Only later—during the mall’s lockup around 10:30 p.m., only then did a black security guard find three children sleeping, roughly spoon-fashion, behind one huge imported palm tree. Like kids from some Grimm tale, lost in the enchanted woods, they’d stolen back among the decorative plantings nearest where Dad said to meet this afternoon at exactly four. Six and a half hours later, discovered tucked behind the fountain—back by its transformer where the rushing water’s clear recycling tubes were coiled and snuffling like their mother’s asthma—three kids waked. They felt sure Dad had found them. Smiling, they turned.

But, no, uh-oh, it was a worried Negro guard, chancing half a smile. And the kids understood they were all in so much trouble. They’d spent their last coins on further Milk Duds. They didn’t know how to phone Mom collect long-distance. And if they had, they might be getting Dad into real hot water. See, without even understanding why, they already knew to be ashamed.

The R——kids attended Methodist Sunday school; bruise-colored consciences were forming. Starter cultures of the ethical and, when need be, the self-punishing. At home, everything usually worked on schedule; so—when it didn’t—somebody got blamed.

The mall guard seemed to be half-eating his foot-long walkie-talkie. People were being called, the lost kids’ father’s full name uttered. Then Dan’s children heard a minor stir. The walkie-talkie picked up one downtown cop: “Oh, him? Yeah, we’ve got him. Guy’s already been printed, guy’s been booked. Good riddance to bad rubbish, hunh?”

“Booked, what fo’?” the kind guard asked. Then Dan’s kids, eyes large, hands laced around each other’s necks and shoulders—they all knew first, knew first what their father really was.

The rest of it interests me because I am one, too.

Like Dan, who was locally noticeable and then became hypervisible en route to being totally unseen, I am trying once again to make myself more opaquely and superstitiously visible an invert. I am trying, through this story.

I am fairly smart and a decent actor, and I’ve had sex with women without soliciting immediate reviews, or expecting ladies’ awe at my versatility; and I can pass. I know that.

If I’d married, and stayed put in Falls: I would now teach art history at a local junior college. I’d have a smart if no-longer-slender wife named Alice, and the one son, Kyle, five—a prodigy-brat-joy.

I didn’t. So I don’t.

Still, I think of what authorities did to Mr. Dan, who slipped that once, then slipped into the searing spotlight before falling so utterly out of view. And—incidentally—out of the life of a kid who liked to look at him, loved just being near him.

When Dan took his own lucky kids to visit Shiloh Battlefield, he brought me back a greenish musket ball. It looked old as Rome. It tasted of salt. I still have it.