IV

A new Caravaggio. I say new. You know that I have worked at the Met for almost fifteen years? Okay. I mean, someone found it, the C, in a basement in some tiny village outside Rome, wrapped in what could be described as swaddling bands (I know). Amazing that these things still happen. The Met outmuscled the Prado and bought it. Balthasar and I were allocating. All song and dance. With these bigger events—even with the excitement about working them—there was always pressure on the rota. In the end, regardless of all the moving around and overtime, we were still short of guards. For old times’ sake? he asked me. You know, Sam, it might do you no harm, remembering what it’s like to be one of the little people.

So I end up, for a week, on the floor. I’d no interest in working the new piece—too many people—but I was happy enough, truth be told, to take Rubens-to-Vermeer. Six galleries. I knew every painting intimately, better than any of the other guards. I was on the floor for ten years before I moved upstairs, and—not to blow my own trumpet—they didn’t promote me for no reason.

There was a skill, too. It looked simple, but there was more to it than standing around, making sure punters didn’t get too close to the works, didn’t stick their fingers where they shouldn’t. When done right it was about a tone, a freedom. I was not blind to the fact that most of the visitors were not poor, that a line still existed that many people were unwilling or unable to cross. I lived still on the fringe of Bushwick, in a fourth-floor walk-up. My neighbours in the building were mostly working-class immigrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, none of whom, I suspected, had ever set foot in the Met. Still, at least the space existed, the possibility, and if it didn’t quite constitute democracy it came closer than a lot else in New York.

 

On the first day, as suspected, the Caravaggio drew the crowds and left the upper galleries quiet. I recalled when I had first started in the job, marking the days by measures of noise. In the downstairs galleries, among the mummies and Renaissance statues, a hubbub always arose, friendly chatter punctuated by laughter, easy banter; the phonetics of fifty languages floating in the air, snatches to be caught and tasted. But upstairs, among the paintings, there was silence, a hushed reverence. People dropped their voices to whispers, became intimate with one another, leaned in close to share thoughts. Thousands of times I watched visitors stop on their own before a painting, moved in a way they had not expected; for some, tears came. I remembered one man in his eighties who had come for a week and wept every day in front of Rembrandt’s portrait of Gerard de Lairesse. De Lairesse suffered from congenital syphilis and eventually went blind, and in Rembrandt’s painting the disease is already ravaging his face, his features swollen. Rembrandt refuses to hide it, and it gives the painting an astonishing frankness, a brutal, compassionate honesty.

I was always intrigued by those visitors who were prone to be so touched. I would look for them as they entered the rooms I was attending. It was an art in itself; I slowly developed a sense, began to identify something in the way they moved, or looked, that I couldn’t quite articulate, but which became increasingly accurate. It was not common, of course, this excessive reaction; but there were times I felt it coming as soon as the person even entered the room. I did not share this with anyone, not even my closest colleagues, aware of how it would have sounded. I had forgotten this sense over the years, away from the galleries, but I returned to it again, moving from room to room, watching people watching paintings.

 

The next morning my head rang, a tinny hollow echo I couldn’t shake out. After work I’d gone with a few people for drinks at a tiny bar on Lexington. I didn’t do this often, but it was Marcela’s birthday, one of the few colleagues I counted as a friend. We started the job within a few months of one another, and quickly discovered a shared, private, almost embarrassed love of the work. We would leave the Met some evenings and head straight for the Whitney, or across to the Guggenheim, thirsty for more. There was nothing sexual in these jaunts, no demands extended beyond simple presence simply shared. She was new to the city, to the country, straight from Caracas, and whatever quantity of intimacy we both required, neither too much nor too little, we stumbled into easily. She was vibrant, generous; she told stories as though they would go out of date, witty and relentless. I loved these both for themselves and for the freedom they allowed me to simply listen, to offer my participation in the form of silence. Wise men speak only when they have something to say, etc. We wined it up and by midnight I was, as my mother would say, lit.

It had been so long since I had been hungover at work, I had forgotten how miserable it was. At break I threw down two cups of coffee and a pint of water. The floor a bit much for you? Balthasar joked.

At midday the galleries were still quiet. I moved slowly, appreciative of the peace. I was thinking—true story—of my mother, and resolved to call her. I had been lax of late. I walked through towards the Vermeers, the images forming in my mind before I even reached the paintings, the droplets of white, the paint transformed, catalysed into light. I walked towards my favourite, the Young Woman with a Water Pitcher.

I stopped at the entrance to the gallery. Someone was already standing in front of the painting, staring closely, moving his face around it, meerkat-like. It was an awkward, unusual movement. I had seen it before—there are no ways to look at a painting, I suspect, that I haven’t witnessed—and yet something this time stopped me short, intrigued me. I watched him from twenty feet away, marked his clothing, the jacket cut well and fitted, the polished shoes, his hands clasped behind his back. He took a step back from the painting, a final pause to take it in as a whole, to recompose the pieces. As he moved off to the left, to the next painting, I saw it, the scar, and felt my throat constrict, my body knowing before the rest of me. Philip.

I moved swiftly, noiselessly backward, almost bumping into an old Chinese couple. I kept moving (get out of eyesight), then turned and walked straight through the galleries to the staff stairway. I punched the buttons and pushed through and walked, half ran, down the stairs into a dim corridor. I leaned against the wall, catching my breath. My hand instinctively went to my own face, and I consciously (self-consciously) pulled it back down again. How many years? I started counting, as though the discipline would help. Thirty-five. A smile caught up with me. I shook my head. It wasn’t really Philip. How could it have been? Philip is dead. Thousands of people every day, millions every year, sooner or later someone was bound to look like my brother. Half-brother. I put a hand to my chest and felt my heart through my shirt, still beating, mocking me.

I started to walk back up the stairs, but quickly felt my throat again, the fear tight again, and stopped where I was. I tried to replay what just happened—as a child, my first therapist told me to do this with the original incident (incident!) when I had nightmares, a pretty stupid idea I thought even then—but each time he turned to the left, the scar ended everything, blurred the picture, cauterised the whole scene. I couldn’t actually see his face, I realised. I hadn’t seen him, I had seen only the scar. But I had seen scars before, and not reacted, not run. Jesus.

After five minutes of prevaricating I retreated to the staff room. I found Balthasar where I expected.

You are not in the right place, he said.

I am not well.

You are hungover.

I am going to throw up.

Avoid the Hogarths, he nodded.

Can you take over?

Go home, he said.

 

I walked quickly downtown, street followed by avenue, L-ing a diagonal distance, putting as much as I could between myself and the museum. I was going nowhere in particular, just away from where I’d been. He’d been. In thirty minutes I crossed the new footbridge into Queens, and began to slow down, the tension dissipating. I kept walking, past the cemeteries at New Calvary and Mount Zion, and finally hit Flushing. On Stanhope Street there was a kid’s birthday party. Latin music pumping, helium-filled pink Disney balloons tied to the railings. The screams of the children, their boisterous playfulness, returned something to me, at least briefly. I walked up the four flights of stairs to my apartment a few minutes later with something approaching calm.

Are you not at work? Orr asked me, before I even closed the door. He was listening to music coming from a small speaker opposite him, as though it were his audience, or he its. I recognised Arvo Pärt’s In Principio. I introduced my father to Pärt, when he first moved in with me. I had not expected him to like it, but he had taken to Pärt, and Tavener, and Górecki, immediately, and I experienced both a satisfaction and a theft, as though in the act of sharing I had had something taken away.

I’m not feeling well, I told him, and he looked at me as though he could see. I had to remind myself that he couldn’t. It is a strange thing, this presence of my father.

 

There are none so blind as those who will not see. He ran the line off as a routine, whenever someone asked him about his eyes, or even if they didn’t. Making light. He shuffled around Bushwick with his white stick, negotiating crossings with the help of passers-by, many of them Puerto Rican or Dominican, amused by him and his Irish accent, his endless stories. They were generous to him, and he to them, in his way, he thought, though he was less certain of himself than he had once been.

The area had changed from when he first arrived, almost ten years before. Gentrification had begun to parody itself; bars and cafés competed with their &s, their craft beers and artisanal baking. The little food stalls that once dotted the streets, offering pinchos, empanadas, arepas, were largely gone, as the people who frequented them moved away. Orr still visited daily the few remaining, including one run by a man he called Guest, a mispronunciation of his real name that was never corrected. Guest was at least as old as Orr, and had a voice low and kind, moving easily back and forth from Spanish to English. He wore clothes in the old Cuban style, guayabera shirts and a battered fedora. He changed the hat-band every few days: if my father guessed the colour correctly he got his lunch for free. Guest often told him he was right even when he wasn’t. At the weekends he was accompanied at the stall by his grandchildren, who also befriended Orr in their irreverent, easy manner, teasing and gently mocking him as he reeled off his tall tales. Orr had never felt so at home.

And how we got here? I had been in New York for almost ten years myself when my father arrived to live with me. At eighteen I left school. My mother secured me an invitation from one of her academic friends teaching at a small college in upstate New York, and so I visited America for the first time. The arrangement was simple: I would work in the college gardens for the summer, tending the lawns and hedges and flowerbeds on the small campus, and they would give me room and board. The invitation was, I suppose, an intervention on my mother’s part. She worried about my listlessness, my frustration with life in Belfast, and felt that a few months away might help me find a path to follow, or at least break through what she saw as my languid hesitation about the future. I packed a bag, a few changes of clothes, a couple of Russian novels (the magnanimity of youth!) I felt would last me the break, and winged it across the ocean.

Anna saw listlessness, but it was something else. I was a marked child. My face wore a scar that I could forget for minutes, occasionally hours; but the memory would return, almost like the pain itself, and I would retreat back inside, chasing myself inwards, as though trying to bury something in my own body. I longed not to be seen.

Doctors did what they could, and with skin grafts and time the scar had faded. Still, it was impossible not to notice, and I had never in all the years since it happened met a single person whose eyes did not move there, find it immediately. It was a focal point; even when someone was not looking at it, they were, I knew, forcing themselves to look elsewhere. It was a gravitation, a black hole (my black hole!) which one gave in to or resisted. Unignorable me.

If this was it, the full measure, I might perhaps have found a different engagement, even an ownership. But the scar was only the method. Philip’s deliberation, his preparedness, settled in me as my own, personal gospel. Philip, slicing his own face first: a test, refusing the hospital, making sure that Anna could repair it, that the damage done would be severe but not fatal. A precision that could barely be contemplated, and yet would never leave. And all for me. A gift. Reparation.

My first summer in Troy was perfect. It sounds excessive, I know: but really, I had never before experienced the freedom of working by myself all day, achieving something—creating beauty, coaxing nature into form—and getting up the next morning to do it all again. I stayed in a room in the college dorms, which were largely empty—only a handful of other students, also working manual jobs through the summer—and would wake in the morning without having to set an alarm, the birds chorusing outside my window. I did not often have to deal with people, and had whole afternoons to lose myself in, the rhythms of my body a new abandonment.

I made a friend. Oki was a couple of years older, from Ghana. He was studying chemistry, and had taken the job of looking after the labs over the summer. He was staying in the dorms too, and I ran into him for the first time in the shared bathrooms. Nice scar, was his opening comment, before turning his bare back to me and showing a gash of his own, running down half the length of his otherwise perfectly smooth body. I appreciated the directness of his observation, his apparent fearlessness. I began to look forward to returning in the evenings, began even, to my own surprise, to linger longer in the showers, hoping Oki would appear. Two or three times I woke in the middle of the night, startled awake by my finger running down the length of Oki’s scar, my finger on Oki’s skin. It took me a moment to come around, to realise I had been dreaming.

 

At the end of the summer, the college offered me a job. They were delighted with my work; in fairness, I was good at it. To bypass visa difficulties, they suggested I take a course at the college; they would allow me to study for free, and give me a stipend on top. I accepted on the spot. And lo, the mother rejoices.

I chose to study the history of art. It was an intuitive decision, immediate. I had grown up the child of a poet, whose best friend—now lover, we’ll come to that—was a painter. Their choices, their refusal to accept the customary way to assign value, had not turned me into an artist myself, but it had created in me a hierarchy of value, and I felt different from other people my age. As a child I was fascinated by Curran’s paintings. My mother often brought me with her on visits at the weekend, and Curran and I would paint together in his studio, canvases side by side in front of the huge windows above the glens. Curran helped me mix paint, taught me how to hold a brush, when and where to apply pressure, to release. I loved to hear him describe me as a natural, and loved Anna’s reactions, dramatic and exaggerated as I knew they were even then, to my presenting her with a finished piece. For a while our living room at home was like a gallery, and as many of the paintings hung around the walls were mine as Curran’s. This interest had run its course by the time I was thirteen. I made my mother take down my childish paintings, petulant and sulky as I was, learning embarrassment with them as I was learning to be embarrassed with myself, a grammar of shame colonising everything.

 

My studies opened up again in me, however, that earlier thrill, that sense of discovery. The precision of the men and women who for thousands of years had carved and scraped and daubed at nature, reducing a piece of wood or stone to a person or an animal in a way that somehow resulted in an addition, an increase; it began to pulse in me. Everything, indiscriminate, grabbed my attention: those little wooden Pharaonic figurines, like children’s toys, workmen carrying baskets on their heads, filled with small carved loaves like stretched communion wafers; the Byzantine busts from Constantinople, all their noses broken off, as though the people they remembered had been themselves relentless brawlers; the dark, almost black, bronze sculptures from the early Renaissance in Italy, set off with a louche gold gilding that made me think of crass hotels. Paintings too. El Greco’s figures, stretched and haunted, their eyes heavy and knowing, I felt were almost shaking their heads at me. I discovered Rubens, the sensualist, his plump people full of life and sex and fat, so much more fleshy than his cautious contemporaries. It all made an impression, sank into me, and I even began, tentatively, to sketch for myself, albeit in the privacy of my dorm room.

My friendship with Oki continued, grew easily. He was boisterous, large-hearted. His demands were a form of generosity, such was the freedom he carried in himself, which could transform the energy of a room he entered. We went to parties together, met girls, drank—standard college fare—and I watched Oki move from person to person, group to group, with a looseness, an abandon unconcerned of the expectations or opinions of others. I could never manage this ease, much as I envied it, and Oki was abundant enough unto himself not to be troubled by my awkwardness.

 

During my first semester Anna came to visit. I hadn’t returned home before my studies began, had continued the sparse, simple life I had lived during the summer, so Anna filled a couple of duffels with the clothes and books I’d left behind and brought them to me. She stayed with her friend who had secured me the gardening job. Even in the sultrier years of my teenage angst, my mother and I had maintained an affection, a humour, fuelled in part at least by our own solitariness, our sense of belonging to no one except each other. So it was easy to return to the routine of eating together in the evenings, trying out the limited restaurants of Troy, accompanied occasionally by Anna’s friend or Oki.

My mother and Oki liked each other immediately. He’s something else, she said to me, after the first time they met.

What do you mean? I asked her.

That swagger, she said. His feet barely touch the ground.

I laughed.

I’m sure the girls line up, she said. He reminds me of your father.

Anna had rarely mentioned Orr in years. She had had a couple of relationships as I grew up, though never anything serious. A handful of men at various stages passed tangentially through my life, barely registering. She did not need them, I suspect. Anna had found in Curran (another married man, Mr Freud?) the confidant she wanted, and sex was bracketed off into another territory, a zone for visiting but not setting up camp. As a teenager, desire growing in me as a forced, unwelcome appetite, I followed her in developing a capacity for keeping it at a remove, turning it from a need to a choice.

It felt like a betrayal, then, when she told me that she and Curran were now together. His wife had died the year before. Edie. I do not remember her very well, more taken as I always was by Curran himself. I recall her only as always ill, though Anna told me this was not the case. But to me her health was always fraying; I was afraid of her sometimes, her unknown precariousness. She collapsed once while we were at the beach at Murlough. I remember Curran’s panic and my mother’s quiet, steady action: calling an ambulance, setting Edie in the recovery position, holding both her hand and Curran’s, like a Renaissance scene. Anyway, she recovered. But a decade later she died, and between Anna and Curran everything changed. She told me that they had found that the limits of their friendship, once so easy in their clear demarcations, quickly blurred. At first, she said, we did not really know what was happening. I knew I loved him but I did not know I loved him.

I hated her then. Not, I still believe, out of jealousy for myself, but—how the mighty fall—for my father. I found myself taking his side; or rather representing him, standing in for his side, a side he’d long abandoned. I didn’t complain, or argue with her, but for the remaining few days of her trip I held my affection in check, gave her so little that she was greedy even for a smile. I hated her and I hated myself, and I was strangely satisfied.

She returned to Belfast after a week. The night before she left she gave a poetry reading in a local bookshop. Her work was now well known, even in the US, and she drew a small crowd, both of students and visitors from nearby—one couple travelled 150 miles all the way from New York. I was there, of course, and Oki too, and despite the antagonism I was nourishing, I experienced the complicated pride and embarrassment of my mother’s minor celebrity. Oki took the piss, kindly in his way, once Anna had gone home. You are a mummy’s boy, he said, laughing, when we met for a drink a few days later. I didn’t know what to say. Oki threw his arm around me. It’s alright, he said.

I had been waiting for these moments, preparing for them. My self-containment had trained me for Oki; both in the desire I now felt flooding me, unbidden and perhaps, I was not yet sure, unwelcome, but also in my ability to turn myself inward, to transform my emotion into a flat emptiness, alchemy in reverse. I hid, as much from myself as from him. The year passed without articulation, without even a hint emerging in the open space of our interaction, though by the following summer my dreams were haunted by longing, darkened by a greed that was animal, vigorous.

 

For the record, I had relationships with a few women, girls really, nineteen, twenty years old, like me, as uncertain of themselves as I was. Any intimacy was always awkward, hesitant, a fumbling towards something never quite reached. Only with one girl, a sophomore from San Diego called Julia, did I find something disrupting, a longing that extended beyond a few weeks. She was dark, swarthy; her skin seemed to change colour every week as the sun dropped on it. Her green, bright eyes moved lightly, quickly. We found a freedom with each other I had never experienced before. She loved my accent, my round vowels as she used to call them, and the way, so she said, I raised my voice at the end of sentences even when they weren’t questions. We laughed together a lot. She was quick to be amused, and it freed me, drew out of me a similar opening to laughter. I was almost surprised at how much I was able to enjoy myself. We were together for most of my second year.

At the end of the year Oki announced he was returning to Ghana for the summer. His grandmother was old and frail, and he wanted to see her before she died. He invited me to join him. I had agreed already to travel to Central America with Julia. We were going to Guatemala, to Honduras and El Salvador, working on farms to earn our way. I declined Oki’s offer, but it grated on me, and I began to return to Oki in my dreams, dreams that had for a long time been, if not peaceful, at least largely empty of his presence. But it crept back, the palpable, physical sensation of desire; increasingly at night I would awaken, sweating, breathing tightly, and if Julia was with me she would ask what the matter was. I would shake my head, silently, and drink a glass of water as though swallowing poison.

Oki left for Ghana early in June, and Julia and I for Guatemala shortly after. It was a brutal summer. The heat in Central America was unbearable, and we were staying in small cabins filled with hot, stale air. We did not so much fight, exactly, as exchange our humour for silence; we retreated inward, each to our own dark story. I stopped, after a while, asking about Julia’s feelings, aware that such a concern would open up questions about my own, for which I could not account, even to myself. He was everywhere; as I pulled plants from the ground, or hacked at the crops I was harvesting, I would find a rhythm, and into that rhythm would move Oki. It was not simply an image, a picture that would appear before me, of his face or his body. It was a more visceral, tentative sensation, a spreading; Oki would move along my nerves, push to the edge of my body, as though, as I experienced in one nightmare, I was a host being eaten at from within.

Julia moved from concern to anger, and began, fairly enough, to push me for reasons for my reticence, my withdrawal. And I had none, had nothing; nothing that made sense. In the end I left early, before we even reached El Salvador. I hitched from the farm we were on, near Olanchito, all the way to San Pedro, riding in the back of pick-ups and station wagons. I sat alone, or occasionally with peasants and farm workers, who offered me cigarettes that I declined. I tried to tease out the various strands of my desire. I thought that by forcing them into words, even words that existed only in my own head, they might become more manageable. The journey took twenty-four hours. The campesinos who sat across from me watched my flat gringo face, my concentration; the kinder ones asked me, in halting English, if I was okay. I nodded, lied. It did not work. There were no words that would stick long enough to the fleeting mess of my sensations, and I lurched from impression to impression, each shaking off my attempt to capture it.

I flew back to New York, and took the train into the city. I had nowhere to be, nowhere to go, and thought I might spend a few days there before returning north. I called a friend who lived in the Bronx; he was away for a week, but told me where I could pick up a spare key. I pushed open the front door of his tiny apartment, threw my bag on the bed—the apartment was one room—and left immediately. I wanted to be alone, but I wanted it in company. It was late, the bars closing already. I wandered the streets aimlessly. Music blared from garages; outside them groups of men and women sat talking and smoking. On a sidewalk in front of a rundown tower block I remember an old couple dancing a rhumba, watched by four or five feral-looking children, transfixed utterly. I walked past a tall, gaunt white man talking loudly to himself, semi-coherent. I heard the phrase repeat as I left him behind: you can have anything you don’t want. I felt myself enlarge as I took it all in, my limits swell to include the mayhem of the city. Over the following days I walked it all, miles on miles. I loved the pulsing havoc, the dissonant music of the streets; but found myself drawn again and again into galleries, museums. I had gone on a field trip to the Met during the first year of college, but my experience had been curtailed by the demands of the course, my focus directed. I wanted to see what I would discover if I wandered on instinct. I lingered among the traditional African masks: the stark, bold beauty of the elongated features, their remarkable emotionality, far beyond what I had expected. I loved being able to move from these rooms to the Picassos upstairs, their unashamed theft of the forms and shapes below, their colonial homage, a complication of love and plunder. I sat in a darkened room and watched Resnais and Marker’s astonishing film, Les Statues meurent aussi, still bold and provocative eighty years later. I walked without direction or chronology, and tried to ignore the labels on the artworks, to see what I would be drawn to without prodding, without the cheating of knowledge. I returned repeatedly to a British painting from the early 1800s by Henry Raeburn, an artist I didn’t then know, of three children. One, a young boy, sits awkwardly on a pony, half turned to face the viewer. To the right of the pony, watching the boy, are another boy and a girl, both a little older. They are watching not the viewer, or the painter, but the boy on the pony, and both of their expressions display a subtle concern, as though they are worried about something that cannot be seen, or named, and is certainly not evident anywhere in the painting. The light is soft; the girl’s dress, a draped white chiffon, hangs on her in loose, unfussy folds. She carries a strange rounded basket, opened at the front, but too dark to see inside. I know this painting so well now. I returned to it each time I visited that week, and was almost shocked when it struck me, on my third visit, that what I was seeing felt like my own childhood.

 

At the end of the summer I returned to Belfast, my first trip home since leaving for America. Anna and Curran had decided on marriage. It was just over a year from when she’d visited me. I remember calling my father, to ask him if he knew. He didn’t—they weren’t really in touch by then at all—and he gave away nothing when I told him. He lived alone, was still preaching in the same mission hall, though he wasn’t working with the cars any more. He’d moved to a different house once his youngest moved out. He asked me if I was coming back for the wedding. I told him I wasn’t sure. It was a strange conversation; I remember us saying very little but some connection, some sympathy emerging, in both directions. Conspirators in loss.

You can stay with me if you like, he said. The if you like felt important.

 

I did, though. I told Anna I’d be there but that I’d be staying with my father. I know that hurt her. I knew then too, but I couldn’t help myself. She didn’t say anything, didn’t complain, but the gap widened, that extra pause, the tentativeness. They had, I knew, set a date for the end of the summer so that I could be there before term started. It did not incline me towards generosity.

I flew home at the end of August. I went straight to Orr’s from the airport. His new place was still in east Belfast, less than a mile from where he’d lived before. He’d said it was small, but I hadn’t expected it to be that small, that contained. It almost felt deliberate, that he was trying to prove something to someone, or himself. Still, it looked well—flowers and plants and pictures, clean air and tidy. A woman’s touch, one suspected. He confirmed he had a young Polish cleaner who came in once a fortnight and looked after it.

I am not as young as I used to be.

I believe that’s how it works, I said.

He took me out for a meal on that first evening. I don’t believe we’d ever gone for a meal before. He’d turned up at birthday parties, came to watch me play football a few times; the stuttering articulations of a distant father. But sitting across from him, across a table with a lit candle, felt like an almost unspeakable intimacy. He wasn’t blind then, I should say. He wasn’t yet sixty, his faculties in full motion. He asked me about university, about studying, about women. I answered, loosening up on a beer, two. I found myself wanting to tell him, wanting to share, up to a point. There was a softness in him that had not previously been there, or that I, at any rate, had not noticed. I found myself longing for some kind of affirmation, for an approval, but could not be sure entirely what form that would take, or what satisfaction I would have from it.

I remember checking my phone when I got home and seeing two missed calls from Oki. As I looked up Orr was watching me.

I know what that look is, Sam, he said. Call her back.

The blunt beat of my stupid heart as he climbed the stairs.

 

They got married in the countryside, in a converted barn, a kind of picturesque secular church. During the meal I sat on one side of Anna, Curran on the other. I watched people watch us, bemused. Many of them had not seen me before, some hadn’t even known Anna had a child. I hated myself for it, but the self-consciousness ate away at me all evening. It drew me back into myself, into my hurt, my—sure, why not?—disfiguration. I took a taxi back to Orr’s before the party was done. He was still awake, sitting downstairs, reading his bible and listening to Miles Davis. For what felt like the first time all day, I smiled.

I sat down in a chair opposite and told him I didn’t want to talk. You’d hardly have called Orr sensitive, but there was a generosity in his refusal to get embarrassed or uncertain; he simply sat there, reading on, and I closed my eyes. I do not often remember my dreams, but I remember that night’s. Orr had set a blanket around me, and I woke in the early hours with a taste of blood, metallic, in my mouth, and the image, solitary and unattached, of an animal—a wolf perhaps, something fanged—dead at my feet.

 

When I returned to America I couldn’t settle. My everyday life was the same; my mother’s marriage did not change anything concrete, practical. I had talked to her rarely enough in the previous year, and she had not often taken up time in my thoughts. But I realised, even if I could not have articulated it at the time, that she had always been there, a kind of invisible anchor, allowing me a certain freedom of movement without the fear of ever getting truly, dangerously lost. I did not care much for Belfast, and my sense of belonging was sufficiently loose to permit me to settle anywhere; but Anna had been my home, and I felt—I am not naïve to the whinging absurdity—that she was no longer mine. I was newly alone.

 

On a Saturday morning four weeks after I returned from Ireland I was in bed reading. Oki barged into the bedroom. It was October, the air cold outside, autumn nudging towards winter. I could look from my window at the season changing, leaves dying into bursts of colour. I had had a number of opportunities to move into a shared house with fellow students, but I loved the view from my window, and the anonymity of the dorms; I was still in the same room I had moved into when I first arrived.

Get up, Oki said, agitated.

Nice to see you, Oki.

Seriously. Stop fucking around. We have to go. Oki was pacing from the door to the window. Those fucking assholes, he said.

Which ones?

Come on, he said.

Oki, I said. Sit down.

Oki stared at me. Where a smile would normally break across his face, realising his unnecessary exuberance, a scowl still hung.

I relented. Where are we going?

New York. They’re deporting my brother.

I closed my book, set it down. Why?

Oki shrugged. I don’t know. That’s what they do.

What are we going to do? I asked him.

Oki stopped pacing, stood in the centre of the room. How the fuck do I know? Are you coming?

I nodded.

There’s a train in half an hour. I’ll meet you downstairs in five minutes. He grabbed a towel and threw it at me.

 

Oki’s brother lived in Harlem, a few blocks from the train station. The train was delayed on the way there, and it was early afternoon by the time we arrived. His apartment was small, cramped; paint cracked on the walls. The smell of Indian food floated through from the apartment next door; the windows seemed porous, the cold air streaming in. Oki and I sat on the two chairs in the kitchen. The table was sticky. Jonathan, Oki’s brother, stood beside his girlfriend, a Dominican woman a couple of years older than him, who introduced herself as Jasmin. She stared at Oki with what seemed utter disdain.

Jonathan listed off complaints as though memorising for a test. They deprivated me a proper lawyer, he said. They deprivated me a chance to make my case. They deprivated me for no reason.

I watched Oki bite his tongue. What did they get you for? He was careful to use his brother’s language.

Nothing. Made up.

What though? Oki asked. He was younger than Jonathan, by five years. He was used to this, I could see; of wearing his achievements lightly so as not to upset the traditional balance, of choosing his questions cautiously. On the few occasions Oki had mentioned his brother, the picture he had painted had been quite different. I was conscious of being brought into something, into a new relation, a confidence.

Jonathan walked to the window, ignored Jasmin’s arm reaching out to him as he passed her. Drugs, he said.

Trucks rumbled along outside, rattling the windows as though contributing to the conversation.

But they made it up? Oki said.

Jonathan looked out the window, peering up and down the street, staring purposefully. He didn’t answer.

It was hardly any, Jasmin said.

I could see Oki’s anger. So now what? Oki asked.

Now he has to leave the country in three weeks, she said. Unless you can do something.

Oki threw back her disgust. Unless I can do something? He fairly spat the I.

I excused myself, requested the bathroom. I stood inside, listening through the thin door as the accusations began to grow, Oki being blamed for everything, his success a form of betrayal, as Jasmin had it. I emerged to see Oki stand up, shaking his head.

I came because I thought you’d been treated unfairly. But you haven’t. There’s nothing I can do.

Jonathan turned from the window and looked at his brother. Fuck you, he said.

Oki picked up his bag, nodded to me.

We walked down the stairs, out into the street. Jonathan leaned out of the window. Fuck you, Oki. I don’t need you. His voice carried. People turned around, followed the sound. Oki stopped for a moment, looked up, then walked on. Fuck you, the voice at his back continued. You piece of shit. You fucking piece of shit.

 

We hardly spoke on the train home. Oki simmered, his anger close to the surface for a couple of hours, but by the time we reached Troy it had dissipated, and a melancholy had taken over. Let’s get a drink, I said.

We went to a small bar on the fringe of the campus. We chased beers with shots, round after round, and by midnight both of us were well drunk. Oki lurched from moments of introspection, his head lowered, barely moving, to flights of bold declaration, anger beating a path through his thick verbs, mocking and hurt. I moved around the edges of his conversation, more padding than responding. I watched him and saw, for what seemed to me the first time, how raw and present were his wounds. Oki had always held himself with such swagger, such apparent freedom, that it was startling to realise how much he too was carrying. His family, I learned, had not paved the way for him to come to the US to study, as he had previously implied, but had rather felt it as unfaithfulness, and had paid him little attention since. They blamed him too, now, for his brother’s increasing difficulties; Jonathan, though older, had followed Oki a year after his arrival, but had abandoned his studies after just a few months, and lived thereafter on shaky ground, his student visa now legally useless. He had moved to New York and barely saw Oki, drifting in and out of informal jobs, soon disappearing almost entirely from his brother’s life, popping up—often unannounced—when he needed money or, once, when he was on the run from a dealer in DC, where he had been staying for a few months. Oki helped him out where he could, but still his family blamed him for Jonathan’s transformation, his increasing isolation.

We staggered home, Oki much the worse for wear, leaning heavily on me. Oki was six foot two, almost half a foot taller, and we must have made a strange pair stumbling along College Square, a four-legged lopsided beast. Oki pulled up, asked me where I was taking him.

Home, I said.

My house is too far, he said. I’ll stay at yours tonight.

I hesitated, briefly but consciously, and wondered later whether if I had given myself a little longer might I have worked it out; might the strength required, or the weakness, whatever, have come to me.

We cut across the square, to my dorm block. I switched on the light. Oki switched it off again immediately.

Jesus, Sam, he said. It’s the middle of the fucking night. He laughed as he said it.

He pulled off his shirt and trousers and dropped on to the bed. I watched him, watched his scar hidden in the virtual darkness, felt I could see it even though I could barely see anything. I took my shirt off, and pulled out a sleeping bag from the wardrobe. I threw it on the ground and lay down on top of it.

He sat up. What are you doing? he said. I’m not going to kick you out of your bed. You can sleep here too.

It’s alright, I said.

He spoke louder. Fuck, Sam, I’ll sleep on the floor then. You’re not sleeping in a sleeping bag in your own room.

I’ll put it away, I said.

Oki lay back down, turned his body to the wall. I lay down on the other side of the bed, hearing myself breathing, feeling that it was giving me away. We lay there in silence, me on my back, Oki facing the wall. I stared at the ceiling, the blackness slowly giving way to shifting greys and blues, my eyes adjusting, calibrating. I remembered, as a child, being on a bus with my mother, somewhere in France, in the country, late at night. I was staring out the window when the driver turned off the internal lights, and the sky, which just a second before had been a black smear, flooded suddenly with light, stars flung messily to every corner.

I turned my head towards him, and saw the scar, the light skin upon the dark, a line flat now before me. I could not take my eyes away, and a feeling of sympathy hit me, not for Oki nor even for myself, but for all the people I had hated for refusing the temptation of my own. I reached out my hand and ran my fingers along it, a ridge where the skin had healed. I held my breath as I did so, waited for his reaction, his anger. But it did not come, and he curved, I was sure, his body ever so slightly towards me. I flattened my hand out, took up more of his back. I heard him breathing now, the slight quickening, the air coming in stronger, faster. I pressed heavier, unmistakable, and still he didn’t react, or reacted by not reacting, and my own breathing almost stopped, slowed to a still, long moment. I leaned over and put my mouth to the line, moved my lips along it. I moved my hand down his back, found the small valley at the top of his ass. I moved further still, under his boxers, the elastic giving as my hand went further, between and within. He tightened but stayed where he was, his breathing now slowing, sinking. I moved myself closer, finding him with my body, the gap closed. I moved my hand around and found his cock, already growing, and edged it through the gap in his boxers. I played the length of it with my fingers, gentle, and felt the weight rise in my hand. I moved my lips now to his neck, his ear, and still he said nothing, still did not turn, but let it happen. I pulled on him, my hand full and tight, and felt him push back, moving to my movement, joining me, participating. His chest moved, the air filling his lungs faster and stronger. He breathed louder, and I pressed myself into his neck as we moved quicker. He came in less than a minute, the low groan escaping him as though forced out, like an animal dying. He did not move though, did not speak, did not turn to me. I stayed where I was for half a minute more, pressed closely to him, still holding his cock as it retreated. I waited for something from him, anything, but he remained closed off, silent. I moved back, let go, and lay where I was before. I put my hand, wet now, on my own stomach, and stared again at the ceiling. The excitement gave way to an emptiness, flat, and I lay there unmoving until, ten minutes later, I was sure that he was asleep.

I got up and walked the corridor to the bathroom. I washed my hands, my face. The mirror threw back more fear than I had imagined. I stared at myself for a minute, two minutes, but could not put words together in a way to make a coherent thought, except to realise that not putting words together made thinking difficult, an irony that at another time might have amused me. I did not know what to do next, whether to return to the room or not. I waited five minutes and then retraced my steps along the corridor, committing myself to the truth of what had just taken place. I pushed open the door, and though it took a few moments for my eyes to adjust again to the darkness, I knew immediately that Oki was gone.

 

The next morning I woke late. There was a lawnmower going already below my window; I remembered that I was supposed to be working. I quickly threw on clothes, splashed water on my face, and ran to the outhouse.

The rota had me in the main college square, but because I was late someone else had been sent there. I was grateful to be exiled to the back fields. By the time I returned, later than my hours demanded, everyone else had packed up. The shed was locked, and I realised I had left my key at home. I didn’t want to leave the tools unattended, so I drove the mower across the campus to the dorms, half a mile away. As I passed the science buildings I saw Oki emerge, with a girl I didn’t recognise. He looked up and spotted me—I was no more than thirty yards away, and driving towards him—and I waved. He didn’t respond. Instead he said something to her, handed her his bag, and moved quickly back inside the building. I kept driving, and drew level with her. I nodded as I passed, and she smiled back, nonchalant, careless. When I reached the end of the street, another fifty yards further along, I turned to see Oki and the girl walking in the other direction. He had his arm around her.

 

I spent the evening preparing for a test on the Monday, and waiting for some contact. My mobile sat in front of me, taunting in its silence. I moved back and forth in my own mind, from decision to decision, but could not, when it came to it, hit the button. I slept roughly, jarring awake three or four times, alert and expectant. There was no fear; it was a steady, austere certainty, hope draining slowly, blood through a pinprick.

I didn’t see Oki all week. I thought, obviously, of nothing else. I began to wonder what had actually happened, the repetition in my mind breaking down, moving between memory and imagination, until I was uncertain which of the pictures I returned to were true. Oki’s skin, though, the smooth dark surface of him, was irrefutable.

On the following Saturday I walked to his apartment. It was early, a little after eight. For the first time the ground had a thin grey-white crust; it crunched as I walked. I had a key, but didn’t use it. I knocked, at first lightly, then with more force. After a couple of minutes Oki opened. He looked startled, as though he had not expected to see me ever again.

What? he said. The door was only slightly ajar. He did not open it further. Most of his body remained out of sight.

Are we going to talk?

He shook his head. About what?

Oki, I said.

There’s nothing to talk about. He looked behind him.

I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. I’d always imagined that was a cliché.

Look, Sam . . . Oki paused, stuck for words. Nothing happened.

It did, I said.

Oki moved forward, his hand reaching towards me. Even as I write this I watch it come, and feel a shock of joy before it touches me. I stumble back a few yards. Oki moving out now, into the corridor. He is wearing only underwear. It fucking didn’t, he says, maybe. I’m not sure. Oki’s fist hits me in the face as the words come out, and I fall, crumple almost. Another cliché: slow motion. Everything slackening. Oki’s foot in my diaphragm, pain the only speed, everything else heavy, sluggish.

It didn’t last long, I suppose. I walk home, my ribs—one broken, I later find out—press against something inside, and I fear a rupture. The sky is dull, like lead, and I remember other skies, other days, like this one but not like this one. I am strangely satisfied. I had it coming, I think to myself. I had it coming. I taste blood in my mouth—literally for once—and swallow it. I raise my hand to my face, and remember, for the first time in months, and I am back in my mother’s bedroom, and the pain gets taken up, lifted into another pain. One pain becomes another. Plus ça change.

 

 

Philip was dead. Inasmuch as absence is death. In the weeks after the attack (a spade’s a spade) he was hunted, the law and social media in unholy alliance. But to no effect. He was sixteen, and it was thought to be inevitable, a matter of time, that he would appear, either of his own volition or by the simple mistake of allowing himself to be seen. But he wasn’t. No CCTV revealed him, no cash machines, no passports. He vanished, sucked up into the air like Christ himself. What these days and weeks were like I know only second-hand, of course—even by the time I was old enough to understand, the stories had collected themselves into a sort of opaque myth, and the surfaces I scratched at revealed more about Orr and Anna’s respective ways of dealing than they did Philip himself.

Anna encouraged me to talk about it, to speak of what I remembered, what I feared, what I hated. Perhaps she saw it growing in me, the event accreting, layer upon layer. I was so young that it didn’t happen only once but rather kept happening, each moment of recollection, as my vocabulary grew, not simply a retelling but a reenactment, the words themselves palpable, structural. The randomness—something happened to me—gave way, over and over again, to sharper, more brutal redescriptions, more specificity. For Anna, at least if I could speak it the less would those words own me, burn themselves through me.

Not so Orr. I saw him less, of course, growing up. Sometimes, for months, not at all. Still, when I did, confusion carried; the bluntness with which he spoke to Anna was avoided with me. I do not know, even now, how much of that was a result of Philip’s actions. I was too young, of course, to remember how he treated me when I was an infant, though I have a vague, hazy sense of genuine affection. There is something that exists for me, too insubstantial to be called a memory, of his face and mine in correspondence, my smile learned from his, an unarticulated kindness; even—God help me—devotion. But after the event (event?), I remember (remember?) only reticence, a hushed stillness on his part. I do not know how much of this is my perception—when I looked at Orr did I see Philip?—or perhaps instead, or as well, he could not see me without seeing Philip, and what must that have done to him, what necessities of restraint must that have involved him in? Philip, in his absence, became more present than he could have imagined. Or a further perhaps—I raise my hat—he knew this perfectly. Philip the mediator. Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone; but if it die, it bears much fruit.

But the boy himself, the body, the person—he was gone. I asked Orr once, much later—just before, in fact, he came to live with me in Brooklyn—if he had looked for Philip. I mean, beyond the conversations with the police and so on. He stared blankly out of the window in the room we were sitting in, high up on the side of the Cavehill, with views—not that he could see them—down on to Belfast Lough, and told me that, for the year and a half after he disappeared, he would walk out once or twice a week, the same time of the day, in the belief that Philip was watching. He would stalk the same route, setting himself up, making of himself a target. He was convinced, he said, that he would appear, emerge from some alley with a poised violence, a wail of anger. He knew, he said, that Philip’s ambition was him, Orr, and not me, that the wrath—I remember this word—he had enacted already would not be sufficient to him.

But there was no appearance, no showing up. Nothing. The police, after the requisite few weeks, had opened a missing-persons case, but after a year of no sightings, they shelved it. Not closed it entirely; but it was widely suspected that whatever anger Philip had directed towards me had been converted into guilt, and that he had enacted on himself the remainder of the violence he had within him. Anna accepted this wisdom, or perhaps affected to accept it, providing as it did a line underneath it of sorts, even if only in pencil. Orr, however, did not. He resisted the shrug, the giving up, and though there was little else he could do, he still carried some expectation of return.

I grew up, then, surrounded by nothing, but feeling the weight of it. Philip I remembered as a fairy-tale figure, the beckoning finger in the tale that promised and threatened at the same time, painted the picture and scored it out. I do not wish to make too much of this—I know—but it is hard to draw the lines, the connections between things, when the things themselves have such little form. The one thing I knew was that Philip was gone. My face was his last act, and then he disappeared, and was never seen again. At least, I knew that until Orr—as I was about to leave that afternoon—took my arm and pulled me back down on to the bench beside him and told me to wait. There was more.

 

It was never easy with Orr. So many expectations in the first few years of his moving here were overturned that it felt at times like violence; as though, in my preconceptions being proved wrong, my father was actively correcting me. It was not like this, of course. I had, naturally perhaps, but unfairly, built a version of my father that was crueller, less interesting, than he turned out to be. But it had still pained, this encroachment of the real Orr into the image I had, and had been content with.

He moved here, I should explain, because he was alone. His sight had begun to blur in his early sixties. He had ignored it at first, and continued to live as he had before, still preaching, pastoring, carrying himself with his regular swagger. But week by week things became more difficult, and eventually a young woman at the church, a nurse, spotted him struggling to read. He had got by for so long pretending because he knew the texts so well he could quote them. Within six months he had lost all the vision in his left eye, and 50 per cent in his right. He took it with good humour—we see through a glass, darkly—but he knew the direction it was all heading, and knew the comedy would be more difficult to sustain. I had not been to Belfast in a few years but I made a trip home, a couple of months after I found out. I asked him—his vision almost gone entirely by this point, already making his way around with a stick—if he blamed God. Your God, I asked, if he blamed your God. You’re fond of that possessive pronoun, aren’t you? he said, and when I ignored the jibe, he continued, blunt as you like: He’s taken everything else. Why not my eyes?

He still had, by the doctor’s final assessment, around 7 per cent vision in his right eye. It was a number that pleased him: a holy number. His sermons had been fairly flooded with sevens—the seven fat years and seven lean, the seven days of creation (the rest day is counted, he was always pleased to point out to the workaholics), the seven devils who left Mary Magdalene. Every seventh year was a sabbath—forgive debts, he counselled, and took his own counsel—and after seven sevens came fifty, the jubilee, when the land itself was set free, returned. How many times shall I forgive my brother? Seven times? No: multiply.

And so he saw shapes still, blurred movement, hazy and dark, like old film footage layered on itself, he described it, one body becoming another. It was not enough, though—he could neither cross roads safely nor shop for food without someone to help, and even his own home became a trap, stairs and seats and doorways unidentifiable. His youngest had already emigrated to Australia, and Anna was with Curran, not that that was ever a realistic avenue, I suppose. So he moved in with his remaining son, who lived in a sizeable house just outside Belfast. It was a compromised scenario though, Orr’s loss of independence more difficult for him than he had expected. He was given a room at the rear of the house, next to their two children, both teenagers, and whilst they liked him, and he them, their mother had never had much time for her father-in-law, and was not slow to let him know. She bickered with her children for spending too much time with him instead of studying, and he spent more and more time in his room on his own, listening to radio shows and audiobooks. The older boy tried to teach him braille: I’ll not live long enough to get the benefit, he said. When the family finally proposed a nursing home—Orr had been living with them for almost two years—the collective relief could have lifted the Hindenburg.

 

He moved into a fold off the Antrim Road. He was nudging towards his late sixties and, his eyes aside, he was healthy and sharp. He could not get used to it. The rest of the residents—inmates, he called them, when he spoke to me by phone, which was more and more frequently—were older, frail and tired, mostly humourless. Half of them didn’t know who they were. He had, at first, looked forward to the company, but it proved a false hope, and he spent even more time alone, his world closing in on him, getting smaller and smaller. He felt himself reduce; for the first time in his life, it was all too much. He was in the wrong place.

He had been in the home for six months by the time I visited again. Another few years had passed and still I did not look forward to returning. It always felt to me like a retreat; it would take me weeks afterwards to shake the Belfast shit off myself, to climb back into the thin, clean air of my American life. My mother had been again for a visit, a few months before, this time accompanied by Curran. I had thought about her often, more than I let myself realise. I held it against her. I was embarrassed, I suppose—or perhaps embarrassed is not quite right. She who had always been there, she who knew everything—I could not forgive her that.

At that stage I was in Gowanus, a pretty shitty one-bed walk-up, the price of my privacy. They stayed in a hotel in midtown, but came across to pick me up one evening, and my mother looked around my apartment as though it were an exhibition in itself. Her ignorance and interest combined to give me something back, a sense of myself as unknown, and I loved her for it. In my childhood her questions had felt like prompts, the narrative predetermined; if there were answers she already had them, and I might hope at best to stumble into some approximation. But I realised, as she scanned my bookshelves, stared with puzzlement at cheap paintings and sculptures I’d bought at degree shows or from friends, that I had begun to find my own corners, my own periphery. My outer reaches. Darkness as character—the unknown not an absence but a space to grow into.

I watched Curran look at paintings, and could not help but share his joy, his thrilled uncool exuberance. I had been working at the Met for a few years by this stage; still only a guard, but already getting noticed, my own attention to detail and evident love of the art catching the wonderful American meritocratic eye. Curran’s childish pleasure turned out to be an inadvertent generosity; I remember noticing, after they left, a confidence in my choices, my namings, that could only have come from him.

 

When I returned to Belfast, then, I could have stayed with my mother, but out of a mixture of curiosity and independence, I suppose, I booked myself into a cheap hotel in the city centre for the five days I was planning to stay. I arrived late on the first night, and walked alone to the Cathedral Quarter. I had kept in touch with no one from home save my parents, so I had no one to call. I could have trawled through Facebook, but in truth, and as usual, the anonymity appealed. I had a drink in a bar I had visited once or twice with my mother when I was still a teenager, her buying me rum-and-Cokes and laughing at my hesitation, my fear of getting caught. I sat on my own, listened to the conversations floating unattached around me, the dropped phrases and thick vowels reminding me of who I was, who I tried not to be. At one stage a woman shuffled up to the bar, money for her round already in her hand. She wore a low-cut dress, breasts barely being held back from their threatened freedom. I tried not to look.

Alright love, she said. Early thirties, a bit older than me. I nodded, smiled. Not bad, eh?

I must have raised my eyebrows, because she pushed her chest out a little more, and laughed.

You’re new here, she said. I can tell.

Can you?

That accent. You pick that up halfway across the Atlantic?

Something like that.

Are you American?

No such luck. I felt myself squeeze back into the words, the metre.

A turncoat, eh? Did you live over there?

Still do. New York.

Fuck me. New York. I fucking love New York. She raised her hand to her mouth, eyebrows jumping. Sorry. Are you good living?

Good enough. But not like that.

Thank Christ, she said, pleased with her own joke.

 

I laughed. I began to relax, felt something happen that I rarely experienced in America. I was being flirted with, which wasn’t new, not exactly, but it was with a woman, which was. They seemed to pick up on it faster there. I was letting go, enjoying the freedom, the disassociation from myself, or part of myself.

You drinking on your own? she asked me.

It’s quicker, I said, and she laughed.

What are you back for?

Reality encroaching again, the ignorant beast. Oh you know. Obligation. Duty.

How long will your duties take?

Ah, it depends. I felt the air sink, flatten. In it flooded: the world, tomorrow, all of it.

She placed her order, added a pint for me. She introduced herself. We shook hands, and I considered telling her, coming clean. But what harm was there? That dogged drive to honesty, to needless explanation, how well had it served me? I thought of my father again and, not for the first time, envied him that, his unapologetic being, his selfishness. What I wouldn’t give. I smiled, told her my name, said it was a pleasure meeting her and, at her prompting, promised to join her and her friends in a while.

I didn’t, of course. I finished my drink and stepped out into the late-summer evening, the air still warm, night not yet fallen. I wandered over the Queen’s Bridge, heading towards the new run of bars down at Titanic Quarter. The city had spread, slowly but steadily, out across the Lagan and into the working-class estates to the east, driving house prices up and families out. It used to be all flags out this way, one or the other; now cranes hung above terraces marked for demolition, and new half-finished apartment blocks caught the eye with their slick surfaces and aura of money. It was hard to lament the old, but the new felt overdone, a banker’s Ferrari, an inner turmoil not so easily displaced.

There were fewer people on the streets here than in the centre, but the bars were still busy. I had one more drink—this time undisturbed—and walked back to my hotel in an unexpected fug of satisfaction, the alcohol thinning my blood just enough, my movements that bit looser, lighter. This place wasn’t as bad as I remembered.

I slept easily, and woke refreshed. I ate breakfast—more flirting, this time with the young Polish woman who served me coffee; what was it about being in Belfast that made this so easy?—and then caught the bus at the side of the City Hall, heading north. The nursing home was on the Antrim Road, on a sprawling piece of garden nestled into the lower parts of the Cavehill near Ben Madigan. It was one of Belfast’s old wealthy areas, large houses neighbouring one another with a stolid pride, architectural confidence. It was a safe affluence, all the same; I didn’t envy it. I wouldn’t have given up my shitty Bushwick apartment for two of them.

My father was waiting for me in his room. A carer led me down the hallway, making small-talk. I remember the sudden hesitation clawing at me, as though I had only just realised why I was there. I stopped—the young man leading me stopped too, turning inquisitively—and caught my breath.

First visit? he said. I nodded. Take your time, he said. He pointed down the corridor. Room 23, when you’re ready. He patted me on the shoulder as he walked away.

I turned and looked out the window. Belfast Lough lay a mile below, the northern suburbs sprawling easy between, green and lush at the end of summer. A light rain had just started to fall but the sun was still out, and the air flickered, shone. The ferry to Scotland inched along in front of Holywood, and I watched it, and was returned to the few summers my mother had taken me to the Highlands on that very boat, Pitlochry and Aviemore and Fort William. I recalled her telling me—I had been eating ice cream at the time, ten years old—that I may have been conceived there, in a cabin near Elgin, and remembered my horror at the thought that I had been conceived at all, whatever that was.

I moved down the corridor. I knocked on my father’s door and waited for a voice. Come in, I heard, and pushed it open. My father sat on his bed, his hands resting on either side of him, as though holding him up. He was dressed well enough, and his hair was combed, flattened, but he was haggard, his cheeks falling in on themselves. I could hardly believe it. He looked at me.

Who is it? he said. Nico, is that you? Is my son here yet?

I’m your son, I said.

A smile crept on to his face, recognition.

There he is, he said. Nice to see you. He laughed, and his face changed, the gaunt hollow replaced with the charm, the cheek that I remembered. Well, come on in then. Welcome to my kingdom.

I looked around the room, took it in, the flowered curtains, the banal browns and creams. I was faintly relieved my father couldn’t see, God knows what he’d have thought of it if he could. Still, he must have known where he was. He’d visited enough of these places before he went blind.

As though I had spoken aloud, Orr said, Probably better that I can’t see it. He still held a smile, and I was surprised at finding myself grateful to him for making this less sombre than it might have been.

You always loved beige, right? I said.

He tried to push himself up but didn’t have it in his arms. What about a cuppa? he said.

 

We sat opposite one another in the common room, at a table beside the window. The view stretched from the lough below around to the northern side, where the zoo used to be. In the distance I could see the war memorial at Knockagh.

Nice view? Orr said.

Yeah.

Describe it for me.

Sure you remember it, don’t you? I was conscious of being looked at but not seen. I remembered the feeling from the last time I was back, but I had hidden it away in the meantime, and I was surprised that such an unnerving sensation could be so easily displaced in memory.

Words are my eyes now, he said.

So we talked. Slowly, gently, one small offering and then another, an exchange first of descriptions, then of kindnesses, then of hurts. This is when he told me about Philip, his desire to lure him out. A routine, an expectation. He spoke also about Anna, a frank ruefulness he had never before expressed. They took shape that day, for me; their solitariness, as I had mostly known it, temporarily overturned by stories, articulated affections, until a picture became present, actual; as Orr spoke I found something release in me, a sort of unanticipated acquittal of myself, enlarged by the capacity they had between them, even if only briefly, created in the world.

We talked for hours. He was wise enough not to pry too much into the detail of my life, though I had not expected him to remember as much as he did. I found myself stunned by my enjoyment, bitter almost that it should feel so easy.

As I went to leave he pulled me back down on to the bench.

I have not told you everything, he said. I have not told even Anna. Philip is not dead. At least, he was not dead, he was not dead then. You were still a boy, he said, nine or ten, when he came back. He’d have been twenty-one. I had given up by then, of course. I was preaching, a wee hall in Larne. The service was halfway through, the singing just finished, and I got up behind the pulpit. Raised up a little—you could see everyone. And I started reading from the text—Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience . . . And I looked up at that point, and I remember the pure shock of it, to see him sitting in the back row, staring at me. His face was stone, flawless. I know this will sound ridiculous, but I thought immediately of how beautiful he was. And I did not know what to do. I went on reading, finished the text. I could barely get through it in places: But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. I was being mocked. When I had finished reading I prayed, as I do, and when I opened my eyes he was gone. I stared at his empty seat and I could not believe it. And then the sound from outside: a crash, glass shattering. I jumped down into the aisle and ran to the back door. My car was parked right outside the church, on the pavement; a rock through the front windscreen. I couldn’t see him. I walked around the car, into the street, looking for him. A few of the elders had come outside and asked if I was okay. Then they saw the car. I could not believe I had not come down from the pulpit as soon as I saw him. Embraced him. I started shouting his name. I can’t remember what else I shouted. The poor people from the hall had no idea, they didn’t know what to do. One started to call the police and I made him put his phone away. I shouted and shouted for Philip to come out, to talk to me. But he didn’t. He was gone again.

He stopped speaking and sat still, silent. I sat beside him, empty of responses. Eventually he spoke again.

That was it. The only time I saw him again. I believe he came to do me violence but couldn’t see it through. Something in him resisted. He did not have the measure of it.

 

I looked across the room at him now, a Bushwick timber yard buzzing in the background, and remembered that conversation, remembered my decision to invite him to New York to live with me. I went to see Anna that night, had dinner with her and Curran. I had made no commitment of secrecy to Orr, but in the end I did not tell her what we had spoken about. I thought about it, alone in my hotel room, the young drunks of Belfast loudly crowding the streets below as I stared down. Invented scenarios bled one into another, and eventually I gave up imagining what would happen and gave myself over to the desire, the unexpected enthusiasm. I proposed the idea when I returned to see him on the following morning. I allowed him a couple of days to consider it, but he told me later he had decided immediately. I stayed on for an extra week, making the necessary enquiries, applications. He had a friend who worked in the US Embassy in Dublin, and made the appropriate winks and handshakes to speed up the process. And two months later I took the subway out to JFK and met him off the flight. So you came, I said, and took his bags from the young airline representative who had assisted him from the plane.

I am come that they might have life, he grinned, and that they might have it more abundantly.

 

 

From the subway exit to the museum was a quarter of a mile. Six hundred and forty-two steps. I tried to force myself into a calmness, each footstep a statement. He was everywhere, I knew, but I didn’t see him. I smiled to myself as I walked through the staff entrance, climbed the stairs. Balthasar approached me before I left the common room for the galleries.

How are you feeling?

I nodded. Ship-shape.

You must take care of yourself, Sam. As my grandfather used to say, there’s few of us left.

 

The morning passed more or less without incident, though one woman in an adjoining gallery had an asthma attack and had to be assisted by a medic, which caused a small scene. It heightened the experience for the other viewers, I again observed; they could never be sure that the unfortunate woman had not been made unwell simply by the art, and it charged their own experience with a potential danger. I had wondered, at times, if we shouldn’t perhaps set up this kind of thing every now and again, an unofficial service to our visitors. Rembrandt while healthy is one thing; but with the subtle threat of illness, even death, in the air, what it becomes. We laughed over lunch as I raised the suggestion. When I returned to the floor for the afternoon, it was with an ease, a lightness; the previous day all but erased.

It was almost five o’clock when it happened. I turned from the Van Dyck towards the Vermeer, and there he was, standing in the centre of the room, staring at me. I stopped moving, and Philip took it up, reaching out his hand as he crossed the twenty feet between us. A couple of visitors turned to see, then turned away. I let him take my hand, felt it drop again to my side. I heard words but could not attach them to things. How are you doing, long time, God, I heard you were here (you heard I was here?), well, you look well, isn’t it, Vermeer’s light, I know. They moved around me, but I concentrated, focused only on slowing my heart down, refinding the thump thump thump that would settle me. Philip’s face, older but so clearly himself, just added to, an accretion. His scar still fairly shone; he had done a lot less than me to hide it.

We should have a coffee, Philip is saying. I hear now. A coffee, Sam, eh?

I am shaking my head.

A coffee, Sam. Jesus. Thirty-five years. Thirty-five, Sam.

I have to go, I said, eventually. I have to go.

Of course, of course, Philip said, still smiling. It’s great to see you. Sure I’ll come back tomorrow. We can have coffee when you finish. Like, five? Five-thirty?

I moved off quickly. I felt his eyes on my back, his stare following me. I shivered, and wondered if he spotted it, the movement. The revulsion. On an impulse I walked on, past the exit door, out through another gallery, giving away, I felt, as little information as I could about where I was going. I was pleased with myself, at my calculation; surprised at my presence of mind. I found another of the staff exits in the north wing and looked around. He had not followed. I pushed through the doorway and took the stairs, already finding the measure of myself. It had happened and yet I was still there. Nothing had ended. As I walked I began to experience almost a joy, a thrill of accomplishment, as though I had willed and implemented a plan successfully. I looked at my watch and realised I had left the galleries five minutes early. I gambled I could get away with it, and stepped into a storeroom in case anyone passed. I waited: two minutes, three, in the musty stillness of the darkened space. A few statues sat awkwardly at varying heights, swaddled tightly in bubble wrap and cardboard. I thought of my family, what passed for my family: Anna, Orr, the boys. I remembered one of the early trips we took together, to an old country house somewhere. We had walked through rooms not dissimilar to this one, and I had pointed to the strange, austere busts that policed the long halls and likened them, laughing, to my brothers.

I walked back out into the corridor a few minutes later and made my way to the common room. The mood at the end of the day was as it always was, a kind of subdued gratefulness, another day down. I scanned the faces for signs but everything was normal. Balthasar approached, but only grabbed me on the shoulder and said, Who’d have thought you could still slum it so well?

 

On the way to the Met the next day I walked slowly through Central Park. Even New York was sleepy on a Sunday morning, subdued and lethargic. People moved more slowly, and there were fewer of them. I walked with purpose, or so I told myself. Fear abandoned. I had one more day on the floor. I had considered making Balthasar come up with another plan, getting someone else to work the shift—it wasn’t like it was my job. But I couldn’t just go and hide in the office. I am no longer a child, my inner voice pleaded, and I will not be afraid of Philip Orr, nor of anyone. He has left his mark—the phrase has always been alive to me—but the past is the past. God, my unconvincing monologue; like one of those yoga exponents continually telling others, repeatedly and manically, how meditation is the answer to everything as their own lives continue to unravel, like everyone else’s, around them.

 

The Rubenses bloomed. The flesh practically fell off them. I had been right: threat, danger enlivened the experience of the paintings, made them visceral in a way the austere silence disguised. Maybe, in a week or two, I thought, I really will approach the management, propose it. Take the paintings into the city instead of getting the city to come in. Cézanne on the subway, Holbein in a pizza joint. Van Dongen in a strip show. I was pleased—proud, even—that I had not lost my love for such a useless art form. Painting died before you were born, one of the newer, younger assistants at the Met had said to me in the beginning, I having uncharacteristically let slip my fascination. Have you been in the Rembrandt room recently? I asked him.

Still, I wondered, sometimes. Was I just holding on to the tiny sliver of the past I still had—my mother, weekends in the Antrim hills at seven, eight years old? How many of the opinions I held were my own? Did I love the early Matisse, like I said, or did I love that Curran loved the early Matisse, and had made Anna love the early Matisse, and so me too, inevitably, begat begat begat, myself?

I moved tentatively the entire day, from gallery to gallery, expecting Philip at every turn. But Philip did not appear. When the end of the day arrived I walked through the top-floor galleries, detouring through to the Impressionists, finding Marcela, as always, in front of Cézanne. We acknowledged each other without speaking, standing in front of Mont Sainte-Victoire. In silence the painting did its work, colour becoming form becoming satisfaction. She slipped her arm into mine.

We moved off, into the adjoining gallery, towards the stairs. Suddenly, raised voices. We turned and there he was, Philip, arguing with another guard.

There, Philip said, pointing to me.

I pulled my arm from Marcela’s.

What is it? she said. Who’s that?

I shook my head. Give me a minute.

I’ll wait for you downstairs, she said, as I walked across the gallery.

It’s alright, Hector, I said. Hector shook his head, clearly pissed off. He followed Marcela to the stairs, muttering to himself.

Sam, Philip said. I got here late, sorry. They were trying to kick me out.

The museum is closed, I said. It’s their job.

I know, I know, he nodded. Anyway. Let’s get a drink.

I heard the door close behind Hector. We were alone. At the far end of the galleries a woman was tidying the gift area. Two hundred and fifty feet, I guessed.

I can’t, I said.

I thought we’d made a plan, Philip said, his voice catching, reining something in.

The paintings stared at us; the air thick.

Tomorrow, then, he said.

Tomorrow I’m off.

Perfect.

No.

He shook his head. No? he said. He looked around, at the paintings, the heavy red walls.

I have to go, I said. The museum is closed.

He stared at me. I felt it again, and tried to refuse it. Fear. Jesus, shame.

You have nothing to fear from me, he said, but I was already walking away. Sam, he called.

I turned, held myself, blood hurtling towards the edges of me. No, I said. No.

Alright, he said.

I watched him walk slowly away. At the entrance to the gallery he turned. I’ll see you again, he said, his raised finger addressing me.

I stood on my own for a few minutes longer, listened to his footsteps descend the marble stairs. The water pitcher shimmered.

 

In the staff room Marcela was waiting for me. What was that?

It doesn’t matter.

You have love problems?

I smiled. Not the way you’re thinking. I threw on my jacket.

You look troubled, she said.

Involuntarily, I lifted my hand to my face, my scar. I noticed Marcela noticing. I had always loved that she seemed one of the few people who’d got past it quickly, who seemed able to see me and not it. I was not unaware, even as I did it, that I was forcing her to look.

I’m alright, I said, picking up my bag. But thank you.

We strode out together, into the brisk late-summer breeze. A chill was already in the air, a foretaste. We bought slices of pizza on the corner of 78th and Madison, and ate as we walked south. I felt myself relax. We turned left at the Breuer, and walked past a crowd of elderly Japanese tourists chattering excitedly in front of the Ashton. As we weaved our way through them one old woman took a step backward, almost tumbling into me. I caught her, smiling, and a ripple of laughter spread through the group, a few cheers. The woman apologised, bowing her head to me in acknowledgement. I bowed back, smiling too, and as I lifted my head, about to move on, I noticed, fifty yards behind, Philip. He was following us.

I took Marcela by the arm and pulled her towards me.

What are you doing?

Trust me, please, I said. We moved swiftly across the road, just before a slew of cars rushed by after us, and she turned with me to see Philip stuck on the other side of the street, waiting for a gap. We quickly rounded the corner on to Park and I dragged us into a run, thirty feet, before ducking into a bar. I moved to the darkened front window, found a spot from which I could look out. Marcela stared at me. I motioned for her to sit down. The barman glared at us.

I raised a finger in the air: one minute. I pressed myself against the wall, watched the street. Ten seconds passed, twenty. I saw him then, moving fast, passing the bar and moving south down Park. I watched him look around, this way and that, and keep moving, almost running now. I stayed put, another ten seconds, and then stepped out from the wall.

Sorry, I said to the barman.

He smiled. Nothing worse than bumping into your wife, he said.

 

I told Marcela everything. From the beginning. Aside from Oki I had told no one. A scar at the hands of my brother tainted me beyond the physical mark itself; in the telling I was sure that some doubt would surely linger for the listener, a hint that, in some sense, I must have deserved it. It was a foolish idea, I knew, but persistent. Marcela sat silently. I told it all: my parents’ affair, Orr’s wife’s death, the toing and froing of my early years, Orr bringing Anna and me close and then pushing us away. Philip’s presence, the few memories blurred, uncertain, and then the one that became them all, a simple slash, more surprise than pain. I did not even know what was happening at first. I told her about moving to America, about the love and emptiness that followed, that went on following, that I could not seem to compensate for. Even as I spoke, for those few blunt moments in that shitty bar, I feared sounding indulgent; but the relief, in the speaking, spread through my whole body. I told her about bringing my father to America a decade before, about living with him then, blind and alert, still steeped in his God. And I told her about Philip turning up at the Met, on Friday, out of nowhere. Standing before Vermeer, looking at it like a script, like it mattered. Like an instruction. Like a crime.

So you haven’t seen him since you were three years old? she asked, after I seemed to have finished.

Hadn’t. Yes. Thirty-five years.

Why is he here now?

I don’t know.

Perhaps he’s come to apologise, she said.

Is that the sense you got?

I hardly saw him, Marcela said.

But is that the sense you got?

She said nothing.

We finished our drinks and left, both tenser now, but strangely composed. Ready. The city was loaded, the buzz that always pulsed now tuned sharper. The sun was setting; the tall apartment blocks caught the low light and threw it on to the streets below with seeming violence. We surveyed the sidewalks, but it was impossible to take account of everything, everyone. We walked to the subway in silence, her arm in mine. She offered to go home with me, but I declined her kindness.

 

As I arrived at my apartment my father was leaving. We passed one another on the stairs.

I’m away to pray, he said. Any requests?

Still no joy with the last ones.

They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, he said; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

Yeah. I know.

What is it, son? Orr asked me. You seem bothered.

My father’s blindness had opened up, he felt, as much as it closed down. He found that the alertness, the sensitivity he was forced to develop—to simple sounds, changes in atmosphere, unexpected pauses in conversation—gave him something he had not had before. It was a harsh exchange, but it was out of his hands, and he had learned to take pleasure in the deliberate exercising of these new abilities, or dispositions, as he thought of them. I was a blur to him, he joked; but the subtle shifts in my mood, the times when I was sad, or frustrated, were not so easily hidden. It was not lost on me that there was an appeal in being seen and not seen at the same time.

I held my silence, left him to it. I moved around the empty apartment, a dull threat lurking in every thought, every movement. The basic actions of life seem both enlarged and redundant. The monologue ratcheted up, deafening: What am I going to do, walk the streets in endless fear, hesitating on every corner? Who can live like that? And anyway, surely I am exaggerating everything, creating a monster where there is only a man.

When Orr returned I was already in bed. I lay there, listened to him shuffling around the living room, making himself tea, putting some music on, the volume carefully low. If he knocks on my door I tell him now. In ten minutes I am asleep.

 

I took two days off. Fuck the raised eyebrows. I did not tell my father, leaving early in the morning as usual but spending the day in cafés in the Village. I say cafés. I had spent my fair share of the last decade in Makeen’s, and The Gattuso; had caught the eyes of enough men passing by to satisfy a lifetime. I say eyes. Not for a few years though. One heartbreak may be regarded as misfortune, etc. Another story, I suppose.

I also called Anna, talked around the topic enough to stir her frustration.

Sam, she said. Do you want to talk about Philip?

I’ve just been thinking about him recently, I said.

Any particular reason?

I wonder where he is, what he’s doing.

I get it, Sam. I understand. But he is long gone. We would have heard something of him, by now, one of us. You know?

I expect you’re right, I said, satisfied that she knew nothing I didn’t.

 

I returned to the Met, and to the safety of my desk. The remove was a relief, but the awareness that I did not know what was happening below, that the floors now contained for me some menace, was almost worse. I could barely read the words on my screen. Every couple of minutes I walked to the window of the office and watched people mill placidly on the steps below. Two or three times I spotted him, and then realised it wasn’t him, and I returned to my desk, dragging, like a dead deer over a hill, my concentration back to the present.

Day by day I wait, I expect. Day by day he does not appear. Or rather, I don’t know if he appears. I realise I am trapped; unable to move in any direction, self-enclosed.

I began, at lunchtimes, to venture out, on to the floors. I walked from gallery to gallery, anticipating, steeling myself. In the African sections downstairs I expect him to show up at any moment, to step out from behind a bust or tomb; the masks from Burkina Faso and Benin and Cameroon, as I pass them, assume his spirit. But he does not appear. Marcela checks in on me every evening, and we begin even to enjoy the subtleties of our unspoken communication, a series of nods and glances that make us feel we are accomplices. After only a few days it seems unreal, as though perhaps I really did imagine it. I play and replay the two encounters, but they shift in and out of focus, phrases assuming lives of their own. I cannot think what they actually mean.

 

Greenwich sucked me in again. Make of that what you will. I had left it behind, I thought, retreated to an online date or two every few months; a meal, a movie, laughter out of time. The serene benefaction of desire contained. So on, so forth. But those few visits reminded me (like I had really forgotten) of breath on my neck, skin on my skin. The danger of Philip, or whatever it was, reawakened other appetites, other vulnerabilities, and the complications of enjoyment they entailed. I believed in love as much as the next man, depending on who the next man was.

I never stayed out all night, but late enough for my father to notice. I was there less, but I saw him more. I mean: I paid attention. The evenings I was home I sat and watched him, knowing he couldn’t see me, wondering whether he thought of his son at all, his eldest. Still I said nothing. On the following Friday, after an encounter without an outcome, I arrived home just after midnight to find him awake, sitting at the table by the window, practising braille. This was a new thing for him; having resisted for so long, it was as though he had decided that he was going to live long enough after all, and so had begun, slowly but concretely, to learn the language.

You’re still up? I said, going straight to the fridge.

These words are not going to learn themselves.

Do you want a beer?

It was a new thing, this drinking together. Orr had drunk rarely in Ireland. He was not teetotal exactly, but had a precise awareness of a capacity within himself—learned through watching his own father—for relentlessness. With alcohol he had always exercised caution, largely from seeing the damage—relentless damage—it had caused in numerous families he visited. Now, however, here—in his new home, his responsibilities shaken off—he allowed himself a little more freedom. He had only a beer at a time, two at the most, and—so far as I know—only with me, in the apartment.

I handed him the bottle and sat down opposite.

You’re in a good mood tonight, he said.

Get thee behind me, Satan.

He smiled.

Are you getting there? I asked.

Dot by dot.

We sat in silence, sipping our beers. I put on some music.

Can I ask you something? he said. He didn’t wait for me to answer. Why do you never bring a lover back?

I laughed. The alcohol, I was aware, had relaxed me. How do you know? I said.

Do you think it would bother me?

That’s nothing to do with it.

It wouldn’t.

I felt an anger, unspecific, rise in me. It’s nothing to do with you.

He raised his hands.

We sat another minute, saying nothing. The music floated around us, a piano piece by Schoenberg. Orr began to play his fingers on the table. I watched them, trying to locate the anger, hold it in place. It kept moving.

What difference does it make to you? I said.

He stopped moving his fingers. None at all, he said. I just don’t want you to think it would bother me. You can do what you want.

Of course I can do what I want. It’s my fucking house. I necked the rest of my beer, walked to the fridge for another. You know nothing about me, I said to him. What do you know about your children? What was the point in even having them?

He stood up, shuffled to his room. He turned to face me. I didn’t mean anything by it, Samuel, he said.

He disappeared into his room, closing the door quietly behind him. I stood where I was, by the fridge, felt my head spinning, the dull emptiness thudding. I realised how drunk I was. Schoenberg played on, a soundtrack repeating, an unravelling melody always approaching itself and then falling away. Philip returns, the man I had met—twice now—replaced by the boy, the boy who had played with me, laughed with me, tickled me. I drink quickly, then open another. I am in my mother’s bedroom. I drink until Schoenberg is finished.

 

I woke late, almost ten; my mouth dry, wasted, my head concrete. I heard Orr in the living room; the previous night’s conversation came back to me in pieces. I couldn’t remember exactly what I said, but the aftertaste was bitter. I lay on my bed until I heard him go out.

I finally left the apartment, a little after midday, and walked, on a hunch, to the church. It was a small, redbrick building, settled between a cheap grocer’s and a nameless glass-fronted shop offering, in tall, blunt capitals, TATTOOS REMOVED. The church’s signage was smaller, but still eye-catching—IGLESIA PENTECOSTAL DE JESUS CRISTO EL LIBERTADOR—painted by hand on a blue wooden board. I tried the door, and it opened. I stepped into the small lobby, frosted glass and fake wood panelling, like the waiting area of a cheap dentist, and through another door into the sanctuary. Orr was sitting at the back. A young woman, in her early twenties at most, was dusting the chairs, moving slowly along the rows, side to side towards the front. She was laughing, presumably at something Orr had just said.

Who’s that? Orr asked.

The woman looked at me. Who are you? Her accent thick, heavy.

I’m Samuel Orr, I said.

No, I’m Samuel Orr, said my father, standing up.

The woman laughed, though surely, I thought, she didn’t understand. She was laughing simply to please my father. I looked at his face, and saw a pride there, a satisfaction, almost sexual.

This is my son, Ceci. Sam, this is Ceci.

She jerked her head up in acknowledgement, saying nothing.

Do you want to get some lunch, Dad?

My father shuffled towards me. Okay Ceci. Until next time. You be good.

I’m always good, señor. Maybe you be good for once, eh? She laughed.

I’m too old to be good, said Orr.

 

We ordered food in a Vietnamese café, huddled together at a shared table beside an old Chinese couple who ate without speaking. The slurps and clinks of their meal amused Orr, who was clearly on good form.

I’m sorry about last night, I said.

Don’t worry about it.

The tiny woman who worked behind the counter brought over our sandwiches. Who is this? she said.

This is my son, Sam, said Orr.

She inclined herself slightly towards me, in what I supposed was a greeting. I attempted to return the gesture.

You look like your father.

Brilliant, I said.

Are you happy here? I asked my father, when she returned to the counter.

I like the food.

I mean in New York.

Orr took a bite, and I waited, watching him.

You haven’t asked me that since about a year after I arrived, he said. He raised his hand. That’s not a complaint. Just an observation. Do I like it here? Yes. I do. I like Bushwick, I like the iglesia, I like spending time with Guest and his kids. Sometimes I worry that I am too much in your space.

I did not answer. He went on.

I know it is different for you. That you do not have the freedom you would have if I was not here. But then I think, he said, that you would tell me. You are not a coward.

I smiled. He left the word hanging. Smart bastard.

I’m not sure you would know if I am or am not, I said finally.

The old couple beside us stood up and put on their coats. As they left, Orr shuffled along the bench, extending himself. Colonising, I thought, unwillingly.

You are not a coward, he said. Experiencing fear does not make you a coward.

You think I experience fear?

Don’t we all? he said.

What are you scared of? I asked him.

He smiled, amused. Maybe I have not tasted life enough. I am nearly eighty years old.

Do you worry you might have it wrong?

Life?

God. The universe.

He laughed. What have I lost if I have? I sinned, I was forgiven.

Is it that simple?

Forgiveness is everything, he said. There is not a person I have met—anywhere, anytime, any kind of person—who would not be relieved by forgiveness. Forgiving others, forgiving themselves, being forgiven.

I don’t need God for that, I said.

I do, said Orr.

 

We walked through Prospect Park afterwards, Orr’s hand in my arm. Birds flitted overhead, their screeches mingled with kids’ shouting and crying. The sun was weak, and described everything—trees, grass, the circling paths—with an impressibility, the sense that a strong enough hand could rework it. The brutal pace of the surrounding streets was temporarily substituted; it was like being in another city, a kinder city. Still I was alert, scouring the park for my inevitable brother.

We rested on a bench near the zoo. Monkey howls echoed in the distance.

I need to talk to you, I said to him.

Is that not what we’re doing?

Philip is in New York.

He did not start, did not express surprise. He turned his face slowly towards me.

He showed up at the museum, I said.

When?

Two weeks ago. Three different occasions.

You didn’t know he was here? He hadn’t been in touch?

He just appeared.

Orr half smiled. Like a ghost, he said. What does he want?

I don’t know. I told him I didn’t want to speak to him. Maybe nothing.

Orr turned away from me. In the distance a dog chased a child on a bike across a piece of wasteland, the dust rising up into a sun-filled gauze. I wondered exactly what he could see of it.

There is no nothing, he said. I got a call from Magee. About a month ago.

The monkey howls sounded closer.

Magee?

The mechanic I worked with. Philip showed up there. Looking for me. Five, six weeks ago.

Did he tell him where you were?

He told him I was in New York. Living with you. But he got cautious when Philip started asking questions. Felt something was a bit off. He called me to tell me.

He didn’t give him the address?

I don’t think he even has it. But no, he said he only told him I was here. In the city.

Did he say why he was looking for you?

No. What did he say to you?

I told him what had happened. He listened, quietly, looking suddenly older. I wondered what pictures he returned to, how similar or different they were to mine. Forty yards behind us a fence rattled violently, and I turned to see a macaque, teeth bared, beating its fist heavily on the chain-link. I bared my teeth back and he paused for a second and then returned to his pointless struggle with more force.

 

I went back to the paintings. I could sit no longer at my desk, the floors beneath me teeming with the unknown. I asked Balthasar for a few days back on the floor, ostensibly for research. He raised his eyebrows but made it happen. So for a week I moved between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Goya to Courbet. It was quiet in the outer wings in the first few days; still, I was visible.

I cannot say what I wanted to happen. Did I want a confrontation? There is a pleasure in shame, is there not, albeit a vicious one; the brutal, satisfying confirmation that we are unworthy of our satisfactions. A longing took me over, for something I would even now find hard to identify. When nothing is named, confusion grows and with it comes anguish. The pulse thickened, my blood drawn towards the outside. It was not revenge, I swear, but it was not not revenge. How much sharper the thirst of the swimmer.

 

I stood alone, in front of Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot. I had always loved the bird, the rough, bold strokes, flashes of colour. The gallery was still, silent; I briefly closed my eyes. The hand on my shoulder was a jolt, and I turned, startled. Philip lifted his hand off theatrically, but he was standing close, too close, and I took a step back, almost falling into the painting. His face was curled into a forced smile. I stepped to the side to allow me away from the wall without having to move towards him.

You weren’t expecting me? he said. Sorry for my absence, the world makes its demands. But now I need your help. I want to see my father.

His hand twitched, and he tapped the ground nervously with the heel of his right foot. His eyes were clear, though, precise.

What for? I asked.

You must believe me.

What must I believe?

I need to see him.

He’s an old man, I said. He has had enough. A thought came to me. You know he’s blind?

He was blind long before his eyes went, he said drily. He owes me. Or I owe him. Either way.

Owes you what?

He shook his head, as at an infuriating child. Nothing is free, he said. Everything must be paid for.

There was no smile, no irony; even the indulgence of self-righteousness was absent. He looked, in truth, pained, his face contracted. His hands moved imperceptibly, as though he was channelling all his energy into stopping them shaking. I thought, for a moment, that he was about to cry.

This is ridiculous, I said. I’m not having this conversation. I moved to walk away.

He reached out and grabbed my arm. I attempted to shake it off, but he held firm.

Justice, he said.

I stared at him.

He repeated: Justice.

With my free hand I pointed to my face.

A Korean family walked into the gallery. The son, six or seven years old, stared at us. I composed myself, again began to walk away, but he held my arm tight, would not let go. The father of the boy, younger than both Philip and I, saw what was happening. Philip stared at him, and he said nothing, taking his son’s hand and walking him, with his wife and daughter, quickly into the next gallery.

He let go. I was young, Sam. I am sorry. You have nothing to fear from me.

And my father? Your father?

He shook his head.

Go home, I said.

Don’t misunderstand me, Sam. I am not asking, I am telling.

I turned and began to stride towards the door.

Do not walk away from me, Sam.

I kept walking, towards the adjoining gallery. I am almost through the gap when I hear the sound, the tear. I turn to see Philip walk in the opposite direction, dropping something into his pocket. Courbet’s painting is sliced neatly down the middle, a clean, brutal cut. The woman, lying back, is in two pieces, a magician’s trick gone wrong. Her smile, now that the canvas hangs sagging, appears more like a rictus of pain, the parrot staring at her in disbelief.

 

The museum director was a man in his late fifties called Rollins. He was trim, precise; he had an easy authority. I’d always liked him. Beside him was a younger woman—the head of human resources, called Carzola, who I didn’t really know—and two other men who were introduced and whose names I immediately forgot. I sat across the table from them, and beside me Balthasar, nervously moving his hands in and out of each other like koi in a pond. He kept looking to me then away again, a disappointed parent.

I was not nervous. This surprised me. I had settled into what happened as though it were a kind of fate, as though it were somehow predestined. I was aware that this thought brought me, with some irony, into what I imagined was my father’s world-view: Moirai, effect, the mysterious workings of God. As the thought played itself out, I was struck that I had it wrong. Orr did not seem tied to a fixed universe.

Rollins passed a sheet of paper across the desk. On it was a description of what had happened the previous day. Read this and tell me if there’s anything you contest, he said.

I lifted the paper and read. No one spoke. After two minutes I handed it back.

Close enough, I said.

You told us yesterday that the man was your brother, Rollins said.

Half-brother, I interrupted.

Half-brother? Carzola repeated.

We have the same father.

And you had seen him previously in the museum?

Three times before yesterday, yes.

And outside the museum?

No. Before he turned up a couple of weeks ago I hadn’t seen him in thirty-five years.

You had an argument, Rollins said.

Yes.

What was it about?

It’s hard to say.

Samuel, I’m not sure if you’re aware of how serious this is.

I am aware.

Carzola leaned forward. It is important that you tell us everything. Your brother destroyed a Courbet, worth many millions of dollars . . .

Half-brother, I said.

This drew a smile from Rollins. Half-smile. What kind of relationship do you have with your half-brother? he asked.

I pointed to my face. I watched Rollins take it in. There was a surprising satisfaction in his horror. Carzola had not understood. What do you mean? she asked.

He gave me this, I said. When I was three years old. That was the last time I saw him.

The man at the end of the table, who until this point had been silent, spoke. Are you in danger?

I felt it again, that distilled shock that had haunted my childhood, a memory fighting its way to the surface.

I don’t believe so. I don’t know.

Rollins nodded. Okay, Sam. Thanks for your time. There is a procedure we have to go through, an investigation. In the short term you’ll be put on paid leave.

What will happen to the painting? I asked.

It will be fixed, Rollins said. As though it never happened.

 

Orr inclined his head, a smile, rueful. Justice, he repeated, chewing over the word like a piece of food. I am telling him, again, what I said to Philip, what he said to me. We are back in the sandwich shop, escaping the claustrophobia of the apartment. Safety in numbers.

And then he sliced the painting?

I had turned and walked away. He’d already tried to stop me twice. Why do you want me to go through this again?

Orr shook his head, dismissing my protest. Humour me, he said.

Yes, and then I heard the canvas tear and turned back and he was walking away.

You didn’t tell me what painting it was.

It was a Courbet. Woman with a Parrot.

Of a woman?

With a parrot, yes.

What is she doing with the parrot?

She’s just lying there. It’s perched on her hand.

Is she naked?

Yes.

Is she beautiful?

What do you mean?

You work in an art gallery and don’t know what beautiful is?

It’s a museum. And yes I do.

Well is she beautiful?

I suppose she is.

He eats his sandwich with evident satisfaction.

Describe her to me, he says.

I’d need to be looking at it.

So look at it.

I picked up my mobile but set it down immediately.

She’s lying on her back, I said, a kind of awkward angle. She’s in a room but it almost feels like a tent because of the way the curtain is pulled back. Outside there are these dark, green trees, and just a small amount of sky, turning orange. There’s a light from above, somewhere in the room you can’t see. It’s falling on her, making her skin soft, this beautiful cream-white colour. Her curves are beautiful too. Her breasts are there, obviously, but you actually notice her belly more, a sort of tiny mound, a roundness. And her thighs are thick, powerful. Her hair is splayed out on the white sheet she’s lying on, going in all directions, thick brown wavy hair, lighter at the ends. And she has one arm stretched up, where the parrot is perched, looking down at her.

Orr sat transfixed, eyes shut firmly to the world. I stopped talking and watched him, his breathing, his body pushing the air in and out, inside him somewhere this picture I had been building. I wondered again at what he saw, what Courbet’s painting looked like to a man who had never seen it, who had heard only my rough description.

It’s beautiful, he said.

Yes.

And they can fix it?

So they say.

We sat a little longer. I finished eating, watched the other customers. Orr seemed briefly lost in a world of his own.

I broke into his silence. What do you think he wants?

Violence, he said. Well. He thinks he wants violence. But it’s not violence he wants. He wants something else. He thinks violence will give it to him.

What does he want?

What everybody wants, he said. Peace.

 

For a week I was at home. My father and I circled one another, rarely in the same room. A dull tension crept in, something undefined pulling at us, injecting a sharpness into our interactions. It was as though, I sensed, by telling him what Philip had said and done, I had acted as his representative. I felt Orr’s eyes follow me around the apartment, aware that my blurred outline was, to him, no different from any other.

I could not shake Philip as I walked the streets, every alleyway hiding him, every corner an opening. It did not matter that he did not appear, he was inside me. It was an unexpected relief to return to work; the Met now, thanks to the increased security, the one place I felt at least marginally safe. The guards regarded me cautiously, though none mentioned the incident directly. I checked in with Balthasar every day, to hear if anything unusual had happened.

On my third day back I was called in to see Rollins. I sat opposite him. He held up a letter.

This arrived, addressed to you, he said. Do you mind if I open it?

Go ahead, I said.

He pulled out a piece of paper:

 

O lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.

 

There was no name. The handwriting was neat, precise.

This is your brother?

I would guess so.

Does it mean anything to you?

Not specifically.

I have a duty to look after the museum, he said.

I nodded. I felt sorry for him.

I went back to the floor, wandered the long rooms stared at by the paintings. It seems strange to insist upon it, but I was calm. I did not know around which corner Philip would appear, but I knew he would, eventually, and when he did I believed I would be ready for him. A sense of destiny settled in me, and even the memory of Anna’s scepticism was not enough to drown it out.

 

I did not have to wait long. A few days later I was walking through Bushwick, coming home from a friend’s house, and I spotted him. He was almost a block away, walking, it appeared, without particular intention. He took a right, walked down Harman as far as Evergreen. As he walked he glanced around him, looking up at the apartments on either side. At Evergreen he took a left, then another left at Greene, walking back towards the main road. He was scouring. He did not know—not yet, at any rate—but he had the neighbourhood. I lived a good half-mile away. I got there quickly, but my father was absent. I ran down to the church. As I arrived congregants were leaving; I saw my father towards the back, laughing with a young black man. I pushed through the rest of them—most of them knew me by now and nodded or smiled—and took him by the arm.

Dad, we need to go.

He was effusive; his pride of me at its greatest among his fellow worshippers. Samuel, he said, calm yourself.

Philip’s here, I said.

He was caught between maintaining his easy charm with the young man at his side, and something else; not fear. Maybe anticipation.

Here?

Nearby. Looking, hunting. We need to go.

The young man stared at us. Are you okay? he enquired, gently but with unconcealed excitement, sensing scandal.

Orr excused himself and I guided him away from the church, whispers already at our backs. It was getting dark, the air chilling. We walked quickly. I told him what I had seen. He said nothing, allowed me to lead him.

Inside the apartment he sat down at the table. I was exasperated; he appeared unfazed.

So what now? I said.

I don’t know, son. To every thing there is a season.

That doesn’t help.

What do you want to do? he asked.

You can’t stay here.

I saw him weigh me up. I saw him measure his objections, then hold them.

He is around here somewhere, looking for us, I said.

It will be okay.

How do you know? It’s a matter of time. Today, tomorrow. He will find us. Then what? It’s a matter of time.

Everything is a matter of time.

You’re a fool, I said.

Fear and shame.

What?

Fear and shame, he repeated. Almost everything we do is out of fear and shame. All of us. I do not want for you and I to live like that. Philip must be Philip. You and I must be you and I.

 

I called Guest, who called his grandson in Queens, Zico. He and his wife agreed to put my father up for a few days. We took a taxi around midnight, and I got him settled, thanked them for their kindness. They seemed bemused. By the time I got home it was almost two in the morning. I went to bed but lay awake, my body pulsing; the sight of Philip walking in front of me—leading me, I began to imagine—forced itself into the space where sleep should have been. I got up, opened a beer. I stared at the street below, almost willing him to appear. How dedicated was he, how far would he go? I felt again that appetite, that unnameable hunger. I returned to bed and fell asleep, eventually, and woke at six with the image of my mother, younger, attending Philip’s scar. She is close to his face, he can feel her breath, smell her skin, see the moist glisten of sweat on her shoulderblade. Except it is not Philip, it is Orr. Except it is not Orr, it is me.

 

The following evening, I went to a bar in the Village. Let’s leave it anonymous. I used to go there for sex, years ago, so much easier to find than love, and less expensive. Anyway, I knew this bar, I knew the men who frequented it. The type of men. It was not as clean as the others; the hangers-on all hung on a little more, if you know what I mean. I nursed a drink, watching the room just like everyone else. One or two men nodded towards me; I waved them away. Eventually I was approached by someone who looked like they might do. His hair was greasy, and he repeatedly, as he offered me a drink, tucked it behind his ears. His skin was pock-marked, darker on one side of his face than the other. His eyes were bright though, clear, too clear. Tripped up, high. He spoke slowly, deliberately, as though to a foreigner. None of this was important. It was the marks on his knuckles that appealed.

We went to the bathrooms and I tried to fuck him. I knew already that he wouldn’t let me, but I saw how far I could push him, how much he had in him, where the line was. I was good at this, at least. When I had his measure—just before he beat the living shit out of me—I stopped, and sat on the floor.

Do you want to make some money? I asked him.

This is not . . . he said. I am not . . .

Not for this, I said. I need you to hurt somebody.

 

 

I stepped out of the entrance to my apartment. I walked, slowly, down the street. I paused halfway along, punched at my phone. I smiled, laughed, as though having received a humorous message. A group of teenagers swam past me, around me, parting then re-forming, their shrill voices ringing in their wake. I was invisible to them. There are none so blind as those who will not see.

It was late, after eleven. My friend—I shall resist naming him too—had not told me where he would be standing, so I would be less inclined to look for him. Nonchalance as weapon. I dropped my phone back into my pocket. My heart hammered in my chest, but I steadied myself. This was the third time we had tried this. It was no more likely to work this time than the others, but there persisted an unmistakable thrill, a charge. I walked to the end of the street, turned right towards the park a quarter-mile away. Much of Bushwick had been prettified; but not this part. Drunks and users stalked it at night, looking for fixes. Half the lights were broken. Scattered glass flecked the path. I sat down on a bench, took out my mobile, feigned attention. I waited.

After ten minutes I became aware of being watched. I mean, in this park you were always watched, but it was a specific kind of attention, directed. I knew it was him. After five minutes he stepped forward, towards me. The sick, pale light caught his scar, rendered it even more garish. He nodded, as though a friendly greeting.

I stared at him. It was a strange moment; the hatred I expected did not materialise. I felt something closer to curiosity, almost empathy. Though I knew what was coming. From behind him, out of the darkness—very noir, I know—appeared my friend. Philip glanced over his shoulder to where I was looking, realising too late. The first punch hit him clean; a crunch, a kind of echoey thud, and he dropped. I stood up and moved away while further punches were delivered. It was not like the films, I was thinking. The sounds were less full, more muffled. I looked around the park but if there were other people there they were wise enough to pay no attention. I heard the report of a bone breaking (arm? collar? rib?) and Philip cried out, more whimper than scream. I told my friend to stop. He didn’t stop. He kicked Philip in the stomach now, now the face. Stop, I said louder, and he looked at me, and swung his foot again, his heel this time landing on the side of Philip’s face. I heard myself shouting now. Fucking stop. Money? I shouted, money?, but still he ignored me. I hurled myself towards him, and as I arrived I felt my own face caught by his fist. The pain was sudden, intuitive, but I was on my feet again in a second and forced my shoulder, low and hard, into his midriff. He fell back. I was on my knees, staring at him. He glared back, breathing heavily; returned, it seemed, to sense. I threw money at him—I’m not even sure how much—and he picked it off the ground, climbing to his feet. He smiled at me, and walked nonchalantly away.

I turned around. Philip was lying prone, one arm splayed awkwardly above his head, a fictional victim. I got close enough to hear him breathing, but he didn’t respond when I spoke to him, tapped his face. I hid my number, dialled an ambulance. I got slowly, painfully, to my feet. I watched him. One minute, two. In the moment I cannot say what I feel because I do not know. I saw a figure at the far end of the park, a woman, swaying, apparently drunk, looking towards us. I walked out of the park, along the cycle lane. There was a dive bar open on the corner. I stepped inside, ordered a whisky, and sipped silently until I heard the sirens.

 

I slept like a child.

I wasted two days before going to the hospital. Waited. Freudian autocorrect. I called first, told them I was a work colleague. They outlined visiting regulations and explained that he would not be released any time soon. He had had a haemorrhage in his chest—a blunt trauma, they said—and, whilst he was stable, he was not yet out of the woods. I hung up and searched ‘blunt trauma’: This happens when a body part collides with something else, usually at high speed. Blood vessels inside the body are torn or crushed either by shear forces or a blunt object. Examples are car accidents, physical assaults, and falls.

After work I took the subway downtown to Mount Sinai Hospital—honour thy father and thy mother—and made my way to the ward. It was a small, personal room at the end of a long corridor. I steeled myself; I still felt blank, impassive, but something rattled in me, ice in a glass: a mute awareness of deception. I looked through the small window and saw a girl sitting beside the bed. She was fifteen, sixteen; dark-haired, pale. Her back was mostly to me, so I could not clearly make out her features, except when she shifted position. For some reason she put me in mind of a Velazquez. She was leaning towards him, talking. His eyes were closed. I couldn’t tell if he was asleep. There seemed to be, in the carry of her shoulders, her delivery—I could not, of course, hear what she was saying—something more of complaint than story. An exasperation.

The corridor behind me was empty, silent. I felt—bluntly—like an intruder. After a few minutes she turned, as though suddenly aware of my presence. She stared at me—my face framed inside the tiny window—and turned back to Philip. I was well dressed, of course. I suppose to her I looked like a doctor.

I went downstairs, drank a coffee. I considered leaving—What am I here for anyway?—but forced myself back an hour later. I looked through the small window: the girl was gone. A small hesitation and then I was in the room, standing beside his bed, staring down at him. He was asleep, or appeared to be. I stared at him without—strike me down etc.—remorse. His face was bruised; dark patches gave way to a sickly spreading yellow. His mouth had been reset; I saw the marks of the wires on his neck. It was strange to stand in front of him like this, above him. Fear absent, and pity. But so too hatred, anger. My eyes searched his face, his body, as though for clues; something to hang myself on. The past, where I had lived for ever, opened up into the present. It felt like the lines between these were no longer relevant, no longer existed.

I saw myself reach out and touch him. I pulled back hair from his forehead, and moved the back of my fingers down his cheek. His breathing did not change. I set my hand, palm flat, on his chest. His heart: thump, thump, thump. We have been here before. Haven’t we? I press down a little. Testing. He does not flinch. I wonder if he has slipped into a coma. I lean my head down above his, turn my ear to his mouth. His breath comes in short, sharp draws. No, then. It is warm against me. I feel it enter my ear, travel inside, to where? I stand up again, again stare at him. My hand moves to his chest, up to his neck. His skin is clammy, tight; a thin film of moisture. My hand rests on his throat. I feel the pulse through it, his life pressing back. It is too easy, I think, but my fingers find such easy purchase. I am a longing I cannot say. I feel my arm stiffen, tighten, as though he is resisting. I move my face to his, closer and closer. Still his eyes are shut, still his breath, barely. I lean my face to his, my lips to his lips, and I kiss him.

I do not know for how long this happens. I move back, take my hand away. I feel my own heart, but it is barely beating. I stand in the middle of the room, a little away from the bed, a supplicant. The hum of the equipment suddenly seems deafening. His eyes remain closed, the landscape of his face unmoved. I am convinced, somehow, that a transaction has taken place.

 

I returned the following day. I do not know exactly why. There is something to be said for presence. I walked along the corridor towards his room; from behind me I heard a shout. I turned to see the girl. She moved towards me, quickly.

You fucking asshole, she said.

She looked different at this angle, this distance. Less Velazquez, more Goya. Her eyes were tiny black balls, penetrating, direct. Her features seemed somehow undefined, as though she was still growing into them, finding their edges. I suppose she was. No more than sixteen. I knew too, with certainty, that Philip was her father.

She reached me and pushed me hard, in the chest. I stumbled backwards, stayed on my feet.

Who are you? she asked.

She went to push me again; I put my arms up.

Who are you? she repeated, louder. I saw her see it, the scar. An infinitesimal flinch, a calculation.

I’m a friend, I said, stupidly.

She stared at me, hatred pushing at her speech. Bullshit. You brought them. She flickered in the air, her taut movement shimmering, her body a vibration.

Brought who? I said.

She paused, measuring me. Her narrow eyes narrowed.

Who? I said again. She looked towards Philip’s room. I turned towards it, took a step.

He’s not there, she said. They took him away.

I turned to her. Who?

The police. She was retreating from the anger, beginning to believe me.

When?

Who are you? she asked again.

So I told her.

 

 

I picked my father up the same evening. As I helped him into the cab, Zico pulled me aside, smiling.

He is some piece of work, your father.

I raised my eyebrows.

You know a young woman came every day? For an hour. Ceci. She would rub his feet, listen to him talk. He is teaching her about music. So he says. It is okay, it was not a problem. I hope I have that when I am his age.

I shook Zico’s hand, climbed in beside my father, smiling. We sat in silence as the cab snaked its way through Queens, down into Brooklyn. The bland, grey streets seemed transformed, illuminated. Rescued. I was aware of the foolishness of the thought, but it rooted in me regardless.

Before we got through the door of the apartment, Orr tightened his grip. Tell me what happened, son.

 

He was unsurprised by it, by all of it, it seemed. I had told Sarah almost everything; but I spared him nothing. We had come this far together, what harm a little further? It was true: I found myself wanting something from him. A word, a sign. Do we ever grow up?

Tell me more about her, he said.

I described her as best I could, her sharp wit and hot blood, but really I did not know. She lives with her grandmother in Fordham, I said. Her mother died, a few years ago. Philip did not cope. The more I talked the more I wondered myself.

I would like to meet her, he said. What’s her name?

I can’t believe I haven’t told him. Of course I can. Sarah, I said.

 

She had given me her number, but for two days my messages went unanswered. I stared at my phone for what felt like hours at a time, but it lay on my desk unresponsive. I examined my own texts—had I been too forceful, too insipid, too quick or slow?—like a teenager myself, I couldn’t help thinking. At home in the evening my father stalked, manhandling his way around my apartment like a blind Humboldt. Our interactions were minimal; each of us awaiting an announcement, an invitation we could not conjure.

On the third day it arrived. Short, direct, straightforward—Come for dinner, Sarah—and an address. She lived near the train station, and my father, ever the democrat, insisted we take the train. To prepare ourselves, he said, as though the New Haven line were a pilgrimage.

I do not recall ever being as nervous as standing on the steps of the house, a two-storey grey-clad working-class Connecticut affair, basic as they come. Paint peeled off at the edges; a dull grey stain spread from below the guttering on the right, like a disease. The street itself was quiet of traffic, though Mexican music blared from somewhere nearby. My father stood beside me as we waited, immaculate in a suit, seemingly unfazed. I stared at him, as much to distract myself as anything else, and he reached out and took my hand, as though I were a child again, and I was flooded with both gratitude and anger. I almost jumped when the door finally opened and there stood Sarah, looking first at me but then ignoring me entirely, turning her attention to Orr, my father, her grandfather, who looked up towards her and said—I’m not sure whether ironically or not, as though it were his door she had just opened—Welcome.

She sat us down at the dining table and began immediately to carry in bowls of food from the kitchen, refusing my help.

Where is your grandmother? I asked, and she shrugged, and I realised, suddenly, that she had done all this herself. So many more questions came, I had to stop myself. My anxiety was palpable, running through me. I could feel Orr’s blind eyes boring, his head shaking almost imperceptibly from side to side. Calm yourself, Sam, I imagined him saying, and I did.

 

She was reserved but not intimidated. Orr, typically, bypassed small-talk, his curiosity unswerving as a child’s. In a similar spirit she answered his questions directly: where she’d grown up, why she lived with her grandmother, what happened to her mother (hit by a truck, she said, three years ago, while crossing a road in Portchester; Orr didn’t flinch). She began to lose interest when I interjected with questions of school, of her future plans. Her answers dropped to a word or phrase, her shoulders hunching into apathy. I felt guilt for occupying the space my father, in his bluntness, had created.

As she carried the plates into the kitchen the front door rattled open and a woman appeared, in her late sixties, hair grey and unkempt, her teeth stained from smoking. As she entered the room she was rummaging in her bag, and stuck a cigarette in her mouth as she looked up. She started as she saw us, but immediately moved on past, staring at us all the while, into the kitchen. I looked at my father, whispered quietly that it must be her grandmother. He nodded. We sat in silence as they spoke in hushed tones in the kitchen, a quiver in Sarah’s voice, pained and plaintive.

A few seconds later Sarah appeared with bowls of ice cream. Her face drawn, an edge in her movements. My insights are few, but I know shame when I see it, and it was as painful to me as if it had been my own body. She sat down opposite us again, silently, once or twice looking towards the kitchen, her grandmother’s unseen presence everything. I felt for her, I really did, but was dumb to help, my awkwardness, I well knew, just an addendum to her own. Orr leaned across and took my arm, helping himself to his feet. I moved to stand up, to help him, but he nudged me back into my seat.

We both watched him as he edged his way around the table, to the empty doorframe. He stepped inside, and we heard him say, Hello, I’m Samuel Orr. Is there a seat you could help me into?

 

Sarah and I sat across from one another. We ate without speaking, listening instead to the muffled voices in the kitchen, the exclamations, the—unexpected, I sensed—laughter. I watched Sarah slowly let her shoulders out, the tension releasing. Her eyes gave themselves to tears, but the rest of her face was impassive, and when I went to speak she snapped her fingers together sharply to shut me up. I smiled, laughed—I couldn’t help it—at the excess of the gesture, and then she smiled too, and her face, with a thin wet line down either cheek, was suddenly alive, transfigured. She let herself breathe, breaths that came and went like a child after running, taking in and letting out as much as she could.

 

A few days later she messaged to say she was going to visit her father. He had eschewed representation and his case had been heard quickly, without our knowledge. For ‘criminal damage’, a term Courbet himself would have appreciated, he received a three-year sentence with a one-year minimum, to be served in a holding centre thirty miles north of the city. It was a week before he could get out of bed, but he was now able to receive visitors.

I warned her that Philip may not now want to see us. I had, as I said, told her who I was, but in every story there are gaps, and I’d been careful enough, or cowardly enough, to leave out some of the darker ingredients. Even as she and my father exchanged confidences over dinner I had seen in him a caution, a withholding, which may have been either generosity or self-protection. Still, she asked if we would come, and I realised it was for her and not for him she was asking.

I spoke to Rollins at the museum. He knew, obviously, but it was better that he knew that I knew he knew. I took the day off, hired a car. My father and I picked Sarah up in the morning. Orr sat in the front, beside me, staring ahead. For the first time in a long time he seemed nervous. The confidence sucked out of him, he sat in gloomy silence. Sarah climbed into the back, her earphones in, and I wondered if this was how it was going to go, but suddenly she took them out, synced her phone to my stereo, and filled the car with expletive-fuelled hip-hop. Orr began to tap the roof of the car with his hand, and she laughed, and we drove north.

 

The walls of the prison—it was a prison, whatever other words they used—were the colour of dirty water. A reek of ammonia punched at us as we walked into the reception. The woman sitting behind the desk pointed us unspeaking towards a corridor, at the end of which we entered a large, open room with tables and chairs set out like a school cafeteria. A few other inmates sat at tables across from partners, parents, children. Those who were talking at all talked quietly, pointless secrets shared.

Describe it, Orr said.

You don’t want to know, I said.

We sat down and waited. None of us spoke. Regret rose up in me. What was I thinking, agreeing to this, bringing them here? Orr shuffled in his seat, his dark glasses catching the fluorescents and throwing them back. Sarah put her earphones in. I remembered, at this moment, my mother telling me—I must have been twelve or thirteen years old at the most—that in the concentration camps they had prisons. Nowhere low enough that you can’t go lower.

We looked up in unison, the three of us, as the door opened. He walked into the room, looked around. It seemed to take a moment for his eyes to adjust, and then. His face moved back, a bad actor expressing surprise. He stood still, unmoved, staring at us, for ten, fifteen seconds. I reached across, took my father’s hand. He walked towards us. I lifted my father out of his seat, and stood beside him. Between him and Philip.

When he reached us he faltered, put a hand on the table. His face had cleared up decently, the bruising almost gone. A few marks still darkened his forehead, and one of his eyes was bloodshot. I realised I hadn’t seen his eyes before; each time I had seen him I avoided looking. They were unmistakably Orr’s. I reached out my hand, but he held his own up as though in warning, and Sarah came around me and helped him into a seat.

Orr was silent throughout this interaction. He was looking at Philip, or looking at where Philip was, but his face betrayed nothing. We all sat down, Sarah beside her father, Orr and I on the other side of the table.

How are you, son? Orr said.

It sounded cruel, that son—though surely it wasn’t. Philip rocked back and forth a little.

Did she tell you how she died? Philip said.

Who? I asked.

Philip continued to rock, forward and backward, concentrated. Sarah reached out her hand and gently put it on his back. He shook it off roughly, glared at her, and then looked back quickly at us, grimacing. The hatred was material, flesh and bone. He lifted a fist to his mouth, the knuckles pulsing white, set it back on the table.

He turned to Sarah. Did you tell them how she died?

Sarah nodded.

She was knocked down, he said. She was knocked down by a truck. He stared at Orr. She was knocked down by a truck.

Orr reached out his hand, blindly, across the table. Philip jerked back, as though under attack. He shook his head, ferocious.

She was knocked down by a truck, he repeated.

I am sorry, son, Orr said, and Philip leaned forward, into his face.

You fucking should be, he said.

I pushed my hand into his chest. Such little force required. He settled back, started coughing.

Sarah stood up, walked out of the room. I wanted to follow her but could not leave my father alone.

What is this for? I said.

He lifted one hand to his face, to his scar. His face a mess of contortions, fraught and unspecific. He looked at Orr, steadily, and the movement began to slow, his face recomposing itself. He said nothing, but the rocking stopped, the shaking in the hands. His breathing steadied into a simple rise, fall. He sat, quiet, calm even, staring at my father. At his father. Two, three minutes passed. No one broke the silence.

Finally, Okay. He said okay. He stood up. My father followed the blurred form, and tried to stand up himself, awkwardly. I quickly moved to help him. Philip turned to walk away.

Wait, son, Orr said. Philip.

Philip stopped, turned.

Can I touch you? Orr said.

Philip stared at him. I see the boy again, sixteen years old, all the love and hatred packed tight into such a small space. I see him make a decision and refuse it, and then again, and then again. And then he said, Yes.

Orr moved towards him, his hands out, and found his face. My own slow heart beats beats beats. Orr’s hands move across his features: his eyes, his mouth, his cheeks. He brings pressure to bear, draws Philip down towards him, and Philip allows it. Orr begins to kiss his face; forehead first, one cheek, then the other. His mouth finds the scar—even blind, he remembers—and stays with it, on it. Philip does not breathe, does not move. Eventually Orr lets go, steps back. He turns, holding out his arm for me to help him. I take it and he leads me away.

 

In the reception we find Sarah. I hand my father to her, and excuse myself. I find the toilets. I stare in the mirror and start to feel that my scar is moving, growing rather, expanding. I literally lift my hand to my face to stop it, and then stop myself. But still it grows. It does not actually change—I’m not seeing things, my face is as it always has been—but the sensation is pure, intimate, and a kind of liquid pain, a pleasure, rips through me. It’s like a shudder: my body shakes but doesn’t move. But I stand there, through it, and let it happen. I keep staring, the mirror throwing me back to myself, and it slowly subsides, water draining through rice, and I am sparkling—I honestly don’t know how else to put it—and I love myself. It is absurd, I know. I feel like I’ve found something I hadn’t lost. It’s not the quick physical ecstasy of drugs, but something slower, more—really?—sexual. I don’t know.

I stared into the sink, head lowered for a full minute, maybe longer, and then looked up again. Nothing was different, nothing. And yet, and yet. I walked back into the room, and there he was, sitting alone at the table. And this time it all came, all at once. The failure of feeling before is transformed, melted down and golden-calfed. All hatred and all love; the untainted joy, the sheer crude aliveness of it. One tiny decision piled upon another, one meaning giving way to another. The sky outside is inside. The walls are arbitrary, the tables are arbitrary, blood is arbitrary. Fuck lines, fuck borders. Fuck family, fuck the law. Fuck one thing following another. Fuck the past, fuck the future. Fuck apology and disappointment. Fuck fear and shame.

I walk towards him. He looks up when he sees me approach, stares cautiously. I move to him, drag him out of his chair and embrace him. I put my lips on his cheek—that cheek, yes—and kiss him. He resists and then does not resist. When I release him I realise I am crying, but it doesn’t matter.

 

 

The year found its own shape. Like any year, but not. Sarah slowly loosened, her caution attenuated. A couple of weeks after the prison visit she came to the city and I showed her around the Met, her and my father both, feigning and not feigning interest, and then we ate Brazilian food in a small café on 45th. I watched as the two of them fell into one another’s jokes, a shared disregard for the niceties of language pulling them closer together. At one point she reached across and moved his fork so that when he went to pick it up again he couldn’t find it. She laughed out loud at his confusion, and then took his hand and guided him. I could not quite bear the sentimentalism I felt, the joy at the pleasure they found in each other; unwarranted, unexpected. A fortnight later we returned to the prison, Philip sitting across from us again, though this time in silence, tempered, but present.

And so it went—month by month the visit north, the ice caps melting, small gestures, uncountable kindnesses adding up to so little and so much. And in between—at first every couple of weeks, then every week, then every few days—Sarah’s life became enmeshed with my father’s, with my own; her concerns became ours, her joys framing and widening the joys we found possible for ourselves. The absurdity of it all: we became a family.

For my father, I cannot say exactly how it was so easy. Whatever measure of hesitation he carried with regard to Philip seemed utterly irrelevant to Sarah, their ease childlike, their connection simple. For me, it was different. Sarah got at me, into me. She refused me apathy; she offered me—forced on me—the judgement of foolishness. She saw my failure to step fully into my life and, unlike everyone else, did not ignore it but poked at it, jabbed and shoved and won reactions. The complicated magnanimity of youth. She expected as much from me as she did from herself, and her demand was a form of generosity. It allowed me to imagine myself at the scale, with the imagination, that she did. Expectation creating hope. With the possibility of getting lost comes the possibility of being found.

 

Twelve months later, we drove north again. Three of us going, four of us to return. The tension was true, but no truer than a new anticipation, a longing for possibility. We had not talked, between us, of what would happen. Philip, when he told us the day of his release, had said only that he would go home, to New Haven, Connecticut, and from there he would see. He agreed, reluctantly, to our coming for him. I had watched him more than spoken to him over these months, watched his body fight to allow him to speak, the simple descriptions even of his days a tiny battle. We were quiet in the car; I streamed Tavener to calm my nerves, and it mingled surreally with the concrete drone of the tyres on the road, the endless traffic flooding around us, drawing us forward.

We pulled in to the car park shortly after 11 a.m. We walked together, still barely speaking, each of us, I suppose, lost in our own expectations, our own fears. Sarah carried a backpack for her father’s things; she looked like a misplaced hiker. The woman behind the desk—we knew her now as Marian—narrowed her eyes as we approached. She turned around, beckoned over a colleague, a man we didn’t know.

Hello, Marian, I said.

Sam.

How are you?

Sam, what are you doing here?

We’re here for Philip.

She looked up at her colleague. He smiled, whistled, shook his head. Philip’s gone, he said. He was released yesterday. He stared at our stupid faces. He’s gone, brother, he repeated.

 

 

I am back in Mount Sinai. My father is almost eighty-one years old, but will not see eighty-two. I walked here this morning, across the bridge, into Manhattan. In a couple of hours Sarah will be here too, when she finishes classes. For the last two weeks we have both come every day, at least for a short visit.

The cancer will kill him before his mind goes. Small mercies, he says, unironically. He is not in pain, but enjoys the morphine anyway. Never one to turn down pleasure where it’s going. He has a steady stream of visitors. In small groups they arrive in from Bushwick and Queens, carrying various absurd gifts to impress or humour him. Guest’s grandkids brought a mobile speaker loaded with hip-hop, with which he has enjoyed winding up the nurses. Ceci has come every day and stroked his face for half an hour. Even after a lifetime, I have not entirely abandoned my jealousy.

As I sit here nursing my coffee I am remembering a trip we took, last summer, before he became ill. We went to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. Sarah and I hiked a little, but mostly we just drove around, the three of us, stopping for snacks or drinks at various lookout points, the mountains green and lush stretching far in every direction. Sunsets came like gifts, and Sarah tried to adequately describe them for Orr, who seemed to take as much delight in her failure as he would have in seeing the sunsets themselves. On one day the clouds were so low we spent most of the day above them, as though out of the world entirely, looking down like gods. We pulled in at a rest stop, and Orr told a story I had not heard before. He and Anna had taken me on a day trip—I was no more than a year old—and we had gone to the Mourne Mountains. They took turns carrying me, strapped to each of their bodies in turn. We had not walked far, he told Sarah, just up the side of a hill. In the distance was Silent Valley, and a crucible of mountains surrounded us, sloping in all directions. I pointed things out to Sam, he went on, birds overhead, or the trees in the foreground, on the slope of one of the mountains. And he would stare in a sort of vague wonder. And I became aware that we were not seeing the same things. I mean, what we were both seeing were just impressions, bits of colour, shape and form, outlines, that I gave names to. When I said trees I wasn’t really seeing trees, he said, I was seeing this clump of colour that I knew, that fitted my idea of trees. And Sam, who then didn’t know the word tree, even though he experienced the same thing, saw something different, unclouded by the definition, by knowledge or expectation. I’ve never forgotten that strange sensation, the realisation that seeing was not just what your eyes do. Not just the light but what you do with the light, what stories you can make out of it. If you don’t have useful words, or good stories, then you see less. The world isn’t just there to be seen, but to be created. When we look at the world we create it.

 

When Sarah gets here I will step outside, wander the streets for a while. It was, at first, just to stretch my legs, to give Sarah some time alone with her grandfather. But it is more now. A week ago, I saw him, or thought I saw him. Lurking in a doorway across 85th, only a few blocks from the museum. I cannot be sure, of course. When we look at the world we create it. But I cannot help myself, or I do not wish, perhaps, to help myself. There is no fear in my suspicion. I walk the streets now as a target, like a deer waiting to be spotted. I want to draw him into the open, to show him I have nothing to hide, that he too has nothing to fear from me. Each being is distinct from all others, wrote Bataille. His birth, his death, the events of his life may have an interest for others, but he alone is directly concerned in them. He is born alone. He dies alone. Between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity . . . But I cannot refer to this gulf which separates us without feeling that this is not the whole truth of the matter. The whole truth of the matter.

Sarah arrives, walks towards me. She is almost twenty now. Her voice is changing, sharpening, the loose slang of New York giving way to a new articulation, a new vocabulary. She kisses me, and brushes on past, to Orr, lying peacefully with his eyes closed, as yet unaware. I wait just a little longer, for his inevitable awakening.