Brodman had not suffered such softness of the brain. The gene for it—if that’s what it was—had passed over him. Or he had hardened his mind against it. His illness was of the flesh, and could be cut away. Now it was in a lab jar somewhere, after his difficult cesarean, and his grandson was in an incubator, four weeks premature. No, he was not confused, only overwhelmed by the symmetry. Together they convalesced, Brodman on the eleventh floor and his grandson on the sixth. Brodman from death and his grandson from life. Mira hurried between them like a congressional aide. Visitors came and went. For the baby, they brought plush toys and tiny onesies of Egyptian cotton. For Brodman, strained fruit and books that he lacked the concentration to read.

At last, on the day the baby was to be released from the hospital, Brodman was well enough to be brought to him. Early in the morning, the Russian nurse came to give him a sponge bath. “Now we wash to meet grandson!” she sang, going about it with a firm hand. Looking down, he discovered that he no longer had a navel. The mark of his birth had been replaced by an ugly red welt, four inches across. What was he to make of this? The Russian rolled him down the corridor in a wheelchair. Through open doors, he saw the bruised shins and clawed feet of the nearly dead poking from the blankets.

But when he arrived, the room was already filled to capacity with people who had claims on the child—his daughter, her girlfriend, the homosexual who had contributed the sperm, the homosexual’s boyfriend. For more than an hour, Brodman waited his turn. From the wheelchair it was impossible even to catch a glimpse of the baby, who was completely walled in by his progenitors. Furious, Brodman wheeled himself out, rode the elevator in the wrong direction, toured the dialysis center, and followed signs to the meditation courtyard, where he took out his anger on a squat and mossy Buddha. When no one came for him, he decided to go back to pick a fight with his daughter.

By the time he returned, the room had emptied out. Mira placed the sleeping baby in his arms, wrapped in white. He held his breath, staring at the whorls of the child’s perfect ear, luminescent, as if painted by Fra Filippo Lippi. Afraid of dropping him, Brodman tried to shift the bundle in his arms, but the baby started and opened his sticky, lashless eyes. Brodman felt something being tugged painfully from his decrepit body. He held the boy against his chest and would not let go.

That night he lay in his bed on the eleventh floor, too agitated to sleep. His grandson was at home in his crib now, swaddled in soft things and dreaming under a lightly spinning mobile. Good, sleep, bubbeleh. All is still quiet in your world, nothing is yet upon you. No one wishes to ask your opinion about anything. Not that the child was protected from opinions. They swirled around him. Ruthie had asked Mira to buy him a Moses basket. “What does she want with such a basket?” Brodman said. Realizing that she’d steered wrong, Mira wrestled the basket back into the tissue paper. But he had already sunk in his teeth. “How long must we go on reenacting this little charade?” he asked. “We’re not slaves in Egypt anymore. What’s more, we were never slaves in Egypt.”