each day the dementia was a little more pronounced. You could always tell from his eyes when he didn’t know where he was. Somehow he both recognized Cynthia and believed she was away at college; sometimes she seemed younger to him-“Do you want me to read to you?” he said to her once-but mostly he asked questions about classes, and about how soon she had to leave again, when the new semester began. Which was odd, since the two of them had never had a conversation like that for his memory to draw on. He was out of the house intermittently for as long as she could remember, and then gone for good by the time she was nine or ten; by the time she went away to school, whole years would go by where she would hear from him only via letter or the occasional, unpredictable phone call.

“So,” he said to her, “any boyfriend at present? Or boyfriends? At your age, that’s allowed, you know.”

She smiled at him. Irene sat across the bed from her, though at the moment he didn’t seem to know she was there, and Cynthia found it perversely satisfying that, for all the other woman knew, father and daughter were remembering something that had actually happened. His lips were cracked; she refilled a kind of sippy cup from the water pitcher that always sat by the bed and held it to his mouth. “A few,” she said to him, a little coquettishly, imitating the self he thought she was. “Nothing exclusive.”

“Well, you just have fun. That’s what youth is for. You don’t need me to tell you to be careful. You have your mother to do that.”

She wanted only to be generous. Still, she was worried that she was going to start holding things against him. It did get to her a bit that the past into which he was receding wasn’t what really took place, wasn’t even the past at all-more like something new. Unless this was a fantasy he had kept to himself for a long time, and now he had been stripped of the ability to maneuver between what was in his head and what was outside of it.

Several times, over those first few days, he would suddenly try, apropos of nothing, to get out of bed; he would submit when she touched his shoulder, but he kept looking around him for something on the floor, like maybe something had fallen there. The third or fourth time it happened, late at night when the two of them were alone, he passed from a mild curiosity into a state more like anger.

“Dad,” she said, “what-Dad, stop-what are you looking for?”

He looked up at her as if she were asking him to repeat something he’d already said ten times. “My shoes,” he said. “Where the hell have I put them? Do you know where they are?”

When her own panic and reluctance to restrain him physically reached the point where she started to cry, she caved in and buzzed for the night nurse, Kay, who was there in two seconds. Part of the reason she didn’t like relying on Kay was that her father seemed, in his deluded way, to be in love with her, and flirted with her ridiculously. Despite the fact that Kay was about sixty and fat as a house, Cynthia didn’t blame him. Her wry competence in even the scariest situation was fucking hot.

“Charlie, what are you worried about?” Kay said calmly. He stopped fidgeting and stared at her with his mouth open, like a baby. Cynthia felt herself starting to lose it again and went out into the corridor. Kay joined her out there about two minutes later.

“Is he all right?” Cynthia said, her voice shaking a little. “Did you give him anything?”

“He’s fine,” Kay said. “Just a little worked up. That happens. We try not to overdo it with the drugs.”

“It’s just, I don’t know what I did to set him off. He was looking for his shoes. It sounds so stupid. But that’s like the tenth time it happened. He was always kind of vain about his appearance. Maybe it’s you he wants to look all dapper for.”

Kay shook her head. “That’s not it,” she said, smoothing the front of her festive-looking uniform. “Believe it or not, that’s kind of a common one, the shoes. Or the coat, or the purse if they’re women. Had a lady in here just a few weeks ago who kept accusing me of stealing her hat.”

Cynthia looked at her, confused.

“They know,” Kay said. “On some level. They know they’re about to go on a trip somewhere, and they need to get ready. Yeah,” she said, nodding at Cynthia as she started to cry again, “I know, right? You think it’s a metaphor or something until you’ve seen it a few times.”

In Dongguan they stayed in a Western-style hotel where everyone spoke English and the food was badly cooked but still recognizable and you got a strange, xeroxed version of The New York Times slipped under your door; but in the morning when they drove out to someplace called Changan, nothing outside the bubble of the car was the least bit familiar anymore. The foundation had built a new dormitory for the people who worked at some factory-it even had the Moreys’ name on it, supposedly-and so they were all going out to have a look. One of the bodyguards had told April this part of China was called the Pearl River Delta, but that had to be some kind of marketing term because it was the butt-ugliest place she’d ever seen in her life. Nothing but concrete and smoke and claustrophobia and a sky that had no hint of blue in it anywhere. The fact that every character on every sign she saw outside the hotel was completely incomprehensible to her made her feel like she was a baby. She kept trying to hold on to her contempt for all of it but in truth the sheer strangeness was so menacing that she sat with her arms folded the whole time just to keep from shaking. The driver offered three times to give her his coat.

Adam sat beside her in the back, reading that little photocopied Times from the hotel. Past his head she could see the bodyguard, whose motorcycle traveled with them everywhere. Why? Why did no one seem freaked out about that except her? Her father had had some kind of meeting that morning, he wouldn’t say with whom. Business, he’d said. The fund, not the foundation. Whatever the hell that meant.

They hadn’t spoken much. Fear made her clam up and she was still mad at him for making her come. She wondered when they were going to get out of this district they were crawling through, which was full of these gigantic, toxic-looking factories, and then, incredibly, the driver coasted to a stop in front of one of them and turned off the car.

“Do I have to go in?” April said. “Can I just wait out here?”

Her father and their driver, who was also their interpreter whenever they got out of the car anywhere, traded amused looks, like it was all just hilarious. “Absolutely not,” her father said.

The first thing that happened was that they were given these huge headphones to wear, and she didn’t get more than ten feet through the door before she understood why. Even with the headphones on it was deafening. But at least this way your ears wouldn’t actually bleed. All the workers wore them too, and helmets and goggles and jumpsuit-like uniforms. It had to be more than a hundred degrees in there. The workers all stared at her as if she couldn’t see them too. They were girls-not all of them, but most of them-April’s own age or younger.

Some very nervous guy in a suit was giving them the tour, shouting at Adam and pointing to a clipboard, even though he must have known that there was no way to hear anything anybody said. Then a strange thing started to happen. Word began to get around the factory floor who the visitors were. April could see the workers talking to one another. One girl’s mouth fell open, as Adam stood nearby still leaning into their guide and nodding as if they were actually conversing, and then she boldly left her place on the line and skipped over to him. April froze. The Chinese girl was speaking rapidly and smiling and lowering her head. She took both of Adam’s hands in hers, and when he gave her a small smile in return and said You’re welcome, that was like a signal to the others, many of whom broke from their place on the line and came to gather around him. It was all happening in front of April not silently, exactly, but like a movie whose soundtrack has been replaced by roaring industrial static. Adam took the women’s hands and nodded courteously as if this were all the most natural thing in the world. When the wait to touch him got too long-at least one red-faced supervisor was screaming at them-another group broke away from the first and rapidly surrounded April herself. She was terrified. The girls lowered their heads and jabbered and took April’s hands in theirs, and when she looked down at one pair of hands that seemed unusually fair, almost pink, she saw that those were burn scars, and that was the last thing she remembered.

Her father was sitting in the front seat this time, twisted around to face her, and she was lying across the back. “Good morning, Sunshine,” he said. “I believe you fainted.”

Her neck hurt. Two minutes later they were back at the hotel, unless she’d fallen asleep again and it was longer than that. He decided they would just have dinner in the room that night; as she lay on the bed he called room service and ordered her a Reuben, but when it came and he lifted the silver cover off the dish, she started crying.

Adam pulled a chair closer to the foot of the bed and sat with his feet up next to hers.

“I want to go home,” April said. “I’m afraid of this place. I know I shouldn’t be, but I am. I’m scared of poor people, basically. What kind of a hideous person does that make me?”

“Poverty is scary,” Adam said. “The thought of not having what you need is terrifying. That’s why people try so hard to avoid it.”

“Okay, so, good, we avoided it. Why do you have to come here at all, then? Why isn’t it enough just to be us?”

“Your mother and I are trying to make the world a better place,” Adam said.

“Okay,” April said. “But why?”

“Well, you can’t just do nothing. Otherwise it’s like you were never here.”

He picked up half the Reuben and took a bite. “Wow,” he said. “Pretty terrible.” April took the pillow from behind her head and put it over her eyes. “But what if you do do nothing?” she said. “What if nothing is all there is for you to do? I try not to look forward but sometimes I do and it’s all these days and I have no fucking idea what to fill them with. That’s why sometimes I wonder if maybe what I’m really trying to do is, you know, shorten it.”

He stopped chewing. “Do not say that,” he said darkly. “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk from you ever again. Understand me?”

She reached under the pillow to wipe her eyes. “I’m sorry I fainted,” she said. “I’m sorry I embarrassed you. It’s just that I couldn’t handle it when they all started thanking me. Thanking me? For what? All I wanted was to be as far away from them as possible. I so don’t deserve to be thanked.”

“You are loved,” Adam said. “Okay? And if you know you’re loved then you might make a mistake once in a while but you are never in the wrong. I know this isn’t a great time for you but I have total faith that things will get better, because that’s what things do. They get better. This is something I know something about. It is, as they used to say, the American way. You may feel a little lost right now but you will know what to do. For now maybe just focus on what not to do. Like hang out with Eurotrash dealers with names like Dmitri.”

“Fine,” she said. “He’s an asshole anyway. I’ll never find someone like you and Mom did, though. You two are ridiculous.”

“Sure you will. I know it will happen. It has to. Put it this way: there’s always someone out there who can save you.”

“So then you believe in fate or whatever?” April said.

He licked his fingers. “Maybe not for everybody,” he said.

He tried to get her to eat but he couldn’t really blame her for refusing; the Reuben, like most of the American-style food they’d seen in Dongguan, was like an approximation based on photographs. Even the ingredients seemed like a best guess guided mostly by color. Instead she closed her eyes, and he sat there at the foot of the bed and watched her, and when she was asleep he got up quietly and went back to his room, leaving ajar the connecting door of their suite.

He’d had to cancel one of his two meetings today in order to stay with her, but the other one had gone well, and everything else he could think of was as it should be; still, something made him uneasy as he stood there staring out the window, which could not be opened, at the gray sky fading unpicturesquely to black. It was the hotel room itself, he decided, the sense of restless distaste these rooms always engendered in him. They made him a little crazy; sometimes he’d wake up in one and it would seriously take him a minute to remember where he was and how he’d gotten there. Having come halfway around the world, you’d think it might feel different. But this room was the same everywhere: blank and haughtily self-sufficient as if it knew it would outlive you by a thousand years. It made you reflective, which was not a state he welcomed or thought highly of, in himself or others. The best thing would have been just to go to bed, but Adam knew his body well enough to know that there was no way he would fall asleep for another hour at least. Just lying there awake in the dark would be worse.

Cyn had told him to call her anytime, but when he tried her now he got bounced straight to voice mail. She might have left her charger back in New York. He left a message at her hotel saying that he hoped her dad was still comfortable and that he loved her.

End of an era, he thought: somehow the fact that his father-in-law had been such a ghost while he was alive made it harder to imagine he’d soon be gone for real. Here was a guy about to pass from the earth having left no trace of himself at all-having lived, in fact, in such a way as to take care that he wouldn’t. It made no sense. Adam had never told Cynthia this but if that child Charlie Sikes had abandoned thirty-odd years ago had been him, the guy could have died alone in a ditch for all he cared. He would never have given him a nickel, he wouldn’t have contacted him or spoken to him or even thought about him. But Cynthia had a bigger heart than he did, in all things. “Better half” was one of those expressions people used without thinking, but she was absolutely the better half of him, and without her he felt like he knew exactly the sort of abyss he would fall into. He’d probably see Charlie there. But family civilized a man. See, this is the kind of shit I hate thinking about, Adam said to himself, and he got up and turned on the TV; but the only thing he could find in English was Larry King and he wound up muting it anyway for fear of waking April.

Outside the window the whole panorama of squared-off roof-tops was swallowed into the grimy dark. That morning he’d gone downstairs to the lobby in shorts and a t-shirt for a run but the concierge had literally sprinted to the door to block his path and said the air quality was too bad for such an activity. Which was plausible. Or maybe the concierge just didn’t want Adam to get kidnapped or shot on his watch, or to see something an American wasn’t supposed to see. This was a ruthlessly ugly city. It was the future, though. Everybody nodded when you said that but only a few people got off their asses and acted on it.

Even inside the fund there were a few people who felt that someone in Adam’s position shouldn’t be doing business in China at all. Most of his employees thought of him, for better or worse, as apolitical, but that wasn’t really true. He was perfectly aware that what he was doing here affected many more fortunes than just his own. Money was its own system, its own language, its own governing principle. You introduced money into a situation and it released the potential in everybody. Maybe you got rich, maybe others around you got rich while you didn’t, but either way it had to be better to learn the truth about your own nature.

The room was as silent as if he’d had earplugs in and so he jumped a little bit when he heard a noise at the door: someone from the front desk was trying to slide a thick stack of what looked like fax paper into his room. He didn’t really feel up to going through it just now. He could feel himself starting to tire. Tomorrow first thing he would get out there and run through those toxic streets even if he had to lay out that concierge to do it. The more he thought about it, the more pissed he was that he’d let himself be turned back this morning. That was five days in a row now-ever since they’d left New York -with no exercise. He was in better shape than most men half his age but what people didn’t appreciate was how fragile a state it was. You had to work so hard just to maintain it: let up even for a moment and that was where time took over. He pulled up his shirt as he sat there on the bed and was able to pinch a small roll of fat between his thumb and forefinger. That was no good. He made himself a solemn promise to double his workouts the moment he got back home.

Back to the hospice at dawn, but her father was already awake. He was staring at the slowly turning ceiling fan, in something like alarm. “What?” Cynthia said. “You want it off? Are you cold?” She switched it off, but the expression on his face stayed the same. She saw his lips moving and went to lean over him at the head of the bed.

“What is that?” he said. “That is, how far away is it?”

You’d answer a question like that, and he’d nod, as if you’d made perfect sense, but then half a minute later you’d see the same look in his eye and you’d know that the question was just more substantial than any answer you could provide. The detailed aspects of himself that would resurface from time to time-the wink that used to mean he was putting you on but couldn’t possibly mean that now, or the particular clicking noise he made with his tongue when he understood something he hadn’t previously been able to figure out-were, Cynthia realized, just vestiges, tics that no longer signified what they used to but that had somehow outlived the more essential parts of him, as if he were fading away from the inside out.

“Who are those idiots?” he said. He lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the sun even though the room was darkened almost completely. “Clear the green!” he said. “For Christ’s sake!”

“Oh my God,” Irene said nervously. “There’s nothing there. You’re seeing things.” She took his hand; he jerked it away and started swinging his legs toward the side of the bed. The rails weren’t up, and Cynthia didn’t know how to operate them. The two women began trying to force him back into a prone position.

“Are you crazy?” he said to them. “It’s a shotgun start. We have to get out there! Where are my shoes?”

“Ring for the nurse,” Cynthia said to Irene, but Kay was already behind them. One look into his eyes was apparently enough to satisfy her that he was beyond the reach of her usual charms; she touched a button beside his bed, and another nurse came in holding aloft a needle.

“Oh shit,” Cynthia said. She and Irene backed out into the corridor and tried not to listen. “Shit shit shit. It’s not supposed to go like this. I mean, is it?”

“It’s just a bad moment,” Irene said, though she was shaken too. “It’s not his last. He won’t go out struggling like that. He’ll be ready.”

God, it hadn’t even occurred to her, until Irene mentioned it, that her father might be in the process of dying right now. One of the nurses came over and gently closed the door. Cynthia stared at it. “How do you know?” she said.

“The Lord won’t allow it,” Irene said. She smiled and laid her hand on Cynthia’s arm. Her expression suggested that she was trying to convey something important and soothing. Cynthia wasn’t sure whether Irene was choosing this moment to out herself as some kind of Jesus freak or whether she was just saying whatever came to mind to calm Cynthia as if they were mother and child, but either way, that hand on her arm sent a bolt through her that made her whole body stiff with revelation. Oh my God, Cynthia thought. There’s no more time. She drew her arm away as cautiously as if she were pulling an arrow out of it.

“The Lord won’t allow it?” she said. “The Lord won’t allow it. Okay.”

A few minutes later, Kay came out of her father’s room and left the door open behind her. “He’ll be sleeping for a while,” she said, her eyes moving back and forth between the two women. “We really don’t like to do that unless we have to, but as I guess you saw, he was getting very agitated. The only other option was restraining him. I’m sorry.”

Cynthia turned to Irene. “Well,” she said brightly, “it looks as if we have a few hours anyway. I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

One of the orderlies directed them to a Cracker Barrel just across I-75. Cynthia rode shotgun in Irene’s car. She didn’t know what time of day it was anymore but she ordered a huge breakfast. “Breakfast served twenty-four hours is one of the things that makes America great,” she said to Irene, who wasn’t really sure what that meant but smiled delightedly. It was the opening Irene had been waiting for, and after they ordered she began by asking Cynthia some perfectly reasonable questions about her children: how old they were, whether she carried any pictures of them, the degree to which they looked like their mother and grandfather.

“I have three grandchildren,” Irene offered. “The oldest is in the navy, living on a submarine, if you can believe that. I don’t know how he does it. My two daughters are homemakers, one in Charlotte and one all the way out in California, in Silicon Valley. Jackie has a son who would be just about your son’s age. Wouldn’t it be something if they could meet?”

Cynthia waved to the waitress and mimed drinking a cup of coffee.

“You know,” Irene said in a different tone, “I know that your father may not have been the most stable figure in your life. But some men just aren’t made that way. For what it’s worth, I know he had a lot of regrets along those lines. There are a lot of things he would have done differently.”

“Irene?” Cynthia said.

Irene gave her the look of a patient receptionist as the waitress set before them two plates so laden that food tilted over the sides.

“I do not want to talk about these things with you,” Cynthia said.

“Why not?”

“It’s past. There’s no point.”

“But it helps to talk about it. Right? I know it helps me to be able to talk about him with you.”

“It does not help. You weren’t there. You cannot insert yourself into it and honestly the thought of you talking about it at all seems kind of obscene to me.”

Irene looked stricken.

“I’ll tell you my thoughts about the past,” Cynthia said, leaning back against the plush booth. “It’s like a safe-deposit box: getting all dressed up and going downtown and having a look in there isn’t going to change what’s in it. I have very little time left with my father. The closer the end gets the more suspenseful it all is and to be honest I don’t have the time to learn anything new about you or about anybody else he might have shacked up with. I don’t have any interest in any kind of half-assed bonding experience with you, like you’re going to be my stepmother or something. And if he’d wanted things to be like that between you and me, he would have mentioned you to me back when he still could have. You know, I’ve changed my mind. It actually does help to talk about it.”

The corners of Irene’s mouth were weakening. “May I ask, then,” she said, straining to be dignified, “why we’re here?”

“Because there’s something I want to ask you, Irene, and I haven’t really known how to ask it. But as I’m sitting here, I realize that it doesn’t matter what you think of me. It doesn’t matter. So what I’ve been wanting to ask you is this: what is your endgame here? Because I’ll tell you something. I don’t know you very well, obviously, but I know him well enough to guess what kind of relationship the two of you had. He was a man who got off on being admired, and when that feeling wore off he would move on, but since you had the good fortune to be there at the end you probably think it was a love that would have lasted forever. He didn’t really live much of a life but if he had a woman in the room with him who thought he was just the shit, well, that’s all he needed to feel good about himself. He could be a little cutting sometimes, right? Pumped himself up by teaching you things and making you tell him how smart he was? And I’ll bet he had lots of good reasons not to get married whenever you brought that up. But the bottom line is you have no real legal connection to him, no obligation, and to be brutal not even an emotional relationship with him anymore, considering that he doesn’t know who you are.” She put some half-and-half in her coffee, because that was the only option on the table down here in fat country. “Do you see where I’m going with all this, Irene?”

Irene’s lips were pursed, and her face moved irregularly like a bobblehead.

“I think our interests here actually coincide,” Cynthia said. “I would imagine that you, an older woman with no visible means of support, as they used to say, are thinking that your years of devotion to this fun guy with the rich daughter, if you can hang in there until the end, deserve some recompense.”

“I beg your-”

“And I,” Cynthia went on, “I would like you to go away and let me have this little bit of time alone with him. I would like that very much. I feel like I can see a way for these desires to dovetail nicely. Can you?”

Irene’s face had gone bright red.

“It’s not about you,” Cynthia said. “You seem like a nice enough person.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“I mean, I don’t want to be rude.”

“If not now, when?” Cynthia said.

“He abandoned you,” Irene said, and then put her hand over her mouth. “I know that he was a terrible, terrible father to you. He knows it too. And he took your money. All those years. He never asked for it, but he could have refused it. He should have.”

“Au contraire. He could have had anything he asked me for.”

“I wasn’t even sure you’d come down here,” Irene said. “I really wasn’t. He said you would, but I thought that was just the way he wanted to see things. And yet you seem so in denial about it all-”

“You had fun with him, didn’t you? I can tell. It’s sad when the fun comes to an end. Somewhere in the world a woman learns that lesson every day.”

Irene closed her eyes. “I’m just trying,” she said, “to honor his wishes. I’m just trying to do what’s right. Money has never even occurred to me.”

“Well, I’m sure that’s true. Let it occur to you now. You honored his wishes. That part is done. I’m asking you to honor my wishes now.”

She began eating. It seemed as if even Irene’s hair had started to come undone as they sat there at the table, as if she were riding in a convertible or sitting uncomfortably on a boat. Into her eyes came the glaze of the rest of her life. Cynthia knew her father well enough to know exactly what he had meant to this poor woman, all the high spirits, all the promise, all the purpose implicit in taking care of someone who expected to be taken care of. But now he was on his deathbed and there were no more high spirits for Irene. Abruptly her mouth fell open, and she emitted a laugh that was more like a bark; she shrugged, with her hands in the air, and shook her head as though denying that she was even the person saying what she was about to say.

“A hundred thousand dollars,” she said.

“Done,” Cynthia said. She reached for a napkin and pulled a pen out of her bag. “I’m going to give you a number to call. Call it tomorrow. There’ll be something for you to sign as well.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

Cynthia was about to insist, as she knew she should have, but something in Irene’s face advocated for mercy. Instead she looked down at the table and spun the syrups meditatively. “God, this is decadent,” she said. “Do people down here really eat like this? Boysenberry syrup? Well, okay, what the hell. When in Podunk.”

“Do you,” Irene said, and then closed her eyes and put her head in her hand. “Do you need a ride back to the hospice?”

“That is very kind of you,” Cynthia said, reaching for her cell phone. “But no.”

When Jonas’s cell phone began ringing more insistently, Novak, who could not figure out how to turn it off, came up with a novel solution: he walked briskly into the bathroom and dropped it into the toilet. Jonas saw it when he went in there. He was allowed, it seemed, to get up from the couch-nothing but fear restrained him-though whenever he did, Novak would stop drawing and stare at him, inscrutably, like a cat, until he was back in his seat again. Jonas was left unsure whether his status was that of a prisoner or hostage of some kind or whether he was simply free to leave. Novak had already demonstrated how far he was willing to go to enforce his own sense of it, though, whatever that was, and Jonas didn’t really feel up to the risk of testing him again. At least not yet.

One of the things that enervated him was the fact that he hadn’t eaten in-well, he didn’t know anymore how long he had been here. Along with the phone he had been relieved of his watch, though for some reason not his wallet or his car keys. The paper had been torn down from the windows but the shades were drawn. Novak had pulled a two-step ladder out of his bedroom, presumably for covering the parts of the wall too high for him to reach, and Jonas thought maybe that would be the time to break for the door, but he hadn’t seen him use it yet. The food from Arby’s had been sitting in the kitchen long enough to contribute to the rank, maddening airlessness, which was almost enough by itself to put you back to sleep.

Novak worked without stopping but he didn’t work particularly fast. Jonas decided, maybe too dramatically, that whatever was going to happen to him would happen once the wall drawing was finished. Of course there were other walls to fill, though filling them would require moving the furniture again. There was no look of rapture or emotion on Novak’s face as he drew; just concentration, that was all. As for what he was drawing, it was just another reconfiguration of the same shit he always drew; it was obsessive and incomprehensible and conveyed nothing, which would once have presented itself as a virtue but was frustrating now that there was something Jonas actually wanted to know. Novak’s mural was no sort of key or portal to anything. And drawing pictures didn’t seem to liberate him from his inner misery at all. If anything he looked grayer and more haggard than he had when Jonas first arrived. It was all one burden, a huge burden, but one for which Jonas had lost all capacity for empathy or even interest. It would not admit him. For the life of him he couldn’t remember why he had been so excited about coming here.

Out of nowhere there were footsteps on the stairs outside Novak’s door, and then a knock, not a friendly one. Jonas’s head lifted up like a dog’s, but Novak did not even react. His fingertips were completely browned by Sharpie ink of all colors. “Joseph?” a woman’s voice called. He went about his business, not responding but not making any effort to be silent either. “Joseph?” More knocking. “Joseph, if you are in there, I have warned you about taking garbage out. I know you don’t like to do it but you have to. I can smell it from all the way down on the sidewalk. Do you hear me?”

Novak may or may not have needed glasses but he worked with his nose almost touching the surface on which he drew. He was working now, in green, on one of the square, blank-screened, rabbit-eared TVs he favored. This particular one sat on the roof of a gas station.

“By tonight,” the woman said. “By tonight or I am calling your brother.” The footsteps receded.

Use your key, Jonas yelled in his head, use your fucking key, you idiot, and then, cursing himself for his cowardice, he jumped up and ran for the door. Just as quickly, Novak dropped his pens on the floor and cut Jonas off, just by standing between him and the exit. Jonas stopped and put his hands up in front of him, his head pounding. Novak’s leg started to shake. Tears came into his eyes. “Just please be still,” he said. “Just be still. Unless you have to pee or something, and then just use the bathroom. This isn’t my fault, you know. You think you’re so smart but you’re stupid. Do you have any idea how much trouble I’m in now?”

What exactly was she hoping might still happen? She was desperate that he not die, that was true, and she knew there was something shameful about that feeling because of its obvious defiance of what he wanted, back when he could want anything. She would never have admitted out loud to anyone how much she needed him to stay alive. But that wasn’t because there was something she had to have from him before he went. It was more that she couldn’t imagine herself in the world without him somewhere in it too. He was the living rebuke to whatever other people may have said or thought about his selfishness, his delinquency, his supposed mistreatment of her, because his adoration of her was no fake, no pose. He knew how to do it, and to make her feel it, from afar. He believed in her self-sufficiency. She adored him too. Everything was good between them, but she needed him alive in order to prove that.

So as bad off as he was, it was agony for her to watch him slip even farther. In his sleep his breathing degraded into a terrible sort of rasp: she’d heard the phrase “death rattle” before and at first assumed that this was it, but then maybe not, because he woke up again. He hadn’t spoken in a day. She took over from the nurse the task of balming his lips, which were cracked all the time, because he no longer had the wherewithal even to lick them.

Still, when she would start awake in the chair by the head of his bed, or when she would rush in from the veranda overlooking the phony lake because she thought she’d heard a noise, she tortured herself with the thought that he had said something and she’d missed it.

She stopped going back to the hotel. She called the front desk to make sure Herman would continue on a 24/7 retainer, with whatever increase in pay that necessitated. It was silly but without Herman she was cut off from everything else she knew. She had no idea where the hell she was. On the other hand, maybe Marilyn the nurse could give her a ride somewhere if she needed it. Maybe they’d even have to stop off at Marilyn’s home first, on their way to wherever they were going, so Cynthia might get a glimpse of how such people lived.

Time had shrunk down to the point where its only unit of measure was each irregular breath. One night, or day, she woke up in the chair and found him staring right at her. “Sinbad?” he said. His skin was drawn taut around his skull, but the film that seemed to lay across his eyes most of the time was gone.

She sat forward. He seemed a little sweaty; she dampened the washcloth and gently patted his forehead, his temples, his cheeks. “That’s nice,” he said clearly.

Bright institutional light slanted in from the open doorway; only by looking through the half-closed louvers could she see that it was dawn. Unless that was dusk. Either way, it cast the empty lake and the man-made berm beyond it in shades of the same blue.

“Don’t cry,” her father said. But she wasn’t crying. She even put her fingers to her face to make sure. “I’m not crying, Dad,” she said to him, and smiled.

“There, there,” he said. He was looking right at her. “Take it easy. I’m right here.”

Why should her first reaction, when he would stray like this, be to try to correct him, to bring him back into the moment? What difference did it make anymore, as long as he wasn’t mad or agitated or looking for the goddamn shoes he was never going to put on again?

“Okay, Dad,” she said. “Thanks. I feel better now.”

“Good. We probably have to get to the church pretty soon. Don’t we?”

Cynthia felt his delusion pulling at her like a drowning person might pull at your ankle from under the water. What was it? He couldn’t possibly be talking about his own funeral?

“What time is it?” he asked her.

She shook her head, but she couldn’t be sure he saw, so she cleared her throat and spoke. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Well,” he said, with a bit of a rasp now, “I’m sure we have a few minutes. They can’t very well start without us, can they?”

She held the cup to his mouth and he took a sip of water. Some of it ran down his cheek, and she reached out and stopped it with her fingers before it reached the pillow.

The way to stay with him, if you didn’t understand exactly where he’d gone, was to eliminate the backdrop of time and place, forget about it, let it fade away, so that it was just the two of you standing against a blankness. So that there was only the present. This was what the two of them knew that no one else had ever understood. Everyone always wanted to know how she could forgive him, but forgiveness was a false premise. The whole idea of forgiveness presumed you were locked in the past and trying to let yourself out. She wasn’t going to drag him back in that direction, to make him explain why he’d lived as he’d lived. That wasn’t who they were. Each moment bore only on the next one and if you were going to be successful in this life, that was the plane on which you had to live. If you started going on your knees to the past, demanding something from it that it hadn’t given you the first time around, you were dead. She asked for nothing from it. Neither did he. She was proud of his lifelong refusal to give in to the pathetic narcissism of depression or remorse. He had done what he had done and there was no changing it. There was no going back. She leaned over until her mouth was close to his ear.

“I’m so tired,” she said. “Is it okay if I lie down with you here while we’re waiting?”

He stared at her, every muscle in his face gone slack; his left hand spasmed a bit, and she recognized that what he was trying to do, or thought he was doing, was patting the bed beside him.

She still didn’t know how those rails worked, so she had to climb over as if it were a fence and drop down beside him as gently as she could. She curled up with her back to him on top of the comforter, which didn’t smell that great, and listened to his even, shallow breathing. She didn’t move; he was so frail that she was afraid of hurting him. “This is your day,” she heard him say. “It’s all in front of you. What a gift to be young.” Some hours later she felt a hand on her shoulder; it was a nurse, one she hadn’t seen before, trying to wake her as gently as possible, and before she had even lifted her head she could tell from the look on the woman’s face that her father, whose weight she could still feel on the bed behind her, was gone.

What had he come here looking for? It was all forgotten now. He had a vision of himself trying to explain all this to someone-what he was doing there in the first place, what he had expected to find, and not to Nikki or Agnew either but to a total stranger who didn’t know who he was-and he felt nothing but that stranger’s disgust for the folly of it. It was all so trumped up. He had invented it for himself. It was like there was no actual heart of darkness anymore and so he had to go and build one up out of nothing, and he had done such a good job of it that maybe now he was really going to die here and wind up as just another element of the overpowering stench in which Novak somehow managed to live.

And where was that Stockholm-syndrome thing you heard about? All he felt for Novak-whom he had romanticized into a figure who suffered for his art and for his noncompliance with the jaded world and its corrosive history-was an instinctive homicidal hatred, as he would for an animal that threatened him. The guy was balls-out insane and that was all there was to it: what difference did it make, to him or to anyone else, if his drawings hung in museums or if he just drew with his own shit on the walls of some madhouse?

Novak mumbled to himself as he worked. The wall was about eight feet by eleven feet. Like a giant piece of paper, was maybe how it presented itself to him. He covered every inch of it. Horror vacui-the phrase popped into Jonas’s head, a phrase he’d once had to ID on the final in Agnew’s Art Brut class. The wall was turning into a landscape of sorts, a flat, dimensionless one, full of those same gas stations and dead TVs: whatever it was he was trying to say with those few icons, he was apparently never going to get it said. A river ran across the picture, or maybe more of a canal, since it flowed straight as a board from one side of the wall to the other. A road made of water. All kinds of people and detritus were borne along in it, some aboard rafts or boats, some swimming or maybe drowning-the ambiguous open mouths of everyone in the picture made it impossible to tell. Novak worked the way a house painter might work, strictly in terms of space, from left to right; no figure seemed more important or more difficult to him than any other. It might have been his masterpiece; at the very least it was going to get him evicted. The strongest feeling Jonas could work up about it was fear of what would happen when it was finished.

A definite knot had formed on the back of his head, right where his skull met his neck. He had touched it so often he couldn’t tell if it was still growing. Maybe it was life-threatening. He was quite sure he’d suffered a concussion at the very least: he felt like sleeping, he was not at all confident that he knew how long he’d been there, he had a headache like he’d never had before, which the blazing lights just made worse. He’d lived his whole life without ever being seriously hurt: that couldn’t be right, it seemed to him, it was too ludicrous, and yet he tried in vain to think of another time in his childhood when anything like this had happened. And just like that, there it was: the Stockholm thing, the point of identification with your captor. His whole life is stunted, Jonas thought; it has not conditioned him to survive even one day outside his own front door. Neither has mine.

His mind drifted a bit and then suddenly he was aware that Novak was lying prone on the floor, working on the last bit of white space on the wall, the lower right corner. Except he didn’t seem to be working at the moment. There was a green Sharpie still between his fingers, and Jonas waited and waited, trying to quiet his own breath, until finally the Sharpie rolled out of Novak’s hand onto the floor.

“Joseph?” he said softly. Jonas couldn’t see his face, but it made sense, certainly, that he might have been asleep. As far as Jonas knew, he hadn’t slept the whole time they’d been together, however long that was. Nor had he seen Novak take any kind of pill. Pills must have been a significant part of his regular, solitary life. Who knew how that would affect him physically. “Joseph,” he said again.

Is this really how it ends? Jonas thought. He felt like a coward and an idiot and still somehow closer to death than ever. As slowly as he could-in part because it turned out to be far more painful than he’d been ready for-he stood up from the couch. The glare from the lights was such that he cast no shadow anywhere. He took a step, and then another, at which point the floor cracked beneath him. Novak didn’t budge. It was maybe ten more steps to the door; Jonas paused a second or two between each step, telling himself not to blow it by panicking, but poised to run for it if Novak so much as rolled over. Then he was sliding the deadbolt slowly, with two hands, and then he was outside on the landing, closing the door behind him to muffle the sound of him tiptoeing down the steps, holding both railings as he did so because he was so dizzy he thought he might pitch forward and descend the hard way.

His whole head was pulsing. The car was still parked right there, just a few steps away; somehow just by tailing the car in front of him he made it back onto the highway again. When he realized his cell phone was still in Novak’s toilet, he was not all that displeased, because even though he knew Nikki would be out of her mind by now and had probably called the police, he wasn’t ready to talk to her, or to anyone. Nikki herself didn’t seem quite real to him yet. He supposed that feeling would come back, maybe when he saw her, but right now, when he tried to summon up anything more than just the image of her, he couldn’t do it.

Maybe he could have left Novak’s apartment hours ago and just didn’t realize it. Maybe Novak had forgotten he was even there. A feeling of epic embarrassment began to press down on him. He hadn’t eaten in so long he wasn’t even all that hungry anymore; when he saw a McDonald’s off the highway, he ordered a burger from the drive-thru, but a couple of miles later he pulled over to the shoulder, opened his door, and threw it up all over the side of the road.

It would have made a lot of sense to get off the highway and find a phone, or find a cop, or even just go to sleep; but he remembered hearing somewhere, maybe in a movie, that concussion victims weren’t supposed to go to sleep, and anyway all he cared about was getting home. Cars were honking at him constantly, or flashing their lights, and he didn’t know why, but they weren’t helping. Somehow he got things turned around in his mind and he thought that the home at the end of this drive was not the one he shared with Nikki but the home he had grown up in, or one of them anyway, that penthouse that overlooked the planetarium, and he was pretty sure that his parents were expecting him there. He didn’t want them to worry. He had something he needed to tell them, which was that he had finally figured them out. They had more money than anyone could ever spend-so much money that they had to hire people just to help them figure out how to give it away-and yet, rather than stop, his father worked harder than ever, making insane amounts of it, obscene amounts of it, out of thin air. It was like when people used to ask, do we really need all those nuclear missiles? How many is too many? The correct answer was that there was no such thing as too many, because it wasn’t about need, it was about feeling safe in the world, and were you ever going to feel as safe as you needed to feel? No. No. Success was a fortress at which fear constantly ate away. Whatever you might have done yesterday meant nothing: the moment you stopped to assess what you’d built, the decay set in. What you wanted most of all, from a strictly evolutionary point of view, was a short memory. And Jonas was getting there: he had already pretty well forgotten everything other than his desire to recover his rightful place in that world that was deep inside the world-the more inaccessible the better. That was his real home. He couldn’t wait. He planned on asking his parents for as much money as they would give him. The first thing he would do with it would be to get Nikki out of that dump they lived in and into some place that offered them all the advantages that were at his disposal, that had been at his disposal all along only he was too stupid and childish to appreciate it. But in order for that to work, he knew, he was first going to have to come up with some decent explanation, something more convincing than the humiliating truth, to offer Nikki when she demanded to know where the hell he had been.

I went looking for this artist but I never found him. I had the wrong address. I had an address for him but I waited and waited and he never came home. I decided to see some of the countryside. America ’s Dairyland. I drive so rarely. On the way home I got into an accident. Feel this knot on my head? On the way home I stopped in Joliet to see the house where my mother was born. On the way home I went to Pittsburgh to see my grandmother. You wouldn’t like her. I didn’t want you to feel obligated. I didn’t particularly want to go myself, but family is family. On the way home I got into an accident and decided to check into a hotel. I got carjacked. I got kidnapped and my parents paid my ransom. I checked into one of those monasteries where they won’t let you communicate with the outside world. Because I just needed some time to myself. On the way home I worried that we were getting too close. I’m leaving you. I left you but then I changed my mind and came back. Will you marry me? On the way home I drove into a ditch. I was mugged. I got lost. I went blind. I went to a bluegrass festival and shacked up with this woman I met but it was a huge mistake and I want you to forgive me. On the way home I was mugged and hit my head and got amnesia. I don’t remember anything that happened before yesterday. I found your address in my wallet. I couldn’t remember my name. I couldn’t remember your name. I still can’t. Let’s go out and get new ones. My treat.