She wanted to come with him, but he insisted that she remain behind. He gave most of the English coach money to Allegheny Airlines and flew to Pittsburgh. The smoke that once had covered everything had been banished by technology and the air seemed no more impure than the air of Massachusetts. There was nothing new under the sun: the traffic was the same as Boston’s; the taxi let him out at a hospital very much like Suffolk County General; on the third floor he found his father in a bed provided by the taxpayers, looking like any of the other derelicts Dr. Silverstone saw every day in the ward.

He was sedated heavily because of delirium tremens and would not come out of it for some time. Adam sat in a chair pulled close to the bed, staring at the gaunt face, its pallor accented by the telltale tinge of jaundice. The features, he saw with a chill, were his own.

Such a waste of human resource, he thought. One man could do so much or throw it all away. And yet human wreckage was often given long life without deserving it, while . . .

He thought of Gaby, wishing he had the power to pluck disease from one body by substituting another.

Ashamed, he closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the ward, here a groan, there a scornful delirium-chuckle, heavy breathing, a sigh. A nurse came by and he asked to see the resident.

“Dr. Simpson will be along later, on rounds,” she said. She moved her chin toward the figure in the bed. “Are you related?”

“Yes.”

“When they brought him in he carried on terribly about some things they left where he lives. Do you know anything about them?”

Things? What could he own of that kind of value? “No,” Adam said. “Do you have his address?”

She didn’t, but fifteen minutes later she was back with a slip of paper.

It was something to do while waiting. He went downstairs and took a taxi, feeling no surprise when the cab brought him to a three-story facade of chipped red brick, an old apartment building that was now a boardinghouse.

Through a grudging crack in the door he talked with the landlady, who after mid-day was still in an old brown robe, her thin gray hair in metal curlers. He asked for Mr. Silberstein’s room.

“Nobody lives here by that name,” she said.

“He’s my father. You don’t know him?”

“I didn’t say that. He was the superintendent here until a few days ago.”

“I came for his things.”

“They were just rags and clutter. I burned them. I got a new super coming in the morning.”

“Oh.” He started to turn away.