They were living in a former mill town (mill now defunct), and they did not have a television, an anomaly that would become apparent to Harry only much later. Harry was four when he learned to read.

“Thank you for being my good boy!” Harry’s mother always said when she came home. She threw her arms around his back and cradled his head with one hand. Harry clung to her neck, the perfume of which (fabric softener) was the sweetest of all scents, or so he believed.

Harry’s mother made Harry Chef Boyardee, and she smoked out the window. He liked to pierce the raviolis, to divide them into perfect quarters before he consumed them. He examined the brown meat inside, the white edge of the pasta envelope. He read the label on the can.

Harry’s mother would get on the phone with Harry’s grandmother.

Harry didn’t know what his grandmother was saying, but Harry’s mother seemed to talk a lot about how well Harry was doing. Sometimes Harry’s mother said Harry was asleep when Harry was not asleep. Harry’s mother regretted her inability to bring Harry to visit his grandmother.

At this time, they had a sofa bed they shared. Harry’s mother was a quiet sleeper. In the morning, Harry’s mother made corned beef hash that, once cooked, she divided in half. She placed half of the corned beef hash in the refrigerator for Harry’s lunch. He remembers it as a beautiful time. There was ketchup and milk.

One of Harry’s favorite games was to lie on his back and look at the molding on the ceiling. He imagined how it would be if the ceiling were the floor of a room, if the ceiling were somehow made available to him as a floor upon which he alone could walk, and which he alone could furnish. The lamp suspended on a dust-bearded chain from a filigreed lozenge at the center of the ceiling would be a blazing flower. He’d put a chair nearby so that he could sit and gaze into it.

Harry stared out the window at telephone wires. He imagined himself leaping through the air from post to post. He’d spring from a post onto the eave of a building.

He’d ascend a distant church spire.

Harry sometimes spent twenty minutes imagining that the glass top of the side table in the second room was a frozen surface beneath which Paleolithic fish were swimming. He gazed down onto their black, spiny bodies. Harry set himself tasks. He placed books in a stack and he placed the radio with a pen and a notepaper block on the kitchen table. He copied down the words he heard on the radio, and sometimes he wrote other things.