And the night stays motionless, just me and the thing encased inside me, and the two of them somewhere else now, back from the poet’s, at some point a soft tap on the door and my name, then nothing. The nothing grows larger and larger until the vomiting feeling returns, sweeping over and through me, upside down on the carnival ride, the Zipper, spinning with Kathy and the little boy, the three of us hanging above the Rhinebeck ground, and M. down below, looking up. He’s holding something on a stick and suddenly I’m wringing wet again, my palms against the bedspread, my hair, my eyelids, and then the Zipper swings down toward the ground so fast that I faint.

Inside the faint is nothing, but when I come to, the thing is pressing me against the cage, taking up all the room inside me, and the Zipper rises again, and when I look down the lights of the midway are blurred, like all colors of paint, and when the Zipper begins to spin, the paint is flung out, moving in a symmetrical design. Whatever he was holding on a stick is gone and he’s no longer looking up but looking around.

My fingers through the mesh of the cage, the thing pressing me and pressing me until I open my eyes and the big square of the window has grown sepia-toned, its edges still dark, like an old photograph. I realize now the boy on the midway ride wasn’t the one Kathy rode the Zipper with that time—he’s a different boy, younger, a small, small child from a book of death photographs I saw once, only he was alive, arranged on a bed, his face a still mask of suffering, eyes fixed blankly on a ball that had been placed near, one hand with its small curled fingers resting next to it. The ball looked like it might be made of stitched leather, striped, a toy put next to him in his final hours, and then the camera set up too, the long process of photographing becoming part of the vigil. The rest were all death photographs—of babies in their coffins or in their mothers’ arms, the photographer called in with his black-draped camera to record the faces the parents wouldn’t remember otherwise, the toddler in a narrow casket leaned against the wall, his face already collapsing, a spray of flowers wilting over his fists. The small girl arranged in a chair, propped by pillows and a teddy bear, her eyelids painted to look like her eyes were open. What desperation in that grief-stricken family, to try to make her look alive for the only photograph they would ever have of her. Nothing, though, compared to the look on the boy’s face, the patience of his suffering, eyes fixed on the striped ball as he waited.