This was inauspicious. Fielding is hardly large, but he is utterly self-centered and therefore disliked, therefore intimidating, and no one wished to challenge him. Who can predict what a narcissist will do in anger?

“Aaaaghhh,” Jeremy managed to say; and Fielding, squeezing him, made this speech: “What do you think? What do you think? I filmed you riding your bicycle and I filmed your sixteenth birthday and you can be damned sure I filmed it when you got back from the hospital and you were in remission and we were all here to celebrate your health and that was no joke, was it? Was it? Maybe you don’t want anyone to care about that. Is that what you prefer? No troubling evidence that you are alive and have feelings and people who love you in spite of the fact that you are an immature child who doesn’t know how to comprehend love? A little kindness would go a long way around here, but I suppose I can’t expect you to have much regard for congeniality because obviously you’re lost in an arrested world of lame jokes and sick tortures. And that goes for everybody!”—peering around the room at the amazed faces, raising his voice to cry above Gunner the attack dog’s savage, intermittent barking—“In my mind there’s a difference between friendly clowning and this kind of malicious assault on a person!” Bark. Bark. Bark. “Mature men ought to know this difference!” Bark. Bark. Bark. “Show some courtesy!”

He let go of Jeremy’s neck. Jeremy, delivered from minor humiliation, collapsed before Fielding’s feet. Fielding was becoming emotional, and, strangely, so were we.

He said to us, “I make documentaries because I love my brothers. Is that wrong? Someone, tell me if it is wrong, because I feel ridiculous for even saying it.”

He bent down, collected the smashed camera pieces. Nobody seemed capable, right away, of speech or action; it was a time for reflection on the complexities of our interdependence and the sorry indignities that pass as currency between us in lieu of gentler tender.

Fielding cradled his camera. Everywhere beneath the obscure light from twenty broken chandeliers, heads were bowed. Virgil laid his full weight on my arm; he leaned on me; and Maxwell, for the moment, was forgotten, though his breaths could be heard, along with Chuck’s dog’s periodic outbursts and Jeremy’s sobs. Not yet seven o’clock and already someone had made someone else cry. The sad function of this—and there is, I believe, implicit in such dynamic enactments of taunting and submissive roles, a manifest, though hidden, function—the function of this is to ally disparate siblings within coherent factions characterized by age or friendship patterns (or some or other preexisting ideological or emotional attitude), and in this way to relieve the stresses that accompany explicitly personal self-presentations in a company as amorphously large as ours. The unconscious drive to assert autonomy through withdrawal into a prejudicial collective is counterintuitive but unexceptional; it can be seen at work during any polite cocktail party, whenever political or philosophical debates erupt, and guests begin either claiming or refuting intimacy with one another by announcing, “Yes! Yes! I agree with so and so.”