IMAGINE A VORTEX, slow-turning but gaining steam, drawn together by lungs: Richard and Jamie sitting on the couch, breathing in the mildew of wet battling dry, while their father sighed near the window with more pose than purpose, rocking as if the expanse of Central Park were his Wailing Wall, the sons keeping silent behind him, waiting for him to say something, to give center to this respiring tension but also glancing around the room, always a mystery growing up, other fathers leaving in the morning for midtown or downtown, but their father simply walked down the hall and shut that always forbidding door, usually only working at night, which added to the mystery, as if this were his secret lair, his Batcave, his Fortress of Solitude, where he tried saving a world he himself created, Richard and Jamie sometimes setting their alarms for past midnight so they could sneak downstairs and kneel by the door and hear the booms! and the pows! and the splats! of the typewriter and envision the battles within, surely more than words put on paper, surely something epic at hand, though the truth was that their father could only relax in the early-morning wilderness, comfortably alone and industrious, unlike the daylight hours where real people had real jobs and he suffered through hateful meaninglessness—I am nothing—the definition of himself growing wobblier by the instant—you are nobody—the people on the street living a life he could only imagine, both alien and common, reaching all the way back to when he was a boy peering from the window in his bedroom and layering upon himself specific detail after specific detail—wearing one red sock, one blue sock, earmuffs, a baseball mitt for a hat, reciting “You Are Old, Father William”—until he was certain, or fairly certain, that he had reached a level of absolute distinction and he could unwind himself from the burden of everybody else, the same sort of freedom he found when sitting at his desk in the middle of the night, never suspecting his sons sometimes listened by the door, their entry forbidden without a knock and a very good reason, though eleven-year-old Richard once slipped in while his parents were eating dinner and he hid behind those emerald curtains—the velvet now moldy green—determined to catch his father in action, Jamie given the task of engineering a bad dream and rushing downstairs to pound on the door, thus allowing Richard’s escape, and all evening long Jamie practiced his nightmare about quicksand and sinking into a belowground world, hoping he might impress with his imagination, but when the time came Jamie slept through the alarm—or so he claimed and would still claim sitting with his brother and waiting for his father to finally speak, but really Jamie wanted Richard to stew behind that curtain, already interested in his own passive effect, a shady witness at nine, and the well-thought-out plan turned into a boy trying his best to remain still to the point where even now Richard thought he could detect a tremor in the curtain as his father stood a few inches from that past and stared at the crushing blueness of the everyday world, broken only by clouds approaching from the west like a posse kicking up dust, Jamie and Richard and Andrew, the three of them trying to brace themselves against whatever might come next.
Jamie decided to toss in a few words, testing the current. “What is this, Dad,” he said, arms expressing the shambolic state of the room, “the office of Dorian Gray?”
Andrew turned from the window. “Always with the clever comment.”
“I try.”
“You try, huh?” He smiled like a man watching a captured animal go free, all because of his benevolence. “You ever wonder why Oscar Wilde used picture instead of portrait? Because portrait seems more appropriate, sounds better too, at least to my ears. The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Those matching -or sounds. Maybe the painting is a portrait but the story is a picture. Or maybe he wanted us to do the correction in our heads, to misremember the title and get it wrong and in getting it wrong actually get it right. That crafty subtextualist.” Another glance toward the window, giving the boys his nose-strong profile. “I’ve been thinking about my last words lately. Of course old Oscar had a bunch of them, all excellent, but who knows what kind of condition I’ll be in? Quite unhappy, I assume, in pain, delirious. I don’t trust myself to come up with something that’s both extemporaneous and memorable, so let me tell you now, in case I forget. Okay. Be kind, rewind. Laugh if you want but I’m serious. I think it has a nice touch of the levitas. Nonsensical and yet still sensical. Vaguely Hindu. I always loved those signs in video store windows. Funny how a phrase can outlive its technology, a Christian sentiment, I suppose. Be kind, rewind. Now imagine what follows is my last breath.” Andrew limped over to his desk and shook two Vicodin into his palm.
“What kind of pills are those?” Richard asked.
“Sorry, but I’m dead.”
“Dad—”
“The truth is, boys, I’m dying and I’m dying soon, to the point where I feel already dead.” Andrew paused, unsatisfied. “Whatever I say lately sounds like it’s been said before by somebody else, like my, my—what do you call this area of the mouth again?” He touched the labial commissure, though neither of his sons knew the term. “Whatever it is, it feels like quotation marks.” Andrew opened and closed his mouth.
“Have you been to a doctor?” Richard again with the asking.
“I should have written this out.”
“We could go to a doctor,” Richard repeated, “maybe tomorrow.”
“My brain is like a game of chance.”
“Is Dr. Harkness still around?”
“Stop with the doctor talk, plus he’s long dead. I need to tell you things, boys. I need promises from you. I need—a lot of needs, I realize, but I need to know that you can still care for me regardless of who I am or who I was. And I don’t mean forgiveness. I don’t need forgiveness. Forgiveness, once spoken, turns into something else, something no longer trustworthy. I was what I was. I am what I am. And now I’m quoting Popeye.” With unsettled effort Andrew lowered himself into his desk chair. In front of him two stacks of paper, one blank, one typed, bookended his Selectric. “I should have written this out for clarity’s sake, but God help my writing nowadays. You should know my goal as a father—and I swear this is true—my goal was positively Hippocratic, to do no harm, and look where that got me. You could sue for malpractice. I am a reckless scalpel. But I honestly tried, or have tried better with Andy, I’ve tried to say the things I should have said to the two of you. But guess what, I think that’s made things worse. I do. I think I did you a tremendous favor by being so absent. I was so different as a boy. Or I think I was different. I must’ve been different, before the writing took hold. I used to climb trees. I could climb the bejesus out of a tree. I loved the heights, the vistas spied through branches, the hiding. That, and I could spend all day in the ocean, the rougher the better, just bodysurfing. There’s a word to hang your hat on. Bodysurfing. But then everything changed. Talk about a hackneyed phrase. Your dad, the writer. But everything did change. And I don’t mean my father dying, though that obviously had its effect, the suddenness of it, and my mother on her own, but I honestly don’t remember being sad. I must have been. But you forget so quickly when you’re young—you forget so quickly when you’re old too, the former because of the latter, the latter because of the former. The push and the pull and the ever-shrinking middle ground. Occasionally there’s a convergence, a moment of balance all too brief where your idea of the future seems to vector with your sense of the past. But I’m off subject. Or ahead of subject. I’ve mugged the goddamn verb.
“The irony I would like to communicate to you boys is the fact that I never enjoyed writing very much. Oh, maybe I enjoyed the moments before writing, the thinking about writing, when the story starts to form around its cagey heart, a word, an image, like with bodysurfing: in a flash I know everything, the themes, the metaphors, five of the characters, the setting, the time frame, the beginning, the middle, the end. It’s a strange kind of fission, where a single atom of imagination radiates all this energy, splitting and splitting and splitting, endlessly splitting until you get Bodysurfing, or The Bodysurfer, which is probably better if perhaps bumping elbows with Cheever. But then you have to write the goddamn thing and it’s Chernobyl. Two-headed cows. Terrible birth defects. And I’m not being glib here. I’m not playing a role, despite resemblances to actual persons living or dead. I will grant you moments of satisfaction in the process, that this mess might make sense after all, that a random piece of filler, say the detail of an airplane flying overhead, might beget a man parachuting down to earth. Yes, there are moments. But it’s not joy, just relief that the disappointment is manageable. Whatever satisfaction is the satisfaction of keeping up the charade. Yep, the old imposter syndrome. But it beats the coal mines, as they say. But the coal mines seem a more honest labor to me, where your life, your real life, is focused aboveground, and your job is simply powering the lights for home. Daddy’s work. But your Daddy chose to be a writer and the two of you were frankly fucked. All because I liked how it sounded in my head—no office, no boss, no bureaucracy, no nine-to-five, no desk, he says, having sat behind this desk for the last fifty years. I’d travel the world. I’d meet interesting people. I would be bohemian. Me, bohemian? But that’s what I pictured, boys. I wanted to be a writer and I jumped into the first cliché. How’s that? Did I ever do it for the right reasons? Mostly I just wanted to steer clear of lawyering and banking and politicking, the normal trades of my people. I needed to be unique. An unpredictable line rather than another circle. But it wasn’t in my soul. Maybe a little bit in my soul. Mostly it just seemed like fun to focus on imagined things. Of course it helped that I didn’t need money, thanks to my father. By the age of sixteen I started on my path. It’s all I did, with superficial stabs in the real world. The work never left me alone yet it always seemed just out of reach. I became insular. Isolated. Always dragging this malformed thing behind me. Even a great day of writing was somehow bad. I shook only the trees in my head. And I was stubborn, my God was I stubborn. I staked my claim on A. N. Dyer and chained myself to that person. Sorry if I sound like Prometheus and Sisyphus rolled into one. Poor, poor me. The only thing worse than a writer is a self-pitying writer. And guess what, we’re all self-pitying.”
Jamie interrupted. “If your writing is a charade, it’s a world-class charade.”
“I mean charade as a parody of living.”
“Oh, is that what you mean?”
“It made me a miserable person, Jamie, is what I mean.”
“And you blame that on writing?”
“It didn’t help.”
“So if you had been a banker, you would have been a great dad, like all those great banker dads out there?”
“Take it easy,” from Richard.
“I’m just confused,” Jamie said.
“Advertising,” Andrew pronounced.
“What?” from the both of them.
“That would’ve been my sweet spot. Spitballing. Pitching ideas.”
“Advertising?” Jamie was unsure if this was a comedy or a tragedy.
“But Dad, people love your books,” Richard said, “like truly love them.”
“And I hate them for that.”
“Oh please,” said Jamie. “Don’t be such an ingrate.”
“You’re right, I’m an ingrate too, but that’s not what I want to talk about.” Andrew knocked on the desk as if calling for order. “The point of this conversation, of getting you two back here, is not me, but Andy. That’s the X among all this noise. Because right now I’m his only family, and I want you two to get to know him, to be there for him. I can’t stomach the idea of him being alone. But first I need to explain a few things, need to put you in my shoes, almost twenty years ago, feeling like a failure while being reminded of what a success I was. That can wear you down.” Andrew’s mouth went slack, and he appeared wan and hollow, lost to some indistinct memory of indeterminate youth. Then he snapped back. “I know you know the story of the Swedish au pair. Not very original, I realize. I forget the exact circumstances of her death, but I remember arguing against her dying in childbirth since that would have introduced an unnecessary psychological element. Of course, after she died, however she died, this baby, our Andy, he was thrust into my arms and everyone discovered the truth. Or lie. In hindsight I would have done that part differently. I think I was too focused on the classic narrative. The surprise was a terrible mistake. Your mother’s a proud woman, properly so, and she was already dealing with the difficulties of living with me. I should have confessed right away. A moment of weakness, I’m sorry, forgive me, please. That might have worked. But the extended secret and the big dramatic reveal? Me and a Swedish au pair? That was flawed from the start. Minimum she should’ve been older, some older intellectual type from Toronto, and that’s why she died, a freakish pregnancy in her late forties and she never could recover from the strain of childbirth. That might have been better. But the two of you have to know I never wanted to split this family apart. And I never—never!—wanted to be with anyone but your mom. That’s the absolute truth. I was, I am, hopeless without her. I stand before you as demonstrable proof. But Andy, he appeared and our life together slid backward and sideways, your mother devastated, you two last-strawed. Maybe it was a relief that I finally proved myself such an obvious shit. No more doubts. No more blaming yourself for my seeming indifference. You were free of my scrutiny. And all of this is true except for the story itself. So many stories spinning. Like the one about an icy road instead of my father driving straight into a tree.”
“What are you talking about?” Jamie asked.
Andrew raised his hand. “Bear with me, I have to just get through this. Forget the au pair story, the real story begins twenty years ago when I was quietly losing my mind and everything I did seemed a form of denial, of avoidance, dangerous anatomizing nostalgia. Pretending took on a different shape in my head. I wasn’t living. Had I ever lived? What the hell was I doing? I was sick of being this person but I was trapped and I was too old to change, which is ironic because I felt the same way at fifty and at forty and at thirty I swear, too old to change anything. It’s the worst kind of passive-aggressive self-destruction, too timid for anything florid. Cowardice really. I blamed your mother for letting me get away with so much and I began to believe she was ignorant and clueless of what I wanted and who I was all because she couldn’t read my mind. By now you were in California, Richard, and Jamie you were God knows where. Thinking of the two of you just reminded me of my further failures. It was about this time that I was contacted by a group of Swedes, or one Swede in particular, a man by the name of Norde Bellaf, who wanted to meet me. I agreed since there were murmurs of Nobel attached to his name and, well, a Nobel would be nice before I finally stumbled into suicide like a good Dyer. Ha, a pun. Anyway, notice the hubris, boys. Like so many stories this is a story that involves hubris. I met Mr. Bellaf for lunch at the Four Seasons. It was late winter but that doesn’t matter. I remember he ordered an elaborate meal but didn’t eat a bite, like the food was some test of will. Over this meal, or nonmeal in his case, this Bellaf character told me that he represented an organization called the Palingeneticists. P-A-L-I-N-G-E-N-E-T-I-C-I-S-T-S in case you’re taking notes. According to him this group was founded in 1890 and bankrolled by Alfred Nobel himself, hence the whispers of Nobel. This is six years before the man’s death and subsequent will, which as you likely know established the prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology, literature, and peace. Notice, boys, science and art and history as defined by the great-man theory. Bellaf explained to me that the Palingeneticists were essentially the shadow to the Nobel’s light, one very public, the other very private. Alfred never married, never had children. He was famously misanthropic. But toward the end of his life he started to regret leaving this world without a proper heir. Now he certainly understood the dangers of mixing unknown chemicals. After all every newborn is a chemical invention unleashed upon the world. He grasped the long odds of success, of true success, of genius, and he started the Palingeneticists with the sole purpose of perpetuating great men—and later women—and keeping their particular talents alive for the benefit of future generations. A forward-thinking man, you might say. At this time great discoveries were being made in the field of embryology, with the two Hanses—Driesch with his sea urchins, and Spemann with his untying of the Primitive Knot—doing their groundbreaking work. Nobel put his friend and confidant Ragnar Sohlman in charge and it was Sohlman who came up with the prizes in order not only to identify these important figures but also to enlist them so that Nobel’s dream might one day be realized. Hans Spemann himself won the prize in 1935, though he had been a member of the Palingeneticists since 1892. It took eighty years before Nobel’s seed finally bore fruit, the first attempts not perfect, particularly in matters of gastroenterology, but soon the process became near foolproof. This is decades before other institutions began touting their sheep and their dogs and their bulls. That’s when Mr. Bellaf informed me that I had been nominated for their particular award, an award not made of silver or gold or glass but of flesh. I can see your faces, boys, and trust me my face looked the same. Pure science fiction. How could anyone believe this gothic nonsense? But Norde Bellaf did not seem the delusional type. And his eyes, it’s hard to explain the awful conviction behind those eyes. It was as if he saw an abyss stretching before him yet he was obligated to try to build a bridge. He offered me no proof, no evidence, no references, none of the names of previous winners, not even their approximate number. These were all secrets closely guarded by the Palingeneticists. They kept no records, had no paper trail. All they had were six men with well-trained memories. My initial response was a fast No thank you, check please, but Bellaf told me he would contact me in five days. I could officially refuse him then. That’s how the devil works, boys. He gives you time. Bellaf said that everyone had the same initial response, but by the end most accepted. Being naturally competitive, I started to wonder who else they had asked. Was there a teenage Salinger somewhere in this world? A toddler Bellow? God forbid another Roth? It seemed something concocted by Pynchon doing his best impersonation of Barthelme. But over those five days I grew curious and engaged with the idea. It didn’t seem like a terrible concept, in the broader sense. Who would complain about having another Einstein in this world, another Salk, another Edison? I thought about myself, about starting over and doing things differently, about, well, bodysurfing in a way. Maybe I could draft a happier version of myself, a better person. I became excited again by the possibility of life. My only stipulation—and here I thought I was being terribly original—was that I had to raise the boy myself. I never even thought about the repercussions with you and your mother. My head was in too deep. I just assumed that she would stay with me, that she might even enjoy having another child, no less another me. Wonderful, the elasticity of my narcissism. Maybe I also didn’t truly believe this Bellaf character, so where was the harm in saying yes? I’d take possible being over definite nothing. Bellaf smiled at my request, or attempted to smile but he didn’t have the right lip strength for a proper smile. He told me everyone insisted on the same thing. Nice to know all of us are equally sick. Three vials of blood later and Norde Bellaf was on his way back to Stockholm and I had no idea what just happened and slowly returned to my silent funk.”
Whatever filial restraint that had kept Richard and Jamie steady on the couch began to waver, at least for Jamie, who glanced toward his brother and tried to nudge him with his eyes, like a moviegoer confused by the plot and in need of whispering, What the hell is going on here? But Richard gave no indication of confusion, if anything seemed to follow along without any problem, which put Jamie in the unfamiliar role of gadfly. “What are you talking about, Dad? I mean I think I know what you’re talking about, but what the hell are you talking about?”
“I never had an affair.”
“Of course you had an affair.”
“No, not with a Swedish au pair.”
“You had an affair, Dad, probably not your first, and the girl got pregnant and she had a baby and here we are.”
“That was just the cover story,” he said.
“The cover story? Really? So this is now some secret mission we’re talking about? C’mon, Dad, you had an affair and you were careless. It’s an old story. Because otherwise what you’re telling us is that Andy is a …” Jamie waited for his father to fill in this particular blank, but his father just nodded, forcing Jamie to carry on. “I mean I was with you for the whole bodysurfing thing, and with Mom, and regret, maybe lost me with the dreams of advertising, though I totally understand where you’re coming from, but the Palingeneticists and Norde Bellaf and—what?—cloning, right, that’s what we’re talking about here, cloning.”
“I hate that word,” his father said.
“What would you prefer?”
“An autonomous reflection.”
“Oh yes, that’s much better.” Jamie’s irritation bounced between his brother’s outward calm and his father’s matter-of-factness, back and forth, like a ball searching for a goal. “Richard, help me out here.”
Richard leaned forward. “Does Andy know?”
Jamie was hoping for a harder kick. “That’s your opening shot?”
“Well—”
“Does Andy know his father thinks he’s a clone?”
“Jamie—”
“That’s your first question.”
“Calm down, okay.”
Andrew remained unmoved by this brotherly sidebar. “Andy doesn’t know,” he said to Richard, “and he can never know. I’m only telling you now because when I’m gone I want someone who can give him a sense of who he is, who he was.”
“Him meaning you?” Jamie said.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“So we’ll never be free of you, is that what you’re saying?”
“I know it’s hard to believe—”
“No, Dad, it’s fucking impossible to believe. Obviously you are”—in the midst of full-blown dementia, Jamie wanted to say, your brain rewiring the past into pure fabulism, all in service of impending mortality and shattered ego and self-inflicted remorse, but instead Jamie restrained himself and simply said, “confused.”
“I’m not confused.”
“I can sympathize. I’m presently being haunted by a dead woman’s cellphone.”
“I’m not confused,” Andrew repeated. “What I’m saying is absolutely true.”
“Let’s do a DNA test then.”
“We’re not doing a DNA test.”
“Why not?”
“There’s no reason.”
“Why, because you say it’s true?”
“Jamie—” from Richard.
“No, because it is true. I wouldn’t lie about this.”
“I’m sure you believe it a hundred percent, but that doesn’t make it true.”
“In this case it does,” Andrew said.
“So that greasy seventeen-year-old kid out there is my dad.”
“My father, the teenager.”
“I know it’s difficult—”
“Enough with difficult crap,” Jamie said. “I’m not a child trying to grasp some adult concept. This is pure—and I want to be kind, Dad, I really do, but this is pure nonsense. This is you spinning yourself into one of your alternate worlds. And I understand it. Or I think I do. I think I know where this impulse is coming from, and it’s a totally human place in my book, and I feel for you. But to say that Andy is a clone—”
“But he is a clone.”
Jamie frustrated his hands into fists. “Is this for a new book, Fathers & Clones?”
“Jamie—” from Richard again.
“Testing our reaction for the sake of homegrown veracity.”
“You know cleverness is not an appealing trait, Jamie, despite what your mother might think. It’s a crutch. Fifteen months after that visit from Norde Bellaf an embryo was successfully implanted into a surrogate, and nine months later Andy was born, without complications, at Landstinget Hospital in Östergötland, Sweden. Check the hospital records if you must. He weighed nine pounds, three ounces, a full pound heavier than me. His mother never died, because there was no mother. Or his mother was my mother, same with his father, and they were both dead long before he was born.”
Jamie, shading red, turned to Richard. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“I’ve been trying.”
“Please, go ahead, speak.”
Richard planted his elbows on his knees and proceeded to rub his hands together as though rolling a hunk of clay into a sensible sphere. It was a move he often took when leading a group session back in L.A., a coach trying to come up with a lifesaving play. Richard was obviously concerned for his father’s mental well-being, but he was also jet-lagged and in need of a longer run than the three measly loops around the reservoir this morning, and while he wanted to take on the role of mediator, he professionally always sided with the sick, at least initially, to get them on his side, and his father was obviously sick and in need of support, and all that was fine and good but more than anything Ampersand turned tightly in his head, along with Rainer Krebs and Eric Harke, who were both in New York this week and wanted to supplicate themselves before the master—now masters, Richard thought, major and minor, and the absolute lunacy of the situation spun a moral debate of using his father’s breakdown to his own advantage, which, after a few more rolls of that psychic clay, emerged into a charitable, if snakelike form, of honoring his father and allowing a confused old man to believe whatever he wanted to believe. Where was the harm in that? “There is an uncanny resemblance,” Richard said.
Jamie nearly exploded. “What the hell?”
“I’m just saying there’s a resemblance.”
“Maybe because he’s his father.”
“And history has shown the power of secret organizations.”
“History has shown, if anything, their incompetence.”
“I’m just saying—”
“You can’t possibly believe this.”
“Let me finish. I’m saying maybe we should give Dad the benefit of the doubt.”
“You mean the willful suspension of disbelief, his stock-in-trade?”
“I believe it’s willing,” his father said, “not willful.”
Jamie’s nerves gripped his stomach. After years of keeping his head down he dared to challenge a question with a raised hand. “Maybe I meant willful. I’m sorry, Dad, but you haven’t earned it, to use another awful expression from your trade. You need some belief to suspend, instead of stealing meaning from other people’s lives. And I can relate to that, oh man, can I relate, but I can’t step into your particular narrative here. Not now. I think you must be feeling very alone and you want to connect before it’s too late, and I can appreciate that, and I’m here to do that, if you want, but I can’t pretend it’s anything else, especially using poor Andy like that.” Jamie surprised himself with his honesty, since usually he just caved knowing that would lead to a shorter conversation and a quicker exit. But here he was speaking almost like an adult.
“I’m mentally fit,” Andrew said. “Physically, maybe not.”
“Dad, you’re an overall fucking mess.” Maybe Jamie was enjoying this too much.
“C’mon,” said Richard. “This isn’t the time or the place.”
“How is this not the time or the place?”
“Can we talk about it later please?”
“When you’re back in L.A. and I’m stuck here with my two dads?”
“I’m just saying we need time to properly digest this.”
“But I’m not swallowing it.”
“I don’t think you’re understanding me.”
“I think I am. I’m just not willing to soft-shoe it. You were checked out when the whole divorce happened but I remember. I remember what she went through, I remember the shock, I remember the phone calls. She was catatonic for a year.”
“Please you were hardly around either,” Richard said. “You were busy doing your Faces of Death tour.”
“Faces of Death?”
“Whatever you call whatever you did, or do?”
“You’re such an asshole. Still.”
“And you’re still incredibly dishonest about yourself.”
“Richard the True rides again. Please tell me more about myself.”
“You’ve never grown up.”
“And your early promise has flowered beautifully.”
Voices rose toward yelling until interrupted by the snap-snap-snap! of a letter striking paper. The brothers turned and saw their father eyeing them from over his typewriter, his index finger firing two more shots—snap-snap!—head shots judging by his squint. “I don’t miss these fights,” Andrew said. “Being an only child I was always frightened of your relationship, its sudden potential for violence. I probably would have been better suited to daughters. But if you don’t believe me, you don’t believe me. I just wanted you to know. Andy is a good kid and seventeen is a tough age and I just hope you’ll try to make him feel like he isn’t alone when all is said and done.”
“Should we push him toward a career in advertising?” Jamie muttered harshly.
Richard threw an eyeful of prick at his brother before getting up with no other purpose than to gain authority: the standing man. “I’m here for him,” he told his father, “and I’m here for you as well. I do think you should go and see a doctor if you’re feeling the way you’re feeling, but you don’t have to worry about Andy ever being alone. I can promise you that. He’ll have family.” Richard found himself standing near the curtains that years ago harbored his younger self. Time seemed to bend back, like an eddy in a river caused by a rock, with Richard taking on the role of his father staring out the window all those four o’clock in the mornings ago, staring for a good hour. “It’s going to be okay,” Richard said, like he was speaking to the boy whose efforts at staying still were slipping along with his bladder. “We’re here for you.” Outside the clouds pushed further east, and though the room had been growing darker, the Dyer men recognized the change as if a sudden and ominous sign instead of a long-previewed piece of weather. The three of them grew quiet, listening for what would come next. It was like one of those brief yet endless silences after a car skids where ears are tuned for the impending crash and the possible sirens to follow.