In one last futile effort against these odds, he turned to lie flat on his back; it was then that he saw Clinton, slumped awkwardly in the chair, still fast asleep.

He rose quickly to a sitting position on the edge of the bed; and his eyes came in contact with the gun on Clinton’s lap. It rested there, between his legs, upside down, the barrel pointed toward the bed. When Berry-berry had looked at the gun for a moment, and back to his brother’s face, and suddenly knew the meaning of what he saw, the knowledge affected him like a poisonous gas that caused not only the discomforts of nausea and a deep visceral spasm of pain, but an overwhelming wave of self-hatred as well. The sound that came from him then was not a word; it was more like a sound of vomiting when there is nothing to be emitted but emptiness. And it was followed by a high and interminable moan that he himself could not even hear. He buried his face in his knees and gave way to it; it was like a prayer so dismal that it became a blasphemy.

When this moment had ended, Berry-berry raised his head and looked at the floor, at Clinton’s feet. He was almost afraid to look again at the boy’s face. But now, in fact, he had no need to, because in an instant he had become totally absorbed in his brother’s foot. He kept looking at it, the soiled black gym shoe, the white fragment of sock that showed above it, the bare ivory-colored portion of leg partly covered by a new adolescent growth of hair. Suddenly he knew that this foot had something to say to him; it clearly held for him some message, perhaps even the secret of some profoundly mysterious riddle. His eyes danced over the shoe, the ankle, the lower calf of the leg, like some crazy moth bent on deciphering the mystery of light.

And then, though he did not move from the bed, Berry-berry saw himself kneeling on the floor and he took the foot in his lap. In his imagination, he saw himself touch, with his hand, gently, the incredible living flesh of his brother’s leg; and as he did so, he knew instantly, and in a way that he had never known before, that there is life in other people than himself, blood and spirit, vulnerability, a heartbeat, a pulse; and he experienced as well, at that instant, in that imagined contact with the livingness of another being, a wave of tenderness so profound that he yearned for its continuance. It seemed that all that he had sought to find with his fists and his tongue and his sex had been yielded to him in a moment, with no effort at all. But coming to him, as it did, from the depths of his own sense of sin, he was fearful of the experience, as if it had in it all the cunning of some supreme punishment: it was his only to be withdrawn from him. Clinton had come here to do violence to him, but he had brought instead a knowledge of love, a knowledge that Berry-berry would be forced to relinquish at the moment his brother awakened. And that would be his doom. He would never in the future be able to submerge himself in purely carnal pursuits, because this moment was inscribing in him the indelible knowledge of their limitations. He would be condemned to go along always, all through his life, carrying with him the intolerable memory of what he had surrendered: the power to know and respect and love the living truth of another.