A short note on the subject of time. I have just said that the time was shortly after seven o’clock. I should more accurately say that I judged the time to have been shortly after seven o’clock. Time in the red library is forever a subjective construct. A proliferation of wristwatches would seem to argue possibilities for agreement on what time it is. However, the opposite is more truly the case. Analysis of the dynamics of male sibling interrelatedness will reveal puerile disputes over abstractions like “the time.” A hundred or so watches new and old will report a spread of at least thirty or forty minutes before or past the hour. Such variability will, among men, occasion pride and combativeness over who’s right and who’s wrong. It is safer, as a rule, not to ask the time. Factor in the conspicuously divergent times given by the half dozen semifunctioning grandfather clocks stashed in assorted nooks and corners around here, and the question of time becomes extremely thorny. On these grounds and on others more personal (having to do with my own passion for avowedly romantic, nonmechanistic lifestyles in bygone eras, the days of kings), I prefer to surmise the hour by traditional means of cosmic observation. Our tall eastern windows offer beautiful access to the stars, planets, and moon in nightly migration across the sky. On chilly evenings when clear polar air blows the haze right out of this forlorn valley, then vistas seem measureless, the heavens boundless; the universe regains its majesty and I feel primed to drink John Barleycorn, put on the Corn King costume, and take on all comers in a battle to the death.

“Let’s have a listen to that heart of yours!” I exclaimed to Maxwell. His eyes lolled in his head as I advanced toward him with the stethoscope. I meant no harm and am sure Max would’ve understood this had he been in his right mind. His head jerked back and his mouth opened wide to bare teeth. Trying to talk? I knelt beside him, leaned in close, and quietly, so no one would hear—Virgil was lying only a few feet away, at the edge of the carpet—whispered, “Maxwell, it’s your brother Doug. You called my name. Don’t be frightened. No one is going to hurt you. We grew up together. Remember growing up? Remember our room we shared with Virgil? Remember how we used to beat the daylights out of Virgil? Everything is going to be all right, Maxwell. What did you want to say to me?”

I took his sweating hand and held it, squeezed it, lightly, in order to calm him and reassure him, and he growled at me.

If you’ve ever been growled at by another person, you’ll know how unsettling this can be.

“Please don’t be unfriendly, Maxwell,” I told him.

The stethoscope depended from my ears. My brother’s dilated eyes watched it hovering in air above him. I shook my head—a small, rhythmic motion causing the instrument to swing back and forth in dreary light from lamps nearby. Barry’s stethoscope glittered. Max, watching it zip along above his nose, smiled.