Hiram leaned forward over the frame of the walker, out over the metal frame. He had me in his sights. He said, “You’re full of hate, aren’t you, Doug?”

“No.”

“You keep it all bottled up inside, your scorn and your contempt for people, and when you can’t control it any longer, it comes flying out and we have one of our little tragic scenes. Isn’t that right?”

“No.”

“This is a family full of love, Doug. We all love one another here. This whole room is full of love. Too bad you can’t feel it, Doug. You can’t participate in love because you’re busy tearing everybody down. You want to tear us down and you want to discredit our forefathers.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s not enough for you to tear down the living, you have to go after the dead.”

“No.”

“Don’t say no to me, boy. I’ve seen you in your same chair by the big window, night after night, rooting through the old books and papers. You think that if you find sickness in others, you’ll be healthy. You think if you find weakness in others, you’ll be strong. Does throwing a bunch of flowers at an old man make you feel strong, Doug?”

“No,” I whispered.

“Speak louder.”

“No.”

“Pick up the flowers, Doug.”

They were all watching me, Pierce and Aaron and Denzil and Saul and Joe with his old-fashioned erotic drawing that no one was looking at. Across the way, Jack in his safari costume stalked the blind Albert. Albert’s white cane swept the air, though ineffectively. “Help me, someone. Oh, help me!” cried Albert as Jack, the expert hunter, gained on his chair.

Then the twenty chandeliers blinked off again and everything became a shade darker for an instant. It was like a negative form of lightning, perfect accompaniment to the routine thunder of wind hitting windows. Gunner barked and barked. The Doberman had managed to unsnarl his leash from the overturned art nouveau armchair, and so he was free at last and sprinting in wider and wider circles around the furniture. “Settle down, fellow,” Gunners owner, Chuck, called to the racing dog.

Around and around tore Gunner with paws skittering. When the Doberman hit carpet, his claws hooked the weave for traction and the shabby fabric popped and ripped.

I prayed for Gunner to dash toward Hiram and knock him down.

Here, boy.

Instead Gunner charged between couches. Men sidestepped to avoid the onrushing dog. Gunner jumped a coffee table then disappeared into a narrow aisle of shelves housing Geology, Natural History, and Mineral Sciences. “Don’t make a mess in there,” Chuck called to his beloved Doberman. Could Chuck possibly have known Gunner’s plans to relieve himself behind a stack of unshelved crystal spectrography manuals?

But wait. I had begun, a moment or two ago, to describe, in plain terms, the situation as it stood that night with the lilies and with Hiram—our little semipublic showdown that wasn’t, in fact, so little. I always charge off the track at moments like these—the bitter moments, I guess you’d call them—and instead begin rendering the scenery and all the extraneous misbehavior of my brothers and their abysmal pets. As if anyone cares. Conflict is the really interesting thing, I’ve found. Conflict! Conflict is always so difficult to recount. By difficult I suppose I mean painful. But also I mean demanding. The technical aspects of describing true conflict are daunting. First, you have to establish your antagonists. It is important to avoid cozy oversimplifications, and to bear down instead on all the obscure and intractable problems of identity and desire that make our lives and our needs so various and dissimilar. The problems in describing a person are essentially problems of knowing a person. One of the sad features of most close relationships is the decay of intimacy as a function of time, turmoil, and all the little misunderstandings that inevitably occur between people, leading them, year in and year out, toward the same tired conclusions: conversation falters; friendships fail.