“What did you do for him?”

“There aren’t any drugs for it, just talk. His wife had taken the long bus ride up to retrieve him, and although she’d been warned, she took it hard. It turned out that he had been humiliated. The owner of the garage where he worked had forced him to crawl out the door in front of his co-workers while the man held a wrench over his head. It seems it was a repetition of his father’s brutality. When he went home to his wife, she called him a coward. He left the house in a rage and disappeared.”

“He came back to himself?”

“Yes, within a week.”

“My brother, the genius.”

“I wasn’t the attending physician. I just followed the case, and even without therapy most people have spontaneous recoveries.”

“But Pappa knew who he was.”

“Yes, but I can’t help thinking that it was another form of fugue, one we haven’t named.”

She nodded. “He always wanted to be so good to everybody.”

“Too good,” I said.

“Too good,” Inga repeated. It was a Saturday evening on White Street. The overhead light illuminated my sister’s delicate features. I thought she was looking a little better than she had. The lines around her mouth looked less deep, and the skin under her eyes had lost its blue tinge. The conversation took place after dinner. Sonia had gone out with a group of schoolmates. We sat in silence for some time after that, an intimate, ruminating silence that is possible only with very old friends, and we drank another glass of wine.

“Well, here we are,” she said finally. “Erik and Inga, a couple of kids from the boons living in New York City, full-fledged, card-carrying urbanites who’ve nearly lost our Minnesota accents. Our father was born in a log house on the prairie. It’s positively mythical.”

I didn’t answer for a couple of seconds. There was a blazing image in my mind—a picture of something I’d never seen. “It burned,” I said.

“What?”

“The log house. It burned to the ground.”

“Yes, that’s why they moved to the house that’s still there, your house.” Inga’s smile was ironic. “Out there, standing empty.”

THE PHOTOGRAPH WAS lying outside the gate that led to the garden apartment when I returned from work. It had been a long day, and on the way home in the subway I had finished reading an article and was musing over its implications when I saw the image, which was lying face up on the ground. As I leaned over to look at it, I recognized Miranda’s face at once, but the black-and-white photograph had been altered. The irises and pupils in Miranda’s eyes were missing. I looked into the blank spaces and suffered an uncanny feeling of recognition, then lost it. I turned the paper over, wondering if there was a message. I noticed the sign I had seen on the earlier pictures, a circle crossed with a line, nothing else.