On these days, Eleanor packed him a lunch, spoke forthrightly to one of his colleagues about accompanying him to the washroom—if he went by himself, he tended to get stuck inside the repeating pattern of identical stalls—then drove to the clinic, where for seven or so hours mothers (and sometimes fathers) would place their babies on the examining table and tell her stories of their infants’ charm and precociousness.

“Yes, well,” she would reply. “We expect that at this age.”

The information Stephen’s father requested of the secretaries was highly specific but nonsensical, like the quasi-scientific talk in science fiction movies. His voice toggled in and out as he fiddled with the phone, making him seem more and more like an astronaut lost forever in outer space.

“I’m not sure, Morrie, but shall I check for you?” one of the secretaries would call out from her side of the transmission.

“Yes, please do, and bring me the answer, don’t page me,” he would order her.

“And where will you be?” Said a little meanly, perhaps, because although he’d had Alzheimer’s for the past three years, he’d been demanding for at least thirty.

He would look around, swiveling in his chair. Wall, window, picture, papers.

“I don’t know,” he would say.

The Kleins had always been high achievers. The parents had both studied to become doctors and both were subjected to the quota system, allowed to succeed only if others of their brethren didn’t. In Morris’s case, it was an accepted practice—in Canada, Jews had to get better scores than everyone else in order to qualify for higher education, so Morris shrugged and did what they asked, ranking just above his peers, WASPs and Jews and whatever else they threw at him. He went on to college and then on again to become a doctor of science, a botanist who made a name for himself in the delicate, knife-petaled world of lilies.

Eleanor, educated in the States, was subjected to equal and alternating doses of contempt and admiration. She ignored both, for years methodically chiseling her way through the granite ceiling until she found herself in the bracing, ammonia-scented air of pediatric medicine. She did a rotation in Africa, and met her husband, Morris, there, he of the pith helmet and wild eyebrows. It was like a waking dream—the blue cinder-block clinic, her fingers pressing a silver disk against narrow brown backs, the glaring sunlight, the feverish, ecstatic nights.

When Stephen was a child, the family moved from Canada to the United States so that Morris could take a job as a professor and researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In every direction, deserted roads and long green corridors of corn. Riding in the back seat in the summertime, dazed by hot wind, Stephen and Nathan would stare out their respective windows, taking in dizzying insubstantial glimpses down each row until they were carsick.