I told him that I had listened up to the passage where Hans Castorp gets caught in the blizzard and slips into a kind of death-bound reverie. His disoriented visions grow progressively darker until they culminate in the ritualistic slaughter of a child by two ancient, cultic priestesses. That’s where I stopped, I said.

Oh but that part’s so good.

Yeah, well—there isn’t always an overlap between good literature and what I wish to put into my head before bed.

Kyle said that sequence made him think about how nature is neither kind nor cruel, but simply a force which is. It sustains life and destroys it, and is beyond our capacity to comprehend or control. And yet we always try. Again and again.

I smiled at his philosophizing, and told him that maybe I should try listening to the book when I wasn’t half asleep.

Speaking of listening—He walked over to the trunk and pulled out an old battery-powered CD player. He sat it on the makeshift shelf, put in a disc, and pressed play. A jazz song kicked off with a plucky piano and a punchy trumpet line.

Well you’ve really thought of everything, I said.

Just the essentials.

Who is this? I asked.

Charles Mingus. Do you know him? I told him yes, I did, my grandmother was a jazz fanatic. This is his album East Coasting, he said. From 1953.

Kyle extended his hand to me in an invitation to dance but I declined, with a laugh—there was no room!—so he did a dorky and endearing little jig. I caught glimpses of the old man and the young boy who both inhabited him. He appeared to know the track by heart, anticipating its ebbs and flows. I couldn’t imagine he had ever dared show this side of himself to any of his friends; at least not the ones I knew. Though sometimes I wondered how many friends he really had, or good ones, at least. He seemed both well-liked and utterly aloof. Had anyone even been calling around, wondering where he was? Was anyone worried about him? He dropped down beside me on the mattress.

Please tell me you’re not living here, I said.

He looked around, like a proud homeowner—I think it’s rather nice.

This is not—My chest felt leaden. For how long?

It’s been a while now.

I shook my head. It’s not right. You can’t—

What? What can’t I do? he asked, with quiet defiance.

I was suddenly outside of myself, looking at us sitting in that tent, in the thicket behind the back field of the school where I was once a teacher, and he was once my student, back in a time when both of us had families, and I was suddenly struck by just how much The Hum had stripped from us.