Friday morning, when Dad went off in search of his past, I took the jar of poison and asked my mother for the study key. She reached into her pants pocket and took it out. I realized that she had been expecting me. She watched me unlock the door but this time she didn’t cross the threshold. As soon as she saw me approach the terrarium she ran back downstairs. The first thing I did when I went in was read the page of the I Ching that my father had left open on his desk. It was on hexagram number twenty-nine. The unfathomable, the abyss. I read the following: “In man’s world, K’an represents the heart, the soul locked up within the body, the principle of light enclosed in dark—that is, reason. The name of the hexagram, because the trigram is doubled, has the additional meaning, ‘repetition of danger.’ If you are sincere, you have success in your heart, and whatever you do succeeds.” It felt like the text was speaking to me more than to my father. I heard the sound of the gate. It was too early for him to be back but I thought he might have forgotten some document, so I looked out of the window to check. I saw my mother leaving, as she always did, to go to the local market that took place every Friday morning. One of the lines of the hexagon was underlined in pencil on the page. “Six in the third place means: Forward and backward, abyss on abyss. In danger like this, pause at first and wait, otherwise you will fall into a pit in the abyss. The nobel son should not behave badly.”

I stopped reading and sat down on the chair where Dad sat every evening watching his Daboia. I told myself that keeping an animal like that was the same as keeping a loaded gun in a drawer: a means to escape the world within arm’s reach. The animal seemed more alert that morning than usual. I noticed a dish of water in the habitat that I didn’t remember seeing the last time, and determined it was the perfect place for me to empty the jar of poison. But before I did, I decided to wait a little. The words of the I Ching were still dancing around in my head. It was then that I heard my father’s steps on the stairs, giving me just enough time to hide the jar under the seat.

He didn’t ask me what I was doing there. Nor did he seem upset. He looked at the Oracle open on his desk and hazarded:

“I gather you’ve already read the response.”