“I just want to make sure that I really know what we’re doing,” my father said. “You and Freddy should probably read this as well, so we can make a final plan.”

I told him I had no intention of reading it. “I’ll do whatever I have to do, and I’ll play along with your plan, but I’m not getting any more involved than that.”

My father seemed not to hear me. “I never imagined that I could find myself in such a situation,” he said. “It’s intolerable. It’s unthinkable.”

I remembered that I had promised my mother that I would take care of him. I decided I should save such energies as I might have for the task until after she was dead. Unfairly, I began to hate my father. After so many years of confidence, he was lapsing into need, and all I did in the face of it was to hate him. I hated Bernard and I hated my father. This made it easier to love my mother.

Helen told me I was really hating myself. When she said that, I hated her.

I couldn’t tell my father how I was growing to dislike him, and so I took it all out on Bernard, whom I was free to loathe from the core of my being, from the center of my heart. I was afraid of my mother’s death and miserable that Bernard had been able to leave me, but I was really most afraid of being left in a world in which I loved no one and nothing. That October, I began to imagine my own death. I imagined it as though it were a form of vengeance.

• • •

The third chemotherapy seemed to be working just then, but we had been through two success stories already, and we knew better than to feel too happy. More than I hated Bernard or my father, I began to hate time. I’ve never stopped. Time is still my enemy. I once said to my mother that I wished that I had a fast-forward button on my life, that I could skip over the darkest hours, and my mother shook her head and said, “You’d just fast-forward your life away.”

Only later did I realize how much more complex my wish had been. I want a fast-forward button, and I want a rewind button and, perhaps most of all, I want a pause button, since I can see no evil in asking the fair moments to stay. I want these buttons for myself and for other people. It is a basic principle of traffic that if all the cars on the highway are moving at the speed limit, they cannot hit one another; only when one of them slows down or speeds up will an accident occur. We all know that our entire solar system is hurtling at some unimaginable speed across the galaxy, but since we’re all moving at that speed, it feels as though we aren’t moving at all. What is the point of time if it happens at the same rate to everyone? I want to be able to move and readjust and change in my relationship to other people and the world. I want to have some experiences over and over again until, like songs heard too frequently, they become tired and uninteresting. I want to skate through some kinds of pain and most kinds of indifference. I want to be born over and over and over, as though I were the world itself in all its changes.