What a sweet feeling. It was a vibrating massage. I breathed out, let myself go slack, and considered, for the moment, the other men lying on the floor.

The doctor was closest. His head was purple and his eyes stared from swollen sockets. One might imagine that the rumbling made by his brothers’ feet produced a gentle back rub, relieving Barry’s aches.

A few steps past Barry was Virgil. Virgil was curled tight around his embroidered cushion. He trembled; you could see his shoulders twitch, but this was, as I may have mentioned, often the case when he slept. The trembling did not appear violent. Clearly our resonating floor had soothed Virgil.

Likewise with Max. Max was still on his back; his nose no longer bled; he seemed looser in the body. Evidently the floorboards were helping him to unwind.

It is worth noting this phenomenon—in which a lot of thoughtless pacing around the room produced a desirable secondary outcome, healing body massage—as an instance of spontaneous, intrafamilial mutuality and caring. No doubt this kind of unpremeditated caretaking occurs frequently in large communities, perhaps even within other species with complex societies, like the termites and bees. It pleased me enormously to imagine my brothers going about routine business while serendipitously tending to one another’s health and well-being. This is the way family members ought to coexist. I can honestly declare that, in that moment, belly-down on our floor, gazing at the ashes, the injured men, the promenading shoes, in that moment I loved my brothers.

I gave another firm squeeze to Hiram’s wing tip, then crept closer and snuggled. Gently I rested my cheek on the shoe’s cold toe. I could feel, pressed sharply against my chest, the hypodermic syringes and assorted medicine vials in my jacket’s inside breast pocket. I did not mind the pain of lying on these things. On the contrary, the needles were a comfort to me. Tremors rolled through the floor, and I heard Gunner the Doberman barking from the dark canyons of bookshelves. The shoe felt so comfortable to lie on. Its smell of leather and pungent black polish gave me a memory that I could not place—the inexplicit memory of a feeling that was like sadness, though not exactly sadness. Certain feelings lie in wait for certain sounds or scents to activate them. Everyone knows the power of the senses. Deep memories of feelings describe the earliest manifestations of the Self. Pillowed by Hiram’s shoe, smelling its leather, I felt transported back to a time too distant to accurately recollect. I felt with real conviction that I was alone in the world, that my brothers were not gathered around me, that no people were outside in the meadow beyond our garden wall. I imagined our garden full of green trees and youthful, blooming plants. The rose garden, in particular, appeared, in my mind, splendid with color. I suppose it was Hiram’s shoes themselves, and his shoe polish with its fertile, earthy smell, that provoked these images of red flowers, crawling vines, branches swaying in a breeze.