One Sunday not long ago, he had taken her to an old-age home. It was far away, in Brooklyn, but it had been specially recommended by a doctor as a place for people who couldn’t remember things. Just to look, of course, he kept telling himself as he drove with her down the highway toward the city, passing by the exits for the area where he and Anna had lived out their younger days, places that he remembered as gleaming with shiny cars and promise and which now smelled of burning tires, piles of old junk. (Was it the riots thirty years ago that had left them like that? Or were they like that when he lived there, too, except that before, other people’s trash had been his treasures?) Then he drove into New York itself, through two boroughs’ worth of it. The city, as he saw it out the driver’s side window, seemed to be teeming with young people. It was as if there had been some law enacted forbidding anyone over thirty-nine from living there. Some of these young people scarcely looked like people to him, with their bodies wrapped in shiny accessories as if they were clad in armor, tattoos bound as signs upon their arms, weird metallic frontlets between their eyes. But in between these armored youth he also noticed others with frank faces—young people who smiled to themselves, or who walked hand in hand or arm in arm and sang out at the traffic lights as they walked, their eyes giving the world a fresh coat of paint. Bill Landsmann noticed these young men and women and kept driving, thinking, for a split second, of Naomi. He glanced at Anna in the seat next to him, but she seemed to have seen nothing. She stared straight in front of her, her eyes on the road ahead.

When they arrived, he could see why the nursing home had been recommended. The building was new and beautiful, with luscious carpets and manicured interior gardens, and the bulletin boards boasted of all sorts of events and activities for those whose memories could still hold up long enough to take in a concert or a game of cards. But the odd equilibrium that had come over him dissolved as soon as he saw their tour guide for their visit: a young Hassidic man.