No one at large paid these three men any attention. That’s because—it should be plain by now—someone or other is always falling sick or having a spiritual awakening, and it’s nothing unusual to step over that person lying on the rug and clutching a pillow as if for sweet life. This is not to say that if we must occasionally step over each other, we do not also cherish each other. On the contrary. Large families are a lot like small communities. We exist in relation to others. One learns to respect or at least tolerate one’s neighbor’s way of life, and also to refrain, whenever possible, from imposing oneself and becoming a nuisance. Otherwise, things get too appalling. For instance: Seamus, his arms waving hysterically for balance, deep asleep with eyes closed tight. Off Seamus went, out across the Bokhara, blazing a crooked trail around wide-backed mahogany chairs, in and out of that packed queue, his mates on their way to get more drinks. How can Seamus know his way to the bathroom? I can’t answer that question except to venture that it seems likely that the sleeper’s unconscious mind holds introjected “maps” of well-known environments; perhaps, in this way, Seamus dreams his way to the bathroom. That night, Porter, Andrew, Foster, and a half dozen others all swiftly leapt clear of their brother’s oncoming fists; and Porter, jumping backward, knocked over a card table. The table tipped; men’s voices cried out; Porter stumbled; the table crashed, and Seamus vanished into Civilizations and Empires of the Late Middle Ages; more voices; a new round of barking. Appalling, as I was saying. Noises came from everywhere, and the chandelier bulbs overhead flashed off, on, off, on, like playhouse lobby lights signaling act one. What a sad theater ours would be, with its inaccessible bar and its fire-hazard electrical circuitry and the cracked ceiling vaults and ripped curtains and the cigarette-burned seats, and the people and things constantly tumbling over and breaking on the floor. It’s enough to make you hate mankind. I sometimes imagine our red library as a kind of bleak and unruly interpersonal anxiety zone. Emotions heat up and tempers break out in real disputes that have their roots in a hundred contingent histories of the standard childhood competitions, degradations, reparations, punishments, tortures—all the gory excitements of pain and power that seem, in retrospect, so ineluctably linked with childish fantasies about manhood. Screaming and crying were the routine bedlam of our bedtimes, drowning out the crickets and the pounding wind outside, but never the voices of older brothers who taunted, “Had enough, you little worms? Father can’t help you now!” It was Zachary who perfected the art of the red belly, that scrubbing technique, the wire hairbrush on Virgil’s bare white skin. Poor Virgil, pinned down by Zachary’s hands to our shared bunk bed’s bottom mattress. I held my eyes closed and pretended to sleep and did nothing, night after night. It grieves me to think back now over old boyish stuff, all the bad times made more bitter in memory by the absence in this strangling red library of a serene corner to hide out in, of a comfy chair that gets enough light for reading without strain, of a taste of unstale air to breathe. It’s shocking, isn’t it, how the dreadful circumstances of one’s life grow to feel, simply because one knows them, perfectly normal. Lost games, stolen toys, handed-down clothes that never fit. I love my brothers and I hate their guts. Me! Me! our voices all seem to shout—as if we were not a true community united in blood and spirit, instead a common mob intent on nothing more than the next drink, the next mouthful of food. I love my brothers and I hate my brothers. Most of all I hate myself, when, during an evening, I find myself alone in the crowd, without a dear old comrade to help me through the terrors. I try not to feel oppressed but I cannot help my feelings, whenever I gaze along one of our interminable shelves of books trailing off into the library’s gray regions. Titles on books’ spines can hardly be read even in adequate light. Age and the damp have faded the authors’ names.