“The first time I met him I was just a kid. My mother took me to visit him in some halfway house or something.”

“And?”

“And he was sitting in the dark in this room and he didn’t turn to look at us. He just stared at the wall and talked to us with his back turned. It seemed to me at the time that he must have had eyes in the back of his head.”

“That must have been a little frightening to a young boy,” she said.

“Not really, because my mother just talked to him like it was all perfectly normal, carrying on a whole conversation while he was turned the other way. And I asked him what he was staring at, if he was looking at the fairies, and my mother yanked my arm so hard I thought I’d fall over. But I really wanted to know. I remember that. After everything she’d told me, it seemed like a logical question.”

“And what did Uncle Charlie say?”

“He laughed,” Jeremiah told her. “He laughed so hard he started coughing and hacking. My mother went over to him and tried to calm him down. I just stood there, where she’d left me, wondering what to do. So finally, I went over to him, too, and he turned and looked at me and said, ‘Yeah. The fairies. I’m looking at the fucking fairies. Don’t you see them, kid?’ And then he leaned in close to me and grabbed my face in both his hands and started laughing again.”

“Did that scare you?”

“Not really,” Jeremiah said, remembering it so vividly in that moment that he could almost smell Uncle Charlie’s vinegary breath and the sweat coming off his clothes. “What scared me more was my mother’s reaction. She pulled at his hands and slapped them away and told him never to touch me again. She loved him, you know? But it must have scared her when he grabbed me like that. He told us to leave and we did.”

“And what did your mother say about it?”

“Nothing,” he said. “We never talked about it. I didn’t see him again until I was much older—eighteen, maybe—my first summer home from college. He was at our house for a barbecue and I had a beer with him and listened to him talk about flies.”

“Flies?”

“Yeah, for a good hour. How they see things in overlapping, fractured images because of the way their eyes are, so they can look at a person and see him from different angles at the same time. He said they know more because of the way they see things. He said he’d like to have eyes like a fly.” He shook his head and smiled at the memory. “He was a real whack job. But at that age, I found him kind of intriguing. I never saw him again after that.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he said, “a few weeks later he jumped in front of a moving train.”