It used to happen on these visits that he would take his mother out. I would meet them on their way to a play or a movie, or I’d see them through the window of our neighborhood Chinese restaurant. She is under five feet tall with a hump that forces her chin almost to meet her breastbone. Frail though she is, this gives her a somewhat robust and even menacing aspect, like some kind of headbutting animal. She has to screw up her eyes when she addresses anyone who isn’t a small child, in a manner that looks painful. Her son is a rangy man who, to accommodate her while walking and talking, has to take baby steps and arch himself sideways like a willow. From a distance they look less like mother and son than like father and obese child. But these days I don’t see them walking and talking, because the man can no longer get his mother to go out. For a while he was able to coax her at least as far as one of the benches in the building courtyard. But she couldn’t sit still. It bothered her that she was visible to anyone looking out the windows of the apartments facing the courtyard. It didn’t matter that these were her neighbors. For one thing, neighbors or not, just about all of them were strangers to her. Long as she has lived in the building—longer than any other tenant, it turns out—she has no friends here. She had a few friends over the years, but they have since moved away, or, like her husband and just about all the friends she’s ever had, these people have died.

This kind of fear—the fear of being seen, or watched, or spied on—has begun to consume the woman more and more. Even worse: her fear of being tricked, or cheated.