What I Loved

"That's rot," I said. I was nearly whispering. We had turned down the long corridor that led to my room, and its emptiness unsettled me more. A soda machine glowed in the dim hallway. I didn't remember passing it earlier and wondered how I had managed to miss that large incandescent object so close to my door.

"What you fail to understand," Giles continued, "is that my work, too, has a personal side to it. William Wechsler's portrait of his son, my own M&M, Me 2, Mark the Shark, is now part of a very special tribute to my own late mother."

I decided not to speak. All I wanted was to get away from them. I wanted to throw my wracked body into my room and slam the door behind me.

"Mark and I share the same regard for our mothers. Did you know that?"

"Teddy," Mark said, "forget it" His tone was gruff.

I was looking down at the carpet. They had stopped walking and I heard a soft click. Teddy was putting a card in a door.

"This isn't my room," I said.

"No, it's ours. Ours is closer. You can stay here. We've got two beds."

I took a breath. "No, thank you," I said as Giles began to push on the door. As the door moved, I anticipated seeing a room like mine, but instead I looked through the opening and saw that something was terribly wrong. The room smelled of smoke—not cigarette smoke but of something that had been burned. From the hallway I saw only part of the room, but the carpeted floor in front of me was strewn with refuse—a room-service tray littered with cigarette butts, a half-eaten hamburger that had drooled ketchup onto the carpet. Lying beside the tray were a woman's bikini underpants and a badly burned sheet that had been crumpled into a ball. I could see the ragged brown and ocher marks left by the fire, but there were also what looked like blood spots all over it, deep red stains that closed my throat when I saw them. Lying across the crumpled sheet were the coils of a pale nylon rope and, not far from the rope, a black revolver. I'm quite sure of what I saw, although my glimpse of that bizarre still life had the quality of a hallucination even while I was looking at it.

Giles tugged on my arm. "Come on in and have a drink."

"No," I said. "I'll find my room." I dug my heels into the carpet.

"Come on, Uncle Leo," Mark whined at me.

I straightened up, moving my spine through ratcheting pain and then shook my arm loose from Mark's hand. My lips were quivering. I moved back from the door, shuffled to the other side of the hallway, and leaned against the wall for a moment before I started to lope away, but Giles leapt toward me and flung out his arm. "Just working through a few new ideas," he said, pointing into the room. I had hunched over again. I simply couldn't endure standing erect. He leaned over me and whispered, "But Professor, aren't you curious about me?" Then Giles put his fingers on my head. I could feel his hand on my scalp, felt him playing with strands of my hair, and when I looked him in the eyes, he smiled. "Have you ever thought of using a little color?" he said. I tried to shake my head, but he grabbed me on either side of my face, pressing the sides of my glasses into my skin, and then he slammed my head against the wall. I grunted with pain.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "Did I hurt you?"

Giles didn't let go of me. He continued to squeeze my head with his hands. I flailed, lifted my knee to jab him, but the motion caused new pain. I gasped and felt my knees buckle under me. I was sliding down the wall, and I panicked. Moving my eyes to Mark's face, I said his name, which came like a wail from my throat I called on him loudly and desperately, lifting my hands toward him, but he stood frozen in front of me. I couldn't read his face. In the same moment, a door opened beside me and a woman stepped out Giles pulled me upward and began to pat me tenderly. "You'll be all right," he said. "Should I call a doctor?" Then he backed quickly away from me and smiled at the woman in the doorway. As soon as he was out of the way, Mark moved toward me. He was talking fast under his breath. "Go back to your room now. I'll go home with you tomorrow. I'll meet you in the lobby at ten. I want to go home."

The woman was pretty and slender with puffy blond hair that fell into her eyes. Behind her I saw a little girl of about five years old with brown braids. She was holding her mother around the thighs.

"Is everything all right out here?" she asked.

Giles was pulling closed the door to the room, but I saw her eyes dart through, the crack for an instant. Her lips parted and then she examined Mark, who took a step backward. She looked at me. "That's not your room, is it?"

"No," I said.

"Are you sick?" she said.

"I've thrown out my back," I panted. "I need to rest, but I've had some difficulty finding my room."

"We took a wrong turn, ma'am," Giles said. He smiled warmly at her.

The woman examined Giles, her jaw locked. "Arnie!" she yelled without budging from the door.

I looked at Mark. His blue eyes met mine. He blinked. I read the blink as a yes. Yes, I will meet you tomorrow.

Arnie led me back to my room. He matched his wife, I thought, at least physically. He was young, with a strong build and an open face. As I walked and tried to control my shaking body, Arnie held my arm. I noticed that his touch was unlike either Mark's or Teddy's. In his tentative fingers, I felt his reserve toward me—that ordinary deference for another person's body that is usually taken for granted but that had been lost to me only minutes earlier. Several times he asked me if I wanted to stop and rest, but I insisted on continuing without a pause. It wasn't until he had helped me into my room and I saw my reflection in the large mirror beside the bathroom door, that I was able to interpret the extent of his kindness. My hair had been pushed to the wrong side of my head, and a piece of it was standing up like a stiff gray stalk. My hunched and twisted body had aged me terribly, turning me into a shriveled old man of at least eighty, but it was my face that shocked me. Although the features in the mirror resembled mine, I resisted claiming them. My cheeks appeared to have collapsed into my three-day beard, and my eyes, pink from exhaustion, had an expression that made made me think of the small terrified animals I had seen so often on Vermont roads in the headlights of my car. Appalled, I turned away and made an attempt to replace the inhuman stare I had seen in the mirror with a man's gaze and to thank Arnie for his kindness. He was standing near the door with his arms folded beneath the words HOLY CROSS LITTLE LEAGUE which ran across the front of his blue sweatshirt. "Are you sure you don't want a doctor or at least an ice pack or something?''

"No," I said. "I can't thank you enough."

Arnie lingered for a moment in front of the door. His eyes met mine. "Those punks were harassing you, weren't they?"

I could only nod. His pity was nearly beyond what I could bear at that moment.

"Well, good night," he said. "I hope your back's better in the morning." Then he shut the door.

I left the bathroom light on. Because I couldn't lie flat, I propped myself up with pillows and plied myself with Scotch from the minibar. That muted the worst of the pain, for a short time anyway. All night I had motion sickness. Even when the spasms in my back woke me and I remembered where I was, I felt that the bed was moving, moving against my will, and whenever I slept, I was still moving in a dream—on a plane or a boat or a train or an escalator. Waves of nausea coursed through me, and my intestines churned as though I had been poisoned. In the dreams, I boarded one vehicle after another and listened to the sound of my heart pounding like an old clock, and it wasn't until I woke that I understood that the muscle was silent. When I opened my eyes and tried to shake off that sickening illusion of movement, consciousness brought Giles's fingers to my hair and his hands tightening around my face. The humiliation burned me, and I wanted to expel the memory, to force it out of my chest and lungs, where it had lodged itself like a fire in my body. I wanted to think, to turn to what had happened and make sense of it. I began to ponder what I had seen in the room—the sheet, the rope, the gun, the leftover food. It had looked like a crime scene, but even while I was seeing it, even while I was staring into the room, I had intimated a hint of the fake. The gun might have been a toy. The blood, colored water—all of it a setup. But then Giles's touch came back to me. That had been real. A sore lump had formed at the back of my head where my skull had hit the wall.

And Mark? All night his face had come and gone before me, and I knew that his last words had given me hope. People imagine that hope has degrees, but I think not. There is hope and there is no hope. His words gave me hope, and crumpled up in that bed I heard them again and again in my mind. "I'll go home with you tomorrow.'' He had hidden that statement from Giles, and this fact opened another possible interpretation of his acts. Some part of his damaged person wanted to go home. Weak and vacillating, Mark had been infected by the stronger personality of Giles, who had an almost hypnotic power over him, but there was another place inside him, the place Bill had always insisted was there—a room where he held on to those who loved him and whom he loved. I had called out to him, and he had answered me. A tormented combination of hope and guilt carried me into the morning. I had said a terrible thing to Mark when I'd spoken to him about his father's painting. At the time, I had believed it, but I suffered from the conviction that my comparison had been monstrous. A thing should never be measured against a person. Never. I take it back, I said to him in my mind. I take it back. And then, as if it were a footnote to my thoughts, I remembered that I had read somewhere, perhaps it was in Gershom Scholem, that in Hebrew "to repent" and "to return" are the same word.

But Mark didn't come to meet me in the lobby at ten o'clock, and when I called his room, no one answered. I waited a full hour for him. The man who sat on a bench in that lobby had made Herculean efforts to look presentable. He had shaved, holding his head sideways to prevent further injury to his back. He had vigorously rubbed the stain on his pants leg with soap and water, despite the excruciating jerks the cleaning gave his spine. He had combed his hair, and when he sat down on that bench to wait, he had contorted his body into a position he imagined might look normal. He scanned the lobby. He hoped. He revised his earlier interpretation of preceding events, made another one, and then another. He deliberated on several possibilities until he lost hope and hauled his miserable body into a cab, which drove him to the airport. I felt sorry for him, because he had understood so little.

Three mornings after I returned to New York, I was moving easily around my apartment, thanks to Dr. Huyler and a drug called Relafen. At about the same time, two plainclothes detectives came to Violet's door asking for Mark. I didn't see them, but as soon as the policemen were gone, Violet came downstairs to tell me about their visit. It was nine o'clock in the morning, and Violet was wearing a long white cotton nightgown with a high neck. When I first saw her, I thought she looked a little like an old-fashioned doll. She began to talk to me, and I noticed that her voice fell into the half whisper she had used when she'd called me from the studio the day Bill had died.

"They said that they just wanted to ask him some questions. I said that Mark had been traveling with Teddy Giles and that the last place I knew he had been was Nashville. I said that he had had problems, that he might not call me at all, but if he was in touch, I would tell him they wanted to talk to him"—-Violet took a breath—"in connection with the murder of Rafael Hernandez. That was all. They didn't ask me any questions. They said 'Thank you,' and then they left They must have found his body. It's all true, Leo. Do you think I should call them and tell them what we know? I didn't say anything."

"What do we know, Violet?"

She looked confused for a moment. "We don't really know anything, do we? "

"Not about the murder." I listened to the word as I said it. So common. The word was everywhere all the time, but I didn't want it to come easily from me. I wanted it to be difficult to say, more difficult than it was.

"There's the message on Bill's machine that says Mark knows. I never erased it. Do you think he knows?"

"He said he did, but then he changed his story and said the boy was in California."

"If he knows and he stays with Giles, what does it mean?"

I shook my head.

"Is it a crime, Leo?"

"Just knowing, you mean?"

She nodded.

"I suppose it depends on how you know, if you have any real evidence. Mark might not believe the story at all. He might really think that the kid ran away..."

Violet was shaking her head back and forth. "No, Leo. Remember, Mark mentioned that two detectives were asking questions at the Finder Gallery That was when Giles left town. Isn't there some law about aiding a fugitive?"

"We don't know that there's a warrant for Giles's arrest. We don't know that the police have any evidence at all. To be honest, Violet, we don't even know that Giles killed that boy. It's unlikely but possible that he might be bragging about a murder he didn't commit—simply because he knew about it. That would make him culpable, but in a different way."

Violet looked past me and over at the painting of herself. "Detective Lightner and Detective Mills," she said. "A white man and a black man. They didn't look young, and they didn't look old. They weren't fat, and they weren't thin. They were both very nice, and they didn't seem to expect anything from me. They called me Mrs. Wechsler." Violet paused and turned back to me. "It's funny, since Bill died I like being called that by strangers. There's no Bill anymore. There's no marriage anymore, and I never changed my name. I've always been Violet Blom, but now his name is something I want to hear over and over again, and I like answering to it. It's like wearing his shirts. I want to cover myself in what's left of him, even if it's only his name." Violet's voice carried no emotion. She was just explaining the facts.

A few minutes later, she left me to go upstairs. An hour after that, she knocked on my door again and explained that she was on the way to the studio, but she wanted to give me copies of Bill's tapes to watch when I had the time. Bernie had been dragging his feet, she said, because he had so much to look after, but he had finally handed over copies of the videos. "Bill didn't know what the work was going to look like. He talked about building a big room for watching the tapes, but he kept changing his mind. He was going to call it Icarus. I know that, and that he made lots of drawings of a boy falling."

Violet looked down at her boots and chewed on her lip.

"Are you okay?" I said.

She lifted her eyes and said, "I have to be."

"What do you do in the studio all day, Violet? There's not much left there."

Violet's eyes narrowed. "I read," she said in a fierce voice. "First I put on Bill's work clothes and then I read. I read all day. I read from nine in the morning until six at night. I read and read and read until I can't see the page anymore."

The first images on the screen were of newborns—tiny beings with distorted heads and frail, squirming limbs. Bill's camera never left the infants. Adults were present as arms, chests, shoulders, knees, thighs, voices, and occasionally a large face that intruded into the lens and came close to the baby. The first child was asleep in a woman's arms. The little creature had a large head, thin blue-red arms and legs, and was dressed in a checkered suit and an absurd little white bonnet that tied under its chin. That infant was followed by another strapped to a man's chest. His dark hair stuck straight up like Lazlo's, and his black eyes turned toward the camera in dumbfounded amazement Bill followed along as the children rode in carriages, slept in Snuglis, lolled on a parental arm, or had seizures of desperate weeping on a shoulder. Sometimes the mostly unseen parents or nannies delivered monologues on sleeping habits, nursing, breast pumps, or spitting up as the traffic rumbled and screeched behind them, but the talk and noise were incidental to the moving pictures of the small strangers—the one who turned his bald head away from his mother's breast, leaking milk from the sides of his mouth; the dark-skinned beauty who sucked an invisible breast in her sleep and then appeared to smile; the alert baby whose blue eyes moved up toward its mother's face and gazed at her with what looked like profound concentration.

As far as I could tell, the only principle that guided Bill was age. Every day he must have gone out and looked for children a little older than the day before. Gradually his camera left infants and turned to older babies, who sat up, chirped, squealed, grunted, and put every loose object they could reach into their mouths. A big baby girl sucked on her bottle as she twined her mother's hair around her fingers in a swoon of contentment. A little boy howled as his father dislodged a rubber ball from between his gums. A baby sitting on a woman's lap reached toward an older girl sitting inches away from him and began swatting her knees. An adult hand appeared and smacked the baby's arms. It couldn't have been very hard, because the baby reached out and did it again, only to be smacked again. The camera moved back for a moment and showed the woman's tired, vacant face before it zoomed in on a third child sleeping in her stroller and held for a few seconds on her dirty cheeks and the two translucent ribbons of snot that ran from her nose to her mouth.

Bill filmed children crawling at high speed in the park and other children walking and falling and then pulling themselves up to walk again, tottering forward like old drunks in a bar. He recorded a little boy standing somewhat unsteadily beside a large, panting terrier. The child's whole body shuddered with excitement as he held his hand near the dog's snout and let out small joyous ejaculations—Eh! Eh! Eh! Another child, with fat knees and a protruding belly, was seen standing in a bakery. She looked upward and uttered a few incomprehensible syllables, which were then answered by an invisible woman, "It's a fan, sweetheart." With her neck craned and her lips moving, the child stared fixedly at the ceiling and began to chant the word "fan," repeating it over and over in a high, awestruck voice. An apoplectic two-year-old kicked and screamed on the sidewalk beside her squatting mother, who was holding an orange. "But darling," the woman said over the howls, "this orange is exactly like the one Julie got. There's no difference."

When the children he was filming reached the ages of three and four, I heard Bill's voice for the first time. Speaking over the image of an unsmiling little boy, he said, "Do you know what your heart does?" The child looked straight into the camera, put his hand on his chest, and said gravely, "It puts blood inside. It can bleed and live." Another boy held up a juice box, shook it, and turned to the woman sitting beside him on a park bench. "Mommy," he said, "my drink lost its gravity." A blond child with nearly white pigtails ran in circles, jumped up and down, stopped suddenly, turned her flushed face to the camera, and said in a clear, precocious voice, "Happy tears is sweating." A little girl in a filthy tutu and crooked tiara bent close to a friend who was wearing a pink skirt on her head. "Don't worry," she whispered in a conspiratorial voice. "It checked out. I called the man and we can be wedding girls." "What's your doll's name?" Bill asked a neatly dressed little girl with cornrows in her hair. "Go ahead," said a woman's voice. "You can tell him." The little girl scratched her arm and held the doll toward the camera by one leg. "Shower," she said.

The anonymous children came and went, aging by increments as Bill watched them, his camera lingering on their faces as they explained to him how things worked and what they were made of. One girl told Bill that caterpillars turned into raccoons, another that her brain was made of metal with eyedrops in it, a third that the world started with a "big, big egg." After a while, some of his subjects seemed to forget he was there. One boy stuck his finger into his nose and dug happily, retrieving a couple of crusts, which he promptly ate. Another, his hand deep in his pants, scratched his balls and sighed with pleasure. A small girl was seen bending down beside a stroller. She began to make cooing noises and then she grabbed the cheeks of the baby who was strapped into the seat. "I love you, you little dumpling," she said, pinching and shaking the cheeks. "You honeybun," she added fiercely as the baby began to sob from the pressure of her fingers. "Stop that, Sarah," said a woman. "Be nice." "I was nice," Sarah replied, her eyes narrowed and her jaw locked.

Another girl, slightly older, about five, stood beside her mother on a sidewalk somewhere in mid town. The two were seen from behind as they looked into a store window. After a few seconds, it was clear that Bill was most interested in the girl's hand. The camera followed it as it roved her mother's back, moving north toward the shoulder blades, then south toward the buttocks. Up and down, up and down, that small hand idly caressed the maternal back. He also filmed a boy stopped on the sidewalk, his small face screwed up in tight belligerence, a sparkle of tears showing in the corners of his eyes. A woman seen from the neck down stood beside him, her body tensed with rage. "I'm fed up!" she bellowed at him. "I've had it with you. You're acting like a little shit and I want you to stop!" She leaned over, grabbed the boy by the shoulders, and began to shake him. "Stop! Stop!" The tears fell down his cheeks, but the boy's expression remained stiff and unyielding.

There was a resolute, pitiless quality to the tapes, a dogged desire to look and look hard. The camera's focus remained close and tight as the children grew taller and more articulate. A boy named Ramon, who told Bill that he was seven, explained that his uncle collected chickens— "Anything with a chicken on it, he buys it. His whole basement is chickens." A plump boy, probably eight or nine, in wide jean shorts glowered at a taller boy in a baseball cap who was holding a box of candy. In a sudden fit of anger, the shorter boy said, "Shit on you," and pushed his adversary violently to the ground. Pieces of candy flew as the boy on the ground started crowing in triumph, "He said the S word! He said the S word!" A pair of adult legs ran into the frame. Two little girls in plaid uniforms sat on cement steps and whispered to each other. A foot away, a third girl in the same uniform turned her head to look at them. Bill caught the child's profile. As she watched the others, she swallowed hard several times. The camera moved through the crowd of schoolchildren and recorded a boy, with a mouthful of gleaming braces, as he removed his backpack and slammed it against the shoulder of the kid next to him.

The longer I watched, the more mysterious I found the pictures in front of me. What had started as ordinary images of children in the city became over time a remarkable document of human particularity and sameness. There were so many different children—fat, thin, light, dark, beautiful children and plain children, healthy children and children who were crippled or deformed. Bill had filmed a group of kids in wheelchairs who were lowered from a bus that had been designed with a lift to bring the chairs to street level. As she rolled her chair off the mechanism, a chubby girl of about eight straightened herself up and gave Bill a mocking royal wave. He filmed a boy with a scar on his upper lip who first smiled crookedly and then made a farting noise with his mouth. He followed another boy whose indeterminable illness or birth defect had left him with ballooning cheeks and a missing chin. He wore a respirator of some kind as he chugged along on his short legs beside his mother. The differences among the children were startling, and yet, in the end, their faces mingled. Above all, the tapes revealed the furious animation of children, the fact that when conscious they rarely stop moving. A simple walk down the block included waving, hopping, skipping, twirling, and multiple pauses to examine a piece of litter, pet a dog, or jump up and walk along a cement barrier or low fence. In a schoolyard or playground, they jostled, punched, elbowed, kicked, poked, patted, hugged, pinched, tugged, yelled, laughed, chanted, and sang, and while I watched them, I said to myself that growing up really means slowing down.

Bill died before the children reached puberty. A few girls showed signs of breasts coming beneath their T-shirts or the blouses of their school uniforms, but most of the kids hadn't even started to change. I suspect that he had meant to go on, that he wanted to film more and more children until a moment came when the figures on the screen could no longer be distinguished from adults. After the last video ended and I had turned off the television, I felt exhausted and a little raw from the parade of bodies and faces, the sheer volume of young lives that had passed in front of me. I imagined Bill on his peripatetic adventure as he sought out kids and more kids to answer some craving in himself. What I had seen was unedited and crude, but when strung together the fragments had formed a syntax that might be read for possible meaning. It was as if Bill intended the many lives he documented to merge into a single entity, to show the one in the many or the many in the one. Everyone begins and ends. Throughout the tapes I had thought of Matthew, first as a baby, then as a toddler, and finally as a boy who had been left in childhood forever.

Icarus. The connection between the children on the tapes and the myth remained oblique. But Bill had chosen the tide for a reason. I remembered Brueghel's painting, with its two figures—the father and the falling boy, whose wings are melting in the sun. Daedalus, the great architect and magician, had made those wings for himself and his son to escape from their tower prison. He warned Icarus about flying too close to the sun, but the boy refused to listen and plummeted into the sea. Nevertheless, Daedalus isn't an innocent figure in the story. He had risked too much for his freedom and, because of it, he had lost his son.

Neither Violet nor I nor Erica in California, who now knew the whole story, doubted that the police would find Mark and question him. It was just a matter of time. After the visit from Detectives Lightner and Mills, I had lost all sense of what was possible for Mark and what was impossible, and without that barrier I lived in dread. The incident in the hallway in the Nashville hotel didn't recede. Every night my helplessness came back to me. Giles's hands. His voice. The shock of my head hitting the wall. And Mark's eyes, which had nothing behind them. I heard myself call out for him, saw my arms reach toward him, and then I was waiting on the bench in the lobby for no one. I had related most of the facts to Violet and Erica, but I had kept my voice even, my description cold, and I hadn't told them about Giles touching my hair. Over time, that gesture had become unspeakable. It was much easier just to say that he had slammed my head into the wall. For some reason the violence was preferable to what had come before it. I found it hard to sleep, and sometimes after lying awake for hours I would go to check the locks on my door, even though I knew that I had bolted them shut and secured the chain.

The only fact that could be determined absolutely from the newspapers was that the broken and decayed body of a boy named Rafael Hernandez had been found in a suitcase that had washed up somewhere near a Hudson River pier, and that identification had been made through dental records. The rest was printed gossip. Blast ran a long article with pictures of Teddy Giles and the headline JUST KIDDING? According to the journalist, Delford Links, people in both the art world and the club scene had known of Rafael's disappearance for some time. The day after the boy disappeared, Giles had made several telephone calls to friends and acquaintances, claiming that he had just done "a real one." That same evening, he had gone out to Club USA wearing clothes that appeared to have dried blood all over them and had careened around the club announcing that the She-Monster had "committed the ultimate work of art." Not a single person had taken Giles seriously. Even after the body had been found, most people associated with Giles refused to accept the possibility that he had actually murdered someone. A seventeen-year-old boy named Junior was quoted: "He was always saying stuff like that. He must have told me fifteen different times that he had just killed somebody."

Hasseborg was also quoted: "The danger inherent in Giles's work is that it attacks every one of our sacred cows. His work isn't limited to sculptures or photographs or even performances. His personas are also his art—a spectacle of shifting identities that includes the psychopathic killer, who is, after all, a celebrated, mythical character. Turn on your TV Go to the movies. He's everywhere. But to suggest that this persona is anything more than that is an outrage. The fact that Giles knew Rafael Hernandez hardly makes him guilty of his murder."

On the Sunday evening after I returned from Nashville, Violet and I were having dinner upstairs when Lazlo buzzed the front door. Lazlo's expression was usually sober, but when we opened the door for him, I thought his face looked almost sad. "I found this," he said, and handed it to Violet. The article came from the gossip column in the downtown paper Bleep. Violet read it aloud: "Rumors are flying about a certain Bad Boy on the art scene and the body of his thirteen-year-old ex-toy and part-time E dealer that bobbed up in the Hudson. One of B.B.'s ex- girlfriends claims that there's a witness—yet another one of B.B.'s many AC./D.C. exes. Could the plot get any thicker? Stay tuned ..."

Violet looked at Lazlo. "What does this mean?" she said.

Lazlo was silent. Instèad of responding to Violet's question, he handed her a business card. "He's married to my cousin," Lazlo said. "Arthur's a real good guy—a criminal attorney. He used to work in the D.A's office." Lazlo paused. "Could be you won't need him." Lazlo didn't move. I couldn't even see him breathe. Then he said, "Pinky's waiting for me."

Violet nodded, and we watched Lazlo walk to the door and close it very gently behind him.

We didn't talk for several minutes. It was dark outside, and it had started to snow. I watched the white motion through the window. Lazlo knew things, and Violet and I both understood that he had left the card for a reason. When I turned from the window and looked at Violet, she was so pale that her skin looked transparent, and I noticed a rash on her neck. Beneath her lowered eyes were faint purple shadows. I knew what I was seeing: dry grief, grief grown old and familiar. It enters your bones and lives there, because it has no use for flesh, and after a while you feel that you're all bone, hard and dessicated, like a skeleton in a classroom. She fingered the little card and looked up at me.

"I'm afraid of him," she said.

"Of Giles?" I said in a dull voice.

"No," she said, "I'm talking about Mark. I'm afraid of Mark."

Violet and I were sitting together on the sofa upstairs when his key turned in the lock. Before we heard the sound, Violet had been laughing at something I'd said, something I've forgotten now, but I remember that her laugh was still in my ears when Mark stepped through the door. He looked sad, a little sheepish, and very mild, but the sight of him turned me cold.

"I have to talk to you," he said. "It's important."

Violet's body had gone rigid. "Then talk," she said. Her eyes never left his face.

He walked toward us, moved around the table, and leaned down to embrace Violet.

She pulled away from him. "No, don't. I can't," she said.

Mark looked startled and then hurt.

In a low, steady voice, Violet said, "You lie to me, you rob and betray me, and now you want a hug? I told you I didn't want you back."

He stared at her in disbelief. "What am I supposed to do? The police want to talk to me." He took a breath, then stepped backward. His arms hung limply at his sides. "I know Teddy did it," he said. He narrowed his eyes. "I saw him that night." Mark sat down at the other end of the table. He let his head fall forward. "He was all bloody."

"You saw him?" Violet said loudly. "Who? What do you mean?"

"I went to see Teddy. We were going out. He opened the door and he was all covered in blood. At first I thought it was a joke, you know, a trick." Mark blinked, then looked at us steadily. "But then I saw him— Me—on the floor."

I felt as if my brain were rising inside my head. "You knew that he was dead?"

Mark nodded.

Violet's voice was steady. "What happened then?"

"He said he'd kill me if I said anything, and I left. I was scared, so I took the train to Mom's."

"Why didn't you go to the police?"

"I told you. I was too scared."

"You didn't seem scared in Minneapolis," I said. "Or Nashville. You seemed to enjoy Giles's company. I waited for you, Mark, but you never came."

Mark's voice rose. "I had to go along. I couldn't get away. Don't you see? I had to do it. It wasn't my fault. I was afraid."

"You have to talk to the police now," Violet said.

"I can't. Teddy will kill me."

Violet stood up. She disappeared and returned a few moments later.

"You have to talk to the police now," she said. "Or they'll come and get you. Call this number. The detectives left it for you."

"He needs a lawyer, Violet," I said. "He can't go without a lawyer."

I was the one who called Lazlo's cousin's husband, Arthur Geller, and it turned out that he was expecting the call. When Mark went in to the police station to speak to the police the next day, he would have an attorney by his side. Violet told Mark that she would pay his legal bills. Then she corrected herself, "No. Bill will pay. It's his money."

Violet let Mark sleep in his room that night, but she told him that after that he would have to find somewhere else to live. Then she turned to me and asked if I would sleep on the sofa. She said, "I don't want to be alone with Mark."

Mark looked aghast. "That's stupid," he said. "Leo can sleep at home."

Violet turned to him. She lifted her palms toward his face as though she were warding off a blow. "No," she said sharply. "No. I'm not going to stay alone with you. I don't trust you."

By posting me as night sentry on the sofa, Violet wanted to make it clear that life was not going on as usual, but my presence wasn't enough to break the spell of the everyday. The hours that followed Mark's arrival were disquieting, not because anything happened—but because nothing did. I listened to the sound of him brushing his teeth and to his voice wishing me and Violet good night in a curiously cheerful tone and then to his shufflings in his room before he settled down to sleep. The sounds were ordinary, and because they were ordinary I found them terrible. The simple fact that Mark was in the apartment seemed to alter everything in it, to transform the table and chairs, the night-light in the hallway, and the red sofa where I had made a temporary bed. Most unsettling was the fact that the change could be felt but not seen. It was as though a veneer had settled over everything, a banal mask that clung so tightly to the hideous form beneath it that it couldn't be pried off.

Long after the whole building was quiet with sleep, I lay awake listening to the noises from outside. "He has a good heart, my son." Bill had been standing at the window looking down onto the Bowery when he said those words, and I know that he had believed them, but years before, in the fairy tale he called The Changeling, he had told a story of substitution. I remembered the stolen child lying in his glass coffin. Bill knew, I thought. Somewhere inside him, he knew.

In the morning, Mark went off with Arthur Geller and spoke to the police. The following day, Teddy Giles was arrested for the murder of Rafael Hernandez and held without bail on Rikers Island while he waited to go to trial. You would think that the dramatic entrance of a witness would have ended the case. But Mark hadn't seen the murder. He had seen a bloody Giles and the dead body of Rafael. It was important, but the D.A. wanted more. The law has to muddle along with facts, and there were few facts. The case was mostly talk—gossip, rumors, and Mark's story. There was little evidence to be gotten from the corpse, because the police hadn't found a whole body in the suitcase. The boy had been cut into pieces, and after months of decaying under water, those fragments of bone, sodden tissue, and teeth had revealed his identity—nothing more. We did find out from the newspapers that Rafael Hernandez wasn't Mexican, and he hadn't been bought by Giles. When he was four, his parents, who were both addicts, had deserted him and an infant sister. The little girl had died of AIDS when she was two years old. Rafael had run away from his third foster family, somewhere in the Bronx, and found his way into the clubs, where he met Giles. He had turned tricks. He had sold Ecstasy to willing buyers and at thirteen had made a pretty good living. Otherwise the boy was a cipher.

Giles's arrest turned the perception of his work inside out. What had been seen as a clever commentary on the horror genre began to look like the sadistic fantasies of a murderer. The peculiar insularity of the New York art scene had often made obvious work seem subtle, stupid work intelligent, and sensational work subversive. It was all a matter of how the art was "pitched." Because Giles had become a sort of minor celebrity, embraced by critics and collectors, his new designation as possible felon was both embarrassing and intriguing to the world he had left so abruptly. During the first month after his arrest, art magazines, newspapers, and even the television news picked up the story of the "art murder." Larry Finder issued a statement in which he said that in America a person is innocent until proven guilty, but that if Giles was found guilty of the crime, he would vociferously condemn the act and would no longer represent him.

In the meantime, however, prices for the work went up, and Finder did a brisk business selling Teddy Giles. Buyers wanted the work because it now seemed that it mimicked reality, but Giles, who freely gave interviews from Rikers, mounted a defense that was just the opposite. In an interview for DASH, he argued that it was all a hoax. He had staged a murder in his apartment for the benefit of his friends, using artificial blood and a realistic replica of Rafael to do it. He had known that Rafael was leaving, going to visit an aunt in California, and he had used the trip to perpetrate an elaborate "art joke." Rafael Hernandez had been murdered, but Giles insisted that he hadn't done it. He cited the fact that his "fabricators" had known about his plan. Maybe one of them had committed the murder to frame him. Giles seemed to know that the police case rested on the shoulders of a nameless friend, a friend who had arrived that day and looked through the doorway into his apartment. Could the friend swear that the blood he had seen was real blood, that the body on the floor wasn't a fake? Perhaps the most curious aspect of the case was that Giles was able to produce an artificial corpse. Pierre Lange told the journalist that he had cast a simulation of Rafael's body on the Tuesday before he disappeared. Giles had instructed him about the injuries to the body, as he always did, and then he had worked with police and morgue photos to give the damage the appearance of believability. Of course, he added, the bodies were always hollow. Blood and sometimes crushed internal organs were added for effect, but he did not reproduce tissue or muscle or bone. According to the article, the police had impounded the faux corpse.

The case lasted for eight long months. Mark camped out in the apartment of "a friend"—a girl named Anya, whom we never met. Violet spoke regularly to Arthur Geller on the telephone, and he sounded reasonably confident that Mark's testimony at the trial would result in a conviction. She spoke to Mark once a week, but she said their conversations were forced and mechanical. "I don't believe a word that comes out of his mouth," she said. "I often wonder why I talk to him at all." On some evenings, Violet would speak to me while she looked out the window. Then she would stop talking and her lips would part in an expression of disbelief. She never cried anymore. Her dread seemed to have frozen her. She would stop moving for seconds at a time and become as inert as a statue. But at other times she was jumpy. The smallest noise would make her start or gasp. After she recovered from the momentary shock, she would rub her arms repeatedly as though she were cold. On the nights when she felt nervous, she would ask me to stay on the sofa, and I would bed down in the living room with Bill's pillows and the comforter from Mark's bed.

I can't say whether Violet's anxiety was the same as mine. Like most emotions, that vague form of fear is a crude lump of feeling that relies on words for definition. But that inner state quickly infects what is supposedly outside us, and I felt that the rooms of my apartment and Violet's, the streets of the city, even the air I breathed stank of a diffuse, all-encompassing threat. Several times I thought I spotted Mark on Greene Street, and each time my heart raced until I discovered that it was some other tall, dark-haired boy in baggy pants. I didn't believe that I was in any danger from Mark. My trepidation seemed to come from something much larger than either him or Teddy Giles. No single person could contain it. The danger was invisible, mutable, and it spread. To be frightened of something so opaque makes me sound mad, as unbalanced as Dan, whose bouts of paranoia could turn an innocent pat on his arm into an attempt on his life, but insanity is a matter of degree. Most of us partake of it in one way or the other from time to time, feel its insidious tug and the lure of collapse. But I wasn't flirting with craziness then. I recognized that the anxiety tightening at my throat wasn't rational, but I also knew that what I feared lay beyond reason, and that nonsense can also be real.

In April, Arthur told Violet the story of the lamp. For a while the case turned on that lamp, and yet its significance for me has little to do with police work or how the charges were resolved in the end. After combing the area around Giles's apartment, the police had spoken to a woman who owned a design store on Franklin Street. Arthur couldn't explain why it had taken them so long to find her, but Roberta Alexander had identified both Giles and Mark as the two young men who had been in her store in the early evening on the day of the murder. The problem was timing. According to Ms. Alexander, they had come into the store after Mark said he had fled Giles's apartment and gone to the train station, where he sat on a bench in stunned distress for several hours before he finally took the train to Princeton. Mark and Teddy had bought a table lamp. Ms. Alexander had the bill of sale with the date, and she was sure of the time, because she had been preparing to close her shop at seven. She had noticed nothing unusual about either Giles or Mark. In fact, she had found them both unusually polite and affable, and they hadn't haggled over the price. They had handed over $1,200 in cash.

According to Arthur, the DA. had started to doubt Mark's story even before he knew about the lamp purchase. As he talked to more people in Giles's circle, he discovered that Mark had lied to most of them about one thing or another. A defense attorney would have little trouble proving that Mark was a habitual liar. Arthur knew that if one fact wobbled, others were likely to follow, and that one by one his facts might turn into fictions and his eyewitness into a suspect. Mark swore that his story had been perfect, with the sole omission of the lamp. Teddy had left the apartment with him, and he had gone along out of fear. He knew that it didn't look good, and that's why he hadn't mentioned it. Yes, he had waited for Teddy to change his clothes, and yes, they had returned to the apartment to drop off the lamp, but everything else was true. Lucille had already vouched for the fact that Mark had arrived at her house that same evening—around midnight.

Mark understood that fear and cowardice in a person who discovers a murder might be met with sympathy. Casually buying a lamp with the perpetrator after seeing the body of his victim would not. Nobody could vouch for Mark's time of arrival at the loft on Franklin Street, and just as Arthur had feared, the D.A. began to suspect that he might have been interviewing an accomplice rather than a witness after the feet. We all did. Arthur began to prepare Violet for Mark's possible arrest, but I think it was unnecessary. Violet had long suspected that Mark hadn't told the full truth about the murder, and instead of showing signs of shock, she told me that she pitied Arthur. Mark had fooled him, the way he had fooled us all. "I warned him," she said, "but he believed Mark anyway." Whether Mark had helped Giles kill Rafael or had merely arrived on the scene once the murder was over, his presence in the store on Franklin Street and the purchase of that expensive lamp put an end to whatever feeling I had left for him. I knew that by some definition both Teddy Giles and Mark Wechsler were insane, examples of an indifference many regard as monstrous and unnatural; but in fact they weren't unique and their actions were recognizably human. Equating horror with the inhuman has always struck me as convenient but fallacious, if only because I was born into a century that should have ended such talk for good. For me, the lamp became the sign not of the inhuman but of the all-too-human, the lapse or break that occurs in people when empathy is gone, when others aren't a part of us anymore but are turned into things. There is genuine irony in the fact that my empathy for Mark vanished at the moment when I understood that he had not a shred of that quality in himself.

Violet and I both waited for something to happen, and while we waited, we worked. I wrote about Bill and then rewrote what I had written. Nothing I came up with was any good, but the quality of my thought and prose was secondary to the fact that I was able to continue doing it. Violet read at the studio. She often returned with headaches and sore eyes, and she coughed from all the cigarettes she had smoked. I started making sandwiches for her to take to the Bowery and asked her to promise that she would eat them. I believe that she did, because she didn't lose any more weight.

Months passed, and Arthur had nothing new to report except that the D.A was still looking for something or someone to tighten his case. Violet and I spent most of that hot summer together. A little restaurant opened on Church Street, below Canal, and we would meet there for dinner two or three times a week. One night, a couple of minutes after she arrived, Violet left the table to go to the toilet and the waiter asked me if I'd like to order a drink for my wife. When Violet spent two weeks in Minnesota in July, I called her every day. At night I worried that she would fall fatally ill or that she might decide to stay in the Midwest and never come back. But when Violet returned, we went on living in a state of suspense, wondering if the case would ever come to an end. The newspapers had dropped the story. Mark had left Anya and was living with another girl, named Rita. He informed Violet that he was working in a flower shop and gave her the name of the place, but Violet never bothered to call and check on whether it was true or not. It didn't seem all that important.

And then, in late August, a boy named Indigo West came forward. Like a deus ex machina, he dropped from heaven and freed Mark from suspicion. He claimed to have witnessed the murder through the hallway door in Giles's apartment. Apparently, Indigo was only one of many people who had keys to Giles's apartment He had arrived at about five o'clock in the morning and wandered into one of the bedrooms. He slept most of the next day and woke to the sound of glass breaking in the front room. When he went to see what was happening, he said that he saw Giles with an axe in one hand and a broken vase in the other, standing over Rafael, who had already lost an arm. A large plastic dropcloth lay on the floor and was covered with blood. According to Indigo, Rafael was tied up and his mouth was taped. If he wasn't dead, he was almost dead. Unseen and unheard by Giles, Indigo ran back to the bedroom and hid under the bed, where he threw up. He lay absolutely still for at least an hour. He said he heard Giles walking around, and once he heard him just outside the bedroom door. When the telephone rang, Giles answered it, and not long after that, he heard Giles talking to someone in the hallway and recognized the voice as Mark's. He distinctly overheard Mark say that he was hungry, but the rest of the conversation was too low for him to hear. When the door slammed and all noises stopped, he waited for several minutes, crawled out from under the bed, and ran out of the building. He said he went to Puffy's and ordered a coffee from a waitress with blue hair.

Indigo was a seventeen-year-old heroin addict, but Arthur said that he repeated his story without variation over and over again, and although the police hadn't found a single blood stain in Giles's apartment, they had noted a stain on the carpet under the bed where Indigo had spent the night, and the waitress at Puffy's, who had had blue hair at the time, remembered him. She had noticed him particularly because he had been shaking and crying over his espresso. When confronted with Indigo West, Teddy Giles accepted a plea bargain. The charges against him were reduced to aggravated manslaughter and he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Indigo West had been given immunity for his testimony, and neither he nor Mark was charged with anything. For a week the papers carried articles on the end of the case, and then it vanished from the spotlight. Arthur guessed that the D.A didn't want to risk going to trial with two witnesses of dubious character. Indigo West had already served a sentence for drug possession in a juvenile correctional institution. The boy was a mess, but I believe that he was an honest mess.

Nevertheless, there was a magical quality to his appearance. When I discovered that Lazlo was the person who had found Indigo, my astonishment diminished somewhat. With Arthur's blessing, Lazlo had pursued his own leads, which included talking to the gossip columnist who had printed the story of a witness. The columnist didn't know Indigo, but his stepdaughter had heard through a friend that a kid who spent every Thursday night at the Tunnel had heard through someone else that there was a third person who had seen the murder. The rumor chain led to Indigo West, whose real name was Nathan Furbank. The question was, why had Lazlo been able to locate a witness when the police had not? I couldn't help but attribute that success to the prodigious qualities of the Finkelman eyes, ears, and nose.

During the case, Violet had called Lucille regularly to give her news. Sometimes they spoke amicably, but more often than not Violet wanted something from Lucille that Lucille wouldn't or couldn't give her. Violet wanted Lucille to acknowledge the extremity of what had happened to Mark. She wanted animal pain, anguish, and desperation, but Lucille would only say that she was "worried" and "deeply concerned" about him. After Giles was sentenced, Lucille became even more tranquil. During her conversations with Violet, she blamed Mark's problems on drugs. The drugs had muted his feelings and his reactions. The most important thing was for him to stay off drugs. Lucille's defense of Mark wasn't unreasonable; Mark's drug use had always been a muddled issue. But while Lucille labored to stay soft-spoken and polite, Violet inevitably grew more and more upset.

One evening in late November, the telephone rang a few minutes after Violet and I had finished eating dinner. From the restrained tone of Violet's voice, I instantly knew that Lucille was on the other end of the line. Mark had stayed briefly with his mother and stepfather after the case was over. He'd then moved into a house with friends and found a job in a veterinary clinic. Lucille calmly told Violet that Mark had filched cash from one of his housemates and then stolen his car. He hadn't gone to work and he hadn't been seen for three days. Violet kept her temper. She told Lucille there was nothing either of them could do, but when she hung up the phone, her face was flushed and her hand was trembling.

"I think Lucille means well," I said to Violet.

Violet looked at me for several seconds, then she started yelling. "Don't you know that she's only half alive! Part of her is dead!" Her pale face and the broken cry in her voice shocked me, and I couldn't find an answer. She grabbed my upper arms and began to shake me, snarling through her teeth. "Don't you know that she was slowly killing Bill? I saw it right away. And Mark, my boy. He was my boy, too. I loved them. I loved them. She didn't. She can't." Her eyes opened as if she were suddenly afraid.

"Remember? I asked you to take care of Bill." She shook me harder as her eyes filled with tears. "I thought you understood! I thought you knew!"

I looked down at her. Her fingers had loosened their grip, but she was still hanging on to me, and I could feel the weight of her body tug at my arms for an instant before she let go. She was breathing hard from her rage, which was quickly turning into sobs. I listened to her cry loudly, and the noise caused a contraction in my chest, as if it were my own grief that I was hearing, or as if hers and mine were one and the same. She bent over, covering her face with her hands. I reached out for her and pulled her into my arms. The pressure in my lungs seemed unbearable. Her face was pressed into my neck, and I could feel her breasts against me and her arms hugging me tightly. My hand moved to her hip, and I let my fingers press the bone beneath it while I clutched her harder.

"I love you," I said. "Don't you understand that I love you. I'll take care of you, be with you forever. I would do anything for you." I tried to kiss her. I grabbed her face and pressed it into mine, tilting my glasses in the process. She gave a small cry and pushed me away.

Violet was looking at me with startled eyes. She lifted her hands as if she were pleading for something and then she lowered them. When I looked at her standing there near the turquoise table with a piece of hair falling onto her forehead, I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful. She was my hold on the world, what I suffered over and loved, and I knew in that instant that I was losing her, and the knowledge turned me cold. I sat down at the table, folded my hands, and stared at them without saying a word. I felt her eyes on me as she stood in the middle of the room. I heard her breathing, and a couple of seconds later, the sound of her footsteps coming toward me. When I felt her fingers touching my head, I didn't look up at her. She said "Leo" several times, and then her voice cracked. "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry I, I didn't mean to push you away, I..." She knelt on the floor beside me and said, "Please talk to me. Please look at me." Her voice was hoarse and choked. "I feel so bad."

I spoke to the table. "I think it's better that we say nothing. It was ridiculous of me to think that you might return my feelings, when I know better than anybody what you and Bill were to each other."

"Turn your chair around," she said, "so I can see you. You must talk to me. You must."

I resisted her request, but after a couple of seconds my stubbornness seemed so childish that I obeyed. Without getting up, I shifted the position of the chair, and once I was facing her I saw that tears were running down her cheeks and she was pressing her fist against her mouth to steady herself. She swallowed, moved her hand away from her face, and said, "It's so complicated, Leo, much more complicated than you think. There's nobody like you. You're good, you're generous ..."

I lowered my eyes and began to shake my head.

"Please, I want you to understand that without you ..."

"Don't, Violet," I said. "It's all right. You don't have to make excuses for me."

"I'm not. I want you to understand that even before Bill died, I needed you." Violet's lips were trembling. "There was an obtuse side to Bill—a hidden, unknowing, unknowable core that he let out in his work. He was obsessed. There were times when I felt neglected, and it hurt."

"He adored you. You should have heard the way he talked about you."

"And I adored him back." She pressed her hands together so hard her arms began to shake, but her voice sounded a little more composed. "The fact is, my own husband was less accessible to me than many other people. There was always something I couldn't get to in him, something remote, and I wanted that thing I could never have. It kept me alive and it kept me in love, because whatever it was, I could never find it."

"But you were such good friends," I said.

"The best of friends," she said, and took hold of both my hands. I felt her squeeze them. "We talked about everything all the time. After he died, I kept saying to myself, 'We were each other.' But knowing and being are two different things."

"Always the philosopher," I said. The comment had an edge to it, and Violet reacted to my hint of cruelty by withdrawing her hands.

"You're right to be angry. I've taken advantage of you. You've cooked for me and taken care of me and stayed with me, and I've just taken and taken and taken ..." Her voice grew louder and her eyes filled with more tears.

Her distress made me guilty. "That's not true,'' I said.

She was nodding at me. "Oh, yes it is. I'm selfish, Leo, and I have something cold and hard in me. I'm full of hate. I hate Mark. I used to love him. Of course, I didn't love him right away, but I learned to love him slowly, and then later to hate him, and I ask myself, Would I hate him if I had given birth to him, if he were my son? But the really terrible question is this: What was it that I loved?"

Violet was silent for a few seconds, and I studied my hands, which were resting on my knees. They looked old, veiny, and discolored. Like my mother's hands when she got old, I thought.

"Remember when Lucille took Mark to Texas with her, and then she decided she couldn't handle having him and sent him back to us?"

I nodded.

"He was really difficult, always acting up, but after she came to visit at Christmas and left again, he really went nuts. He pushed me, hit me, screamed at me. He wouldn't go to sleep. Every night, he threw a fit. I was nice to him, but it's hard to like someone who's awful to you—even when it's just a six-year-old kid. Bill decided that Mark missed his mother too much, that he had to go back to her, and they flew to Houston. I think it was a fatal mistake, Leo. I understood that not long ago. A week later, Lucille called Bill and told him that Mark was 'perfect.' That was the word she used. It meant obedient, cooperative, sweet. A couple of weeks later, Mark bit a little girl in school on the arm so hard that she bled, but at home he was no trouble at all. By the time he came back to New York, the furious little wild man had disappeared for good. It was like somebody had cast a spell on him and turned him into a docile, agreeable replica of himself. But that was the thing I learned to love— that automaton." Violet's eyes were dry and she clenched her jaw while she looked at me.

I examined her tight face and said, "But I thought you didn't understand what happened to Mark."

"I don't understand what happened to him. All I know is that he went away one thing and came back another. It took a long, long time to even begin to see that clearly. He had to demonstrate his falseness for years before I could really look behind the mask. Bill refused to see it, but he and I were both part of it. Did we cause it? I don't know. Did we ruin him? I don't know, but I think he must have felt that we were throwing him away. I'll tell you this, I hate Lucille, too, even though she can't help the way she is—all boarded up and shut down like a condemned house. That's how I think of her. I felt sorry for her in the beginning, after Bill left her, but all that pity is gone. And I hate Bill, too, for dying on me. He never went to the doctor. He smoked and drank and stewed in his own melancholy, and I keep thinking he should have been harder, tougher, meaner, angrier, not so goddamned guilty about everything all the time, that he should have been stronger for me!" She paused for several seconds. Her lashes were shiny black from her tears and I could see the small red veins in her eyes. She swallowed. "I needed somebody, Leo. I've been so alone with my hate. You've been so kind to me, and I used your kindness."

I started to smile then. At first, I had no idea why I was amused. It was a little like giggling at a funeral or laughing when someone brings you news of a terrible car accident, but I realized that it was her honesty that made me smile. She was trying so hard to tell me the truth about herself as she knew it, and after the innumerable lies and thefts and the murder we had lived through together, her self-criticism seemed comic. It made me think of a nun in the confessional booth whispering her meager sins to a priest who is guilty of far worse.

When she saw the smile, she said, "It's not funny, Leo."

"Yes," I said, "it is. People can't help what they feel. It's what they do that counts, and as far as I can tell, you've done nothing wrong. When you and Bill sent Mark back to Lucille, you thought you were doing what was right. People can't do more than that. Now it's your turn to listen to me. As it turns out, I have no power over my feelings either, but it was a mistake to talk to you about them. I wish I could take back what I said— for my sake as well as yours. I lost my head. It's that simple, but there's nothing I can do about it now."

Violet's green eyes regarded me steadily as she put her hands on my shoulders and began to stroke my arms. I was caught off guard for a moment by her touch, but I couldn't resist the happiness it brought me, and I felt my muscles relax. It had been a long time since I had felt someone's hands on me like that, and I actually tried to remember the last time. When Erica came for Bill's funeral, I thought.

"I've decided to go away," Violet said. "I can't be here anymore. It's not Bill. I like being close to his things. It's Mark. I can't be near him anymore, not even in the same city. I don't want to see him again. A friend of mine in Paris invited me to give a seminar at the American University, and I've decided to do it, even though it's just for a few months. I'm leaving in two weeks. I was going to tell you at dinner but then the phone rang, and ..." Her face contorted for a second and then she continued, "I'm lucky that you love me. I'm really lucky."

I began a reply, but Violet put her finger to my lips. "Don't talk. I have to tell you something else. I don't think it could go on, because I'm too confused. I'm broken, you see, not whole." She moved her hands to my neck and rubbed it softly. "But we can be together tonight if you want. I do love you very much, maybe not exactly the way you would like me to, but..."

She stopped talking because I reached for her hands and pulled them gently away from my neck. I continued to hold them in mine while I looked at her face. I knew that I wanted her badly. I had forgotten what it was not to want her, but I didn't want her sacrifice—that sweet offering she held out to me, because I imagined my greed and lust accepted but not returned, and that picture of my desire made me quail. I shook my head at her while two large tears spilled onto her cheeks. She had been kneeling throughout our talk and she put her head down on one of my thighs for a second before she stood up, led me over to the sofa, sat down beside me, and leaned her head against my shoulder. I put my arm around her and we sat together for a long time without saying anything.

I remembered Bill in Vermont then, walking out the door of Bowery Two just before dinner. I saw him through the kitchen window of the Vermont house, and although it was an uncommonly lucid memory, I felt no emotion or nostalgia. I was merely a voyeur of my own life, a cold spectator who looks on at other people going about their daily routines. Bill lifted his hand to greet Matthew and Mark from the top of the stairs, and then paused to light a cigarette. I saw him stride across the lawn toward the farmhouse while Matt tugged at his arm, my son looking up at Bill. Mark was grinning as he staggered behind them and feigned a spastic disorder—holding one arm akimbo and waving the other helplessly in front of him. I surveyed the large kitchen in my mind and saw Erica and Violet pitting olives at the table. I heard the screen door slam, and at the sound, the two women looked up at Bill. Smoke rose up from the butt between his fingers, which were stained with blue and green paint, and as he sucked on the cigarette, I could see that his thoughts were still in the studio, that he wasn't ready to talk to anyone yet. Behind him, the boys had crouched down to look for the garter snake who lived under the front step. No one spoke, and in the quiet, I could hear the ticking of the clock that hung to the right of the door—a big-faced old school clock with clear black numbers—and I found myself struggling to understand how time can be measured on a disc, a circle with hands that return to the same positions over and over again. That logical revolution looked like a mistake. Time isn't circular, I thought. That's wrong. But the memory didn't let go of me. It continued—vehement, acute, inescapable. Violet glanced at the clock and pointed at Bill. "You're a stinky mess, my love. Go wash. You've got exactly twenty minutes."

Violet left New York on December ninth in the late afternoon. The low sky was beginning to darken, and a few tiny flakes of snow had started to fall. I carried her heavy suitcase down the stairs and left it on the sidewalk while I hailed a cab for her. She was wearing her long navy blue coat, which tied around her waist, and a white fur hat that I had always liked.

The driver popped the trunk, and we lifted the suitcase into it together. While we said good-bye, I clutched at what was there—-Violet's face coming toward mine, the smell of her in the cold air, the hug, and then the quick kiss on my mouth, not my cheek, the sound of the car door opening, then slamming, her hand at the window and her eyes with a tender, sorry look in them under the fringe of her hat. I followed the yellow taxi up Greene Street as Violet craned her neck and waved again. At the end of block, I watched the cab turn onto Grand Street I didn't leave until it had traveled some distance from me—a shrunken yellow thing lost in the jumble of traffic. When I felt that it was just about the size of the taxi in my painting, I walked back up the block to my door.

My eyes started to go on me the following year. I thought that the haze in my vision was caused by strain from my work or maybe cataracts. When the ophthalmologist told me there was nothing to be done, because the form of macular degeneration I had was of the wet rather than the dry sort, I nodded, thanked him, and stood up to leave. He must have found my response perverse, because he frowned at me. I told him I had been lucky with my health so far, and I wasn't surprised by illnesses that had no cure. He said that was un-American, and I agreed. Over the years the haze turned into fog, and then into the thick clouds that block my vision now. I've always been able to see the periphery of things, which allows me to walk without a cane, and I can still negotiate my way on the subway. The daily effort of shaving became too hard, however, and I grew a beard. I have it trimmed every month by a man in the Village who insists on calling me Leon. I don't bother to correct him anymore.

Erica remains a half presence in my life. We talk more often on the telephone and write fewer letters, and every July we spend two weeks together in Vermont This July was our third year, and I'm sure we will continue the tradition. Fourteen days out of 365 seems to be enough for us. We don't stay in the old farmhouse, but we aren't far away, and last year we drove up the hill, parked the car, walked around the lawn, and peeked through the windows of the empty house. Erica isn't strong. Headaches continue to interrupt her life, rendering her a semi-invalid for days, sometimes weeks, but she still teaches with fervor and writes a lot. In April 1998, Erica published Nanda's Tears: Repression and Release in the Work of Henry James. At home in Berkeley, she often spends the weekends with Daisy, now a pudgy eight-year-old girl enamoured of rap music.

Next spring, I will finally retire. My world will shrink then, and I'll miss my students and Avery Library and my office and Jack. Because my colleagues and students know what I've lost—Matthew, Erica, and my eyes—they have turned me into a venerable figure. I suppose a near-blind art history professor gives off a whiff of the romantic. But nobody at Columbia knows that I lost Violet, too. As it turns out, she and Erica are about equidistant from me these days, one in Paris, one in Berkeley, and I, who never moved, occupy the middle ground in New York. Violet lives in a small apartment in the Marais not far from the Bastille. Every December, she returns to New York for a few days before she flies home to Minnesota for Christmas. She always spends a day with Dan in New Jersey, who, she says, is doing a little better. He still paces, chain-smokes, makes the O sign with his fingers, and speaks several decibels louder than most people, and he has yet to master the ordinary business of living day to day. It's all hard—cleaning, shopping, preparing meals—and yet Violet feels that everything about Dan is a little less Dan than before, as if his whole being has subsided a notch or turned one shade lighter. He is still writing poems and occasionally a scene for a play but is less prolific than he once was, and the scraps of paper and manuscript pages that lie scattered about his one-room apartment are covered with verse or bits of dialogue followed by ellipses. Age and thirty years of potent drugs have dulled Dan a bit, but that muting seems to have made his life a bit easier.

Four years ago, Violet's sister, Alice, married Edward. A year later, at the age of forty, she gave birth to a daughter named Rose. Violet is crazy about Rose, and every year she arrives in New York with a suitcase stuffed with Parisian dolls and dresses to bring to the angel in Minneapolis. I hear from Violet every two or three months. She sends me an audiotape in lieu of a letter, and I listen to her news and her rambling thoughts about her work. Her book The Automatons of Late Capitalism includes chapters entitled "Manic Shopping," "Advertising and the Artificial Body," "Lies and the Internet," and "The Parasitic Pyschopath as Ideal Consumer." Her research has taken her from the eighteenth century into the present, from the French physician Pinel to a living psychiatrist named Kernberg. The terms and etiologies of the illness she is studying have changed with time, but Violet has tracked it in all its shifting incarnations: folie lucide, moral insanity, moral idiocy, sociopathy, psychopathy, and antisocial personality—ASP for short. These days psychiatrists use checklists for the disorder, which they revise and update by committee, but among the features most often included are glibness and charm, pathological lying, lack of empathy and remorse, impulsivity, cunning and manipulativeness, early behavior problems, and a failure to learn from mistakes or respond to punishment. Every broad idea in the book will be illustrated by individual cases—the countless stories Violet has been collecting from people over the years.

Neither Violet nor I ever mention the night I told her I loved her, but my confession still lies between us like a shared bruise. It has created a new delicacy and inhibition in us that I regret, but no real discomfort. She always spends an evening with me when she comes for her yearly visit, and while I'm making her dinner, I notice that I try to suppress the most obvious signs of my joy, but after an hour or so I lose that self-consciousness, and we lapse into a familiar intimacy that is almost, but not quite, what it was before. Erica tells me that there is a man called Yves in Violet's life and that they have an "arrangement"—a circumscribed liason that involves hotels—but Violet doesn't speak to me of him. We talk about the people we have in common: Erica, Lazlo, Pinky, Bernie, Bill, Matthew, and Mark.

Mark turns up every once in a while, and then he vanishes again. With money Bill had set aside for him, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts and impressed his mother and even Violet (who followed his school career from Paris) with his first-semester grades, which arrived in the mail—all As and B's. But when Lucille called the registrar's office for some information during Mark's second semester, she discovered that Mark wasn't a student. The grades were clever forgeries done on a computer. After a week and a half of school in the fall, he had collected his tuition money, which was refunded directly to him, and had run off with a girl named Mickey. In the spring, he had enrolled again, taken the money again, and disappeared. He calls his mother from time to time, saying that he's in New Orleans or California or Michigan, but nobody knows for sure. Teenie Gold, who is now twenty-two and a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, sends me a Christmas card every year. Two years ago, she wrote that a friend of hers thought he had spotted Mark in New York leaving a music store with a pile of CDs, but he wasn't a hundred percent sure.

I don't want to see Mark again or speak to him again, but that doesn't mean that I'm free of him. At night, when every sound is amplified by the relative quiet of the building, my nerves race, and I feel blind in the darkness. I hear him in the hallway outside my door or on the fire escape. I hear him in Matt's room, even though I know he isn't there. I see him, too, in visions that are half memory, half invention. I see him in Bill's arms, his small head nestled against his father's shoulder. I see Violet throwing a towel around him after his bath and kissing his neck. I see him with Matt outside the house in Vermont, walking toward the woods with their arms over each other's shoulders. I see him wrapping a cigar box in masking tape. I see him as Harpo Marx honking madly on his horn, and I see him outside the hotel room in Nashville, looking on while Teddy Giles slams my head into the wall.

Lazlo tells me that Teddy Giles is a model prisoner. In the beginning there were those who speculated that Giles might be killed in prison for a crime unpopular even among criminals, but it seems that he is well liked by everyone, especially the guards. Not long after his arrest, the New Yorker carried an article on Giles. The journalist had done his homework, and some mysteries were solved. I discovered that Giles's mother had never been a prostitute or a waitress. She wasn't dead, but alive in Tucson, Arizona, refusing to speak to the press. Teddy Giles (who was christened Allan Johnson) grew up in a middle-class suburb outside Cleveland. His father, who worked as an accountant, left his wife when Teddy was one and a half and moved to Florida, but he continued to support his wife and son. According to one of Giles's aunts, Mrs. Johnson suffered a severe depression and was hospitalized a month after her husband's departure. Giles was farmed out to a grandmother and spent most of his early years between his mother and various other family members. At fourteen, he was expelled from school and began to travel. After that, the journalist lost Allan Johnson's trail and didn't pick it up again until he surfaced in New York as Teddy Giles. The writer made the usual comments about violence, pornography, and American culture. He pondered the ugly content of Giles's work, its brief, sensational rise in the art world, the dangers of censorship, and the bleakness of it all. The man wrote well and soberly, but as I read the article I was overcome by a feeling that he was saying what he knew his readers expected him to say, that the article, with its smooth language and received ideas, would unsettle nobody. On one of the pages there was a photograph of Allan Johnson when he was seven—one of those badly taken grade-school portraits with a fake sky as the backdrop. He had once been a cute kid with blond hair and protruding ears.

Lazlo works for me in the afternoons. He sees well what I see poorly, and together we make an efficient team. I pay him a good salary, and I think he mostly enjoys the work. Three evenings a week, he comes and reads to me purely for pleasure. When Pinky can get the baby-sitter to stay late, she comes along, too, but often falls asleep on the sofa before the reading is over. Will, also known as Willy, Wee Willy, Winky, and the Winker was two and a half last month. The Finkelman offspring is a devil for running, hopping, and climbing. When his parents bring him over for a visit, he leaps on me as if I were his personal jungle gym and leaves no part of my aging body untrampled. I'm fond of the redheaded little dervish, however, and sometimes when he crawls over me and puts his fingers on my face or touches my head, I feel a small vibration in his hands that makes me wonder if the Winker hasn't inherited his father's unusual sensitivities.

Will, however, isn't ready for an evening of The Man Without Qualities, which his father has been reading to me for the past two months. For such a laconic person, Lazlo reads pretty well. He is careful about punctuation and rarely stumbles over words. From time to time, he pauses after a passage and makes a sound—a kind of snort that moves from his throat and up through his nose. I look forward to the snorts, which I've dubbed "Finkelmanian laughter," because by matching snort to sentence, I've finally gained access to the comic depths in Lazlo I always suspected were there. His is a dry, restrained, often black humor, well suited to Musil. At thirty-five, Laz isn't young anymore. I have no impression that he's aged physically at all, but that may be because he's never modified his hair, glasses, or neon trousers, and my eyes are fuzzy. Lazlo has a dealer now, but he sells too little to make the dealer happy. Nevertheless, he plows on with his kinetic Tinkertoys, which now hold small objects and flags with quotations on them. I know he reads Musil with an eye for a sharp quote. Like his mentor, Bill, Lazlo is attracted to purity. He has an ascetic streak. But Laz belongs to another generation, and his observant eyes have been fixed too long on the vanities, corruptions, cruelties, foibles, fortunes, and foils of New York's art world to have remained untouched by it. A tone of cynicism sometimes creeps into his voice when he talks about shows.

Last spring, he and I started listening to Mets games on the radio. It's late August now and there's excited talk about a possible Subway Series. Neither Laz nor I has ever been a rabid fan. We listen for two fans who died, and we take their pleasure in soaring home runs, hard-hit doubles, beautiful slides into third and a scuffle on first about whether the guy was really out. I enjoy the language of baseball—sliders, fastballs, knuckle-balls, a can of corn—and I like listening to the games on the radio and to Bob Murphy inviting us to stay tuned for "the happy recap." The play-by-play has started to excite me more than I would have expected. Last week, I actually popped up from my chair and cheered.

Lazlo likes to take out the portfolios of Matt's drawings and look at them. When my eyes tire, he sometimes describes the scenes to me. I lie back in my chair and listen to him tell about the tiny people in Matthew's New York. Last week, he described a picture of Dave: "Dave's chilling out in his chair. He's looking kind of beat, but his eyes are open. I like the way Matt did the old guy's beard with those little squiggly lines and the white craypas over them. Good old Dave," Lazlo said. "He's dreaming about some old girlfriend probably. He's going over the whole sad mess in his mind. I can tell, because Matt stuck a little wrinkle between his eyebrows."

Lazlo's been my right-hand man when it comes to the book on Bill. For several years it's been growing and shrinking and then growing again. I want it to be finished before Bill's retrospective in 2002 at the Whitney. Early in the summer, I stopped the revisions I was dictating to Lazlo in order to write these pages. I told him I had a personal project that I had to take care of before we could continue. He suspects the truth. He knows that I dusted off my old manual typewriter for the occasion and have been typing in a trance every day for hours. I chose my old Olympia because my fingers don't lose their position on the keys as easily as on a computer. "You're straining your eyes, Leo," he tells me. "You should let me help you with whatever it is." But he can't help me with this story.

Before she left for Paris, Violet told me that she had left a box of Bill's books on the Bowery for me. She had saved volumes she knew I would like and that might help me with my work. "They're all marked," she said, "and some of them have long notes in the margins." I didn't pick up those books for over two months. When I finally went to get them, Mr. Bob trailed after me, sweeping while he delivered his harangue. I was robbing Bill's ghost, violating the sacred ground of the dead, cheating Beauty of her inheritance. When I pointed to my name written in Violet's hand on a cardboard box, Bob was tongue-tied for a moment but rebounded immediately with a long discourse on a possessed breakfront he had tracked down in Flushing twenty years earlier. When I walked out the front door carrying the small box in my arms, he punished me with a rather perfunctory blessing.

Violet hasn't given up the Bowery studio. She still pays the rent for herself and Mr. Bob. Eventually, Mr. Aiello or his heirs will want to do something with the building, but for now it's a sagging, forgotten structure inhabited by a mad but highly articulate old man. Bob gets most of his nourishment in soup kitchens these days. About once a month, I go and check on him or send Lazlo to do it when I feel I'm not up to the old man's monologues. Whenever I make the trip, I bring along a bag of groceries and am forced to endure Bob's whining about my choices. Once he accused me of having "no palate." Nevertheless, I've sensed a slight softening in his attitude toward me. His hostility is a little less vituperative, and his benedictions have become longer and more florid. It isn't altruism that prompts my visits to Mr. Bob but my eagerness to listen to his ornate farewells, to hear him invoke the radiance of the Godhead, the seraphim, the Holy Dove, and the Bloody Lamb. I look forward to his creative perversions of the psalms. His favorite is Psalm 38, which he alters freely for his purposes, calling on God to keep my loins free of loathsome disease and to maintain the soundness of my flesh. "O Lord, let him not be bowed down greatly," Bob bellowed after me the last time I was on the Bowery. "Let him not go mourning all the day long."

I didn't find Violet's letters until May. I had opened some of the other books, but never the volume of da Vinci drawings. I was saving it for when I began to research Icarus. I felt sure that Bill's unfinished work had been influenced by the drawings, not in any direct way but because the artist had made drawings for a flying bird-machine. I had been avoiding Icarus. It seemed impossible to write about it without mentioning Mark. As soon as I opened the volume, the five letters spilled out. After only seconds, I understood what I had found and started reading. I read and rested, read and rested, nearly panting from the strain, but hungry for the next word. It's good that no one saw me deciphering those love letters. Heaving, dizzy, blinking, and straining, I finally managed to get through all five during the course of a couple of hours, and then I closed my eyes and kept them shut for a long time.

"Do you remember when you told me I had beautiful knees? I never liked my knees. In fact, I thought they were ugly. But your eyes have rehabilitated them. Whether I see you again or not, I'm going to live out my life with these two beautiful knees." The letters were full of little thoughts like that one, but she also wrote: "It's important now to tell you that I love you. I held back, because I was a coward. But I'm yelling it now. And even if I lose you, I'll always say to myself, 'I had that. I had him, and it was delirious and sacred and sweet.' If you let me, I'll always dote on your whole odd, savage, painting self."

Before I mailed the letters to Violet in Paris, I xeroxed them and put the copies in my drawer. I wish I had been nobler. To resist reading them was probably beyond me, but if my eyes had been better, I might not have made those copies. I don't keep them to study their contents. That's too difficult. I keep the letters as objects, charmed by their various metonymies. When I take out my things now, I rarely separate Violet's letters to Bill from the little photo of the two of them, but I keep the bit of cardboard and Matthew's knife far away from the other things. The doughnuts eaten in secret and the stolen gift are heavy with Mark and with my fear. The fear pre-dates the murder of Rafael Hernandez, and when I play my game of mobile objects, I'm often tempted to move the photographs of my aunt, uncle, grandparents, and the twins near the knife and the fragment of the box. Then the game flirts with terror. It moves me so close to the edge that I have a sensation of falling, as if I had hurled myself off the edge of a building. I plummet downward, and in the speed of the fall I lose myself in something formless but deafening. It's like entering a scream—being a scream.

And then I withdraw, backing away from the edge like a phobic. I make a different arrangement. Talismans, icons, incantations—these fragments are my frail shields of meaning. The game's moves must be rational. I force myself to make a coherent argument for every grouping, but at bottom the game is magic. I'm its necromancer calling on the spirits of the dead, the missing, and the imaginary. Like O painting a slab of beef because he's hungry, I invoke ghosts that can't satisfy me. But the invocation has a power all its own. The objects become muses of memory.

Every story we tell about ourselves can only be told in the past tense. It winds backward from where we now stand, no longer the actors in the story but its spectators who have chosen to speak. The trail behind us is sometimes marked by stones like the ones Hansel first left behind him. Other times, the path is gone, because the birds flew down and ate up all the crumbs at sunrise. The story flies over the blanks, filling them in with the hypotaxis of an "and" or an "and then." I've done it in these pages to stay on a path I know is interrupted by shallow pits and several deep holes. Writing is a way to trace my hunger, and hunger is nothing if not a void.

In one version of the story, the burnt piece of doughnut box might stand for hunger. I think Mark was always starved for something. But what? He wanted me to believe him, admire him. He wanted it badly for at least as long as he looked into my eyes. Maybe that need was the one thing that was whole and true in him, and it made him radiant. It didn't matter that he felt little or nothing for me or that he had to pretend to get my admiration. What mattered was that he felt my belief. But the pleasure he took in pleasing others never lasted. Insatiable, he gorged on crackers and doughnuts, on stolen things and money, on pharmaceuticals and on the chase itself.

I have no object for Lucille in my drawer. It would have been easy to save some scrap of her, but I never did. Bill pursued her for a long time, a creature in his mind whom he could never locate. Maybe Mark was looking for her, too. I don't know. Even I followed her for a while, until I came to a dead end. The idea of Lucille was strong, but I don't know what that idea was except maybe evasion itself, which is best expressed by nothing. Bill turned what eluded him into real things that would carry the weight of his needs and doubts and wishes—paintings, boxes, doors, and all those children on videotape. Father of thousands. Dirt and paint and wine and cigarettes and hope. Bill. Father of Mark. I can still see him rocking his little boy in the blue boat bed he built for him on the Bowery, and I can hear him singing in a voice that was low and hoarse, "Take a walk on the wild side." Bill loved his changeling child, his blank son, his Ghosty Boy. He loved the boy-man who is still roaming from city to city and is still reaching into his traveling bag to find a face to wear and a voice to use.

Violet is still looking for the sickness that moves in the air, the Zeitgeist that mumbles to its victims: scream, starve, eat, kill. She's looking for the idea-winds that gust through people's minds and then become scars on the landscape. But how the contagions move from outside to inside isn't clear. They move in language, pictures, feelings, and in something else I can't name, something between and among us. There are days when I find myself walking through the rooms of an apartment in Berlin— Mommsenstrasse 11. The furniture is a little blurry and all the people are gone, but I can feel the sweep of the empty rooms and the light that comes through the windows. A bitter nowhere. I turn away from the place as my father did, and I think about the day he stopped looking for their names on the lists, about the day he knew. It's hard to live with nonsense—gruesome, unspeakable nonsense. He couldn't do it. Before she died, my mother shrank. She looked very small in the hospital bed, and her freckled arm over the sheet was like a stick with pale loose skin. It was all Berlin and flight and Hampstead and German and confusion by then. Forty years had vanished from her head, and she called out for my father. Mutti in the dark.

Violet packed up Bill's work clothes and took them along to Paris. I imagine that she still puts them on from time to time, for comfort. When I think of Violet in Bill's ragged shirt and paint-smeared jeans, I give her a Camel to smoke, and I call the image in my mind Self-Portrait. I never imagine her at the piano anymore. The lesson finally ended with a real kiss that sent her far away from me. It's odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another. Matthew drew an old man many times, and he called him Dave. Years go by, and it turns out that he was drawing his own father. I am Dave now, Dave with patches on his eyes.

Another family has moved in upstairs. Two years ago, Violet sold the loft for a lot of money to the Wakefields. Every evening I hear their two children, Jacob and Chloe. They shake the light fixtures on my ceiling with their ritual war dances before they go to bed. Jacob is five and Chloe is three, and noise is their business. I suppose if they thumped for hours on end, I would be annoyed, but I've grown accustomed to their routine explosions around seven o'clock. Jacob sleeps in Mark's old room, and Chloe sleeps in what used to be Violet's study. In the living room, there's a plastic slide where the red sofa used to be. Every true story has several possible endings. This is mine: the children upstairs must be asleep, because the rooms above me are quiet. It's eight-thirty in the evening on August 30, 2000. I've had my supper, and I've put away the dishes. I'm going to stop typing now, move to my chair, and rest my eyes. In half an hour, Lazlo is coming to read to me.