Every year I weave one shroud, never so long as the first. People cannot buy them, but the gallery displays other things that I am willing to sell. Not tablecloths or shawls. Whether or not I wish to be, I suppose I am an artist now.

96. Bandaged man on Pearl Street, New York, 1969

No self-respecting doctor would have crisscrossed white adhesive tape on a cheek that way. This is a home job, even though a guy wearing a suit like that can afford to see a doctor, which is what makes him so interesting. That and the noble way he’s holding his damaged face in profile, like he’s posing for a coin. The crazy diagonals of his bandage work against the perpendiculars of the city grid stretching behind him. Cover his face with your hand, and you’ve got a perfectly ordered streetscape. Take your hand away, and it all goes askew.

I got a letter from Detroit a few weeks after the move, but Kaja was a much better talker than she was a writer, so the letter was short and didn’t sound like her. I wrote back, and after that there was nothing. Write to her, my mother said. Write to her, Grete begged the few times I saw her before she and my mother stopped hanging out. Meanwhile I saw Kaja sitting at drugstore counters, and in the passenger seats of cars, and on buses, and running up the block, and walking across the street. For the rest of the 1970s, I saw her in the newspaper or on TV whenever the latest experiment in people’s liberation issued a manifesto, or blew something up, or robbed a bank, or got arrested or shot. These days I see her in dreams where I’m my actual age but she’s still twelve, like some juvie Peter Pan, daring me to sneak with her through the back door of the RKO or to stuff the latest Ingenue down my pants. Then I wake up.

That summer, Grandpa came down to breakfast in his suit; afterward he went to his study instead of his car. This was how I learned he’d taken early retirement and that Grandma was working as a part-time teller at the bank. Doctor’s orders, at least the early-retirement part. Grandpa wasn’t thrilled about Grandma’s bank job, but she said she enjoyed talking to customers and handling money in such a fine-looking place. Grandpa had been coming home from work so tired that he fell asleep at dinner, sometimes so deeply that Grandma had to leave him at the table overnight. He’d always wanted to research his family tree, plus he’d joined a flight club that built model planes with working engines and control lines.