The Philippines was not the perfect place for me to research the story. Timicheg and his people had merely been of ethnographic interest until they’d left, and it would have made more sense to be in Ghent, where they were abandoned by Schneidewind and where the Bontoc chief had died from pneumonia. If I’d stayed in the States, I would have had access to extensive archives. But I wasn’t yet sure what shape the book would take. I wasn’t sure of anything, other than the fact that I’d wanted to get out of New York.

I again slept late, and when I reached the dining room, all the breakfast offerings had already been cleared. Beng was nowhere in sight. I made myself a cup of instant coffee from the packets and thermos on the side table and cast a cursory glance at the book proposal. The sections seemed to flow naturally. There would be a chapter on the Bontoc Igorot, region, hunting practices—­Rousseauian tripe necessary to get the piece going. And then a chapter on Schneidewind and where he’d come from. The next chapter would segue into the Coney Island midway, followed by a chapter on the world’s fair in Ghent. I had written the proposal as an exercise and was now faced with writing the book. It was a sort of joke. The opening sentence seemed an impossibility. I checked my phone to see if there was Wi-Fi, which there was not, and stood from the dining table to take the broad steps that led upstairs.

The second floor had largely been abandoned not only because of my aunt’s compromised mobility but also because the space was not needed. Half of the floor plan was taken up with an immense master bedroom, now filled with boxes. I suspected that they belonged to my cousin Jim, because he often stored things in his mother’s house. I could hear the cook snapping at Beng in the kitchen, but the sound reached me through a filter of silence. My uncle had died in this room, but I felt that his spirit had never left and was hovering in the high corners of the ceiling or maybe behind the oval mirror, framed in heavy wood, that had startled me before I realized the other presence in the room was actually my reflection.