He looked at Clinton’s hands, one of them making a fist in his lap, and the other supporting his head against the side of the chair. He looked at his face, untroubled, resting, the eyelids moist, lips slightly parted, pink as berries not quite ripe, cheeks pale from the strain of suffering, suffering that Berry-berry knew he had inflicted. He saw him there as he was, and as the four-year-old child who had followed him to school when he was in the fifth grade, the nuisance who had asked a thousand questions of him every day, questions he had seldom bothered to answer; he saw him as the peanut-butter thief, caught red-handed with the goods in his bed with him; a child in a household of older persons, hiding behind doorways and furniture to listen to conversations he could not have understood, or could he? and he saw clearly the arrival of the young boy in Key Bonita in the dead of night, inquiring after him in waterfront dives, at the police station, and in the flea-bag hotel, eagerly offering to a whore the gift of his innocence in gratitude for her company, her friendship, and being led by the dirty hand of Ramírez to the bus station without having found what he had come to seek, a hero who did not even exist, himself.

These reflections, the alternating waves of regret, despair, tenderness for his brother, that Berry-berry experienced, had all taken place within so brief a span of time that they occupied a position in his life that can be compared only to a pause, a semicolon of truth in a long memoir of falsehood. In this pause, Clinton had become, for Berry-berry, a mysterious giant possessed of powers that he himself had little hope of attaining.

When Clinton opened his eyes, he found Berry-berry looking at him, examining him with an expression on his face of dumfoundedness, awe. It took him a moment to realize how he had come to be there, in his brother’s room, asleep in a chair. And when suddenly he remembered, his first question to himself was: Does he know? Does he know why I came here?

By this time, Berry-berry had averted his eyes. He pretended to be looking for his shoes, and in a tone of casualness so false that his voice cracked under it, he said: “Hi, kid. You sleep good?”

Clinton murmured something that neither of them understood; and then their eyes met and the knowledge hovered there between them, caught like something black and bleeding and awful on an invisible spit. Berry-berry’s eyes dropped to Clinton’s lap, the revolver between his thighs. Clinton looked at it, too. And then, once again, neither of them able to avoid it, they looked at each other, and at the terrible thing that hovered in the air between them.