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Dedication

For Mom, and for Dad

Epigraph

How many bad incisions must be made

on my way to becoming a blade?

—BEN KOPEL

Begin Reading

Picture a living room, a staging area. Furniture ringed around its perimeter—a large couch, several upholstered armchairs, a wooden accent chair in the corner. Big, demonstrative windows on the wall facing the street. A coffee table occupied the center of the room at one point, though it’s been removed: there are still faint indentations in the cream-colored carpet where the feet sat for years, and a rectangular patch of the carpet slightly richer in color. The center of the room, as a result of its former presence, seems eerily empty, anticipatory in its emptiness. There are two, maybe three entrances to the living room: it may open into a kitchen, or a hallway, or a foyer. Though there isn’t a television, the couch and chairs are arranged in a way suggesting there once was one, or there was clearly a focal point to the room, some space to which the eyes and attention of the sitters or those present were naturally drawn, as to an altar. This space has since been filled, maybe by bookshelves or a console table, another set of chairs, but the position of the other furniture still seems to cater to it—an angle toward which everything seems to lean, as if cocked at attention. The front window, curtains drawn, from the right angle offers a sightline clear to the house across the street, a brief, golden shot into a similarly made-up living room, reflected darkly back.

Out and beyond, over a land equally haunted, we settle like a smoke cloud, like breath in the palm of a hand, like the blood pounding in your ears in the instant after a shock, when your instincts are wild and uncalibrated, your body wracked, for a moment, with violent potential—like air boding a storm.

Inside, in one of these houses, one floor above, a bitter young man lies in his bed at the end of his day, his idle dark thoughts unspooling into the night. He is otherwise alone in the house, or effectively alone. His parents—in this case, a mother whose work has taken her elsewhere, and a father he hasn’t seen in a decade—are not part of this story.

Let’s begin here.

BY THE THROAT