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.