“I’m self-taught. I’m too old and sick to go to the university. Sit down.”

“You’re not old. How old are you? Did you ever teach, like Mom did?”

“No. I’m thirty-four, but it feels like two hundred.”

Gaspar sat down on the cushion, and his knee almost knocked over a bottle. His father steadied it to keep it from spilling, then picked it up and took a long drink. How had he not smelled the alcohol on his breath? Now Gaspar understood why he was receiving so much information: his dad was drunk. Again.

“Do you study that stuff because you could always predict things, or is it the other way around? Did you study in order to be able to predict things? Did you always see people?”

“Yes, but they don’t bother me. There’s a technique to avoid seeing them—you can turn it off at will, and I’m good at it.”

“It never fails?”

“Everything fails, but I’m not afraid of them. They’re echoes. Manifestations. They can’t touch us. It’s just disconcerting.”

“What does disconcerting mean?”

“Something that surprises you, that catches you unawares. What kind of vocabulary do they teach you at that school of yours?”

“They’re not bad teachers,” Gaspar insisted, “I just don’t use the dictionary that much.”

“If you say so.”

“Dad, am I going to see those things, those echoes?”

“No. But if you did, you’d know, no question.”

Gaspar sat thinking. Another long drink. The book his father had been reading fell to the floor and Gaspar looked at the title out of the corner of his eye: Selected Poems, John Keats. Then he picked it up, opened it, and read: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness . . .” He tried to translate it into Spanish: Estación de nieblas. Temporada de nieblas.

“Can I take it?”

“It’s hard. Use the dictionary. You’ll like Keats. He died very young, you know. At twenty-five. What else are you up to, son? I want to know what normal things you’ve been doing. Talk to me.”

Gaspar leaned his head against his father’s legs and decided that the episode of the box of eyelids wasn’t important, it had been part of a nightmare, it was forgiven, forgotten. He felt his father’s hand caressing his hair as he told him how Adela hadn’t liked his gift of the mirror box.

“Sick people are different,” his father told him.

“She’s not sick,” replied Gaspar.

“I know, but still, people who have physical problems are all alike, and we’re different from healthy people. If, for example, you gave me a wheelchair, I wouldn’t thank you for it.”

“Do you need one?”

“No, not yet. But if someone gave me a wheelchair, I’d burn it. You don’t need to understand it, you just need to know.”

“Will she get over being angry?”

“Probably—missing a limb isn’t the same as being about to die.”

“Don’t say that, Dad.”