When you’ve walked all the way from the Upper East Side to Greenwich Village in the middle of the night, the first sight of home should be an occasion for joy. Wes felt anything but joyful as he climbed the stoop. He had hoped that a long walk through the dark and quiet city would give him some perspective, but it hadn’t worked out that way. In other circumstances, it might have been an adventure but it was all nothing but a blur, thoughts as flimsy and disposable as plastic bags. If he had been a character in a book—Prince André in War and Peace, say—he would have seized the opportunity for a round of rough, candid soul-searching that would inevitably have led to some brilliant new insight into human nature in general and his own moral frailty in particular. But he wasn’t Prince André—he was just Wes, idiot Wes, the guy who’d just ruined his life forever and forever, and he was as confused and miserable now as he’d been when he’d set out from Lucy’s apartment two hours earlier. He stood at the threshold and took a deep breath, but it didn’t help: the sadness didn’t go away. In fact, he felt a tear welling, and he leaned forward to rest his forehead on the cold, damp lacquer of the front door.

Wes knew it was a terrible thing for someone so young to feel so sad in this particular way. It seemed to combine elements of exhaustion, shame, hopelessness and loss. A teenager had no business feeling this way. He didn’t have a lot of experience in these things, but he felt instinctively that this was a much older person’s kind of sadness, informed by regrets, nostalgia, a sense of half a lifetime’s squandered opportunities. It was the sort of feeling a middle-aged loser might have when he realizes that he made a bad choice twenty years earlier, and can trace everything that’s gone wrong ever since back to that one moment. It was the sort of feeling that Wes could easily imagine his dad feeling. Another tear squeezed itself from his eye and was caught on his eyelash, blurring his vision. With the key in the lock, Wes changed his mind and turned to sit on the top step of the stoop.

Wes felt paralyzed by indecision and weariness. He’d been up practically the entire night, but he wasn’t physically tired. He could push on to the river, only five minutes away; letting the sun rise upon him and the fresh winds wash over him might be a cleansing, healing balm. It seemed unlikely, somehow. Wes doubted that he would ever feel clean again. This was usually his favorite time of day; he was often out walking Crispy in the dark before the dawn. He loved the streets of the Village when there was no one around, when it felt like being on an empty stage that belonged to no one but him, but now it was spoiled. The coming of the daylight seemed ominous and bleak, as if the new day would set the night’s events in stone—as if, should the night go on forever, there was still a chance that they could be undone. So long as he lingered out here in the night, somehow they would remain confined to the world of dream; if he entered the house and closed the door behind him, he would cut them adrift and give them their own independent life, where he would be helpless to direct a new outcome. Either way, he was fucked.

During the week, even at this hour, commuters often slowly prowled these blocks in their cars looking for free parking, but on a Saturday morning the streets of the neighborhood were deserted. A distant rumble of trucks from the avenue; the wind rising off the river rattled the few dry leaves still clinging to the ginkgos, which hissed and groaned with a sound of shale in the tide. A few late autumn clouds, underlit by the city, stood out against the magenta sky, and even as Wes watched began to turn from yellow-white to pink. A guy in a hoodie, shoulders hunched and hands in pockets, glanced up at Wes without breaking stride and was gone. Wes wondered what he himself would look like to a passer-by who knew nothing about him. Would he be mistaken for a junkie, a spurned lover, a homeless mental case? Wes generally spent a lot of time imagining what he looked like to other people, friends and strangers alike; he sometimes stood before a mirror and tried to see himself as others might, but it was useless. He was altogether invisible to himself, and he wondered briefly if this is what it felt like to be a vampire—dead to all hope, all eternity stretching out before him like a lifeless, frozen sea. All the girls he knew were reading Twilight; Wes would never go near a book like that, but he bet he could teach them a thing or two about loneliness and hopelessness. Wes moaned and dragged his palm across his face. One thing was certain: no stranger hurrying by at the foot of the stoop would be likely to take him for what he really was—a seventeen-year old boy who had just lost his virginity. He stood up, turned once more to the black, gleaming front door, fumbled in his coat for the keys, and let himself into the house.

No one had waited up for him, of course. All was dark in the front hall, except for the faint blue glow of a cabinet light in the kitchen and a splash of pre-dawn luminosity through the lead-paned fanlight. No sound but the slow settling of floorboards—too early, even, for the boiler to wake up in the basement—and the refrigerator humming to itself. Wes was home. Now the night was truly over; there was no turning back from its truths, or evading its consequences, because it no longer belonged to him. What he had done, the mistakes he had made, belonged forever now to the petrified past, the past of textbooks and Wikipedia entries and Twitter logs. Wes could not pretend it had not happened; the whole school would know about it by Monday morning, and never, ever again—no matter how long he lived, no matter what he did or where he fled, until the day he died—would he be the person he had been on Friday morning, someone with a choice between two futures, bright with justified hope. Almost anyone Wes knew or could imagine in his position would be celebrating right now. How many fucking movies had he seen about desperate nerds with hearts of gold trying to get their dicks wet for the first time? And when they did—they always did, of course—everything changed for them. Everything changed for the better, naturally. Everybody Wes knew took their cues from movies like that—horny and pimply before, manly and reticent after. And the sorriest part about all this mess was that Wes had bought into the whole rite-of-passage thing too—a bold expression of self-confidence, a source of pleasurable memories from the very fountainhead of youth. I mean, he said to himself, have I or have I not just spent the night in bed with a beautiful, willing girl who chose me, and whose scent clings to me still? Am I or am I not a virgin anymore, and will I or will I not be a virgin ever again for as long as I live? Did it really matter all that much that she happened to be the totally wrong girl?

But it was no good, and Wes knew it. The more he struggled against the feeling that he had destroyed every prospect he’d ever had for happiness and moral bearing, the tighter it compressed his heart—a Chinese handcuff, only not one that can be released by relaxing. He pulled off his sneakers and placed them gingerly on the floor beside the coat rack. He already had his tiptoe on the first riser when he heard a sound, a rustle of paper, from the kitchen.

He found his father, barefoot in sweatpants and T-shirt, leaning on both hands over the counter. The bluish light of the cabinet fixture picked up the incipient bald spot beneath the thinning hair on the crown of his head, and illuminated the architectural blueprints spread out between his hands. Wes had seen these blueprints before—they’d been drawn up for a gut renovation of the kitchen that had been put on indefinite hold by his mother’s illness. Poring over them in the fish-tank glow of the cabinet light, his father looked like a hapless criminal caught in the act, especially when, startled by Wes’s sudden appearance, he hastily folded them up and pushed them aside.

“Hey kid, you’re up early.”

“You too.”

“Couldn’t sleep. Guilty conscience, I guess.” The joke fell flat, for obvious reasons.

“Me neither.”

“Are you coming or going?”

“I just got in.”

“Don’t you have a curfew?”

“No.”

His father nodded and took a long draw on a glass of water, tipping his head back, to cover the awkward silence. It was odd: his dad was a perfectly healthy guy, as far as Wes knew, not otherwise nervous or clumsy, but his hand always shook visibly when he drank, which made him look like an alcoholic, or at least much older than he really was. Wes imagined that, in some other distant world, if he remembered nothing else about his father, he would remember that his hand trembled when he drank water. That, or the fact that his eyes teared up whenever he heard “Brown-eyed Girl” on the radio.

“How was it?”

“How was what?”

“Your party, or whatever.”

“Uh, you know.”

A porcelainy sound, like a teacup shifting in a saucer, rose from the garden parlor downstairs where Wes’s father kept his apartment, and they both turned to the half-open door, through which Wes glimpsed, or thought he glimpsed, a shadow glide across the stairwell wall. He locked eyes with his dad for the briefest moment, but it was a pointless exercise and they both knew it. Nobody was going to be making any confessions tonight.

“Must be Crispy.”

“I’ll walk her when I get up. ’Night.”

“’Night Wes.”

On the second floor landing, Wes paused to listen for sounds of wayward wakefulness. His mother was a fitful sleeper, easily awakened by little noises or her own discomforts, and even at this hour she was capable of making demands if disturbed. Wes himself was an early riser, but on a weekday he often heard her summoning Narita with her little glass bell even before he was out of bed. Narita wouldn’t mind—that’s what she was paid for—and in theory Wes didn’t mind either. It wasn’t such a big deal, having to take care of your mom once a week, fixing her meal or whatever, but still. He knew it wasn’t true, but sometimes it seemed that his mom woke up especially early on Saturdays, when Narita stayed with her family in Ozone Park and the glass bell rang not for her but for Wes. As he stood there in the loosening dark, it was not difficult to imagine her on the other side of her bedroom door, staring at the ceiling, sending out waves of probing consciousness into every corner of the house. Not now, though; her door was ajar, and from deep inside he could hear her regular, sinus-heavy breathing. Even so, it would not be long before she needed him. Wes moved on past Narita’s room and up the stairs towards his own.

The top-floor landing, with its little bell-jar skylight, was the brightest area of the house, but the glass had not been cleaned in so many years that even on the brightest summer’s day the light that made it through was pallid and compromised. Now, the grayish smudge that heralded the dawn perfectly complemented Wes’s mood, as if he were not going to bed after a long, trying night in New York City but waking up to a day of hopeless drudgery in a coal mine in Siberia. He staggered into his room and threw himself on his bed, determined to sleep, but almost immediately became aware of his clothes clinging to him in a way that made him feel unclean; he got up and stripped down to his underwear and lay down on top of his bedclothes. But even his boxers, slipped on warm from the dryer and fragrant as fresh-baked bread only twelve hours earlier, felt damaging and polluted, so Wes wriggled out of them and squirmed naked beneath the blankets. But now it was his body that seemed to pulse with foul emissions, his own skin coated in a film of rancid oil overlaid with a dusting of grit, cigarette smoke, stale vodka and organic decay. With an inward sigh, Wes recognized that it would be pointless trying to get to sleep feeling so soiled; he rolled off the bed and padded across the landing to the bathroom. Stepping over the sill of the ancient claw-foot tub, he grabbed a tube of Nora’s lavender bodywash, positioned himself beneath the showerhead and turned on the water. As he scrubbed himself from neck to toes, then shampooed and conditioned his hair, he tried to will his mind to go blank, and to convince himself that all his troubles were simply the accumulated sweat of an eventful day that could be sloughed off and washed down the drain. But that was no good, either, because when you betray yourself and your deepest-held convictions you become a different person forever, and no bodywash ever invented can bleach out that stain, and even washing your hair becomes an act of consummate hypocrisy. Add hypocrisy to the list of his failings. He returned to his room, dropped the towel on the floor, climbed into bed, pulled the blankets over his shoulder, turned to face the wall and went to sleep.

He dreamed that he was sitting at a long gleaming table in the Rose Reading Room of the public library. Before him was a yellow legal pad with many pages rolled up and tucked under the top of the pad. The page open before him was covered in meticulously calligraphed mathematical equations and diagrams that he could not remember having written, and so exquisitely drawn that he could hardly believe they were his. He was a member of a team of efficiency experts that had been tasked with calculating the number of light bulbs hanging in the chandeliers overhead. At the same time, looking around the room, he realized that it was the physical embodiment of someone else’s Facebook homepage, and that a related task was to identify the person to whom the page belonged by triangulating the hundreds of people sitting at his and the other tables. By calculating which were friends in common with each other and with the unknown subscriber, he would be able to find the subscriber himself, and thus determine the number of light bulbs. He was working under the assumption that the subscriber was Barack Obama, but as he glanced out of one of the enormous arched windows to see a jetliner angled nose down and speeding silently towards the western façade of the library, he suddenly understood that the Facebook page was none other than Prince André’s, and that he would therefore never be able to calculate the light bulbs. He woke up to find himself on his back, and from the angle of the light streaming in from the yard he knew that he had only slept a few hours. The night was over, it had really happened, and suddenly this new day was at the beginning. He began to cry again, only silently and without tears. It felt like dry heaving of the eyes.

The boiler had kicked in since he’d fallen asleep; the ancient radiator hissed and clanked, and the room felt close and too hot. He rose abruptly and opened the window at the foot of his bed. He leaned his palms on the sill and stuck his entire upper body out the casement. It was a crisp late autumn day, with just a hint of wood smoke and woodlands pulling through the air. The sky, cloudless now, retained the promise of magenta it had shown before sunrise, and the sun hung coolly in the naked branches. From here he could see the backyards of just about every house on the block and the jumbled rooftops, chimneypots and water towers of half of Greenwich Village. Some were shabby, unkempt and cankered with ancient wooden sheds, cracked paving of brick or slate, tangles of skeletal briar and vigorous ivy, angled limestone lintels and crumbling mortar. These belonged to the long-term, pre-gentrification residents, like Wes and his family. Others had been remodeled, sporting new rear walls made of thick glass and heavy pivoting doors of brushed steel, stucco additions and terraces lined with cedar planters and expensive garden furniture, Japanese rock gardens or hedges of well-trimmed heritage hydrangeas. These belonged to bankers, hedge fund managers and media moguls.

Wes looked down into his own yard. Nothing grew under the ancient sycamore at the far end; it was just dirt, a farmyard where the dog peed when no one could be bothered to walk her. There was an old, warped wooden school desk and chair where his father sat on sunny days, and a white extension chord running into the basement window. Over the years the yard had been the scene of a number of utopian construction projects: a tree house, chicken coops and rabbit hutches, a wood-fired bread oven. All had reached various stages of completion before being abandoned and cannibalized. Now there was nothing but some unhappy shade borders of variegated hostas and ghost ferns, an outdoor dining set of green rubberized iron and an old kettle grill that was barely able to stand on its tripod. And there, too, was Nora, sitting on the bench that circled the foot of the sycamore, knees up to her chin, a teen magazine in her left hand, her right thumb in her mouth. She rocked as she read—in an absorbed way, not a crazy way.

Wes called down. “Hey cookie!”

Nora looked up and smiled. “Hiya daddy-o.”

“Watcha doing’?”

“Memorizing slang from the old days.”

“Mom up?”

“Uh-huh.”

“She get breakfast?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Dog walked?”

“Climb it, Tarzan.”

He smiled at her again and blew her a kiss. Wes couldn’t help himself. Every time he saw his sister he was filled with love for her. She was the most delightful, easy, dependable, kind and intelligent child on the planet, and all he wanted to do was to protect her from all this, have her call him “daddy-o” forever and make sure that she didn’t grow up too fast or around the wrong sort of people. But then Wes remembered that he himself had become the wrong sort of person, precisely the kind of person that little sisters need protecting from, and maybe she needed protecting from him, too. He withdrew from the window and returned to the bed. He slid beneath the covers, lying on his back and cradling his head in his palms, and looked up at the cracked plaster overhead.

“I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in and stops my mind from wandering.” When he was little, Wes had never understood this line. Why would a hole stop his mind from wandering? Surely, his mind required a hole to escape through into the outside world. But now that he was older, and had a crack in the ceiling of his own, he thought he understood better. His crack did not let any rain get in, but it had a way of focusing the mind that was not helpful or conducive to unfettered daydreaming. If it should also let rain in, that would be particularly focusing and unhelpful. What a mind needed, if it was to roam freely, and especially if it was to roam productively, was a sealed space in which it was safe, contained and undistracted. That is why Wes had always thought it a mistake for Paul McCartney to paint his room in a colorful way as an encouragement to his wandering mind, because surely plain white walls were a better inducement? Maybe it was a generational thing with color. One thing that Wes and the Beatles had in common, however, was their agreement that his room was right where he belonged. Wes felt that he could live here forever and never grow bored, no matter how faithless and shallow he might be.

Wes thought about his dream; it was not like any other he could remember, and he didn’t understand anything about it. It was true that Prince André had been much on his mind lately, but it would be a challenge to figure out how he or any of the rest of it related to Wes’s current circumstances. He tried to break it down to its references. Barack Obama—okay, he was on everyone’s minds these days. Facebook—same. He’d spent a good deal of time in the Rose Reading Room, maybe his favorite place in the world, so that was explainable. But light bulbs, calligraphy? And what did the airplane mean? Why should a perfectly curious and enigmatic dream suddenly become a nightmare?

Wes had had a genuine nightmare not long before. An atomic war had broken out, and a bomb exploded over New York. Wes found himself in some sort of bleak, cinderblock dormitory, and he knew that he had died and gone to hell. It was explained to the newcomers that they were free to roam the city, but that they absolutely must be back at the dorm by six. The punishment for non-compliance was left to their imagination. Wes didn’t remember much of the dream after that, except that his new home was a small rust-belt city under a perpetually overcast sky the color of liver, and that at some point he had found himself on a bus, looking at his watch. It was ten to six, and he had suddenly realized that he was on the wrong bus, had no idea where he was, and that it would be impossible to reach the dorm by six. Wes had woken up with a start, his heart racing. The point, he had figured out later, is that there’s a very fine line between real life and hell, just the matter of a missed deadline, and you won’t know you’ve crossed it until it’s too late. All you have to do is make one mistake, and for all eternity you will be wandering aimlessly in a desolate landscape, friendless and desperate. Now that was a message he could understand.

And then he remembered that, in his dream this morning, the Rose Reading Room had been not at all like it is in real life; its distant vaulted ceilings with their multiple chandeliers seemed to leap on forever and in all directions above the gleaming tables. It had been a little like the Library of Babel in the short story. That was an interesting twist. Borges described the Library as infinite, which meant it contained not only every book ever written, but every book that could be written, past and future. Wes thought this was interesting because it meant that infinity was a concept where the difference between space and time becomes meaningless. There is no difference between something that is infinitely big and something that is infinitely old, and no difference between something that had existed forever and something that would exist forever. Wes had often daydreamed about walking through the Library, which was made up of an infinite number of hexagonal units, connected horizontally by corridors and vertically by open shafts. In each corridor there was a spiral staircase leading up and down to the adjacent level, and a bathroom facility for the “librarians,” who seemed to be simply the Library’s inhabitants, since there was no mention of patrons who might borrow or study the books, which would then require reshelving by the “librarians.” Borges didn’t say anything about what the librarians ate or where they slept or their other physical needs. Presumably they were able to wash their clothes in the bathrooms, and hang them out to dry on the railings lining the shafts, but one would imagine that there were considerable winds in the shafts—maybe even entire weather systems—so the librarians would need clothes pegs to secure their laundry, not to mention soap to wash it, and where did those things come from? Some librarians seemed to be territorial, while others were nomadic, spending their entire lives searching for a particular book. How did they replace their shoes when they wore out? Were there male and female librarians, and if so, did they have sex with each other when they met? Did they mate for life, or just hook up? What happened when the lady librarians got pregnant? Were the male librarians steadfast and faithful, or were they weak and unprincipled, and easily led to betray the ones they loved? Borges said nothing about baby librarians, or librarian obstetricians, or about librarian schools. Wes knew this was silly speculation, but it irritated him that Borges had thought to provide the librarians with toilets in every corridor, but with nothing else they would need to get by in their infinite time-space continuum.

Wes had spent a lot of time thinking about the story since he had first read it three years earlier. He had read it many times since and had not tired of it yet. He had always suspected that the endless library was a metaphor for the imagination, for the mind’s infinite creative and intuitive power. The story was probably where Wes had first got the idea of his own mind as an infinite—or almost infinite—source of ideas and understanding. The mind was its own ecosystem, creating its own internal weather, like the library, and since it was the exclusive creator of all problems and all solutions, it was very possible that it had, in fact, created the universe itself. And that was precisely why it made no difference at all where it was located in the “real” world—in a sealed room all by itself, in a vast library with infinite chambers and corridors, it all came to the same thing. Wes had always imagined that he could be very happy as a monk. He almost never felt lonely.

But how could any of this help him today? This was a real problem, maybe even a tragedy, not some pseudo-mystical sci-fi conundrum. Wes had betrayed the woman he loved by sleeping with someone he didn’t care about or even like very much. Wes’s mind hadn’t created this problem; it was not something he’d stumbled upon in his wanderings through the labyrinth of his imagination; it was not a metaphysical exercise. It was real—real real, as opposed to fixing-a-hole real. What did that mean? It meant it involved other people and their feelings. It meant it involved actions that could not be revoked. It meant consequences that could not be evaded by shaking the world like a Magic Eight Ball until it gave you the answer you wanted. No matter how much you might want it, life is not a Library of Babel—you can’t just wander off down a hallway in search of some elusive intellectual prize. You’ve got to find somewhere to do your laundry, to repair the holes in your shoes. That was what his father had been doing for decades, and what he had sworn to himself that he would never do. It was what Wes had to look forward to for the rest of his life. Never, ever again—not when he went off to college, not when he figured out how to make a living, not when he wrote the novels he was destined to write, not if he got married and had children of his own—would he be able to say to himself that at least he was better than what his father had been.

Wes shook his head, trying to clear it of all these extraneous thoughts and tangents that were preventing him from examining the problem at hand. He didn’t need to be thinking about dreams or libraries, and he especially did not need to be thinking about his father right now. He needed to figure out how he had gotten himself into this terrible situation and what, if anything, he could do about it. He decided that he needed to go over it methodically, step by step, try to remember exactly how it had all gone down, where he had gone wrong, what were the insuperable character flaws that had allowed him to make such an awful mistake. It was too late to take any of it back, and he doubted that he would ever find a way to forgive himself, but he had a vague idea that the fallen can be ennobled, in a pathetic sort of way, by the effort to salvage some trinket of redemption from the wreckage of their moral failure. He needed to start from the beginning.

To say that Friday had dawned full of hope would have been an exaggeration, but there had certainly been nothing to suggest that it would be a day out of the ordinary. He had an advisory with Mrs. Fielding at 7:50, so all his usual morning chores had to be done twenty minutes earlier, but that wasn’t difficult for Wes. Unlike almost everyone he knew, he was an early morning person, able to leap from bed in the dark, his mind fully logged on, his thoughts warmed up and flexible before his feet hit the floor. Morning was when Wes did his best thinking, and whenever he found himself gnawing late at night on an instransigeant bone of homework, he knew enough to leave it for the morning, when it would seem more digestible. Sometimes, when he was particularly enjoying a book, he would put it down at midnight, close his eyes, then pick it up again at four as if it were five minutes later. His father had told him once, with his usual wistful bitterness, that you never again read books with the passion and intensity you bring to them as a teenager, and that was easy to believe. And it wasn’t only that Wes’s mind worked well early in the morning; he also felt better—cleaner, stronger, more moral, the quivering arrow of a powerful compass. He loved to be awake alone in the world, to walk the dog on quiet streets that had not yet been invaded by the trying multitudes, where he could pretend that tourists and bankers and real estate brokers were harmless abstractions. When he was even younger, the sense of a day’s untapped potential had been almost physical, it had been so delicious and irresistible Wes had wanted to throw himself into the day as if from a high dive. Now, he still felt that sense of possibility, he still jumped into the day feet first, but there was less passion behind it, it was more like the feeling you get when you climb into a bed made up with freshly laundered sheets, crisp and bleachy. Unpolluted and not yet soiled.

That was what Friday morning at 5:30 a.m. had felt like. Wes had to walk the dog, shower, wake Nora, feed her and see that she was clean and properly dressed. Narita would have done it, but Wes didn’t trust Nora’s welfare to anyone but himself. Then, if there was still time, he would eat and read the paper and be out of the house by 7.15. These were all things he looked forward to doing, or at least that gave him no sense of being oppressed or put upon. And the feeling only increased later in the week as the Times crossword puzzle grew progressively more difficult, until by Friday he sometimes had trouble completing it. Because of his appointment, he would have to put the crossword off until the evening. And there was almost always some fact to look up on Wikipedia that had come to mind in the middle of the night and disturbed his sleep. It had been one such string of searches that had first led him to The Manual.

He’d gone about his morning tasks on Friday with the usual bustle. He’d had an argument with his best friend James the day before about the percentage of water in the human body. James had said it was ninety percent, Wes had argued that it was much lower. He’d forgotten about it until that morning, when it took less than fifteen seconds on Google to prove Wes right: sixty percent, give or take. It was not much of a victory, but it had set the right tone for the day. On his crosstown walk to the subway at Union Square, he’d rewarded himself by listening to Belle & Sebastian’s “If You’re Feeling Sinister” on the iPhone. It wasn’t new but it was his favorite album of the moment, and he rationed his listening so as not to wear out its pleasures too quickly.

By the time he reached school he’d all but forgotten to wonder why Mrs. Fielding had asked him in early. Wes was quite fond of Mrs. Fielding, but he was generally fond of all his teachers, having found that the unpleasant but necessary parts of school, such as science classes, were far easier to get through if you thought with pity and compassion of those teachers whom you might otherwise dislike. Wes had figured out long before that people who were mean or impatient were almost always unhappy, maybe even in direct proportion to their meanness, and he had trained himself to feel sorry for the teachers who liked him less because he was not good at the subject they taught. That was true for all the sciences and math, and increasingly so for soccer. It was not, however, even remotely true for English, a subject in which he knew himself to be widely acknowledged as one of the best in school, although Wes himself did not feel that way. He was a lover of books, certainly, and knew himself to be a charming, fluid writer, occasionally glib. The piece he had composed for Mrs. Fielding was definitely in that mold—he’d written the entire thing in bed, in one sitting. But he also knew something about himself that his facility generally concealed from all but the most astute teacher—that he was a lazy and undisciplined thinker who too often relied on the shining surface of words to mask his disdain for academic pieties. Mrs. Fielding had been showing signs of late that she was on to him. It was unlikely that she’d called him in to heap praise on his latest effort.

On Friday morning, she had been waiting for him behind her desk in room 405. She had a kindly face framed in pale blond bangs that the mean girls in class insisted was the handiwork of a superior and very expensive colorist. Wes didn’t know anything about that and didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, remarks about a teacher’s personal appearance were simply attempts to dehumanize a person who did a very difficult job for not much money, and usually—at least at Dalton—did it very well. Wes appreciated his teachers, even when they didn’t get it, but he was also aware of the difference between not deliberately giving someone a hard time and fawning. Wes thought he was reasonably adept at treading that line. Students who pandered were viewed with distaste by their peers and faculty alike, and generally received no reward for their efforts. But this situation with Mrs. Fielding had been unknown territory. Wes was not used to causing or getting in trouble at school, and wasn’t quite sure about the protocol. Mrs. Fielding had smiled at him, openly enough; there had been a smear of pink lipstick on her front tooth and Wes had immediately looked away, only to find his eyes alight on another pink, lip-shaped stain on the rim of her coffee cup, cerulean blue with white Hellenic motifs. The paper he had handed in two days earlier sat on the desktop beside the cup, and it was ominously free of red ink. When he raised his eyes again, Mrs. Fielding had stopped smiling, though in all fairness she could hardly have been said to be frowning, either.

“Good morning, Wes,” she had said, motioning to the chair across from her. “Thanks for coming in early.”

Wes had sat down beside her, not certain where to rest his gaze.

Mrs. Fielding had seemed to be waiting for him to say something—he always had something to say—but when he remained silent she had reached across the desk for his paper and placed it delicately in the space between them.

“I imagine you already know why I asked you to come talk to me.”

“Is there something wrong with my essay?”

Mrs. Fielding had snorted, delicately, then perhaps sensing that it was a disproportionate response, she had sighed.

“Not really, no,” she had begun tentatively. “It’s well-written, dili­gently proofread, properly formatted, thoughtful and provoca­tive in places. But it’s not the assignment, and you know it.”

Again, Wes had found himself at a loss for words.

“Will you read the assignment topic for me please, Wes?”

Wes had pulled the paper forward and leaned into it, as if by earnestly focusing on the immediate task he could prove the sincerity of his intentions and thereby mitigate his sin. He had cleared his throat and in a soft, serious tone read out the assignment at the top of the first page.

“‘The authors of Candide, Pride and Prejudice and The Nose all emphasize their social and psychological themes as much through the use of language and narrative trope as they do through plot and characterization. Discuss, using any work of literature of your choice and all the critical tools at your disposal.’”

There had been a long pause, apparently not at all uncomfortable to Mrs. Fielding.

“Get it now?”

Wes had got it—he’d gotten it, of course, before he’d sat down to write the paper, but had assumed he would get away with it—yet for form’s sake he’d felt he ought to put up some semblance of defense.

“It says ‘any work,’” he’d muttered lamely.

“‘Any work of literature,’ Wes. This is a class of literature.”

Wes had chosen deliberately to misunderstand her. “I know it’s not European, but . . . ”

“I don’t care if it’s European or not. If I’d cared I’d have said ‘any work of European literature of your choice.’ But I did say ‘literature,’ and you did not choose to write about a work of literature. Therefore you have not fulfilled the assignment.”

“I’d say it’s a work of literature.”

Mrs. Fielding had smacked the edge of the desk with the tips of all ten fingers, as Wes had seen her do a thousand times when a student failed to see the obvious. “Come on, Wes. How many classes have you and I had together over the years? Conflict, resolution, growth, self-understanding, hubris, submission, Iliad, Romeo and Juliet, The Quiet American. You know me better than that. You know better than that.”

“I thought . . . a break with convention . . . ”

“No, you were being smug and clever and lazy. You thought I’d be so dazzled by your iconoclasm and wit that I wouldn’t notice that you’d barely gotten out of bed to write this. And that’s why I’m making you write the paper again. Not because the US Army’s M16 Operator’s Manual is an unfit subject for an honor’s class in European literature, although it is, but because you tried to get away with something that is unworthy of you.”

“Okay.”

“Stretch, Wes. Stretch. You’re too young and too smart to take the easy way out. If you sit on your laurels now, at your age, you may never get up.”

“Thanks, Mrs. F. I appreciate it. I really do. When do you need this by?”

She had turned to him in mock, wide-eyed astonishment and held out her hands, palms upward in the universal expression of powerlessness. Wes had thought, rather, that the palms, angled both towards each other and towards him, were reflecting mirrors, or the dishes of a radio telescope, concentrating upon him beams of energy summoned from across the universe. With her neatly plucked eyebrows raised, and her mouth open in a cannon’s pucker, she’d been sending him some alien message across the generations. It was ostensibly couched in a language he understood, spoken by an intergalactic traveler who appears in human form so as not to cause panic. “I can’t believe that’s all you have to say to me after all this,” he was supposed to read the message as saying. In fact, Wes had known that she was actually saying “Please be a good person, be as kind as you can possibly be, because I will be dead so soon, so soon.” Wes had heard the message loud and clear, and had instantly regretted that his reaction to Mrs. Fielding’s critique had been less than generous and grateful. Message relayed, she had lowered her eyebrows, closed her mouth and turned away.

“Monday morning will be fine, Wes.”

And now it was Saturday morning, and despite the fact that the entire world had changed in the intervening twenty-four hours, Wes still had a whole paper to write from scratch. Not entirely from scratch, as he already had copious notes for War and Peace, but still. It wasn’t precisely that Wes felt himself ill used, or that Mrs. Fielding had been unfair in her judgment of his efforts, but it now seemed kind of dismal and petty in the light of events, this quibbling over intent and mere words. If she only knew how damaged and debased Wes was feeling at the moment, he was convinced that Mrs. F. could muster the compassion and empathy to let him off the hook. But no one would ever know, or care. If only they knew the love and generosity, the open-heartedness and pity, with which he thought of them, they would consider him the greatest person in the world. But it’s not something you can tell people.

Wes rolled over and retrieved his backpack from beneath the bed. From among the dog-eared sheaves of paper, heavy textbooks and loose implements he pulled the offending manual, which he had taken to carrying with him as incidental reading at moments of leisure. Wes had found the Manual online, following a link from the Wikipedia entry on the M16, which he’d stumbled upon at the end of a string of links that had begun with a query about the breakup of the B-52’s, following a drunken boast by Wes’s father that he had danced all night to “Rock Lobster” and “Private Idaho” when he was in college. It was a simple PDF file available for download and evidently photocopied directly from a yellowing copy of the 1985 edition, including a worn and fraying spine. The original had been slim and palm-sized, presumably to fit into a soldier’s breast or back pocket, but Wes’s printout of the file ran to almost 150 pages and was quite substantial. Wes wistfully riffled through the pages, many marked up with yellow highlighter, as if through a sheaf of old love letters or college rejections, artifacts of some earlier, more innocent interval in a life gone bitterly wrong. He stopped at his favorite passages, knowing that he was probably reading them for the last time.

The first dozen pages or so were devoted to addenda and corrigenda to earlier editions, then came a radiation hazard warning about the tritium gas sealed into the front sight post. The M16A1 weighed six and a half pounds, was 39 inches long. The only difference between the M16 and the M16A1 was that the A1 was equipped with a forward assist assembly. The manual described it as “lightweight, air cooled, gas operated, magazine fed and shoulder fired,” a classic rock-and-roll song about a favorite car. Its purpose was “to provide personnel an offensive/defensive capability to engage targets in the field.” Wes read it as if it were poetry—what mysterious mind had had the courage to jump the ontological chasm between “shooting at strangers” to “engaging targets in the field?” Wes felt an almost ecstatic intellectual communion with his fellow writer, very probably dead now since the M16 had entered into service in the 1960s. Even though Wes suspected that, in fact, there had never been any such person, the Manual having surely been written by committee, in his paper he had speculated about him at length, as one might about the writer of some ancient epic, the Bible or Gilgamesh, inventing a self-conscious mind behind a text accreted over centuries of oral precedent. And in creating a writer for the Manual, Wes had grown to love him for his lonely struggle with a resistant, intransigent vocabulary. All this he had expatiated upon at length, in keeping with the theme of language and narrative trope. He’d thought, he was sure, that he was passionate and sincere about his subject.

“When round reaches approximate end of barrel, expanding gases from burning propellant pass out through gas port and into gas tube. Gas goes into bolt carrier assembly, ejects old cartridge, and chambers a new round.” “One click of elevation of windage is equal to one block change in elevation or windage.” “Throw away the white gloves for rifle inspections.” “Overnight while the Teflon has been forming a film for lubrication, the cleaning solvents in the CLP have been at work in the nooks and crannies (actually in the pores of the metal) seeking out carbon and firing residue.” The language, Wes could not help feeling, was pure and musical, a triumph of minimalist compression on a par with anything from Carver or Beckett. Just look at the ambiguity in the use of the word “actually.” It could simply mean “to be precise,” as if the writer were saying under his breath: “The M16A1 is not an English muffin; it does not in fact have nooks and crannies, but microscopic pores that can be clogged with dirt and oil.” Or it could be an expression of suppressed excitement, as if to suggest that an exhausted soldier could expect his dreams to be suffused with awe and wonder at the tireless industry of the lubricant that actively seeks out and never sleeps. Of course, a correct and sensitive parsing of the sentence would allow for both interpretations simultaneously, because that is what gives the sentence its resonance, as the author surely intended. Wes worshipped him for that, and the Manual was inseminated with such gems. In its way, the prose of the operator’s manual was perfect and irresistible, and had the distinct advantage over War and Peace of being profusely illustrated. If the author of the operator’s manual and Tolstoy were locked in a room together, and ordered to exchange writing philosophies, Wes doubted that the latter would have much to teach the former, except perhaps in the use of serial commas and in beginning sentences with conjunctions. Wes felt like a scholar who had stumbled upon a lost masterpiece and whose task was to reintroduce it to the world—gently, persuasively, lest its power be put to the wrong use or devastate precisely those whom it might, judiciously wielded, most benefit.

But War and Peace it would have to be. War and Peace had been Wes’s original subject for the paper until it had fallen to him to discover the Manual, but he had found himself profoundly irritated by it. There it was, sitting on his desk beneath the thesaurus; where yesterday it had looked lumpen and forlorn, it now exuded an aura of smug vindication. It did not deserve, had not earned the passion that Wes had lavished on the Manual, but he could write that paper in his sleep. Mrs. Fielding would give him no more than a B+ for it because it would lack conviction and transcendence, but there was nothing Wes could do about that. It occurred to him that he might just be able to place “Language, Poetry and Narrative Trope in Operator’s Manual for Rifle, 5.56-MM, M16 (1005-00-856-6885) Rifle, 5.56-MM, M16A1 (1005-00-073-9421)” in some literary magazine, which could well compensate for the damage done by a B+ to his college prospects. His dad would know the right publication to submit it to, but as Wes could not stomach the idea of turning to his father for a favor he would have to figure it out for himself. How hard could it be? Paris Review, Granta—they all had their own websites.

The iPhone chimed daintily from some pocket in one of the pieces of clothing discarded on the pile by the bedside. It was only a text message, hardly worth getting up to retrieve, but the timing was odd. Almost everyone Wes knew had been at Lucy’s party, and Wes was the only freak in his acquaintance who could stay up most of the night, fall asleep half-drunk for a couple of hours, then get up and leave while it was still dark and walk home across half the city. The rest of them would sleep until way past noon. Who could possibly be texting him at this hour? Wes wondered what the time was, but he didn’t own a watch and the only clock was on the iPhone. He supposed he ought to check in with his mother, but since Nora had already brought her breakfast there was no immediate hurry. The iPhone chimed again, as it would every minute until Wes read or responded to the text, but since he had chosen the tone precisely for its soothing effect—a thin metal blade being struck twice against an expensive crystal wine glass—rather than to spark any sense of urgency, as other tones seemed designed to do, he continued to stare at the ceiling.

Wes heard Nora coming up the stairs, her pace light and skipping, a large mouse. She knew he heard her; like him, she had learned from necessity how to climb the stairs in complete silence, and this was her way of announcing herself. Instead of knocking, she would stand outside his door and count to three, giving him the time to tell her not to come in if he did not wish to see her, which was rare but occasionally necessary. And here she was.

Dressed in green capris and a white, short-sleeved polo with her school crest, she flounced in and dropped herself beside him on the bed. She took his free hand in both of hers and stroked the tips of his fingers.

“I’m bored.”

“Why are you wearing your school uniform?”

“I couldn’t find anything else clean.”

“I’ll do the laundry later. Call a friend. I’ll walk you over.”

“Nobody’s around. They’re all at their country houses. In Connecticut.” She pronounced it “connect-i-cut” on purpose.

“All of them?”

“I was supposed to have a playdate with Claire, but she’s grounded.”

“Why is she grounded?”

“She took a picture of herself in her underwear with her cell phone and sent it to Leo.”

“Why would she do that?”

“She likes him.”

“That’s disgusting. How old is she?”

“Eleven. Leo texted her back and said he hates her and told her to fuck off, and now no one will talk to him, but I’m sure it was Katrina who told him to do it.”

“Who’s Katrina?”

“His sister. You know her. Do you want to see Bobby?”

“No.”

“Will you play Mastermind with me?”

“I can’t. I’m writing a paper.”

“You’re lying in bed.”

“I’m writing it in my head. Where’s dad?”

“Dunno.”

“Find dad. He’ll play with you.”

“Whatever, dipstick.” She got up and walked out in a huff, but she closed the door behind her so gently that it didn’t even click.

He hated it when she said “whatever.” On the one hand, she was quite right—dad would never play Mastermind with her, even if she could find him, and it had been a little cruel of Wes even to suggest something so ridiculous. On the other hand, until recently it would not have occurred to her to use an expression like “whatever.” She was growing up; any day now she would be a teenager, no longer the sweet thoughtful child who always worried about everyone’s feelings and never sulked, who was able to put an optimistic spin on any unpleasant circumstance. She would stop coming to share his bed when she couldn’t sleep at night, or he would have to find a reason to send her away because she was growing boobs. Wes had always felt that she was the best part of him, that he could always find something good about himself when he looked at her, and if she stopped being that he wouldn’t know where to go looking for it. She reminded him of that incredibly sad section in Mary Poppins where the twins outgrow their ability, shared by all babies, to speak the intimate language of nature and to communicate with all animals and even with inanimate things like the wind. Wes had read the book the previous year with the idea of writing a comparative study about childrearing in fiction, intending to match it with Oliver Twist and Less Than Zero, but he had so embarrassed himself crying inconsolably over the fate of the twins that he’d dropped the whole idea. Now he thought that maybe he should play Mastermind with Nora, and do the laundry, and check in on his mother, before it was all too late. He began counting, and when nothing happened he started again from zero. This time, when he reached sixteen, he got up.

He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands clasped between his knees and his head hanging down, just because it seemed like a cool position and if someone interesting should happen to walk into the room at that very moment it would make him look extremely philosophical and deep. He remembered Katrina, or at least he remembered her hands because he’d spent much of the eighth grade staring at them. They were very pale and her fingers were unusually long and slim, the nails often lacquered. She was said to have given someone a handjob in the jungle gym in the playground, but no one could say precisely who it was or when the blessed event had occurred. Wes didn’t remember anything else about her—not the color of her hair or her last name—or where she’d gone to high school, even though almost everyone who attended a private high school on the East Side knew each other and a girl who gave handjobs was sure to be popular. The phone chimed again, and since the pile of clothes in which it was hidden lay right between his feet he was able to justify the effort needed to locate it. The text was from Lucy. It said “Hey you.”

Wes lowered the phone to the floor, nesting it among the crumpled clothing as if it were an egg or a bomb that might explode. The text window was still open, and he stared at the message. Hey you. Instead of looking up his number, she had added her message to the string of their broken conversations from the night before, her texts in white balloons, his in yellow. It was an entire history of their evening in shorthand, more terse and expressive even than the Manual.

Oct 31, 2008 8:16 p.m.

Yellow: “What’s ur address?”

White: “623 park 11a”

Oct 31, 2008 10:16 p.m.

White: “can we talk”

Yellow: “Where r u?”

White: “behand u”

Oct 31, 2008 11:49 p.m.

White: “want 2 dance?”

Yellow: “bnkdl”

Nov 1, 2008 12:02 a.m.

Yellow: “Where r u?”

White: “bdrm”

Yellow: “Too many. Which?”

White: “find me”

Nov 1, 2008 9:28 a.m.

White: “Hey you”

As he stared at the screen, Wes was struck by the fact that he had dutifully punctuated all his texts, whereas Lucy did not even seem to know where to find the punctuation keys on her Blackberry. It somehow seemed to carry a special significance that Wes did not care to parse. Wes felt sick to his stomach and panicky at the same time, and the iPhone screen went black. He stared at it a while longer, willing his mind to go blank the way he did in restaurants when he didn’t know what to order, trusting his instincts to make the right decision for him. When the nausea and panic subsided a little, he picked the phone up and turned it on. The wallpaper was a photo of Wes and Nora in a swimming pool, clinging to the edge and smiling up at the camera, their arms draped around each other’s shoulders. It had been taken six years earlier in Tuscany, on their last family vacation. People Wes’s age who had seen the photo made fun of him for it, but he didn’t care. It always made him happy to look at it, but not this time. In fact, it made him feel infinitely sad, which was better than panicky, but not much. Wes unlocked the phone and pressed the text button.

“Tell Bobby 2 come c me,” he typed. The “send” bar had barely filled when the response came back. “K.” Wes slipped back under the covers. Twenty seconds later Nora was at his door, her upper lip pulled back against her teeth in Bobby’s signature grin.

“You called?” Bobby said hopefully, his voice distorted by Nora’s effort to keep the lip in position while talking.

“Tell me a story, Bobby.”

“‘Kay. Did you know I got married again?”

“Tell me.”

Wes lost the thread of the story almost as soon as it began, but it didn’t matter. The sound of Bobby’s voice, rasping and slurred at the same time, was the point. Bobby the bisexual mouse-boy was Nora’s most popular and fully-developed character, with an entire life history behind him that included being thrown out of his parents’ house at the age of three because of an incurable addiction to cheese, a stint (Wes seemed to recall) as a streetwalker in mid-town, where he met his first boyfriend Lee, a hustler who had died of AIDS, and then marriage to a cricket named Raquel; Bobby and Raquel had had several children, whose names Wes could never keep straight and who had grown up to have children of their own. When Raquel died of breast cancer, Bobby had hit the road and become involved in a series of adventures with any number of itinerant characters, which was more or less where his life’s story had led him up to the present day. Wes could not remember Bobby’s origins, either; he had seemed to spring to life fully formed a couple of years earlier, just as their mother’s illness was beginning to bite. At first, Bobby happily monopolized entire family meals, keeping them in tears of hilarity while the food turned cold on their plates. He was always funny, always cheerful in the face of the terrible tragedies for which he seemed destined, and you never knew when to expect an appearance. But as their collective meals had gradually fallen apart and eventually disintegrated entirely, and everyone had retreated to the privacy of their own rooms, Bobby had taken on the role of family therapist, summoned whenever needed for solace and his peculiar philosophical perspective. Wes knew he wasn’t the only one who relied on Bobby’s advice; he could sometimes hear Bobby’s patient, irreverent voice lecturing their mother in her room directly beneath his own. In fact, Nora was almost always Bobby with mom these days. Wes wasn’t sure if his father ever turned to Bobby, as his moments of greatest need often coincided with his moments of greatest incoherence, but he did know that Bobby was not shy about sharing his opinions uninvited—often at times when they might be most unwelcome. In earlier days there had been other creatures, includ­ing Wes’s own Enochs the spitting monster, and Enochs’s best friend Sunny, a boy who lived in the Sun and who had pressed on for a while, pale and sickly, even after Wes had put aside such games. Bobby had eclipsed them all, Yahweh to their Olympus, but Wes supposed they might still be alive somewhere, waiting with pathetic and forlorn hope for their religion to be revived.

“What’s a matter?” Bobby’s voice broke into his thoughts as he took Wes by the hand.

“What? Nothing?” Wes turned his head away.

“Leslie’s crying.”

“Leslie’s not crying.”

“Leslie has baby jellyfish in his eyes, maybe? Leslie’s crying. Bobby always knows when Leslie’s sad. Don’t be sad, Leslie. Life can always get so much, so much worse, and it surely will.”

“I don’t want to be sad, Bobby, but I can’t help it.”

“But why, Leslie, why?”

“Life is sad, Bobby. Life is too fucking sad.”

“Bobby knows that. Silly Leslie. All Bobby’s grandchildren are junkies, even baby Ramsey. But is Bobby sad? No sir! Life is sad but Bobby’s happy. Why is Bobby happy, you ask?”

“You know, Bobby? I know I asked you to come, but I don’t think I’m really up for this right now.”

“Suit yourself, daddy-o. Bobby doesn’t hang with losers anyhow.”

The moment Bobby withdrew Nora flung her arms around Wes’s neck and burst into tears. Wes hugged her to him and pressed her hot, damp face into his shoulder.

“Don’t cry, Cookie. It’s nothing. I’ll get over it soon enough.” The words were wet ashes in Wes’s mouth, but he made himself say them, over and over, until one of them, anybody, would believe them. “It’s all right. It’ll be all right.”

Nora sobbed silently. When her heaving subsided, she leaned so still against him that Wes wondered if she’d cried herself to sleep. Wes felt sick again, sick and so filled with sorrow that it seemed enough for ten, a hundred people to share. He remembered how he had felt early that morning on the stoop, that no young person should be able to feel this way because it was older people who were supposed to be grief-stricken by a sense of the futility and wastefulness of it all, not someone with everything ahead of him and a world of possibilities, which Wes knew himself to be despite it all. But he couldn’t help himself. It was as if he were standing before a mirror that reflected him as he would be in ten or twenty or thirty years from now, a curse of limpid foresight that no teenager should have to endure. No one he knew, no one his age felt as he did, except maybe James in his better moments; they lived their lives like animals, unaware even of such a thing as the future, and he hated and envied them for it in equal measure, all of them dancing and drinking and texting. He’d love nothing better than to be callow and thoughtless, to be able to pump his fists and say “Fuck yeah,” but it was a lost cause. He had never been one of them, could never be, but still he seemed to spend his life trying, pretending, and look at the disaster he’d gotten himself into. Everything he did, the good and the bad alike, turned to dust.

“Mom’s ringing.” Nora’s voice was normal, serene, a little impatient even, as if she had long since recovered her equanimity and had only been waiting for the right moment to break the silence.

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“She’s ringing. It’s your turn.”

“Okay, let me get dressed and tell her I’ll be there in a minute.”

Nora, relieved of duty, scampered from the room and bounced heavily down the stairs. Wes knew, among all his countless weaknesses, that he mustn’t cry in front of Nora, or really be anything to her but the strong, optimistic big brother. What he really needed to be was the man of the house, competent and involved, forging on, a brave pioneer armored in fortitude and resilience, most especially for Nora’s sake, since who was left to take care of her but him? What kind of a childhood was it for her? Wes, at least, had a handful of happy memories to fall back on. Nora had had to be the strong one, the cheerleader; fortunately she seemed to have the right stuff for it, but still it wasn’t fair to her. After some jag of self-pity or weariness, Wes always felt renewed and capable, determined to relieve Nora of her burden, but it never lasted very long, and soon he’d be back in his room, hiding out among his books, and Nora would be left rattling around in that decaying old house, preternaturally silent, to play computer games, videochat and do her homework alone in the dining room that no one used anymore. This time, Wes told himself as he climbed into last night’s jeans and a clean T-shirt, he would do it, and do it right: he would let Nora do her homework in his room when she asked; he would help her with her math and science; let her read a story to him out loud instead of making her feel like a baby; make sure she always had clean clothes to wear to school; not make fun of her for talking too loud and too fast and losing her train of thought in mid-sentence; accompany her on her walk to school sometimes; have a serious talk with dad about the need to be a more conscientious parent to his preteen daughter. Barefoot, Wes padded across the hall to splash some water on his face in the bathroom. Staring at himself in the mirror, trying on a smile that only made his pale blue eyes look watery and weak, Wes thought that even if he couldn’t be strong enough to be a good person, he really might have it in him to be a better brother. As he looked at himself, he suddenly thought of Lucy and how horrified she would be to see how he lived, even for five minutes, and as he pictured that pretty face of hers distorted in disgust and incomprehension, with its Mustique tan and ski-jump nose and thick, dark scimitar eyebrows, he felt a mild twinge of triumph, as if he already were the good brother he aspired to be. She probably wouldn’t even like Nora.

Wes dried his face and went downstairs and stood before the door to his mother’s room, its surface creamy and rippled with generations of white gloss enamel. He hesitated only a moment before rapping gently and pushing inwards, the door whispering benignly against the thick burgundy pile.

He stood in the doorway, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dark, mitigated by the wan glow of the television. The new flat-screen LCD emitted a light far less lurid than that of the old cathode tube, but it was also less bright, and Wes had not yet accustomed himself to the change. It was an improvement, he thought, and the room now felt more like an aquarium for tropical fish than a laboratory in a science fiction movie, but he doubted that his mother, with her fading eyesight, had any great appreciation for the difference. The pervasive aroma of urine, buttered toast and topical antiseptic remained unchanged, and would do so as long as the windows, blinds and drapes sealed the room from the outside world. The natural reaction of anyone entering his mother’s room for the first time would be to throw it all open to the light and air, but Wes no longer even raised the issue with her. The light hurt her eyes, and the fresh air brought on uncontrolled trembling, even when it was warm. This was her natural habitat now, and it was for visitors to adapt or inure themselves to it, as Wes and Nora had. Wes lifted his nose for any hint of pus or necrosis in the air, but the bedsores seemed to have healed since she had recovered limited mobility after the last attack.

“Hi, mom. How you feeling?”

“Wes? Come over here, honey.”

Wes crossed the room to the side of the bed, which was adjusted to raise her upper body for ease of viewing. The bedclothes were neat and folded at the top, which Nora must have done earlier, and her arms lay on top of them at her side, sleeved in the thin cheap cotton print of a hospital gown. Her head was nestled in a cradle of newly plumped pillows, hair so thin and colorless now that the white of the pillow cases showed through it. Wes propped himself at the edge of the bed, which was so high he was almost on tiptoes, and leaned in for a closer look.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m just dandy.” Her voice was whistling and reedy, as if she had to push it through a rattan sieve to get it out; still, it was quite a bit stronger than it had been a month earlier, and no longer slurred. “How are you, honey?”

Wes was never quite sure what she meant when she asked him this. Sometimes, she was genuinely alert to what he had to say; more often, it was just the disease talking through her, as if she were a ventriloquist’s dummy, and what she was really saying was “Just pretend everything will be alright.” Usually these days, Wes was reluctant to test her, but now he let a note of equivocation creep into his voice.

“I’m okay mom.”

“What is it, honey?”

“Oh mom, I don’t know. I . . . ”

“Only I’m a little hungry. Can you bring me some pudding?”

“Didn’t Nora already make you breakfast?”

“No she did not, the little beast.”

“She didn’t make you breakfast?”

“Wes, do I have to tell you? She didn’t make me breakfast, damn it.”

“Okay, okay, keep yer panties on. I’ll take care of it. Can I turn the light on for a minute?”

“It hurts my eyes.”

“Just for a minute. You can close them. I want to check your skin.”

“Go ahead.”

Wes stood up and turned to the bedside lamp and walked straight into the support strut of his mother’s electric lifter. It didn’t hurt but Wes swore at the machine under his breath. It was a kind of swing set straddling the bed, but instead of swings it had a nylon sling, like the kind that are lowered from helicopters in rescue operations. In theory, Wes’s mother could roll to the side, position the sling beneath her buttocks, press a button and rise and slide to her wheelchair besides the bed. The idea was to make her feel independent, but in fact she found it almost impossible to position the sling properly beneath her and hadn’t used it for months. Wes and Nora had tried playing on it when she was in the hospital, but it had been less than fun. It was only kept around in anticipation of the day when she could no longer walk herself to the bathroom at all, even when assisted by one of her children, and that was why Wes hated it with its gunmetal finish and bright yellow warning labels ringed in orange. The insurance rep had told them, sitting around the dining room table, that it was cheaper to leave it there than to dismantle and remove it, only to have to reinstall it six months later.

Wes switched on the lamp and returned to his mother’s side. Her face could be a little frightening to look at under its corona of colorless wisps, but Wes rarely noticed because it had been such a gradual decline. He had only the vaguest mem­ories of her as a healthy woman—a beach somewhere, where she had leaned back against her elbow and he could see her eyes smiling behind her sunglasses; some walks to school, with singing and hand-holding; a bright office in midtown, where she designed book jackets on enormous computer monitors and taught him how to use the software to make digital collages. He seemed to remember that she’d been gregarious, that she’d worn colorful scarves on her head, knotted at the nape, that she cried watching E.T. That she had played show tunes on the upright downstairs. It was odd how little he remembered, given that the earliest symptoms of illness had not manifested themselves until Wes was seven or eight; he supposed his mind must have packed all those memories away somewhere. It was as if she had always been sick. Nobody ever talked about her getting better or anything like that. It was only on the rare occasion when he joined Nora in her intense scrutinies of the family photo albums, the only evidence that their mother had ever been anything but a diminished invalid, that the damage stood out in stark contrast. Deeply sunken eyes the color of aged porcelain rhimed with red, grey lips collapsed upon themselves, restless liverish tongue always licking and seeking—Wes noted it all briefly with alarm, then allowed it to fade from consciousness. Now, under the lamplight, his only interest was in the color of her skin. The optic neuritis that had recently attacked her one good eye had been treated with massive doses of steroids, which had dyed her skin yellow. It was still as dry and transparent as tracing paper, but it seemed to have purged itself of most of the toxins, although it was hard to tell in this light. Wes kissed her on the cheek, switched off the lamp and leaned back against the raised segment of the mattress.

She was watching “The Joy of Painting,” and Wes sat beside her and watched for a few minutes. This obsession with “The Joy of Painting” had all started out as something of a family joke when Wes had come home from school one day to find Nora transfixed. For a while, they had made it a family tradition, poking fun at Bob Ross’s afro and his obsession with woodland creatures and his catchphrases. They’d gone around saying “It’s your world” and “beat the devil out of it,” and Wes had even begun calling Nora his “happy little cloud.” But then one day, after she’d taken to bed for good, his mother had explicitly asked Wes to find “Joy of Painting” on cable for her, and he’d tivo’d it, but by that point the show was only on once a week so he’d offered to find her some DVDs. In the end, though, it didn’t make a difference as she didn’t seem to mind watching the same limited number of episodes over and over again. She was often agitated, and it wasn’t always clear what she was agitated about, or even if she could see the television clearly, but there was something about Bob Ross’s gentle, monotonous diction that soothed her. Now it was just about the only thing she ever watched, along with “Gossip Girl,” about which she was almost as passionate as Nora. As a matter of fact, Wes himself was fascinated by Bob Ross and had even considered basing the protagonist of his first novel on him, although he was worried about lawsuits and might not take the risk.

As he sat beside his mother watching Bob Ross patch together a vile Alaskan wilderness, Wes thought of the thousands of bland, cheerful housewives and retirees in their converted garage studios across the country, following Ross’s every move with their own fan brushes and alizarin crimsons, and he thought of his mother’s imprisonment in this room and her declining health. He was convinced that she would never have watched Bob Ross if she was healthy. It seemed so totally unfair, but then could you ever really say that one person was worth more than another, or that the people who painted along with Bob Ross were making better use of the comfort he offered than someone who lay in bed all day and watched the same 12-year-old rerun over and over again? Wes thought of that game children play with each other, maybe when they’re six or seven and first become aware of mortality and the ethical dimension of decision-making. “If someone comes with a gun and says he’ll kill your mother or your sister, who would you choose?” It was never about who you loved more; in fact, there was always a right answer. If the choice was between saving your mother or your sister, you saved your sister because she was younger and had more to live for; if the choice was between your mother or your sister and your dog, you saved the dog, because it was innocent and blameless, although a few forward-thinking kids saved the sister because it was a sign of mature selflessness to sacrifice your dog for a lesser, though human life. Wes had never really understood the pleasure of the game, because the real mystery, which you were supposed to ignore, was how this situation was supposed to have arisen. Wes was always distracted by the question of what kind of circumstances could drive a person to offer you such an option. Why would it ever be necessary for anyone to have to kill either your sister or your dog, and even if it were, why would they offer the choice to a six-year-old child? These side issues always spoiled whatever was supposed to be fun about the game, both for Wes and the other kid. Wes supposed that, like playing with dolls or in competitive games, children instinctively grasp the need to rehearse in safety the only dimly understood decisions they see their elders make, but it wasn’t until very recently, when it seemed as if his mother had finally gone into terminal decline, that he had seen the relevance of such preparations to his own life. That held even more true for Nora. Mother or brother? Mother or dog? It was even a game you could play by yourself, if there was no one else around to play it with.

It was, by all evidence, a game adults played among themselves, too. Wes had hazy memories of the house once having been lively with visitors, boozy dinner parties that ran late and rose muffled to his room through the floorboards and the pillow, but the visitors had gradually stopped coming by when she could no longer walk and became moody and withdrawn. At first, Wes had assumed that they had stopped coming because they were not real friends and she was no longer any fun to be around, but then he understood that she was the one who had sent them away. Was it because she was ashamed of what she had become, or too prideful to let others see her in this condition, or perhaps even that she had never much cared for them to begin with and had seized on her aggravated infirmity as an opportunity to let them drop? After a while, it didn’t matter very much anymore. When it had become too difficult for her to negotiate the stairs to the second floor, they had considered installing an electric chair-lift, but that wouldn’t have solved the problem of the stoop and her wheelchair, especially in the winter, so it had been decided to relocate her to the garden floor, where at least she had some access to the outdoors. When the weather was fine, a few friends of long standing would occasionally drop by to sit with her in the dappled shade and light her cigarettes. But she hadn’t been kind or patient with them and they had gradually stopped coming. And it had become apparent by then, too, that Wes’s father was secretly—and then not so secretly—resentful of having had to give up his study with the French doors to accommodate his wife’s illness. One summer’s evening, as he and Wes had sat on the wrought-iron dining room balcony overlooking the backyard, directly above the wide-open French doors, he nursed his third scotch and complained bitterly of how restricted his private life had grown, between work and parenting and insurance claims, that the only place he had left to call his own, where he could retreat and write and just think, had been his room on the garden, and now that was gone too, and then he had compared himself to Shakespeare’s sister and reacted very peevishly when Wes had immediately recognized the allusion. And then he had moved out altogether for a while—Wes had almost forgotten that part—and didn’t come home until it was clear that she would be bedridden for good. When he moved back in, she had returned to her bedroom on the second floor, where she had remained ever since, excepting hospitalizations, and his father had converted the garden study into an apartment, where he now slept and wrote and fucked his students.

It was his father who had destroyed the collective family pleasure of watching “The Joy of Painting” together by drunkenly denouncing Bob Ross as a sell-out.

“It just really gets to me how mediocrity is rewarded again and again in this country while true artists go hungry in the streets. I mean, this guy must be a zillionaire, and just look at the crap he’s making!”

“Don’t you have to have ideals before you can sell out, dad?”

“He had ideals, this fucker, don’t think he didn’t. Of course he did! Everybody does. And now look at him. Making it harder on the rest of us.”

“How is he making it harder on you?”

“Think I wouldn’t sell out in a second if I could? In a second! But I can’t. I’m not selling widgets here. I can’t just crank it out—it’s got to mean something to me. It’s got to come from somewhere.”

“Well Bobby thinks he’s a very nice man. Bob Ross likes little animals like Bobby, and Bob Ross loves everybody in Amer­ica. And he’s been dead for ten years.”

“Let me tell you something, Bobby. I don’t care if he’s dead. Bob Ross is a cunt. He’s a rich, pandering, talentless hack cunt.”

Nobody wanted to hear him say that word again, so they all went back to watching the show in chastened silence, but after that day making fun of Bob Ross seemed to have lost some of its luster, and they’d stopped watching the show en famille.

Bob Ross was putting the finishing touches on his landscape, using a palette knife to scrape a layer of snow down the mountainside. Wes’s mother took his hand in hers. It was always a defining moment of any show when Bob Ross applied the snow; with nothing but a knife, some white paint and a few spare sweeps of his hand, he brought the entire composition into three dimensions, creating boulders and crevasses and shadows and arcing slopes where a moment earlier there had been nothing but flat planes of color. His father was right—it was sleight of hand, nothing more—but irresistible for all that. Wes could definitely sympathize with anyone who’d rather watch and listen to Bob Ross than deal with reality. Wes’s mother squeezed his hand, and he looked down at her and smiled warmly.

“Pudding.”

“Oh yeah. Be right back.”

Nora was in the kitchen, standing in front of the open refrigerator and peeling the plastic off a mozzarella stick. She was wearing the stringy blue wig that they had bought Crispy for Halloween, but which had made Crispy look so reduced and defeated that no one had been able to bear seeing her in it. Nora smiled at Wes shyly, to which he responded with a deliberate glare, and the smile vanished. Unlike the other rooms of the house that faced the back, the kitchen had no curtains or blinds on the window, and the light from the yard, with no leaves on the tree to filter it, was unpleasantly bright and yet dead and thin at the same time. Wes pushed past Nora and slid the lower sash open with casual brutality.

“It’s too hot in here.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter. Where’s Crisp?”

“I think she’s with dad. What’s wrong?”

“You sure you walked her?”

“I didn’t walk her. You asked, and I told you I didn’t walk her.”

“Anything else you didn’t do?”

“What didn’t I do?”

“Mom’s pudding? Like you said? Is it too fucking much around here to . . . ? Oh, fuck it. Just give me a fucking pudding. I’ll do it.”

Nora was already crying copiously by the time she reached the sink, her eyebrows reddening as the wig slipped partially down one side of her head. She reached into the sink.

“I did give it to her. Here’s the spoon, see? Here’s the cup, see? I told you.” She held up a dirty spoon, a few grains of white rice and a film of dried cream still clinging to it. “See? See? See?”

Wes’s anger instantly collapsed in on itself. Nora always looked five years younger when she cried; even as a helpless baby, her eyebrows had reddened just like that when Wes startled her with a sudden noise, such as deliberately dropping a fork on the metal tray of her high chair or sneaking up and clapping his hands just behind her head of silky blonde curls. What was worse, he knew that the moment he offered her words of regret and a gesture of comfort, she would accept it gratefully, without hesitation, and with all her great heart, as she had done as a baby. This was now twice in one day—in one morning—that he had made her cry, and the second time he had had to take her in his arms to staunch her tears. She was a better person than Wes would ever be, but he wasn’t sure how many more times he could get away with it before it stopped working.

“She told me you didn’t, Cookie. I’m sorry.”

“She doesn’t remember, Wes. She forgets everything.”

“I know, I know. I’m truly sorry.”

“Nyeh.”

“Is that ‘Nyeh, I forgive you’ or ‘Nyeh, you’re an asshole?’”

She giggled into his T-shirt but didn’t answer.

“Tell you what. I know you’re bored. Give me a little time—let me take this up to mom and get started on my homework—and I’ll take you out later.”

“Where will you take me?”

“Dog run?”

“Nyeh.”

“Museum?”

“Nyeh.”

“Movie?”

“What movie?”

“Taxi to the Dark Side?”

“Nyeh.”

“Your choice. Nothing too girlie. And walk the dog, please.”

“Nyeh.”

Wes rinsed the soiled spoon in the sink, shook off the excess water, and retrieved an individual-portion cup of rice pudding from the fridge. He took the stairs on his tiptoes, three steps at a time, and again paused outside his mother’s door before tapping. This time he entered without waiting. Bob Ross had started a new painting, a subdued forest scene with a winding path, shrubbery in full bloom, and a sunlit clearing just around the bend, but Wes’s mother seemed to have fallen asleep. Wes was not entirely sure, as she had not moved and she often closed her eyes even when she was awake, but there was something about the rhythm of her breathing that told him so. Just to be sure, he allowed the bowl of the spoon to make a light ping as he placed it on the glass tabletop. Her eyes opened momentarily then closed again. Wes could see them moving beneath the pinkish lids, blindly looking for something, as she licked her lips. She looked just like a lizard lazing on a rock, but in the darkened room the resemblance took on a sinister cast.

Occasionally Wes stumbled into wondering what things would be like when his mother was gone. When his mother was dead. Usually, he was able to suppress these thoughts, reminding himself that her disease was not fatal in itself, and that even in her weakened state she could easily survive another bout or two of pneumonia, as she had survived the last. But every so often the doubts would sneak in when he wasn’t paying attention and entertain themselves in his head, bouncing off each other and jockeying for dominance before he caught them and shut them down. And then, too, especially when he was too tired, fed up or depressed, he sometimes gave them free rein and listened, with a kind of detached, horrified fascination, to what they had to say. The first thing that would happen, without doubt, is that his father would move back into the master bedroom. All this—the sling, the carpeting, the heavy drapes, the television, the hospital bed—would go. And although his father never talked about it, Wes knew that, despite her inheritance and the medical insurance, his mother’s illness weighed heavy on the family finances, so when she died there would be money to pay for the redecoration. Wes was as sure as he could be that his father would want to make a new start. The kitchen would be the first thing to go—his dad was obsessed with the plans for the new kitchen, with its under-the-counter Sub-Zero freezer and six-burner Wolf cooking range—but the bedroom would come next, and there would be nothing left to remind anyone that she had spent years as a dying prisoner here. But he also knew that whenever he passed on the landing and heard the clicking of laptop keys instead of Bob Ross’s soothing murmur, it wouldn’t make any difference. This room would always be haunted, even if his father never sensed it. As for Nora, his mother’s death would be a disaster. Already, Nora clung to the wreckage like a shipwreck victim hanging on to a floating timber, desperate to convince herself that it would keep her afloat indefinitely. It meant everything to Nora, being able to go to her mother, even when she was half incoherent from painkillers for her bedsores or had soiled the bed, and read to her or watch “Gossip Girl” together, or just lie by her side and suck her thumb. She treated her mother the way a lonely child treats her favorite doll, skilled at convincing herself that she was an equal partner in the conversation, that she could lift her own cup, that she could hear and respond to her worries and concerns. What would Nora do when all that was gone? What were the chances that their father would man-up and step in? Wes wanted to believe that he himself could make up some of the shortfall, at least until Nora was old enough to take responsibility for her own emotional welfare, but he knew that he would be at best a woefully inadequate substitute. And then what would happen? Would Nora just drift away? Would she start taking drugs, flunking school, sleeping around? Would she shut down, become remote and joyless and unreachable, or would she take all her wit and sparkle and use them as shields—the funny girl who always has a clever putdown for everything and a joke for every occasion, even the most intimate—so that Wes would have to stand by and watch that beautiful smile of hers stretch and twist itself into a hideous mask?

But even worse than lying around worrying about how everything would collapse after his mother’s death were the moments when Wes caught himself speculating about the ways in which life would become better, easier, less encumbered. Wes always squelched these thoughts the moment he found himself entertaining them, and was left with the nauseating stench of self-loathing, but it would be too late. The images conjured up in these fantasies remained, colorful and alive, to taunt him whenever he least expected it. It was the smallest inconveniences, rather than the cosmic implications, that he imagined he would be most grateful to be rid of. No more rice pudding in the refrigerator, no more spoon feedings, no more having to watch her try to feed herself, barely able to grip the spoon as it rode trembling to her dry lips and missed, so that she would then have to scrape the food off her cheeks or chin into a mouth sucking and gaping like a sea worm. No more late-night wake-up calls, no more adult diapers, no more waiting at the bathroom door having to listen to her grunts and whimpers. No more having to roll her over and wipe the shit smears off her lower back with a wet washcloth. No more rushing home on the weekends with that sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that one of her vital supplies had run out during the day. No more sitting at her side dutifully telling her about his day when she was hardly aware of his presence, when he knew full well she was a thousand miles away. No more sneaking past her bedroom like a thief whenever he needed a moment to himself, and no more fretting, every time he took a moment for himself, that he was being selfish and inconsiderate. No more being embarrassed to bring friends home after school, and no more feeling ashamed and worthless for being embarrassed. No more hating himself for resenting her. No more being angry all the time, no more taking it out on Nora. No more feeling like a shallow, egocentric brute every time, despite all his efforts not to, he slipped into little dreams of freedom. No more pretending, to himself and to Nora, that she wasn’t going to die, and that it wouldn’t be a relief to everyone concerned, herself included, when she did. No More.

Wes crept from the room and closed the door with infi­nite care.

From the landing, Wes could hear the iPhone calling to him. He went into his room and was somehow surprised to find it just as he had left it, waiting like a faithful dog in its nest of dirty clothes. He threw himself down on the bed, intending to ignore it, but it was insistent and would not rest until he acknowledged its call. He rolled over and retrieved it from the floor. A text message, a voice message and an email. The text—“pls call”—was from Lucy. The email was from James: “Today you are a man, my son.” The voice mail was from Delia; her cell number was programmed into the phone, the call-back button said “Delia.” As Wes stared at the name his heart began to race and he felt his cheeks grow hot, and the letters on the display seemed to ripple and pulse. He pressed the delete button and dropped the phone to the floor.

Like the kitchen, the bedroom was now flooded with light that felt like a thin, noxious vapor. It was a wintery light, but it was a long way to winter; the days were still too long, too warm, too inviting. Wes longed for the winter, when it was safe to shut oneself away. He loved waking up and going to school and coming home in the dark, the privacy of walking alone in a twilit street in the cold, the lonely romance of winter sounds—wind whisking at the bare tree branches, dry leaves scudding along an unswept sidewalk, the muffling that descends before a snowfall. What he hated was the summer, things that were bright and open and shadowless. He hated waking up in the sunlight, the skimpy clothes, the endless hazy twilights that somehow made you feel less than wholesome if you wanted to crawl into bed with a book while there was still a warm, pastel glow in the sky. He hated the way the Village streets remained crowded deep into the evening with people wandering around aimlessly in cargo shorts and sports bras, joylessly anticipating their first drink, a walk along the river with the fam, some stupid night on the town, any number of dismal prefabricated pleasures. Summer turned every New Yorker into a Disneyland vacationer; unforgivably, it blurred the distinctions between city-dwellers and suburbanites—distinctions which Wes felt should be maintained crisp and unmistakable at all times.

Wes thought of Brave New World, a back-up candidate for his European lit paper, and the deep sense of kinship he’d felt with Helmholtz Watson as he rejoiced at being exiled to the Falklands. Helmholtz had been offered his choice of any island in the world—Hawaii, Tahiti, the Caribbean—but he asked to be sent somewhere with bad weather, somewhere with lots of wind and storms, just as Wes would have. Until that moment, Brave New World, even with its abundance of casual sex for people of all ages, had seemed to Wes to be the most idiotic of books. But it had been almost redeemed by Helmholtz’s request. A place where you could spend all winter holed up with your books, your notebooks, your thoughts. Wes suspected that this was not a normal desire for a seventeen-year old, but he couldn’t help himself. All he wanted was to be boxed in by howling winds and lowering skies in every shade of grey. For the same reason, whenever he played Risk with Nora he always made Kamchatka his home base and defended it to the end. It would help, he supposed, to have somebody, some body, pale-skinned and red-haired like Delia, to have sex with at odd hours, but then again that could just as easily be a liability, in the event that such a body turned out to have needs of its own. If he were ever to be a serious writer, Wes reasoned, he would have to learn to embrace solitude and silence, though he did not suppose that he would suffer from loneliness. All he’d ever wanted, as far back as he could remember, was to be left alone, like Helmholtz, where the mind can expand to fill the vast silence, where a man can find peace from chatter and temptation and opinion—a one-room stone cottage with small leaded windows and a large fireplace, glacial run-off to bathe in, unpolluted, unobstructed views for the eye to linger upon in those blank moments before inspiration strikes. In the morning, black coffee from a moka pot, and a solid wedge of black bread spread thick with creamery butter and lingonberry jam. At night, a roaring fire, a mutton chop charred in the brazier, a peaty single malt, a pipe, maybe an old radio for the dramas and sports scores. Where, Wes wondered, on that rocky volcanic plain would he find a steady supply of firewood? Or coffee, whiskey, tobacco, mutton? Helmholtz, because he was technically a ward of the state, would have all these delivered to him, free of charge, and maybe a girl every so often, because those people were so keen on the pacifying effects of extremely impersonal and uninhibited sexual encounters. But Wes would have to be realistic if he were to survive and work—after all, writers in the real world do not have the luxury of being exiled by benevolent dictatorships, they have to survive by their own wits. Either you find a way to live on the cheap, or you sell yourself into lifelong drudgery and compromise in advertising or academia. Wes planned to pull a Helmholtz, but he thought that it might be better to start off somewhere more temperate to begin with, until he had honed his survival skills. Somewhere like Newfoundland or the highlands of Scotland, maybe, where he could trap grouse and grow winter barley and drive into the village once a week for supplies and a pint of bitter, whatever that was, at the local pub. And where he could roam the scented gorse in rubber boots with a fowling piece on his hip and a brown lab at his heels. But even then, where was he to get the money for rent, the car, the dog, the shotgun, the boots? How long would he have to work in the fallen world so that he could escape it? His father, after all, had pandered his entire life to a similar dream, and just look at where that had gotten him: loveless marriage, indifferent kids, a job he hated, exile to the basement. He couldn’t even afford to live in a place of his own, which would have suited everybody. It was no wonder he was such a loser. Wes was absolutely determined to avoid his dad’s fate, to foreswear all the entanglements—partly because it wasn’t so hard to see himself behaving exactly as his father behaved if he were in the same predicament—but it all seemed so impossibly far away, impossible to imagine maintaining the necessary purity of soul and thought while he waited and plotted his getaway.

It occurred to him that he should revisit Brave New World as an option for his paper, as it would be so much easier and faster than War and Peace, but he couldn’t bear the idea that someone might consider it an obvious choice, and anyway someone else in the class was bound to choose it. In any case, Helmholtz notwithstanding, Wes had truly disliked Brave New World as a novel; Mrs. Fielding would not appreciate the tone of snotty disdain that was sure to come through if he wrote about it. He turned his head towards the desk as if he might will War and Peace to float across the room to him, but it did not. The mere thought of getting up, retrieving the monstrous book, returning to bed, propping his back with pillows and proceeding to sort through 1,200 pages of highlights was disheartening in the extreme, and reminded him of everything that was wrong with his life, but it was precisely the outrage awakened by the unfairness of it all that gave him the energy to rise and do what had to be done. A few moments later, he was back settled beneath the covers with all the necessary paraphernalia spread in an arc about his lap: book, laptop, headphones, phone, legal pad, yellow highlighter and post-its.

Wes had already done almost all the preliminary work; dozens of post-its rose like buoy flags from the pages where he had highlighted relevant passages as he had read, and several pages of crabbed notes were handwritten into the flyleaves at the back. All Wes had to do was connect the dots. The problem was, he had had some sort of thesis in mind when he was taking notes, but now he was sincerely incapable of recalling what it was. It didn’t matter much; he would have no trouble coming up with a new one. As a junior, every grade he received this year would be an important part of his college transcripts, and he badly wanted to prolong his unbroken string of A’s in English, but he worried as he flicked through the post-its that he had never felt the least flicker of inspiration or kinship with the characters of War and Peace. In fact, he recalled thinking at the time that it was little more than Gone with the Wind with samovars. He’d read longer books in his time—Lord of the Rings, for one—and books that seemed longer—Atlas Shrugged, for instance—but War and Peace felt denser, somehow, as if the words weighed more on the page, the novel burdened by the gravity of its own importance, as if the years had given it a lustrous patina that made it appear more venerable than it really was. It was easy reading enough, he supposed, and not at all slow going, but irritating and clumsy at the same time, like scaling a rock face with a partner suffering from gout.

The book fell open at page 467 and Wes began to read. Prince André was listening to Natasha sing and was evidently on the verge of falling in love with her. Typically, André was choking on his own philosophical boner. “A sudden, vivid awareness of the terrible opposition between something infinitely great and indefinable that was in him, and something narrow and fleshly that he himself, and even she, was.” Wes found himself distracted almost immediately. What was that supposed to mean—that our real selves are not our bodies? The tragedy of an expansive soul confined to a fragile, decaying cage of flesh? Not exactly a shattering insight. And yet, as he forced himself to read on, Wes remembered with vivid clarity precisely what had been on his mind when he had flagged this passage. It was an idea that had much preoccupied him at the time, three weeks earlier, when he’d read the book over the course of a single weekend—that life is, or should be, a perpetual interior war between alienated factions of human nature. It was only because Tolstoy was so ham-handed with characterization that Wes had been able to recognize in his writing the cartoonish extremes of a genuinely subtle and complex problem he’d been trying to work out for himself.

What Wes had finally come to see as he watched Prince André fall in love with Natasha is that Tolstoy had divided his characters between strugglers, like André and Pierre, and accepters, like Boris and Berg, and that Tolstoy was firmly on the side of the strugglers—people who are continuously engaged in an inner battle with their own natures and received ideas of the proper way to live, even if it makes them miserable and turns every little decision into a swamp of confusion and loneliness. It was a problem that Tolstoy had illustrated as a black-and-white thing, and Wes felt that it was much more complicated than that, because he knew from personal experience that no one is purely a struggler or purely an accepter, but it was no less real and perplexing for all that. Wes felt that, like Tolstoy, he admired the strugglers, or tried to admire them, even if he couldn’t always grasp their internal dilemmas. To be a struggler was to be alone, and to be confused and lonely all the time, but just because you fight the good fight, choose the high road, doesn’t mean you admire yourself for it. Usually you irritate yourself to no end, because you can never find a comfortable way to be, and maybe you even end up hating yourself for having become the very person you aspired to be. You start to despise people like André and Pierre for the very things that make them admirable, and admiring dickheads like Boris and Berg for the very things that make them hateful. You ascribe qualities to them they don’t have, such as the thoughtfulness that would justify their arrogance and self-confidence, even though you know in your heart that they’re arrogant and self-confident precisely because they don’t engage in interior struggle, and that if they did they couldn’t be arrogant or self-confident. How did that work? The more you think, the more you feel you should think less, and the more you feel, the more you think you should feel less? And the worse thing about it was that those who actually did think and feel less didn’t seem to suffer from a similar sense of insufficiency—the smart people wish they could be more like the stupid people, but the stupid people never seem to want to be more like the smart people. Which hardly seemed fair.

Natasha was still singing, and André was still angsting. It was kind of weird, and a little sick, that all these grown men were lusting after a teenage girl, and Tolstoy let them do it without any sense that it was inappropriate. What was André—in his late twenties, maybe? He had a moustache and whiskers, he was a soldier, a hardened veteran, rich and sophisticated. He had probably fucked lots of peasants and whores. And Natasha was only fifteen, younger than Lucy. She had thin arms and a barely-formed bosom, Tolstoy said. Wes knew what that meant—a mature Russian woman, even the most beautiful, would have shoulders and arms rounded out by a little fat, big billowy boobs that had to be strapped down, a slight tub in the gut. But Natasha was probably more like a supermodel, or the star of some teen movie, with pillowy lips, hard, perky little tits, a flat tummy, and sharp hip bones that looked great in low-slung jeans. Nowadays a guy like André would be considered a total perv just for looking at a girl like that. But André wasn’t thinking about her body, probably; he wasn’t there, listening to her sing, trying to make out the outline of her nipples under her dress or imagining what she’d be like in bed. He was thinking of her unwearied soul, shining through her clear eyes and her piping voice, a beacon of purity and optimism and sincerity in a fallen, cynical world. That was all well and good, but a total turn-off as far as Wes was concerned, and she was still a kid no matter what you said. A freshman, for god’s sake.

Now Hélène, that was a woman in every sense of the word. If Wes were in War and Peace, if he were André with all his money and connections, he’d have made a play for Hélène first thing, before Pierre could get his fat, clumsy hands on her. She was the kind of woman that every man who saw her wanted. Wes had been surprised at how low-cut the aristocratic women wore their dresses in those days, how Hélène was constantly flaunting her “high, beautiful breasts.” Just that word “high” had been enough to send shivers down his spine. They were probably powdered, too. That scene where she leans over Pierre and he can suddenly picture her entire naked body beneath her dress.

Wes thought of Lucy and Delia and the differences between them. Physically, no doubt about it, Lucy was all Natasha, although probably darker of complexion, but much more like Hélène in temperament—manipulative, insincere, comfortable with her power over men, haughty and dismissive towards those who had nothing to offer her. Wes was certain of one thing—that he could never fall in love with someone like Lucy. Delia, on the other hand, was a full-blown woman like Hélène; true, with her pale skin and freckles and curly red hair pulled back in a casual ponytail, she didn’t look much like Hélène, but she was dignified and quietly authoritative, self-possessed and powerfully built, not at all a svelte little seduction machine like Lucy or Natasha. Wes had never seen Delia in a low-cut ball gown, but he had seen her in a bathing suit and she definitely had softly rounded shoulders and high, beautiful breasts. Still, neither Lucy nor Delia was a Marya or a Sonya, earnest and devoted, but weak and at the mercy of the whims of fate. He couldn’t stand that, someone clinging to him and helpless without him, someone who would never criticize him no matter how badly he treated her, eager to please but equally ready to fade into the background; taking her own vows solemnly, but content to release the faithless from theirs; feeling that she had a spark of godhead somewhere deep inside, yet not especially surprised that no one else recognized it; yearning for romance and love, yet always half-way towards persuading herself that they did not exist. Wes definitely couldn’t stand someone like that.

There was a tap at the door, and Wes’s father poked his head in with a sheepish smile.

“Got five minutes?”

“I’m doing my homework, dad.”

His father stepped into the room, clasping an open laptop at his hip. “Just a quick question. I won’t bother you. What’s the homework?”

Wes held up War and Peace and waved it wearily even as he lowered his eyes to his own computer screen, which had gone dark for lack of activity. Wes punched a button on the keyboard and the screen lit up again. His father strode across the room and took the book from his hand. He was barefoot, in a white T-shirt and plaid Bermuda shorts that may or may not have been underwear. His hair was freshly washed and plastered against his head, and he smelled strongly of Monsieur Balmain.

“War and Peace? I was just about your age, maybe a year or two younger, when I first read this. Very powerful. A big influence on me in my formative years.” He began to leaf through it, as if to revive fond memories.

“Wanna do my paper for me?”

“You have to learn to think for yourself, son.” He dropped the book on the bed and opened his laptop without sitting down. Wes noticed for the first time that his father had hair growing in his ears, squiggly little grey-brown hairs like pubes, and he looked down at his own toes, which had lately begun to sprout little tufts of light brown hair of their own.

“What do you need, dad? I’m very busy.”

His father turned the laptop downwards to show Wes the screen, which was opened on a Facebook page.

“What do you know about Facebook?”

“I know it’s not for old guys.”

“Wrong, pal. There’s more of my kind on here than your kind.”

“What do you want to know?”

“See, I signed on a couple of months ago, kind of by accident. And I never used it, but then people started friending me. It started slowly, but suddenly it’s snowballing, dozens and dozens of people coming out of the woodwork, people I haven’t spoken to in decades.”

“And?”

“I guess I want to know what sort of things I can do with it.”

“How do you sign on ‘by accident?’”

“I don’t know. Nora wanted me to look at something and her computer was broken or she couldn’t find the charger. I don’t remember. But see, like here, somebody tagged this picture of me from college.”

The photograph showed Wes’s father, aged maybe nineteen, sitting at the end of a row of students on a low wall at the edge of some sort of quad or terrace, supremely pretentious, in the pre-grunge fashion of the early eighties, in a thrift-store herringbone overcoat several sizes too big, his shoulders hunched Bob Dylan-style against a non-existent chill, as evidenced by the trees in full leaf directly behind him. Apart from the full head of thick brown curls and the blue-tinted granny glasses, he looked much as he did now. The look he had apparently been stretching for was that of a down-at-the-heels artist, a writer or a musician, in the days before he had become a household name, someone indifferent to the hunger and cold that come with the territory of being a young, unsung genius. Like many of the similarly affected students at Dalton, his father might have pulled it off had he not been studying at an elite educational institution that cost more a semester than most people earned in a year. Wes did not recognize any of the other people in the photo, all men or boys, and it was not in fact clear whether his father was part of the group or simply clinging to its periphery. Wes ran the cursor over each one; some had been tagged, some not.

“They spelled your name wrong. See the question mark? Whoever tagged you didn’t know you very well.”

“Yeah, I noticed that. Can I change that?”

“Just go down here to ‘Tag this photo,’ put the cursor on your face and click. You can put in anything you want.”

“But will people know it was me who made the correction?”

“I’m not sure. I think so.”

“Forget it, then. What else can I do?”

“Like what?”

“You know, post my own pictures, find friends, join groups, that sort of thing.”

“Dad, I really don’t have time for this. Can’t you figure it out for yourself? Everybody else does.”

“Sure, I just thought . . . Maybe it was something we could do together.”

“Nostalgia. Wasted youth. Bitter regret. I’ll pass.”

“Can I friend you?”

“Parents and children cannot be friends. That would be a travesty. Now please?” The iPhone rang, and Wes made a big show of pushing his father to the side, picking it up off the floor, and raising it like a talisman between them, as if it were a silver cross and his father a vampire. The call was from Lucy. Wes had no desire to talk to her, but anything was better than helping his father make a total dick of himself on Facebook. He gave his father a dismissive glare, pointed at the door and answered the call. His father shrugged his shoulders and padded from the room.

“Wes?”

“Oh Lucy.”

“Where are you?”

“At home, doing homework.”

“I was worried about you, when you disappeared like that. I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I’ve got this paper due Monday and I haven’t even started it.”

“Can I see you later?”

“Like I said, I’ve got to get to work . . . ”

“I know, but it’ll be, like, just for a few minutes. I really need to see you.”

“Lucy, any other time.”

“Please? Five minutes? I’ll come downtown.”

Wes was not very experienced at casual cruelty, and in fact had impressed himself by holding out as long as he already had. Now he had exhausted his entire repertory.

“What time?”

“Whenever’s good for you. Some time this afternoon?”

“What time is it now?”

“I don’t know. Hang on. Eleven twenty.”

“Say around three? You know where I am?”

“You’re in the school directory. I’ll find it. I had a really fun time last night.”

“So I’ll see you three-ish.”

“Bye?”

“See you later.”

Wes didn’t get it at all. Why was she calling him? Why did she want to see him? Twenty-four hours earlier she would barely have been able to identify him in a line-up, and now she . . . what? Involuntarily, Wes reviewed a mental slide show of memorable moments from the previous night—memorable for him, certainly, but he could hardly persuade himself that he had so distinguished himself among Lucy’s many lovers that he had ruined her for every other man. Had he somehow, quite unknowingly, touched her in a way she had never been touched before—emotionally? The truth was, he knew her mostly by reputation, had rarely spoken to her until the day before, and was hardly in a position to pretend to know or to predict what she might be thinking on any particular subject, much less about him. Wes hoped that he was the kind of person who was able to judge people on their own merits and to rise above idle gossip and speculation, but in fact he had never had any reason to question or doubt the extent to which she had earned her reputation, simply because he had never given it a moment’s consideration. Lucy was the hot sophomore with pouty lips who left herds of middle-school dweebs dry-mouthed and stricken in her wake as she floated down the halls. From everything he knew or thought he knew about the kind of guys she liked—rich, well-groomed, confident, clever but not unduly intelligent—he was well out of the running for what was said to be the best fuck in the upper school, and since his interests and desires had long lain in a very different direction, he had never considered himself to be in the running in the first place. Delia was the girl he wanted, the girl he had always wanted. And he knew in his heart of hearts that when Delia was finally his, the long, humbling wait would prove to have been more than worth it, because it would have demonstrated the primacy of love and faith and patience, and gotten him laid. The Lucies of this world were for guys who set the bar a little lower.

Wes recalled the fateful moment on Friday morning, just minutes after emerging from his meeting with Mrs. Fielding, that he had received Lucy’s tweet. The school had been still largely deserted, although a few early arrivals like himself were beginning to disturb the serenity of the empty halls. Because his daily commute to school involved a long walk across town and a crowded subway ride on the local line, Wes tended to arrive at the last moment, when the lobby was most frenzied and he himself had no time to loiter. But with fifteen minutes before the bell, on Friday morning he had lingered in the lobby. He had never before noticed all the campaign posters that plastered the lobby walls, and he took a moment to appreciate them. Incongruously, someone, probably in administration, with a view to some misguided concept of political correctness or to forestall controversy, had thought to balance or neutralize them by posting almost as many for McCain as for Obama, although many of the McCain posters were defaced with mustaches and horns or, in the case of Sarah Palin, erect phalluses, usually aimed towards her mouth. Almost everybody Wes knew was for Obama and felt deeply energized by and connected to the electoral process, even though most of them were too young to vote; the few eligible seniors had been strutting around school for months now and making their newly fungible opinions known to anyone who would listen. For almost everyone, Bush had been president as long as they had memories of politics, so the imminent upheaval felt extremely personal in a way that very few issues could to a group of overprivileged teenagers, and even the tweenies in middle school acted as though they were individually responsible for electing the country’s first black president. But Wes’s guilty secret was that he could not play along, at least not in his heart. He despised Bush as much as anyone, he supposed, but he worried that, like the housing market, the hysteria surrounding Obama was a big bubble bound to burst. If you’re in the opposition your whole life, and you’ve come to identify yourself with the frustrated, stifled and outmaneuvered moral minority, how do you take to victory? Republicans knew this; they were masters at playing the victim even when in power, they didn’t own it even when they broke it, but Democrats and these kids didn’t get it and they were going to get their fingers burned. America holding its head high once more among the comity of nations, the dawn of a new day, everything changed and renewed from one day to the next—Wes just couldn’t buy into it, as much as he’d have wanted to. He wished he could just be free to enjoy the moment, but he didn’t seem to have it in him to pop a woody for new beginnings.

He supposed it must have rubbed off from his dad. A vision of his father’s face, livid and distorted with anger, superimposed itself upon Barack Obama’s calm, forceful features in murky red, white and blue as he gazed with visionary intensity into a dawning future of hope. Wes’s father hated Bush with an almost erotic passion, railing savagely against the President’s every utterance and decree. He was completely addicted to this hatred, but Wes had no idea what his father actually believed in. The closest his father ever seemed to come to expressing conviction in anything other than the fact that someone, somewhere, had led his life astray was when he recalled the glorious utopia that was the Lower East Side in the early 1980s. How repulsively he reveled in his memories of a city filled with crime, crackheads, ageing Beatniks, $250-a-month walk-up studio apartments in Alphabet City and freewheeling artists thronging the sidewalks of Avenue A at three in the morning, making the world safe for something. How cruel and untrue it had been to tell someone like his father that when you ain’t got nothing you ain’t got nothing to lose. He had had nothing and had lost everything, and had spent the rest of his life making sure that everyone around him understood that they were accomplices in the theft. Especially his own wife, who’d bankrolled him through two decades of bitter disillusion, which doesn’t come cheap. Wes’s father, for all his so-called liberalism, was the anti-Obama, and Wes could not help wondering, as he gazed at the Senator’s beautiful face, what further price he himself would have to pay for his lifelong exposure to that virulent strain of psychogenesis.

Lost in thought, he felt a strong hand on his left shoulder, and turned to his right to find James, smelling organically of coffee, smiling maniacally through his blonde bangs and thrusting his Blackberry into Wes’s face.

“Seen this tweet?”

“What is it?”

“Check your phone.”

Wes had dutifully shucked his backpack, rummaged through the side pockets, removed his phone, turned it on and opened Twitterific. There was a new tweet from PrincessLucy. It said: “When the cats away . . . ! Party @ my place 9 on. C U 2nite mice!”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Lucy, man. You know, hot Lucy in tenth.” James snickered oddly.

“So why’d it come to me? I don’t subscribe to her tweet.”

“You do now, my friend. I signed you up. At her request.”

James seemed to be perfectly serious, yet it made no sense at all to Wes.

“How, at her request? I hardly know her. It’s gotta be a mistake.”

“No mistake, Wes. She likes you. You’ve been summoned. You’ve received the call. Resistance is futile, you lucky fuck.”

And now, lying on the bed with War and Peace resting mutely between his raised knees, Wes felt the full force of shame wash over him. His ears began to ring, his vision blurred and his skin felt hot as coals. The shame was inside him too, snaking through the corridors of his body like that archaic video game with the worm that keeps getting longer, hollowing him out to the core. Love had not won out, of course, and yet he still couldn’t quite see how it had happened. For the better part of a year, ever since the moment he had allowed himself to understand that he was in love with Delia, he had prepared himself for just such a contingency. Over and over again, he had rehearsed scenes in his head in which he found himself compelled to rebuff, gently but firmly, the advances of women who approached him in the street, at the library, at the fish counter in Citarella, on the subway, on a banquette admiring the Fragonards at the Frick, on line for bagels at Russ and Daughters, in a plush Park Avenue parlor, in a darkened screen­ing room watching “Breathless” at the Film Forum, and offered themselves to him unconditionally for an hour, an afternoon, a weekend of unbridled and possibly kinky passion. Because he was attracted to older women, a category to which Delia nominally belonged, and because he felt that his own puppyish enthusiasm and lack of experience would be irresistible to jaded housewife types, the women in these fantasies tended to resemble the young mothers who crowded the sidewalks outside Dalton every afternoon, waiting for their young ones in tight jeans and high ponytails. No celebrities, except perhaps for the actress Blake Lively or the author Marisha Pessl, whose jacket photo he had spent many hours condoling with over her hopeless infatuation for him, Wes. To those women he would say: “I’m sorry. I’m flattered. You’re very attrac­tive, really. Under different circumstances I would be happy to oblige. But you see I’m in love, and mindless, anonymous sex with beautiful strangers holds no allure for me. Haven’t you ever been in love? Then you’d know how I feel. No, not even a blowjob in the back of the taxi. I’m sorry.” It was true that such advances had not come his way, but Wes felt that, lit up from within as he was by the light of pure love, the way pregnant women were said to have a special glow about them, it was only a matter of time. And when it happened, he would be ready, and he would be a rock.

And then it happened. From the very moment that James had called him a lucky fuck, leaving him stunned and paralyzed in the middle of the school lobby, Wes had spent the rest of the day constructing scenario after scenario of heroic resistance. Lucy was no cougar, but she was said to be aggressive and inventive. He told himself repeatedly throughout the day, as he mentally reviewed every conceivable permutation of the seduction scene, that to be forewarned was to be forearmed. What kind of tactics and techniques could someone like Lucy deploy to weaken the resolve of her unwilling victims? Most boys, of course, would not even entertain the notion of resistance; most boys would in fact, from the very subtlest first encouragement, seek to take charge and ascribe the outcome to their own aggressive charms, so Lucy would need a minute or two simply to grasp the notion that she was being rebuffed—and not in a coy way but with profound moral determination and integrity—by a boy who gave no particular outward sign of being different from all the rest but who had actually turned out to be unlike anyone she had ever met before. On the other hand, once she had this concept firmly fixed in her mind, it would serve only to whet her appetite and hone her hunting instincts, and then Wes would need to be on his guard. How would she go about it? Perhaps they would be talking casually in a quiet corner of her apartment with drinks in their hands—his a club soda, hers a cosmo—when she would suddenly lean in and whisper something in his ear, her breath hot and moist, and run a red fingernail down the side of his neck. Or they might be dancing when she pressed her thigh between his legs as she stared straight up into his eyes. He didn’t think it would be something vulgar or less subtle; that wouldn’t be her way, but he should probably be prepared for anything. And if it had somehow come to her attention that Wes was rumored to be a virgin, he would be wise to expect the challenge to send her into a frenzy of competitive predation.

In the end, all it had taken was a simple text message—“find me”—to send Wes in search of her without an instant’s hesitation, and today he saw himself for what he really was. Wes did not care to attach the cliché “saving himself” to whatever it was he had been doing with respect to Delia—that would have been too saccharine even to put into words in the privacy of his own thoughts, let alone to suggest to James who, alone among the boys of his acquaintance, might be sympathetic to his motives even if he ragged him mercilessly for it. And in any case it would not have been entirely true, as Wes had pretty much done everything but “it” in the course of casual dating before Delia. Wes was no prude, either; he felt that safe sex between consenting teenagers was probably a very good and healthy thing. Even so, he knew what it meant to have done what he had done last night. He had not been unfaithful to Delia, who suspected nothing and expected nothing from him, but he had betrayed her and himself nonetheless. He couldn’t quite get his mind around what, precisely, the betrayal had consisted of, but he was quite certain that he could not take it back and that it had destroyed something that he’d taken pride in. It was precisely because he had done something that almost anyone in his place would have done that he felt diminished and clownish. Maybe he’d thought he really was different from everyone else, but now he felt like a dog in a blue Halloween wig, humiliated and ridiculous. He felt like his father—the ultimate dog in a blue wig.

And none of this, of course, went any way towards explain­ing why Lucy now seemed so anxious to see him. He was a notch in her belt now; by Monday morning the whole school would know that she’d popped his cherry and moved on, and even those who were most jealous of him—especially those—would make a meal of it. What more did she want from him?

Wes looked down at the book in his lap, its lines swimming. It was even heavier now than it had been earlier, and Wes felt a thousand miles away from it, could barely even remember what the book was about. The diminutive forest of post-its was daunting, and Wes shook his head in dismay that he had ever imagined this to be an easy A or even a doable assignment. He turned to the back of the book, where he had scratched down some thoughts as he had read, hoping they might jog his memory, but they were less than helpful:

 

• “idiotic behavior of Pierre at Borodino.”

 

• “812. Shock that André is wounded at Borodino, presumed dead. Had the idea that A’s lesson in life was forgiveness, that he would get back together with Natasha. When later, that is exactly what happens, disgust that Tolstoy is so predictable.”

 

• “Death of Petya. Manipulative to what end except pathos? Ultimately, P’s death is necessary to get Natasha to focus on her mother and someone else’s grief, but that is just a plot twist. Is a boy’s life of so little value? Never identified with Petya, boyscout type, but angry on his behalf.”

 

• “Everyone learns the lesson they need to learn (list)”

 

• “p.1071 ‘And there is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness, and truth.’ Whole book in a nutshell.”

 

Wes stared at the last entry, willing it to mean something, anything, as he thought it should, but it was as drained of emotion as a doctor’s illegible scrawl on a prescription pad. Wes sighed and pushed the book to the floor, along with the pens and papers. He sat up; the laptop slid down the blanket tented against his left leg, snapped shut and fell into the crack between bed and wall. Wes balled his fists and pressed them into his cheeks, gritting his teeth, kicking his feet and vibrating his entire skull in a silent scream that caused him to feel light-headed and pathetic, but offered no catharsis. With a grand spontaneous gesture, he swept the covers aside, swiveled his entire body on the pivot of his butt, and planted his feet firmly on the floor. Wes thought that it might be a good idea to take the dog for a walk along the river, throw her some tennis balls, do something normal to clear his mind of all this confusion.

Leaving his dirty clothes on the floor by the bed, Wes crossed the room and removed a clean pair of underwear, black jeans and a white T-shirt from his dresser. Slipping into the pants, he paused, bare-chested, before the mirror. Until last night, he had been sure that he would look different on this day. In fact, he had envisaged this very moment many times before—the moment when he first catches sight of himself in the mirror after losing his virginity. In the fantasy, the difference between before and after was subtle and hard to describe, but quite irrefutable and as evident to everyone, friends and strangers alike, as it was to himself. Obviously, it was not physical—he was still five foot eleven and one hundred and thirty-five pounds, all protruding ribs and narrow shoulders, but well-formed arms that girls and gay men often commented on and asked to touch. Shaggy brown hair, hippies’ delight, rather attractive large blue eyes and high flat cheekbones that conveyed, in general, the impression of someone two years’ younger than he was, a flaw that he had always played to advantage by adopting a social persona that was both endearingly bashful and aggressively intellectual yet accessible and ecumenically open to less evolved points of view. But he would carry himself differently, he had imagined; no swagger, of course, and only occasionally aware of the change, but with less apology for taking up space, allowing his arms to swing in uninhibited arcs, fingers lightly curled, his stride easier, swaying, not on the balls of his feet but on his heels like a character from R. Crumb. Mostly, though, the change would be visible in his face, in the steadiness of his gaze and the serene settledness of his features. He would smile less often and less broadly, but from a deeper and less perturbable foundation of confidence. He would be like a Tibetan monk, able to slow the beating of his heart and abide fools without getting upset, and without quite understanding why people, women and men, would respond to him with correspondingly greater respect, admiration and desire.

But Wes could see now from his reflection that none of this had come to pass. His shoulders were not thrown back; his bony chest, hairless but for two ridiculous tufts of hair around his tiny brown nipples, was not swollen with a new inviolable mystery; his lips were deflated and colorless and his cheekbones eroded. His eyes seemed to have taken on the lifeless, green-gray pall of a winter’s day far out to sea in the North Atlantic. What was there here that could possibly have attracted the interest of one of the hottest chicks at school? Wes scowled at himself and pulled the T-shirt over his head. He then applied deodorant to his underarms—it was original-scent Old Spice, the smell of which had given him much secret delight over the years, although it afforded him little pleasure now.

He looked in on his mother on his way downstairs. She was awake with the light on, looking perkier than he had seen her in some time, sitting almost upright, her eyes shining in a way that, if she had been a healthy person, would have made her look as if she had recently been crying. In her case, it simply meant that she was alert and functioning. Her hair had recently been washed and combed, but as usual this somehow had the effect of making her look worse rather than better. A speck of rice pudding clung to the down above her upper lip. Nora lay curled up at her side, like a toddler, her knees almost to her chin, reading aloud from a book propped against a pillow.

“I’m walking the dog. Do you need anything before I go?”

“No thanks, Leslie honey.”

“Movie!”

“What are you doing there?”

“Bobby’s reading to momma.” Wes looked at her helplessly. Was she there on a selfless mission to keep their mother company, or was she so bored that she would do absolutely anything for entertainment? She popped her thumb into her mouth, and in the dim light it was impossible to read her impression.

“Let me walk Crisp, then we’ll go, I promise.”

Wes turned to leave.

“Wait, Leslie.”

“Mom!”

“Wes. There is something I’d like, Wes, if you don’t mind.”

“Name it.”

“Sweetbreads.”

“What?”

“Sweetbreads.”

“You mean, like, pastry?”

“Look it up. You asked what I want. I want sweetbreads.”

“Do we have any in the house?”

“I don’t think so, honey. You may have to go the store.”

Wes thundered down the stairs, calling for the dog, who appeared from somewhere on the garden level, wagging her tail and laying her ears back submissively. He slipped into a worn gray hoodie that hung from the coat rack by the front door, and scratched the dog above the tail as he pulled the phone from his back pocket, opened the iPedia app and typed in “sweet bread.” He took the leash down from the coat rack and hooked it to Crispy’s collar while he waited for the query to load. He had opened the door, with Crispy straining on the leash, when his query came up, redirected to “Sweetbreads.” Above the text was the photo of something brown, bulbous and glistening on a bed of creamy rice.

 

“Sweetbreads are the thymus glands and pancreas glands of lamb, beef, or pork. There are two different connected parts to the thymus gland, both set in the neck. The ‘heart’ sweetbreads are more spherical in shape, and surrounded symmetrically by the ‘throat’ sweetbreads, which are more cylindrical in shape. Although both are edible, the heart thymus gland is generally favored because of its delicate flavor and texture, and is thus more expensive.

 

“The etymology of the word ‘sweetbread’ is thought to be of Old English origin. ‘Sweet’ is probably used since the thymus and pancreas are sweet and rich tasting, as opposed to savory tasting muscle flesh. In Old English, sweet was written ‘swete’ or ‘sweete.’ ‘Bread’ probably comes from the Old English word ‘bræd,’ meaning ‘flesh.’”

 

Wes pulled Crispy back into the house, closed the door, unhooked the dog from the leash, hung the leash back on the coat rack and returned to his mother’s room. Nora was still reading, and now that she had sat up Wes could see that the book was A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals, a book he himself had read aloud to his mother, cover to cover, twice over the past few years. She seemed to love it because it was about Paris and it was about food, but Wes could never quite figure that one out, since her diet was now basically restricted to high-fat rice pudding and the only time in her life she had been to Paris was on her honeymoon, a time he imagined she would prefer to forget. But she couldn’t get enough of it. She and Nora looked up expectantly as he entered the room, holding the offending iPhone in front of him, evidence of an as-yet undiscovered crime.

“Mom! Are you kidding me?”

“What is it, Leslie? What’s wrong?”

“Sweetbreads? It’s disgusting!”

“I didn’t know you were such a prude, honey.”

“Let Bobby see!” Wes handed the phone to Nora, who peered into it as if it were an oracle or a train schedule.

“I’m not a prude, whatever that means, but I can’t cook this.”

“Of course you can. You’re a fabulous cook. You can cook anything.”

“Mom, please don’t ask me . . . Anyway, I don’t think it’s such a good idea. All you’ve eaten is rice pudding for a month. It’ll make you sick.”

“I’ll worry about that.”

“Ew! This is gross! Bobby’s gonna barf!”

Wes sat down at the edge of the bed and took his mother’s hand, which was warm and dry.

“Mom, I don’t want to . . . are you sure this is what you want? I mean, you’ve been kind of out of it for a while. Are you sure you’re not . . . I mean, is this really what you want? Pancreas?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Please do it for me. Maybe we can even make a family meal of it. Like the old days.”

“Have you ever had it before?”

“No. Never.”

“Then why?”

“Bobby knows why.”

“Oh yeah?”

“It’s this book. It makes mommy hungry for Paris.”

“Paris is where your father and I took our honeymoon. You know the story.”

“I don’t.”

“Let Bobby tell!”

“Okay Bobby, tell.”

“Momma and dada went to Paris, and they went to a romantic little restaurant with candles and red lampshades, a bis . . . a bis . . . ”

“Bistro.”

“A bistro. And momma couldn’t understand anything on the menu ‘cause it was all in French except one thing, rice and veal, so she ordered that. Only it wasn’t rice and veal.”

“It was ris de veau. Sweetbreads.”

“And dada was so proud of her for ordering it ‘cause it made her so so-phis-ti-cated. But when it came she almost puked. So when dada went to the bathroom she scraped the whole thing into her bag and pretended she’d eaten it. And she never told dada what she did.”

Wes could see what was going on here. Whenever his mother had a momentary upswing, its effect on Nora was like a sugar rush, she became overexcited and acted silly, which his mom would egg on, thrilled to be the center of anybody’s attention. That explained the sweetbreads and the baby talk. Both of them would crash soon enough, leaving Wes to clean up the mess, but he could hardly begrudge his mom for feeling frisky.

“And now you’re sorry for what you did. Twenty years later.”

His mother had closed her eyes, and her hand had slipped from his and was now groping, crablike, across the counterpane in a blind search for the remote. Nora turned her eyes to Wes in alarm, but his mother’s face offered no sign that she had recognized the resentment in his voice.

“That’s right. I’m sorry and I want to try it. How do you like them apples? It’s never too late to learn something new.”

“Yeah, Leslie. How do you like them apples?”

Nora was too young to remember a time when their mother had been in full health, but Wes was not, and he found the ups and downs disorienting. He had been through this before, periods of rapid deterioration followed by gradual recovery that never fully returned her to what she had been before the latest attack, and the pneumonias and the bed sores and the incontinence, and he knew better than to allow himself to believe that she was getting better. It almost made him angry, as if she were playing a game with them, which of course she wasn’t. Even in this light he could see Nora scanning their mother’s face for signs of new growth, as if the spring had come, and he wanted to shout at her, at both of them, for making things more complicated than they needed to be. For the briefest moment, he suddenly saw the image of Prince André, pale and gaunt on his death bed, with a repentant Natasha at his side, all mystically aglow with the prospects of a new life. Nora had nothing to repent, she was only twelve, but Wes knew that she was consumed with fear and guilt—she herself didn’t understand what she was feeling, but Wes did—and every time his mother seemed to be improving it was as if she had been reprieved, and she was momentarily, like Natasha, filled with naïve hopes for the future and the sense that she had been absolved and redeemed. Only she had never done anything wrong. She was the only one who never did anything wrong.

“You stay there, Nora. I’ll take care of it. Let me have the phone, please.”

Crispy was still waiting by the front door, and wagged her tail in a despondent expression of optimism as Wes descended. He sat on the bottom step and returned to the iPedia entry on sweetbreads. At the foot of the page was a link to a “Top Chef” recipe, but when he followed the link he found that the very first ingredient was golden raisins, and his mother hated raisins. He stood up with a sigh and a groan and went into the kitchen, where he found his father standing in front of the refrigerator, peeling slices of cheese from a package of provolone, rolling them into cylinders and sliding them into this mouth. Wes ignored him and went to the row of cookbooks lined up on a warped shelf above the counter. There were a great many of them, thirty or forty, representing every ethnic group in Queens, but he could not recall when he had last seen anyone reach for one. Wes had been the chef of record at home for some time, and it was true that he could cook just about anything from a recipe, but with homework and SAT prep he tended to keep it simple these days, sticking to the dishes that he knew Nora would eat—macaroni and cheese, spaghetti with sautéed vegetables, breaded chicken cutlets, steak, the sort of food they might eat if they lived in Indiana, he imagined. His father was the better cook, but he rarely had the energy for it these days, and refused to descend to the children’s standards.

“Can I have some money? I need to go shopping for dinner.”

With his free hand his father pulled his wallet from the back pocket of his shorts and handed it to Wes.

“Take what you need. What are you making?”

“Sweetbreads.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“That’s what Mom asked for.”

“Count me out. I’ll have cereal. Can’t stand sweetbreads. Barely stand to look at them.”

“Mom wants it to be a family night. You have to.”

“Have my wallet back?”

His father left the room and Wes turned to the cookbooks. After coming up blank in the first half dozen, he finally found what he was looking for in The Union Square Cookbook—“seared sweetbreads with mushrooms and frisée”—although the idea of wilted frisée struck him as excessively gallic, and he thought he might substitute baby bok choy, if it was available. He typed the list of ingredients into a new memo on the notepad app of the iPhone. As he typed, his eyes wandered down the various steps of the recipe. The sweetbreads were to be soaked for an hour in ice water, which would have to be changed every fifteen minutes; they were then to be poached for three minutes, drained, cooled in fresh cold water, trimmed of fat and connective membranes, and pressed under a weighted plate for five hours. Only then were they to be dredged in flour and fried to a golden brown. Wes trudged back upstairs and leaned in at his mother’s door.

“Mom, it’s going to take about seven hours. Are you sure you . . . ?”

“Leslie, do I have to tell you . . . ”

“Okay, okay. Where’s Nora?”

“I don’t know, Leslie.”

Wes left the house and turned east, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his hoodie. The streets were crowded now, mostly with people Wes deemed to be tourists and daytrippers from the outer boroughs and the suburbs because they walked too slowly and did not look intelligent enough to live in Greenwich Village. The sidewalks were narrow, and even when the crowds were sparse they were strewn with obstacles—trees and fenced beds, garbage cans, fire hydrants—that had to be negotiated. Now they were lousy with invaders, all of whom imagined themselves to be an integral part of the life of the city; Wes had to turn sideways just to squeeze past them. How he hated them, with their high-tech strollers, their pristine sneakers and shopping bags and Jersey license plates, all converging on his neighborhood from places that no one would ever want to visit, let alone live in. They were all so puffed up and pleased with themselves because they had purchasing power and hard-to-secure reservations, but they were the kind of people who would never know what it’s like to belong, to truly belong to a place the way Wes belonged to the Village. They were the kind of people who move whenever they can afford to buy a bigger house in a richer place. They thought of the city as a place that is impervious, a place to drive badly and behave rudely and give vent to their most basic acquisitive instincts; they consumed it as if it were both inexhaustible and disposable, but they would never know how tender and fragile the city really is because they were neither tender nor fragile themselves. How could they be, living in boxes surrounded by lawns like minefields, never rubbing shoulders, never looking strangers in the eye, never really understanding what it is to be living human beings? To know one small place like this one, and to know it as few others did, and to understand one’s place in it without complication and doubt, seemed to him an almost blessed condition. Some jerk in his class had written a pretentious, pseudo-Marxist analysis of “The Wizard of Oz,” concluding that Dorothy was a reactionary know-nothing who preferred to return to the ignorance and squalor of her Bible Belt dirt farm, with its libertarian promise of individualism, than to lead the citizens of Emerald City out of the bonds of oppression. Wes had offered a furious counterargument and was, in turn, condemned as a reactionary, but his outrage had had nothing whatsoever to do with politics. The fact was, Dorothy’s Kansas and Wes’s Village had a great deal in common, and Dorothy’s extended family had much in common with Wes’s ideal of what family life should be. The class had taken a straw poll, and everyone but Wes had agreed that, in Dorothy’s shoes (no pun intended), they would have chosen to remain in the land of Oz. But Wes had no patience for world travelers, for what is there to see outside one’s own internal monologue, the infinity of one’s own mind?

Wes turned right on Bleecker, encountering an even denser wave of tourists. A long line of happy people—European teenagers, Mid-Western families, Japanese tour groups—snaked from the entrance of the Magnolia Bakery and around the corner. Wes whistled the tune to “Bah Bah Black Sheep” as he sidled by them, but doubted that any of his targets would have the wit to understand they were being insulted.

Wes was put in mind of The War Between New York and New Jersey. About four years earlier, his father had rented a car and the entire family had taken a day trip to a no-kill shelter in southern Jersey where they hoped to adopt a dog. They had found Crispy within the first five minutes, an adorable eight-week-old white puppy with black spots and a patch over one eye—maybe a pointer mix but maybe also an Australian cattle dog, no one seemed to know which. On the way home they had stopped outside a picturesque river town for a picnic on the banks of the Delaware, and it was there that the entire plot for The War Between New York and New Jersey had come to Wes in a flash of inspiration. It was to be set in the midst of a civil conflict that had broken out over the secession of Staten Island, and New York’s militia now occupied most of New Jersey and was closing in on the capital. The character based on Wes was a teenage volunteer from Manhattan who had been posted to a farmhouse on the banks of the river outside a pretty village just like the one where they were picnicking. His job was to monitor traffic on the river and prevent smugglers from ferrying relief supplies to besieged Trenton. The boy would be a thoughtful, intellectual type but a true believer in New York’s cause—the triumph of liberal urban civilization over suburban ignorance and conformity—but then he would fall in love with the milkmaid daughter of the dairy farmer whose house he was occupying, and his certainties would be thrown into confusion. There would also be an evil realtor who had set his sights on the milkmaid, and Wes’s character would have to shoot him to protect his beloved’s honor, but even though his valor and courage would bring them close together, tragically he would still not get the girl because there was too much cultural distance between them. Of course, Wes had never written more than the first three pages, but it was the first time that he had ever imagined what it would be like to be a writer. The idea of the book had lingered with him long after he had dismissed it as childish and didactic, and it lingered with him still, or at least the title did, along with the feeling that there were irreconcilable differences between people who chose to live in suburbs and those who remained loyal to the city, the birthplace of civilization.

Wes raised his head to find himself on the corner of Seventh Avenue. Even here, half a mile from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, the weekend traffic was backed up almost to a standstill. As Wes felt another wave of irritation building within him, he remembered to be mindful, as Delia had taught him, and by focusing his attention on his emotions he was able to calm them. A good Buddhist would not allow himself to be tied up in knots by negative energy. Wasn’t it just possible that each of these people, as mediocre as they appeared to be, was an ocean of fear and blind suffering every bit as real and valid as Wes’s own? In place of peevishness Wes now felt a welling of platonic love for all these suburbanites filling his city’s streets with noise and stink, because being benighted and blinkered was a condition that called for compassion and sorrow, not impatience and disdain. As he waited for the light to change, Wes tried to reconstruct the string of thoughts that had led him to this revelation, but finding it hopeless he mentally shrugged his shoulders, quite mindful of what he was doing, and decided that it had not been a string of thoughts at all, but a moment of pure insight. He crossed the avenue and tried to keep his mind blank, but when he reached the guitar shop he stopped and felt a pang of acquisitive envy, and instead focused his mind on admiring the objective beauty of the instruments, and felt himself suffused with love for the guitars, their makers and their eventual purchasers, not despite but because of the fact that he would probably never be one of them.

He turned left on Jones Street and a minute later found himself at the butcher, a tiny wedge of a shopfront that had been there for generations and that made him feel like an insider because there were never any tourists there and it was not in any guidebook and had sawdust on the floor. When there was a line here, it was composed of locals like him who knew something other people did not and called to the butchers by name, and when you ordered something they didn’t just pull it from the glass display case but cut it for you right there on heavy butcherblock pedestals that were worn and smooth with age and use. They were always busy, but you never minded waiting because the butchers at their work were something beautiful and Zen-like. If Buddhists ate meat, they would shop here, Wes thought, but then he grew nervous and shy as his turn to order came. The compact Hispanic lady in the white coat behind the counter who took the customers’ orders was called Teresa. Wes knew her name but was pretty sure she didn’t know his, and he could never figure out how to address her. He wasn’t even convinced that she recognized him from one visit to the next. Wes wondered how the other customers had first made their names known to Teresa. He wanted her to know his name because he and his father were lifelong customers and he knew how gratifying it would feel to be welcomed personally in front of the other customers, and before coming to the store he often rehearsed scenarios in his head of ways that he could lead the conversation in a manner that would require her to ask his name, but there didn’t seem to be such a way. If he simply said “Hi there, Teresa, how are you today?” she would be unlikely to respond “I’m fine, thank you, and what’s your name?”, even if she didn’t find it impertinent that a boy his age would address her by name.

“Next,” she called, and Wes shuffled forward.

“Do you have any sweetbreads?”

She narrowed her eyes and smiled conspiratorially at him, as if he had just given her a secret password.

“Veal or lamb?”

“I don’t know. I never made them before. What’s the best?”

“Veal is better, but lamb is good. How much do you need?”

“I don’t know. For one?”

Her eyebrows lifted and her smile broadened. “I’ll see what we have.” She disappeared into the walk-in at the back, leaving Wes feeling very grateful that he had not introduced himself. He studied the old black-and-white photos that hung on the wall, showing the store as it had been one, two and three generations earlier, and all the dead butchers who had once worked there. There was a time, it seemed, that they had all been Italians, some of them younger than Wes, the older ones with mustaches and shiny hair and quite dark skin, but all the butchers now were Mexican. Wes wondered what all the young Italian men who might have been butchers were doing instead, and if any of them were happier than they would have been if they had been butchers. As Wes watched the Mexicans trimming the fat off great lumps of meat with long curving knives, or carving chicken breasts into cutlets, he wondered if he could be happy as a butcher. On the one hand, he thought, it would be a great job for someone who was conscientious, a perfectionist who believed that life offers never-ending opportunities for self-improvement and thoughtful application, as Wes did. Clearly, you could work an entire lifetime as a butcher and never fully satisfy yourself that you were as artful as you might be, and that was a good thing. On the other hand, Wes believed that the time would come when, as an artist focused on honing his craft and grappling with philosophical and literary conundrums, his interest in food would gradually fall away, leaving nothing but the core need to satisfy hunger as he became increasingly ascetic and otherworldly; by his early twenties at the latest, when he had stopped growing and no longer needed lots of protein, he would certainly have given up meat-eating, especially given its karmic and ecological implications. Now it would be incredibly interesting to consider the moral and ethical implications of being a vegetarian Buddhist butcher, and probably an amazingly difficult and worthy exercise in principles of self-mastery, but Wes couldn’t be certain that he had it in him. What if, after decades of devoting your life to form and mindfulness, it should just turn out to be really boring? In theory, Wes didn’t believe in boredom because there was always something to do with an unoccupied mind, but still.

Teresa emerged from the walk-in with a sheet of butcher’s paper in one hand, on which there sat something pink and shiny and mottled, enmeshed in a network of threadlike capillaries and pocked with globules of fat. It looked perhaps like a giant embryonic mouse. Teresa tilted her hand towards Wes so that he could assess the quality, and several waiting customers leaned in simultaneously to get a better look, one even emitting a low, awestruck gasp.

“That looks fine.”

“Two pounds is the smallest I have. Too much for one, okay?”

“No it’s fine. I’ll take it.”

An old lady in a tweed overcoat and a thick grey scarf around her neck nudged Wes in the elbow, tutting. “How are you going to cook that?” she asked in an old-fashioned Little Italy accent.

“You have to soak it and poach it and press it. Then you can fry it and serve it with mushrooms or raisins.”

“You’re the cook?”

“It’s easy. It’s just complicated.” The old lady nodded approvingly and gave Wes’s forearm a little squeeze. It was like something out of a movie, and Wes felt a little swell of pride in his heart. He looked up to see if Teresa had noticed that something special had passed among her customers, but she was wrapping the sweetbread with her head lowered. She would remember him now, and the next time he came he would be sure to introduce himself.

Wes continued along Jones, turned east on West Fourth, then immediately north on Sixth Avenue on his way to Citarella. Although the brown paper package containing the sweetbread was light and unobtrusive, it felt heavy and conspicuous, as if it concealed the tell-tale heart and was calling out to everyone on the street. Although he planned to be a vegetarian one day, Wes was still an avid meat-eater and did not generally suffer ethical qualms about it, so he was puzzled by this creeping sense that he was doing something wrong. Unless there was something he didn’t know about sweetbreads, in theory they were no different from any other cut of meat, since the animal from which they came had had to die in order to supply it. Wes thought that maybe it had something to do with Teresa’s question: “Veal or lamb?” He remembered now that when she’d asked, for an instant so fleeting that he was unaware of it until it had passed, there had popped into his head the image, almost like a drawing in a children’s book, of a calf and a lamb with a backslash between them and a question mark to the right. There was something about calves that upset him, even when he thought about them ever so casually, because of the way they seemed to be born to suffer. Lambs, at least, gambol and play, but calves seemed to be sad, somehow, from the moment they’re born because virtually all mammal babies are cute but calves seem to be stamped with the mark of death from the very beginning, like the condemned calf in “Dona Dona.” And he couldn’t help but think, as he strode towards the Jefferson Market library and noted the time on the clock tower, of the very calf that had died to give Wes its one and only pancreas or thymus gland, and he saw in his mind’s eye a kind of accelerated history of his sweetbread, which was really the brief and doleful biography of a living creature that had maybe never even had one sip of its mother’s milk before it was carted off and kept in concrete pens and fed from stainless steel hoppers and shouted at and taunted and tolerated on this earth just long enough for some blank-eyed stranger with a knife and elbow-length plastic gloves to reach deep, deep into the recesses of its hot, frightened body for that glistening pink jewel of viscera. Of course Wes knew that the butchering process was not like that at all, that the sweetbreads would be among the last thing to be removed once the body had been dismantled, but in this montage it was the sweetbreads that had held all the other parts together, and once they had been harvested everything else—the various cuts of meat, the hide, the components of the head, the bones and the intestines—all flew apart, pieces of a puzzle or a planet exploding in outer space, and away to their appointed destinations in foam trays in supermarket coolers, tanneries or great vats of boiling water. And when you abstracted it that way, when you allowed yourself to think of the body as an assemblage or a vessel, rather than as a sodden sponge infused with sorrowful knowledge, it did help a little. You could imagine the calf’s soul soaring free and exuberant from the wreckage, and that tiny interstice in which it had been entrapped in its living body as an aberration, a hiccup that the creature’s spirit could look back upon later and laugh about. This was where Buddhism, even just a smattering of it, came in quite handy. Wes was quite pleased that he was on his way to becoming a Buddhist.

A year earlier, a girl had fallen or jumped in front of an oncoming train at the 77th Street station. Wes had not known her, but those who had said that she had struggled with depression for years. Even so, the school administration had taken the opportunity to organize mandatory parent-student drug-awareness events in which participants sat in safe circles and voiced their misapprehensions about each other. To encourage candor, parents were placed in separate circles from their own kids, and that was how Wes had found himself sitting besides Delia. She was a grade above him, but he’d seen her before, of course, in the hallways or on the street, and had long been attracted to her because she didn’t look or act like anyone else at Dalton. Wes found her very beautiful, with her kinky red hair and pale skin, her strong nose and the womanly curve of her lips, but she was unusual enough to allow him to imagine that no one else had ever recognized her beauty as he had, and that if she were to look deep into his eyes she would be startled, then gratified and grateful, to see herself understood, appreciated and desired for the first time in her life. When you pictured some girls naked, it was all thrashing and grunting, but when you pictured Delia naked, with her round shoulders and broad hips, you thought of waking up in a feather bed in an icy cottage on the moors with one of those strong, smooth, fragrant thighs splayed across your midsection. And that was precisely the image Wes had entertained as they held hands in their circle, while even at some distance his father’s voice rose above the general murmur to insist that drugs don’t always pose a mortal danger to a healthy, socialized adolescent.

Wes had no reason to suspect that complaining bitterly about his father wasn’t a perfectly suitable opening gambit when they broke for juice and cookies.

“What does your father do?”

“He’s a failed novelist.”

“That’s his profession?”

“He teaches creative writing at the New School.”

“What does it mean, ‘failed novelist?’”

“He’s published one book in 20 years.”

“Then he’s a published novelist, right?”

“The failure is in his heart. If you asked him, he’d say he was a failed novelist.”

“Did he give up?”

“God, no.”

“Then he hasn’t failed. Think of Melville or Balzac.”

“They all did their best work in their youth. Trust me, he’s a failure.”

“That’s such a horrible thing to say about someone you love, and so lacking in compassion.”

“He also sleeps with his students. They do it in the house.”

“Then he must be a very unhappy man. You should pity him.”

And that was how Wes had discovered that Delia was a Buddhist, and that he loved her hopelessly. She was less than a year older than him, but she made him feel like a cranky little child, and then and there he had vowed to become worthy of her, to close the gap between them. For the remaining minutes of their break, he limited his self-expression to sage nodding of the head as she discoursed on meditation, mindfulness and the loving-kindness that she tried to practice toward her own parents. She was calm, poised; the gentle modulation of her voice acted upon Wes like a cool hand upon a fevered brow. She was everything he wanted to be and despaired of having, and with her knowing serenity and quiet self-confidence she continued to be just that through the entire year that Wes worked to catch up with her. She was always self-contained and unhurried, as if she didn’t sweat and woke up with her breath smelling of rosehips, and despite her curvy, voluptuous body, she was always somehow untouchable. It was hard to picture Delia allowing some smooth-talking jock to put his tongue down her throat or grope her tits; she just didn’t seem to be made for that kind of transaction. Even in his fantasies, Wes somehow managed to skip over most of the dirty bits because it was almost impossible to imagine Delia in a state of sexual arousal. Of course, she could be the kind of girl—woman—who was attracted to much older men, graduate students in philosophy or yoga instructors, but that only added a sense of urgency to Wes’s project of self-improvement because it was always possible that he could get to her before she had figured out what kind of guy she was attracted to. He had decided that he would not even attempt to have sex with her until he was confident that he had become the kind of boy—man—that Delia could admire on an intellectual, an emotional, a spiritual plane—until such time as he could look in her eyes and see the same shock of recognition that she would see in his eyes when she looked at him, if only he could persuade her to look hard enough. If he were honest with himself, he would have to admit that it had been not so much a vow of chastity as insurance against humiliation, but it had kept him faithfully engaged in bettering himself, which must have its own rewards other than the promise of losing one’s virginity to a woman one truly loved. And until his fateful encounter with Lucy the night before, Wes had sincerely believed that he had been closing the gap, despite the incontrovertible evidence that, with only seven months left to graduate, Delia had yet to lay a thigh across his midsection. And now, as he approached the gourmet market, thoughts of Delia’s thigh, which remained an object of idealized, frustrated desire, and of Lucy’s thigh, which smelled of grapefruit and vanilla, confused themselves in Wes’s mind until in their combined carnal warmth they became a disembodied leg of lamb, rising joyously through the dimensionlessness of karmic space.

The automated glass door opened at Wes’s approach, and he headed for the vegetables, losing his train of thought. Wes knew this market well because he stopped in several times a week on his way home from school to shop for supper. But as he stood before the vegetable display case with the list of ingredients open on the iPhone in his right hand and the plastic basket in his left, as he had done in virtually identical fashion countless times in the past, it occurred to him that he had been standing right on this very spot, give or take a few square inches, only eighteen hours earlier, give or take a few minutes, but that somehow, in that very brief interlude, he had become an entirely new person and the world had been entirely remade.

He remembered himself eighteen hours earlier, who he had been and what he had been thinking. After he’d read Lucy’s tweet, he’d spent the rest of the day fretting about how he would defend himself against her aggressions, should they come, or speculating about the possibility that it was all just a mistake—or worse yet, a prank—and that she had absolutely no romantic interest in him whatsoever, and then he’d left school, skipping a meeting of the Lit Club, and come here to shop for dinner, and the argument had continued to rage in his head even as he had stood in this spot. Now, barely aware of the shoppers who were forced to push past him as he blocked the aisle, Wes shook his head and smiled indulgently on behalf of his previous self, whose exercise in self-delusion had been so transparent it had taken an almost miraculous act of will not to puncture the illusion. It was as if he had sequestered an entire sector of his analytical brain and given it over to alien control, the way you can allow tech support to take remote control of your laptop during a technical crisis, and suddenly some dude in Mumbai is moving the cursor across your monitor while your own keys go limp. That was how it had been all day yesterday—some avatar who didn’t know anything about the real Wes controlling his thoughts—but it was only now that he could see it. It was so obvious, at least to the new person he was today, that the whole resistance-versus-misunderstanding scenario had been a total scam that he had perpetrated against himself. Of course he had not really wanted it to be a misunderstanding, and even more, of course, he had had no real intention of resisting her if she was interested in him. If he had, wouldn’t he simply not have gone to her party? Instead, he had found himself in this market after school trying to decide what he would make for dinner on the basis of how he could impress her, later that night, by describing the exotic, sophisticated supper he had prepared for his family that evening. He had entered the store intending to buy ingredients for a meal of grilled pork chops and baked potatoes, but he’d taken one look at the bin of Idahos and realized how lame it would come across if he tried to make a boast out of such a pedestrian effort. Instead, he’d ended up spending a fortune on saffron, carnaroli rice and Nantucket bay scallops to make a risotto that no one but his father had really enjoyed, and that Nora had rejected altogether in favor of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and all so that he might possibly be able to use it to impress a girl who might possibly but probably wasn’t interested in him. And he had done all this without once admitting to himself that this was what he was doing. In the end, at some point in the evening he had told Lucy about the risotto, and she had been duly impressed. Like a jerk, he had even promised to cook it for her one day. Still, it wasn’t easy to admit to yourself that you were the kind of boy who thought that bragging about your exploits in the kitchen was a good way to seduce girls. Wes wished he’d made the pork chops instead.

Wes could only marvel at his former self and his capacity for self-delusion, and maybe envy his naivety a little. How lucky he was in a way, that dopey little virgin, with his preoccupations with risotto and army manuals, so little suspecting that he would shortly be engaged in an exercise to tear down everything he believed in. Maybe, despite everything, he had done himself a favor. In fact, maybe what he had done the night before had actually been to shed the final, ragged skin of childhood—not the virginity but the capacity to see the world as you wanted to see it and not how it really was in all its hypocrisy, deception and selfishness. Surely this new clarity of vision must be the one absolute requisite of adulthood, if anything was, without which it was impossible to survive in their world? It was the thing that allowed his father to look his own children in the eye every morning. It was the thing that gave the calf its mournful eye and made it old even in its infancy. Tolstoy always gave it to his characters when it was too late to be of use to them, or at least he made them earn it by really running them through the ringer. Maybe, even more than having betrayed his noble love for Delia, it was the thing that had made him cry today. He wished he didn’t have it; even more, he wished he didn’t need it. Wes thought of Louis XVI’s diary entry for July 14 1789: “Rien.” Nothing. Louis XVI had no clarity of vision, and that one-word diary entry was what had doomed him. Without clarity of vision, the most important moments of your life come and go without you’re being aware of them. Wes had always chided himself for not keeping a journal, but for some reason—probably sheer laziness—he had never cultivated the habit. If he had, he would have been able to go back and track the heedless innocence that had led to yesterday’s debacle. If he had, he knew just what he would put in today’s entry. “Everything. Everything happened today.” It occurred to him that he should stop in at the stationery store on his way home and pick up a blank notebook. If ever there was a good day to start a journal, this was it, but then he thought no, it would not be a diary but a novel. It would start with the words “Everything. Everything happened today,” and it would be called Everything Happened Today.

Without quite remembering how it had happened, Wes glanced in his basket to find that he had filled it while daydreaming. He checked off its contents against the shopping list: mushrooms, bok choy, shallots, garlic, tomatoes and parsley. The only thing missing was veal stock, which was prepared fresh and kept in a refrigerated display near the front of the store, along with homemade soups, pasta sauces and guacamole in small plastic tubs. As Wes bent down for a container of stock, his eye was caught by the packages of precut crudités—carrot, celery and red pepper sticks—kept alongside the dips. The celery reminded him of the first Bloody Mary that James had had ready for him the night before when he had arrived at Lucy’s at nine-thirty. It had been fresh and sludgy with horseradish and black pepper and a celery stick for a stirrer, delicate pale green leaves still attached. Earlier in the day, Wes had silently pledged to stick to sparkling water at the party so he would be sober enough to resist Lucy, but he had accepted the Bloody Mary without hesitation. They had not spoken as they clinked glasses at the threshold, and Wes’s second thought had been about a story he had recently been told third hand about a party where a girl had gotten so drunk that she’d wandered off, passed out and drowned in a puddle, and every kid who had brought alcohol to the party had been arrested and charged as accessories to her death, as had the parents of the boy who’d thrown the party, even though they were away at the time and had had no idea that anything was going on in their home. And even as he raised his glass to his lips, Wes had imagined Lucy’s parents at their cottage in East Hampton or wherever and how they must feel about their daughter to trust her enough to leave her alone in the city for the weekend, and all the things they didn’t know about her, and how incredibly sad that was for them, and how incredibly duplicitous and manipulative Lucy must be to throw a massive blow-out behind their backs and know she could get away with it. And then as he had sipped his fiery drink, which was so strong as to be light pink and almost translucent, and James had taken him by the shoulder and led him into the party, where the Velvet Undergound was playing, Wes had scanned the room of some thirty kids, looking not for Delia but for Lucy, but then he had caught sight of Delia, standing by a pair of French windows with another senior girl and almost enveloped in the floor-to-ceiling Venetian damask curtains, and had made directly for her. He had been about half-way across the room when Delia had looked up from her conversation and appeared to see him, but then immediately turned back to her friend. Delia usually wore long, colorful, flowing dresses that concealed her shape, along with black leggings and South Asian-type necklaces and bangles, but tonight, Wes noted, she was dressed quite uncharacteristically in tight-fitting denim capris, a sleeveless white tunic and cork-soled wedges with ribbons that ran up her calves in a crisscross pattern. Her beautiful red hair, which she usually allowed to flow freely, was done up in tight pigtails that opened a crisp white part from the top of her head to the nape of her neck, where it was lost in a mist of loose curls, a tropical waterfall seen from a great distance. Seeing her like that had immediately made Wes feel guarded and proprietary, but then almost instantly ashamed, so that he’d felt his face grow flushed and ran the cold tumbler across his forehead before he reached her. He tapped her lightly on the shoulder, and she partially turned towards him with a vague smile—just far enough to acknowledge his presence, and too briefly for someone who didn’t know who it was that was standing behind her. But just as he had been preparing to move away before anyone had seen what she’d done, she’d reached out and grabbed him gently by the wrist in such a way that the girl she was talking to couldn’t see, and a moment later she’d swung around and was standing very close to him and he was looking down into her eyes, which were heavily lined with kohl. It had been an odd moment for Wes, because although he knew it wasn’t true, he always had this idea that she was taller than him, but even after all this time they had rarely stood close enough for it to make a difference. Now he could smell her mimosa shampoo, and it made him momentarily dizzy. Delia held on to his wrist as they talked.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she’d said, almost in a whisper, and leaned in to kiss Wes on the cheek, but because Delia had very full lips that Wes often imagined kissing it felt different from a peck and sent a little electrical shock through his body.

“I’m glad I am too. I mean, I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“No, you didn’t.” She’d said this with a sly smile that, like her clothes, was so at odds with her usual manner that Wes had found himself confused and a little alarmed. Delia was not the bantering kind and was rarely coy or playful, which contributed to the awe and uninformed esteem in which she was widely held at school, and perhaps also to the failure of gossip and lack of suitors in her orbit. Wes had learned how to be around her—earnest, attentive, morally engaged and one push shy of challenging; there had been a time when he had worried about how such deference would affect their sexual compatibility, if it should ever come to that, but he had long since set such concerns aside. If she was sometimes a little intimidating or intellectually dismissive, that was part of why he loved her. But everything about her tonight—the way she was dressed, the makeup, her relaxed body language, the whispering and the mystery—was new and confounding, and left Wes feeling unprepared and unprotected. He wasn’t sure he liked it.

“What do you mean, ‘no, you didn’t’?”

“I mean I wanted it to be a surprise. For you.”

“Well, I am surprised, I guess. I didn’t even think you knew Lucy.”

“Seniors don’t need invitations.”

“What made you so sure I’d be here?”

She gave his wrist a squeeze that, if he hadn’t known better, he would have interpreted as suggestive. Wes wondered if Delia had been drinking. That was not her style at all, but then again, nothing about her was quite right this evening. There was no glass in her hand, and she did not have liquor on her breath, but that didn’t mean anything. Between the smell of her hair, the wrist-holding and the sting of her kiss, Wes was feeling decidedly lightheaded, and he thought that there was probably a simple explanation for her odd behavior, if only he could find a moment to breathe and get his bearings.

“I think I need a drink.”

“You already have one, Wes. Come and sit with me on the couch. I don’t know anyone here.”

Even though it was not on his list, Wes took a package of celery sticks, which came wrapped with its own little container of French onion dip, because they were Nora’s favorite snack, more even than baloney.