Nodding, his dad began to eat the apple, his face impassive: It had been a long time since he could spare energy for expression. It occurred to Lew that his dad might live to the end of his days without ever smiling again. Only the blue of his eyes seemed intensified, as a mirage might be to someone dying of thirst.

The coffee he had made out of grounds that had already been used a few times tasted like muddy water. He waited until his dad finished his eggs.

“I’m getting married, Pop. Annie and me—next week.”

His dad took hold of his own chin, covering his mouth and concentrating in what looked like a young child’s imitation of deep thought.

“I got a job in town with Saul Hirsch. Probably live with her folks for a while before we get our own place.”

“Got nothing to give you.”

“Don’t need nothing.”

“Not going to shake his hand.”

“Who, Sal?”

“I won’t shake his hand.”

A tentacle scraped, and Lew quickly protected the back of his neck. The window went dark as a cloud moved across the sun.

They sat in silence for a while. At last his dad said, as if it were all he had left to give, “You never did nothing. You never did harm Roh.”

It was the first time he had spoken about it since the day after it had happened, and he spoke as if it were the most simple and obvious truth, though he wouldn’t look at him. His dad should have been under glass in the Vatican. Cursed and conscienceless, he was like a weapon once used to murder a saint. The memory Lew had struggled against all these years returned, as clearly as the night he had seen it: Sal flinging Roh, like a dead rat, into the river. Sal was a part of this. But was Annie? What his dad had just revealed had broken his resistance to what the deepest part of him knew was true, and all at once he understood—the child. The child growing in Annie. He got up, his chair clattering to the floor, and flung open the front door. Dark clouds, black and pink, leached the sky. They were coming. Wah’Kon-Tah had never wanted to destroy him—had used him. Wah’Kon-Tah was dis-em-body, exiled into immortality, into the air and the earth and the waters, in which all lived and grew and died. Wah’Kon-Tah wanted no longer to exist as this field of being, to endure—changeless—all change. No longer to be life and death, but to live and to die, a single being. Lew’s whole body trembled with the clarity of it: the child. He knew it now. But if Wah’Kon-Tah found a way into the mortal world through that child, then all life would end, for that which separated men from gods, that membrane more fragile, more lovely, more sacred than either, would break and vanish. Dreamless, we would all go mad.