Is that how he, too, will grow old? Will he ‘come of age’ by creating memories that fade into loving forgetfulness, like old emulsion photographs, blurring, softened with time? This process started a long time ago, he acknowledges. He also has an inventory of things kept in mind, an index of important things to remember.

Now he tells the hour by the erratic slamming of doors, the radio being switched on, the ritual news-hour voices booming through the house. Silas is home, filling his soul with the numbing incantation of views, opinions, the dull beauty of reported life.

4

Mikey told his father that he didn't feel well – a headache, and his stomach was running – and so he was not going to the hospital, would Dad mind, would he explain to Mom? He said all of this in one quick breath, as he climbed the stairs to his bedroom, not giving his father a chance to question him, to feel his forehead the way fathers do – what can you learn by putting your palm to someone's head? – to offer medication, or simply to search his face for some signal – ‘Tell me what's really bothering you.’ The ridiculous – telepathic – things that fathers expect of their children, more so even than mothers, who are supposed to be clairvoyant when it comes to their offspring.

Silas stood at the bottom of the stairs, aware that when he went to visit Lydia, he would take with him the burden of Mikey's absence, that any attempt to justify his not being there – he was not feeling well, these things happen, you know everyone feels out of sorts now and then – would be transformed into something mysterious, even sinister.

‘This is not like Mikey, what's the matter with him, really the matter?’ her eyes would ask.

Constrained by her family's presence – hovering like members of an animal pride, alert to the needs of a wounded child or sibling – Silas would not be able to speak openly to Lydia. He would not be able to confess that he didn't know what was really bothering Mikey, except that he felt Mikey was staying away from the hospital not because he did not love her enough, but because he loved her too much. Silas did not have the gift of speaking with his eyes, with the way he held his body or with the gestures of his hands. His world was a verbal one, he had to say things to give them meaning.

The doorbell rang and he went to answer it in irritation, he could not contend now with a beggar's pleading voice or with someone selling brooms in order to survive, he was not responsible for all the poverty and misery in the world, and would they go away, for fuck's sake, as he was facing the crisis of an inscrutable son and an inconsolable wife.