He’s my little seismograph of invisible worlds. He observes me and everything else around him with an outlandish, almost primeval sensitivity. He’s capable of perceiving the fifth dimension of reality so many modern people cannot see in our digital age.

The fifth dimension was the name given to it by a spirit investigator who had had a first career as a physicist and biologist and now, in his second life, was conducting research into the irrational. “The sphere between heaven and earth. You know, strange coincidences. Somebody dies and a child is born. You’re thinking about a friend you last saw thirty years ago when the phone rings and he’s on the line. Odd sensations that take hold of you in a ruined building or when you drive through countryside that was once plagued by war. The coast of Normandy still has a bloody pall over it. Have you ever been there?”

Yes, I did go once, with Malo and Yvan, and what the man said is true: the sky was more gray, the grass more tired, and the centuries-old houses seemed lower and sadder than elsewhere. The land lay defeated on all sides. At the time I thought the fault lay with me and attributed it to my knowledge of the tens of thousands of people who had died there, not to the fact that the land had its own memory. A bloody pall.

The spirit investigator explained that there were many things that people could not perceive through reason or with their limited senses tamed by civilization, either because they aren’t physically or mentally capable of it, or because they no longer want to do so.

“Children, dogs, and cats see and sense things whose existence we deny. Growing up doesn’t always make you smarter. It usually makes you more stupid.”

My son, on the other hand, can still see all these things. His senses have thousands more eyes and ears than mine or, presumably, anyone else’s. A funny thing happened one day. He pointed to a corner and said, “Grandpa! Grandpa!” He could have meant either Malo or Yvan. I couldn’t see anything, but Sam started laughing and giggling. Can he see my father or grandfather? Can children see the dead?

One day in May, when I’m trying to teach Sam to count, repeatedly attempting to represent the number four—four fingers, four shoes, four blades of grass—he shouts out, loud and clear, “Yellow.”

“No, Sam. Four—not yellow.”