What happened after that, even Wilhelm Landsmann’s normally watertight memory couldn’t precisely recall. Nor did he ever find out what exactly was happening on that riverbank. But he knew that for one of the few times in his life, he had suddenly felt that he was on his father’s side—that this woman, whoever she was and whatever she was talking about, was sick in the mind, not just sick in the mind but sick in the soul too, and that his father deserved her claws no more than Wilhelm himself deserved his father’s cold cruelty. Suddenly things made sense. A moment later, before his mother and grandmother dragged him away, Wilhelm noticed an extra piece of bread resting on the riverbank. He picked it up and flung it in the river, watching as it hurried out to sea.

BILL GLANCED at the rest of the captions on the list enclosed with the slide carousel called “Ben, age six”—a variorum of “Ben feeding ducks” covered at least five pictures—and decided he couldn’t continue with this carousel. Not now. Instead he took that carousel off the slide projector and went back to the shelves to select a newer one, a better one. He consulted his catalogued list of carousels and decided, with an inner shudder, that it was time for the final test. He selected a box from one of the bottom shelves, labeled “Naomi’s sixteenth birthday party.”

Anna was still sitting on the couch, motionless, her world contained entirely within her skin. He approached her like a high priest approaching the altar, bearing his offering in his hands. “I want to see if you remember this, Anna,” he said.

His fingers were trembling slightly, and he had to struggle to remove the carousel from the box. He put it on the projector in a daze, barely seeing it. He didn’t want to look at the slides, to be awed or disappointed by how many of them there were on this particular reel. It was enough to do it by touch. He clicked the machine to the first slide.

“Remember, Anna?” Bill Landsmann asked.

He looked up at the slide, unwilling to check the captions, as if he were quizzing himself. The picture was of Anna, smiling at the camera, bringing a glass of soda to a young girl, one of Naomi’s friends. It was the same girl, Bill instantly realized, he had found in the paper, the one who came to the house, the one who—but what was her name?

He consulted the list of captions, where, he discovered, he hadn’t recorded her name either. All it said was “Anna and Naomi’s friend.” Terrified by the hole in his own memory, he clicked to the next slide, moving his eyes down the caption list to the next entry, where he had typed “The birthday girl!”

“Do you remember, Anna?” he asked.