The boy grinned. “I lay a bomb on you, dad, I’d be creating something—a less pathetic world, for one thing.”

At that, Douglas seemed to give up on him. Turning to look at Hook, he almost fell down and had to take hold of the stairway banister for support. “What you think, old buddy?” he asked Hook. “Is he right? We pathetic?”

From his seat on the window cabinet, Hook regarded this man who was addressing him as old buddy, including him as we. Was he so drunk he had forgotten who Hook was, why they were together in the first place? It was possible, of course, for they had been drinking steadily for over six hours now.

“Huh?” he repeated now. “We pathetic, old buddy?”

Hook could not have begun to tell him, knew he would have had even less chance of getting through to him than Douglas or the bearded youth had with each other, for they at least spoke the same language, the language of politics, while Hook did not. To him, liberal and conservative and Marxist and anarchist were all out of the same garbage bag, labels on empty cans, tactics before policy, frenzy in a void. He wanted to go over to Douglas and seize him by his coat and shake him and shout in his face that his son, his Chris, even now was only a week in the ground, lying between his mother and great-grandfather, and they were just three in a long row of graves and there was row after row of similar graves and graveyard after graveyard all across the world, because Death was the one true and final government, the king of kings, the worm emperor of the universe, and the worm was right there in the attic now, in all of them, in Hook and Douglas and in the bearded youth and in the infant sucking on the pacifier downstairs. Yet in the face of that awesome knowledge these two prated about politics. To Hook, they were like rabbits gorging in the soybeans—while the owl watched.

But Douglas was still after him. “Tell him, old buddy. Tell him.”

Hook got to his feet, wobbly as a toddler. “I think it’s time we cut out. Time I got back to my motel.”

Douglas dismissed him with a swipe of his hand and turned back to the youth, who was taking a pull on the wine bottle again. Douglas watched him for a moment and then roughly tore the bottle out of his hands. “Give me that, ya creep,” he slurred. “And get outa my attic. Ya don’t belong here.”

The youth did nothing for a time, just stood there looking mildly incredulous as Douglas, holding onto the banister with one hand, tipped up the bottle and drank, deeply, as if it were water. Then Hook saw the new thing come into the youth’s eyes, a glint like gunmetal. And abruptly he stepped in close to Douglas, as if he were going to kiss him, but instead hit him solidly in the stomach. The bottle clattered to the floor, spilling what little wine was left in it. Douglas staggered forward a few steps and then dropped to his knees at the top of the stairway and began to vomit, not much, for like Hook he had not eaten all evening long. But he could not stop, it seemed, just knelt there in the dust of his past retching violently over the meager pool of vomit he had produced.