He thought, though, that maybe it was right, just not in the way generally thought; that maybe there was something to be salvaged from the military image. There were plenty of parallels—just not ones to which the doctors alluded. Cancer was like war in that both were brutal and nonsensical. There was no such thing as a just cancer. Innocent beings who happened to live next to power plants got tumors they didn’t deserve, while chemical executives got to live in gated communities and drink clean water and avoid cancer’s reach. War and cancer both involved metals and carcinogens, poisons and blood, colored ribbons, charities, and lawsuits. They both had treatment centers and therapy groups for survivors and family members of survivors. Many professions existed supposedly to end war and cancer but also to serve and support those who were affected. Governments and hospitals and businesses profited from the growth and development of both war and cancer even as they proposed ways to eradicate them.

The system wants to kill us slowly as it wrings our bodies of every last drop of value, Alfonzo hummed to himself. My mother is just another one of their wool rags.

His dad did everything by the letter. His mom was the most positive fighter the hospital could ever ask for. But she still died. At the end, when she was not in great pain, it was because she was stoned out of her gourd, and when she was not stoned out of her gourd, she was in great pain. Those were the options they had.

The night Alfonzo’s mother died, he and Vivi were at a concert.

All these little details were etched in his mind. The serious audience of birds and sheep and cats dressed as if they worked in a factory that produced utopian toys, with abstract squiggles and leaflike shapes dotting their jumpsuits and kerchiefs. That had been the style of the season.

The singer they’d assembled to see was a thin dog with a thick, wavy black coat. Before she sang she told the audience a story and explained how it had formed her conception of music.

The singer talked about remembering and forgetting as a form of composition. She remembered hearing an old country song from puppyhood. She forgot the words. She made sounds like what she remembered. It was an invented memory, a translation of time. Her youth and her adulthood. The singer described the evocative power of contrary-motion string bending. She stuttered, and Alfonzo remembered being touched by that vulnerability. Her voice wavered as she spoke of the quality called natural sustain.