A LONE CICADA in the garden in front of your house is sucking at the night’s succulent thickness; its rhythmic trilling picks at the silence, like the beating of your heart, while you sit at your desk in your study, a magazine open on your table. You pay it no attention, your skin covered with a cool film of sweat. The air is ponderous with humidity; every time you place your arms on your desk, your sweat stains it. All the bookshelves that wall your study are inhabited by books. Neat. Tidy. Expensive. Immaculate proof of your learning and success. Into this womb you retreat almost every night now.

Your wife is asleep in your bedroom at the other end of the house. For a moment you picture her, sheet drawn up to her neck, arms crossed over her ribs, her pale face shining like marble in the light of her bedside lamp, eyes shut, her breathing hardly audible. You’ve been married for thirty-five years and, always, she has slept in that position. Some nights, while watching her, you think she is dead or dying (or, more frightening, lying on a sacrificial altar inviting the priest’s stone knife). You’ve dared not tell her this. Recently, at a particularly boring cocktail party, you told everyone that she was still ‘the passion of your life’. When you returned home she chastised you: ‘You shouldn’t get so drunk!’ You refused to tell her that you hadn’t touched a drop all night.

You break from your thoughts when you hear a mouse scratching at the ceiling directly above you. A quick, urgent scratching. Must get some rat poison.

It is after midnight. In the air, wafting in slowly from the veranda, you detect the odour of the dark-green moss that lives on the barks of the immense monkey pod trees outside. A rich, medicinal scent that you enjoy. The mouse scratches again. You glance up, expecting to see tiny claws piercing the ceiling. Yesterday was your sixty-first birthday. For ten years you have refused your wife’s offer of birthday parties. Waste of money, you keep telling her. But you don’t begrudge her the money spent on her grand birthday celebrations: orgies of food and drink and meaningless conversation and gossip; good for business, though. You imagine the night is an enormous whale curled protectively around your house up on these slopes, a kindly, benevolent softness into which you can sink, be embraced by. Your son John, who everyone fears as the relentlessly honest and righteous Attorney General, and Nora, his humourless New Zealand wife, whose charity extends to running the newly formed Society for the Intellectually Handicapped, and their two teenage sons, thoroughly spoilt demanders of everything and who respect nothing, came for your birthday dinner last night. You’ve never been able to think of Nora as your daughter-in-law, or her sons as your grandchildren. To keep them at a distance you give them anything they want. Your wife knows the way you feel about them; you never provide her with the opportunity to discuss it though. Whenever they visit, the conversation, the warmth and rapport is always with your son only. Nora and her sons keep trying to break into the sacred circle but you always ease them out of it politely, firmly.

Your T-shirt, now drenched with sweat, sticks to your body; it feels like a slippery second skin. You get up, peel it off, drop it into the wastepaper basket, walk over to the open windows and, hands on your hips, you let the faint breeze caress your skin with its cool fingers. Soon the acrid smell of your own body invades your nostrils. You suck it in deeply and hold it down. One … two … three — you count to fifteen and then ease the air out of your lungs. Your own smell reminds you suddenly of a woman’s sap during sexual intercourse. You don’t expect a pleasurable reaction from your flesh, and you don’t get it. You fondle yourself slowly, deliberately tempting the once almost uncontrollable passions of your flesh. No reaction. It is good, you tell yourself. You live beyond physical desire now. Free of it.

At the edge of the light cast from the windows of your study, the night walks. You think of it as your son, in flowing silk-black robes, pacing the shadow of the judge’s bench, defiantly stalking the guilty, the sinners, the innocent …

Last Monday night while I was in my study my recurring migraine grew to inhabit, almost to bursting, the whole of my head, and, as usual, I tried to ignore the intense pain. I have always pictured my migraine as a fully inflated balloonfish with its spikes extended like threatening spears, bulbous eyes staring unblinkingly at me, its small round mouth opening and shutting in time to its breathing, suspended in the still sun-clear waters of a tropical reef. Why I came to associate this creature with my migraine I’ll never be able to fathom. I can remember though that my migraine first roared out of the depths of my brain the night I watched, with a mixture of horror and fascination, my son being born in Auckland Hospital where my wife, who doesn’t trust the local hospital, had insisted on going. All babies, so the stereotype goes, are expected to scream as they are slapped for the first time by the hostile cold of our atmosphere. John’s reaction, however, was an unforgiving, contemptuous silence, and, in his eyes, I caught an accusation. He seemed an utterly self-contained being from another planet. Perhaps the round accusing silence of the balloonfish reflected John’s birth silence. But even suffering the first full impact of my migraine, my eyes brimmed with tears of joy: the love I felt then for my son was greater than I had experienced for anyone or anything else before. I would tell no one, not even my wife, of how I had felt then, nursing my treasure secretly, afraid that if I revealed it to anyone it would diminish in value. That night while I foraged in my desk drawers for the flask of brandy to drug my migraine, I rediscovered the folder of papers which my father had left me almost twelve years before when he had died of a stroke, and which I had avoided looking at.

My father, who was nearly ninety when he died, was a self-made man (so he was described in business circles). His parents were humble villagers, so, after pastor’s school, at the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to a German carpenter, and, with his very meagre wage, he supported his parents and six brothers and sisters. He discovered early that to succeed in business in Apia he would have to learn German and English and accounting. He proceeded to master these at night by teaching himself and, during the day, by practising on his employer and any other person who was fluent in English or German. In 1914 he put his knowledge into effective use when the Germans were expelled from Samoa by the English-speaking New Zealanders, and he took over the German carpenter’s modest construction business. Throughout his life he was admired, even by his business rivals, for his impeccable English, business acumen, and his inspired sermons as a lay preacher in the English-speaking Protestant Church where he met and married my mother, against her parents’ wishes.

Proud of his ‘self-creation and self-education’, his own description, he refused to throw away anything, especially the literature that he collected or generated. His spaciously gloomy bedroom came to be stacked on one side, from floor to ceiling, with his treasure of boxes, cartons and crates containing all the books, magazines, papers and the other odds and ends of his education. It was as if he needed all this to prove to himself that he was an educated man. We were forbidden to touch any of it. I was tempted to but after Max, my oldest brother, suffered a severe beating for doing so, I dared not. Often, as a boy, I imagined the stack growing larger and larger, bursting out of the bedroom and filling all the other rooms, then the whole house, even the toilet, and eventually, with a loud thunder-like cracking, the house bursting apart and my father’s treasure setting out to smother our country.

My father’s hoard remained intact in his cavern-like bedroom right throughout his two marriages, his rise to being described in the papers as a ‘prominent businessman’, until the week after his funeral when my son and I went to examine it. (He had bequeathed it to me in his will. I was the only surviving son from his first marriage but he had five children by his second wife. I was puzzled, therefore, about his reason for leaving it to me, saying, in his will, that I deserved it.)

At that time my son, John, was a strapping nineteen-year-old who had just returned for the holidays, having graduated from high school (my old school in Auckland), and who was now getting ready to return to start law school in New Zealand.

My stepmother and her family were conveniently absent from the house, which is situated on the banks of a stream of brackish water, known in the neighbourhood as the Vaipe, behind the Apia police station. It is a two-storeyed wooden building with rows of louvre windows, dark blue and green outside walls and a bright red roof. As tidy and neat as my father had always been. I was reluctant to visit it, fearing my father’s hoard and the childhood memories that would entangle me once I was there. Yet I also wanted, with an insatiable curiosity, to explore the mystery that my father had assumed in my life, after he had divorced my mother when I was twelve years old. In the entrails of that treasure I hoped to find the father I never knew.

I hesitated at the front door of the house. Glanced at my son, a splendid youth on the threshold of discovering more about his grandfather. He smiled at me. We stepped into the house together.

In the sitting room I recognised nothing from my childhood. A TV set, an orderly array of expensively padded furniture, sea-green carpet, a garish velvet mural of the Last Supper; alone on the far wall was a large black and white photograph, framed in gold, of my father as a young man, in a stiff black suit, white shirt and bow tie, bowler hat in his right hand clasped to his belly. For a moment my breath stuck in my chest: my son was the mirror image of his grandfather, and, suddenly envious of the resemblance, I tried not to accept it. At John’s age I had looked like my mother — short, stumpy, fair almost like a European, with brown, blond-tipped hair. Here, beside me, my father was alive again physically in the darkly handsome, very Samoan form of my son.

As we walked up the wooden stairs I tried to suppress my inexplicable jealousy. Our footsteps rang hollow; the house smelled of the uncanny twists of history. ‘How many times have you been here?’ I asked my son in English. (In our home, as in my grandparents’ home where I was reared, Samoan was spoken only to the servants and those Samoans who couldn’t speak English.)

‘I used to come on his birthdays, you know that.’ My father’s birthdays were only for his grandchildren: lavish organised games and presents and unlimited food for the children, while he sipped expensive whisky and observed them.

My father’s bedroom was at the end of the dimly lit corridor. ‘I’ve never been in there!’ John whispered.

‘It’s been a long time for me,’ I admitted. (Almost a lifetime, I wanted to say.)

‘I liked him,’ he said. ‘I liked him a lot even though I visited him only once a year.’ He paused. I wanted him to continue telling me about the man my father had grown into. John knew more about that man than I did. ‘He kept telling us about you: how we, his grandchildren, should behave like you did as a boy. Obedient, hard-working, outstanding at school. How you always used to protect your brothers and friends who were weaker than you …’

I didn’t want to listen any more. I turned the door-handle and pushed open the bedroom door.

The gloom of the bedroom gaped at us. Out of it seeped my father’s smell: the healthy, almost stale odour of hard work, thrift, clean Sunday sermons, and his working khaki shirts and trousers which he insisted on wearing until they were shiny with age and then he cherished them more. Mingled with this, underlying it like a river bed, was the strong smell of mould and old books and mildewing paper.

Hesitantly I entered the room.

The curtains were drawn. A brilliant slit of light, from a gap in the curtains, cut across the darkness. In it, bright particles of dust were floating.

It was as if I had never left that cluttered room with its stacks, the enormous four-poster bed and its canopy of a tasselled mosquito net, the oversized kapok mattress covered with a thick white sheet with embroidered lace edges, its wall of cupboards, in which he stored all the presents he received but never used.

‘Are you okay?’ John asked me. I nodded, straightened up and walked to the stacks, with my back turned firmly to him.

‘Open the curtains,’ I said.

The zipping of the curtain rings being pulled across the metal rod was like the sharp slashing of a bushknife through parched grass. For a moment the daylight blinded me but I refused to let my son see me shield my eyes.

‘What are we going to do with all this?’ he asked, gesturing at the stacks.

It jumped out of the depths of my being before I realised it. ‘Burn most of it!’ my voice said. Before he could argue with me, I started dragging a box into the middle of the room. ‘We’ll take them outside and burn whatever we don’t want!’

‘But …’ he started insisting.

‘Just do what I’m asking you!’ I said. His eyes, for an instant, were bright with anger. ‘It is of little use to us!’ I pleaded, avoiding his eyes. ‘Whatever books are in good condition we’ll give to the public library.’

He picked up a tattered cardboard box that was bursting with magazines. Fat cockroaches scuttled out of it and vanished into the stacks as John brushed past me.

I stood listening to my only son’s footsteps thumping down the corridor and then down the stairs, remembering, with fear and regret, the unforgiving thunder of my father’s boots stamping out of our house after quarrelling loudly with my mother whenever he came home drunk and accused her, our family and God of feeding off his blood, every sacrificial ounce of it. To block out such disturbing memories I hugged two small boxes and, as spiders and cockroaches burst out of them and wriggled down my clothes and body, I stumbled out of the room, dripping insects that hit the floor and fled like the boyhood years I didn’t want to trap me.

There is a shady stand of fau trees behind the house, at the edge of the stream. The fau were yellow with flowers, their leaves were turning brown, ready to be shed. I found a half forty-four-gallon drum in the garage, rolled it to the middle of the fau trees and, using dry twigs and branches, started a small fire in it. The smoke wafted up into my face.

I refused to allow my thoughts to analyse, dissect or argue with me. Quickly I sorted through my two boxes, mainly files and accounts from his business. I watched my hands flipping through the pages, my mind reading random figures and sentences, then, screwing up the pages, I dropped them into the flames. The fire surged up greedily as I fed it.

The papers seemed to be alive as they squirmed and turned black and crumpled into white ash. At times, bits of black swirled up into the tangled branches of the trees or over to lie on the water like shattered pieces of a black mirror.

John kept bringing the boxes; he refused to look at me.

The next box contained newspapers and magazines. I didn’t bother to read any of them. My hands ripped and tore and screwed up the pages.

The fire roared like wind blowing through a small tunnel. I became oblivious of time, caught in the fury of feeding my father’s remains into the fire.

All the books that were in good condition I saved in the empty boxes. A random survey of the books’ titles revealed that my father had avoided collecting fiction — no poetry, or novels, or plays, or stories. Most were about religion, mainly fundamentalist tracts; there was a large section of biography and autobiography, mainly about religious and business leaders. I counted three about John P. Rockefeller. Travel literature was plentiful too; most of it was about Europe, which my father had never visited. Teach-yourself books about construction, architecture, book-keeping, accounting, astronomy, French, Russian, English, carpentry and other subjects featured well too.

I saved none of the magazines or newspapers. The magazines were nearly all religious (the Watchtower, the Light of the Angel and so on) or practical, related to his business.

Once I glanced up from my work to see the whole tangle of trees aswirl with white smoke that brimmed up fiercely, like a vengeful joy, through the foliage and into the hungry sky.

John kept bringing the boxes.

We were now into business ledgers and account books, filled mainly with his neat figures and handwriting. Thick, bulky well-bound books. To rip them apart I had to open them, hold one side down with my foot, and pull upwards with my hands. The sharp-edged pages cut my hands often, but I didn’t notice. Scattering the torn pages over the flames, I watched all the debts he had incurred, all the profits he had worked so diligently to make and all the losses that had left their wrinkles on his brow and a perpetually complaining peptic ulcer in his disciplined stomach turn into ash. Like my own orderly life, his had been determined, to a great extent, by the profit and the loss neatly recorded and balanced, year in and year out. Even his family had lived according to that tide.

For a few frightening minutes a set of pictures flicked through my mind as I observed the thick leather cover of a ledger squirming and writhing and shrivelling up in the fire, like human skin. A group of Nazi SS officers in their black regalia and armbands, their eyes capturing the flames in a mad joy, around a fire in which books were burning; white flame bursting from the mouth of an oven into which a corpse was being pushed; a row of high black chimneys thrusting arrogantly into a grey sky …

‘Are you all right?’ My son saved me. I nodded. Throughout the day he would ask that periodically, and I would notice that he was throwing nothing into the fire: he was leaving the burning, the burial in fire, to me.

At midday John asked if I wanted to go home for lunch. I shook my head and continued feeding the fire. Soon after, I realised that I hadn’t come across any letters, so when I went through the boxes I looked for them. Their absence was a painful puzzle. Letters contained personal revelations but there were none. Why?

‘Have you come across any of his letters?’ I asked John, who shook his head. ‘How far have we got?’

‘About halfway through the mountain!’ he chuckled.

We would find no letters to or from him. To me he had bequeathed an inheritance without eyes into his flesh, blood and spirit. Once again a deliberate denial, and I raged, working more intensely to thrust more and more of his corpse into the flames.

A few months after he and my mother divorced, my father married a woman who was almost half his age. We (my mother and two brothers Max and Henry and I) shifted to my mother’s family, wealthy merchants who hadn’t wanted her to marry ‘that poor and uneducated Samoan’ (my grandmother’s description). They were half-castes (part-Europeans is the term in vogue) but considered themselves ‘Europeans’, superior to the ‘Samoans’.

My grandfather’s father had been an American trader from Connecticut who settled in Samoa, marrying my great-grandmother, the daughter of another American trader and a Samoan mother. On the other hand, my mother’s mother was the daughter of English missionaries.

My grandparents refused to allow us, their grandchildren, to see our father again; they did it effectively by sending us to St Andrew’s, an Anglican boarding school in Auckland, New Zealand; and in our presence they never again referred to our father or mentioned his name.

Even our Samoan surname was changed to our grandparents’ English one. It was as though our father had never existed. Our mother never remarried; she had many suitors but, encouraged by her parents, she could never again break from the rich, comfortable bondage of her home.

My grandparents, though they were born and raised in Samoa and had visited America only once and England twice, modelled the life of our family on what they believed was that of the English Victorian gentry. Our lives were governed by the word proper. There was, said my stern and austere grandfather (whom I respected but couldn’t love), a proper way of doing everything, even dying. And the proper way was strict, severe and inflexible. For boys there was a proper way to dress, which meant long-sleeved shirts, shorts, socks and shoes, and not a spot of dirt was to be seen on any of these at any time. In the tropical heat our uniform was like armour. There was a proper way of talking to your elders: speak only when spoken to, and say sir and madam always. You were to show no pain; no tears were to be seen in public. Every minute of your life was an established routine, a habit predetermined not to offend God, society or Grandfather. Wealth had to be earned properly through dedicated hard work, honest business dealings and faith in the Almighty. Most important of all, we were not to reveal at any time our ‘Samoan side’ which, according to our grandmother, was ‘uncivilized and pagan’.

I loved the strict, orderly world of my grandparents’ household. In it I knew where I was, what I had to do, where I was going, and what everyone expected of me. My brothers struggled valiantly to survive within it. Later the always impish, clear-seeing Max described it as ‘trying to shape yourself to fit into a rigid mould, like a demon trying to fit into a starched white Sunday suit’. We started at St Andrew’s boarding school in 1934. I thrived in it because it was a replica of my grandparents’ rigid world.

In 1936 Max graduated and, with our grandfather’s proud approval, enlisted in the New Zealand Army; he fought and died in Italy in 1943. With enormous tears sliding down his face — it was the first and last time I would see him cry in public — my grandfather declared, during a memorial service at our church, that his beloved grandson ‘had died a glorious death for God, King and Country’. (Our father wasn’t invited to the service.)

Henry excelled at every major sport at our school but failed academically. Grandfather’s reaction, when Henry returned home to work in the business, was an unforgiving silence. For three painful years Henry tried to be ‘the glorified clerk’ (his description) Grandfather wanted to turn him into, then he disappeared into the large silence of New Zealand’s South Island. The silence ended, in June 1950, with a short note from one of Henry’s friends informing us that Henry had died on Mt Cook in a mountain-climbing accident. In full view of his whole family, Grandfather tore the note into neat little pieces, rose slowly to his feet as if he were carrying Mt Cook on his now frail shoulders, and retreated into his study. The next morning he emerged to tell us that ‘in no way is his name to be mentioned in my presence!’

I excelled in my studies at high school and university, returning as a qualified accountant with a young wife, daughter of a successful Auckland lawyer, and whom my grandfather approved of wholeheartedly. Soon, after he was satisfied I was running our business efficiently — properly — Grandfather retired from ‘active service’ (his phrase). He died in 1961, a few months before Samoa became independent, something which he had dreaded and opposed because it meant ‘the Samoans, the ignorant forces of anarchy, are going to run and ruin the country’.

He made me his sole heir.

That hot afternoon as I burned my father’s treasure, large segments of that history paraded slowly through my mind. It was as if I were re-examining it and feeding it to the fire. My brothers kept returning, insisting on not allowing me to let the fire consume them; and the wonderful, magnificent imagery of our boyhood together eventually pushed all else from my heart.

With such beauty came the huge pain of loss, the unhealing wound that bled into an enormous rage when I realised that there could be no profit, no cure, to balance such a loss.

The evening hatched a consoling silence around me as I emptied the contents of the last boxes into the fire. I sat, dirty hands cupped to my cheeks, feeling as if the blood had been sucked out of my every cell. The fire spluttered and began to die. ‘Let’s go home!’ my son whispered. Obediently I followed him to our pick-up. Handing me a clean rag and pointing at my face, he said, ‘I’ve loaded all the books you saved onto the truck.’ I got into the truck, looked into the rear-view mirror, then wiped the tears and soot off my face. I avoided looking at my son as he drove us home. Slowly I became aware that the smell (more stench than smell) of my father’s mouldy, decaying treasure seemed to be smoking out of my pores. Once I brushed my hands through my hair, and they came away covered with soot which, in the thickening darkness, looked like blood.

‘You didn’t have to, Dad,’ John said. It was the first time that day he had called me that, and I tried to clutch on to his forgiveness.

‘It was mainly useless paper,’ I said.

‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘You know a lot about him.’

I remained silent as our truck sped through the cicada-voiced evening up to Vailima.

As we got out of the truck in our garage, John said, ‘I’ve saved three of the boxes. I didn’t show them to you. One is for you; the other two are mine. I’ll put yours in your study.’ He was gone before I could protest. For nearly a week the box sat in the armchair in my study. I avoided it. Finally, my wife sorted through it and informed me she had stored the books in my bookshelves and the folder in one of my desk drawers. Last Thursday night I opened the folder for the first time. In it is a letter from my father to my mother, and four drawings in coloured crayons: two by Max (as a seven-year-old), one by a six-year-old Henry, and one by me when I was five, all carefully labelled by our father. His florid handwriting in blue ink is now barely visible in his letter to my mother.

As I started reading it, an itchy trembling began in my nose and, within seconds, it had emanated like rippling water throughout my body. I thumped the letter down onto the desk and clutched the desk edge tightly with both hands, until the shaking eased away like a receding tide, leaving me, once again, stranded on the jagged reef of my balloonfish migraine and my father’s dismal confession of love for my mother.

Apia

14 June 1933

Dear Margaret,

I love you. I will always love you. I will give you a week. If you don’t return with our children by the end of that time, I will consider our marriage ended. I won’t even give your parents the satisfaction of contesting the custody of our children.

God bless you.

I shut the folder and hurried out onto the veranda overlooking the hills and sharp-edged ravines of Vailima. For a long time I gazed up into the ocean of stars. Around me, the night breathed heavily like a jealous lover.

I refused to look at the drawings that night. I retreated into our bedroom, stripped off my clothes, slid quietly into bed and, rolling into a ball against the warm stillness of my wife’s side, tried to sleep.

… The cicada has stopped crying. The memory of its sound lingers in your head like the quivering wings of a monarch butterfly. You try to hold on to it but, in a brief while, it dissolves into a regretful whisper. You return to your desk. Finally you take the folder out of the drawer, pull out the four drawings and spread them out on your desk. Onto the drawings drips the sweat from your arms. You use a piece of blotting paper to suck up the islands of sweat. You scrutinise Max’s first drawing. A scrawny yellow tree with four branches, like arms without hands, stands in the centre of the picture, under a strip of navy-blue sky. In the background is what looks like a line of snow-capped mountains with a red sun above it. In the right-hand corner of the picture is a tiny creature with a black, eyeless head and six orange legs extending from either side of its body. To the left of the tree, halfway up the page, is a yellow bird with a huge black beak, one pink eye, and scarlet talons.

Across the bottom of the picture your father has printed: THIS IS BY MAX WHO IS SEVEN YEARS OLD. IT TELLS THE STORY OF A PARROT AND A MILLIPEDE WHO GO LOOKING FOR THE MOUNTAIN OF ICE. MAX TELLS ME THAT I AM THE THIN YELLOW TREE.

Max’s second picture is in black and red. First you read what your father says about it at the bottom: THIS IS ABOUT A RED FISH IN THE BLACK SEA. You examine the picture from all different angles, trying to find the red fish. You can’t. The picture remains a wild tangle of red and black lines, scribbles and whorls.

Henry’s picture is an almost blank space inhabited, at the centre, by a round blue creature with two legs extending from its belly, and three toes on each foot. The creature is faceless, HENRY MY SIX YEAR OLD DREW THIS HANDSOME PORTRAIT OF ME, your father jokes at the bottom of the picture.

Your picture, the smallest of the four, is about six inches square. You are trapped utterly in that small space as you confront your five-year-old self. Curled into the prison of that space, like a frightened foetus, is a purple creature which is made up of six barely discernible circles joined together. Two antennae jut from the sides of the top circle, and two pairs of what you assume are legs curve out from the second and last circles. A thick yellow line, the sky, stretches across the top of the space. Right across the bottom edge, like the solid foundation of a house, your father says, THE ARMADILLO IS A MOST STRANGE CREATURE, SO MY FIVE YEAR OLD SON GABRIEL TELLS ME.

You break away from that space, with your father’s song — and you admit it is a song — echoing throughout your depths like the bleep bleep bleeping of a satellite piercing the void, the black abyss, searching.

The dictionary is in your trembling hands. You search quickly. You find it:

armadillo (n) small burrowing animal of S. America with a body covered with a shell of bony plates, and the habit of rolling itself up into a ball when attacked.

Once again you find yourself out on the veranda, standing in the night, the cool wind blowing up the steep slopes, weaving and curling around your naked body, bringing with it the inconsolable grief of your parents and grandparents and brothers, your heritage, the profit and the loss no longer in equilibrium; your son, the avenger, is a victim of that terrible history, too.

So high the heavens glowing with a wondrous sheen. So high.

Even your migraine, your kind balloonfish, whose excruciating pain has saved you always, has deserted you. You know it won’t return, ever.

With that acceptance, you watch, fascinated, as your skin transforms itself slowly into a fabulous shell made up of bony plates, and in whose impregnable sanctuary your soul wants to roll up in a ball and die.