I tried practical reasoning. A fat person who wants to lose weight shouldn’t bake desserts for a living. A kleptomaniac shouldn’t get a job in a jewelry store. An alcoholic shouldn’t work at the drive-through beer barn, and an ax murderer shouldn’t become the tool guy at Babcock’s Hardware. I didn’t want to be gay, and when I masturbated, I was incapable of thinking about anything but boys. Therefore, I resolved never, ever to masturbate again. Two days later I chose a different strategy: proactive normalization. Alone in the house, I rooted through Matt’s belongings for anything even vaguely pornographic. Like my father, Matt had left a lot of stuff behind. Guitars and amplifiers and wah-wah pedals. A metal Nabisco snack rack he’d pulled from a dumpster and filled with handgrips and nunchucks and empty shotgun shells. From under the bed I dug out surfer magazines, scuba diving magazines, stacks of Rolling Stone, but not a single copy of Playboy or Penthouse. Finally, I resorted to Farrah Fawcett-Majors. She was still hanging on the wall between a poster of Jimi Hendrix and a cross fashioned out of crumbling palm fronds. She flashed a set of teeth as perfect as shuttle tiles, her face floated in a storm of blond hair, and her nipples punched at the backside of a bathing suit the color of a circus peanut. Come here, darling, I thought as I took the poster down from the wall. Utilizing a pair of scissors, I acted with all tenderness and good intention, tried to become hypnotized with the visual of it, and succeeded only in giving myself paper cuts in the last place you would ever want them.

Frankie was on the floor surrounded by action figures, multicolored dice, and sheets of hexagonal graph paper. He was drawing what looked like a rainbow that had been run through a blender.

“Did you take my new colored pencil set?”

“I did,” he said without looking up, “but only for purposes of intergalactic peace.”

“Frankie.” I reached down and took hold of the ear I saw sticking out of his wavy black hair.

He moved his head sideways with the tug. “Gravitational pulls! Misunderstood trajectories! There’s no interspecies language for this; the only way to keep track of them is to assign each one a different color!”

I let go and he jerked away from me, rocking the four-inch Luke Skywalker doll that hung from a shoelace around his neck. A week ago, when we were all fanned out across one side of the living room, eating dinner on TV trays, my mother had asked him out of the blue why he was wearing that doll. Without looking away from the television, Frankie had answered her in Glocken.

My mother cleared her throat. “Translation, please.”

“It’s not a doll,” Frankie said. “It’s an action figure.”