“Daddy? I got this eye on a argument. Boys rag me more and more. It’s got to where I hate school, playground especially. I always say no. But there’s way more of them. Dad, you know Doc Dix?”

I heard the massive Adam’s apple snag. There came a pause one-eighth of a mile long. “Sure, he’s right prominent in town.”

“Teddy, Ralph, and Walter Early. Some other older boys, sixth-graders? They said I was, that he might could be … Is. They say Doc Dix is my … REAL ONE.”

I had just called Clyde Melvin Delman, Sr., my sole reality, unreal. Even today, I must re-explain to myself how often I’d been punched. I felt so tattered by the daily denying. I simply meant to beg my dad for some assurance.

“Talk, idle talk,” he mumbled, head shaken sideways.

Then, alone, so loud he scared me as our car lurched, my father started singing, “Into the aiiiir, Junnnior … upside down … keep your noses off the ground!” And he was doing it very hearty but I could see his chest grow tense, bucking as if trying to close down over one huge latent cough.

With trying to sing, he meant to stop me. But I would not give way. Why not? Was it my mother’s crueler genes? Why was I demanding both Dad’s promise and denial?

Then I said, “What if you and me are not really … ?”

I did not make much sense. I was in most ways working blind. Pressing toward some fact literally unimaginable. It meant taking away the only earthly thing that I felt sure of standing on. What else in this life was I—except Clyde M. Delman, Sr.’s junior? Where else geography? Homework? Home?

Still driving, Clyde now turned and looked at me. I can say it was the first full moment of my adult life: he greeted me as a naked man greets another bare grown man in Hell’s own locker room, no secrets possible now. First time ever, I saw what others meant when they called him Almost Monster. Now Dad’s face was so unsmiling, inert. His eyes lacked a light forever present there before—some dancy will to see the best in me. And I knew now, oh yeah, he truly was ugly. Ugly as the big boys claimed. I felt ashamed of suddenly so much. I had tricked Clyde into letting me see him complete. Because I had stunned his love for me completely shut for just one second. It seemed like some protective current that had wrapped the two of us forever, stopped. And no Utility Company on earth could ever “resume service” fast enough. All interior clocks would need resetting. Everything must be renegotiated now, invented as if for the first time. And I was only eight.