‘My money bought it, but it’s not mine.’

‘It’s the money that preoccupies you, is it?’

‘Show me something pretty,’ Sarah demanded, flailing, determined – absolutely determined – to find some weakness in him, something – almost anything. ‘What’s my money brought for me? Come on, show me something that’s mine. No, there’s nothing. So show me something that’s at least not hideous. I want something to look at. I want a carpet. I want a pelmet. I want – What do I have? What is there for me?’

‘You’re beginning to sound as though you’re just plain against me—’

‘Against you? What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘—no matter what I say or do.’

‘Against. For. With. What does it matter? It’s going to be like this forever. Look at you. You eat away at yourself—’

‘Sarah!’

‘You’re eating yourself alive. I can see it!’

Chekhov – not a man given to overstatement – said that every day he had to make an effort to squeeze the last drops of slavery from his blood. But Chekhov hadn’t been a real slave. My grandfather, who had been, couldn’t measure his slavery in drops; it ran in his veins, as red and rich as the hemoglobin itself. Every day his heart and brain had to fight against the very stuff that fed them. Every night, the illusion-stripped world of the slave ruled him just as it rules Atlas’s patients while they sink into mental and physical incontinence, bladder and bowel on the loose and brain incapable of anything but terror and sleep. What is old age but Jonathan’s nightmare carried to its logical conclusions? What is his nightmare but the ultimate secret, the essence of life itself?

‘Don’t speak to me—’ he said to Sarah. There was a tremor in his voice, and the ice was gone. So it was that she knew something important had happened.

In my mother’s and father’s fights there was always a break-free point like this. My father baited my mother beneath his professorial manner, much as Jonathan – albeit unawares – baited Sarah with his coldness of response, and my mother’s voice climbed, veered off, slid here and there (as Sarah’s voice was sliding), until at last she found the lever that would catch him, pull him into the fray with her, engage him a gear higher, where he could no longer escape the battle that he himself wanted so passionately. The famous raspberry-scented condom she charged him with was one such lever. My sisters and I cowered upstairs, each in her room alone, each at her door listening to the downstairs prelude in rage. I couldn’t hear the words, but when the idiotic object itself appeared on the field, I recognized the moment of crisis as I’d recognized many such moments before. It’s like the break-in-two of a train that Jonathan describes: there’s a change in the sound of the engine’s exhaust. No more. But after that, nothing is the same. It was only by accident that Sarah had stumbled into the land of Jonathan’s nightmare, but Jonathan was atremble with the sudden humiliation of what she’d seen, as though in seeing, she’d made the degradation real. She’d let loose chaos itself around him.