While I sit with all the other patients in the waiting room, I always think that I will ask Dr. Wald what exactly is happening to my eyes, but when I go into his examining room alone it is dark, with a circle of light on the wall, and the doctor is standing with his back to me arranging silver instruments on a cloth. The big chair is empty for me to go sit in, and each time I feel as if I have gone into a dream straight from being awake, the way you do sometimes at night, and I go to the chair without saying anything.

“Charlotte!” Cinder said. “I know what this looks like, but I was an absolute wreck when Mitchell got here – wasn’t I, Mitchell? – and he literally glued me back together. You know what we should do, though. I’m absolutely starving. We should get some pirogi. Hey, I’ve learned this interesting new fact about men. The more weight they make you gain, the more attractive it means they are. God. Why can’t I be one of those little twitching things who shred their food when something goes wrong? I wish I were willowy and thin like you, Charlie.”

“You are willowy and thin,” I said. “I’m bony and big, like a dinosaur skeleton in a museum.”

“Dinosaur skeleton.” Mitchell centered me slowly in his gaze, and I faltered. “It’s been a long, long time since I thought about one of those,” he said.

“Mitchell, darling,” Cinder said, straddling him to massage his shoulders, “how could I get you to go next door and get us some pirogi? Like three orders, with extra sour cream. I am ravenous.”

“That stuff I glued you together with sort of absorbed my liquid assets,” he said.

“I have money,” I said, handing him a ten.

“Where do they live?” I said.

Lee took out a big U.S. road map. “They’re over here, in Baltimore.”

“That’s so far,” I said, following his finger.

“In a sense,” he said. “But on the other hand, look at, say, Pittsburgh.” His finger alighted inches from where we were. “Or Columbus.”

“Or Louisville!” I said. “Look how far that is – to Louisville!”

“You think that’s far?” Lee said. “Well, listen to this – ready? Poplar Bluff!”

“Tulsa!” I said. “Wait – Oklahoma City!”

We both started to shout.

“Cheyenne!”

“Flagstaff!”

“Needles, Barstow, Bishop!”

“Eureka!” we both yelled at once.

We sat back and eyed the map. “That was some trip,” Lee said.

The words she would have said and the sound of the blow she’d gone ready to deliver echoed and died in her head. Words rushed up and died in her throat—panicked words, words to soothe, to tame, to call him back—they rushed on her, but she forgot them halfway to her mouth and he lay so still. And that’s how she learned that Beau Clinton, her only son and the son of Charles Clinton, was dead.

They gave her a plate with the world’s biggest hamburger on it. It was like a cartoon hamburger, the kind she ate with her father every Saturday at the drugstore: no onion, no mustard, a frill of lettuce, and the reddest red tomato. Twice she tried to bite into it, twice the bread slipped, and a pinkish mix of catsup and mayonnaise splattered onto her plate. It was the most beautiful hamburger in the world, but she couldn’t eat it. She began to whimper.

In our family, it’s customary that on our birthdays we wear or assemble or plant what we’ve been given. Nobody remembers how this began, but it’s a ritual. Toward sunset on that birthday I went into the back yard and found Papa there digging holes for the azaleas Mother had given him. The yard is choked with flowering shrubs. He wore his new tennis shoes and he dug back along the fence line. He aimed each jab of the shovel. In the fading watery sunlight the skin on his forehead looked thin, the bone was a fact underneath, and seeing this I was suddenly afraid.

For as long as we could remember we had been together in the house which established the center of the known world. When we were younger we woke in the mornings while it was still dark. Grandad would be clumping out of his back room and down the hall to the bathroom, phantom-like in his long underwear. He wore it because he was a farmer, which was why he got up before first light to do the chores. In the two iron beds in the attic room there were the four of us—Celia and Jenny, who were sisters, Anne and Katie, sisters too, like our mothers, who were sisters. Sometimes we watched each other, knew differences. But most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal.

…before long Aunt Grace was pregnant and unable to work at all, she was so sick. When her time was near she went back to the farm so she could deliver her baby where she was truly happy, in the room where Gram slept, with its open view of fields and woods, above the fireplace mantel the picture of the Indian brave. They called Neil in plenty of time to be there. Two years later, when Katie was born, Aunt Grace’s labor was faster and they couldn’t contact him in time. Over the phone when finally they reached him and told him he was the father of a second healthy child, another girl, Neil retorted: “How come you bothered to call?”

“We must never again believe the physicians. Do they have the power of life and death? Do they note the sparrow’s fall?” Christian Science was a science of health, it was the power of God revealed and demonstrated. It would help all of us, as it had helped her; and it was going to cure Aunt Grace completely. Aunt Elinor was absolutely convinced of it. Besides, under the circumstances, “Grace, my dear,” Aunt Elinor asked, "what have you possibly got to lose?”

The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…

The bartender was a fine distinguished mantis standing thin and alert and flexible with all the green grace of his species; it was very dark in there, and he never said anything, and the previous bartender (whom Mantis had killed and devoured) had never said anything, either, just pointed dryly to the cash register to indicate the amount owed for prior happiness; so nobody noticed the transition to new management; and anyhow Mantis conveyed an impression of sympathetic as opposed to apathetic acceptance and knew what was wanted and mixed very adequate drinks. The whores were nervous around him because he never pawed them or gestured for freebies like his predecessor when they gave him his share of their take (which the bugs used to buy anti-insecticide chemicals), just stared at them with his piercing bulgy eyes on either side of his green head. So the ceiling creaked and the toiled flushed and the cistern overflowed out back and life went on.

These bugs have the advantage. Not only do they outnumber us a million to one, not only do they live by alien insect creeds that attach no value to individual life, but they also retain the rectitude and purity of the underdog. And so it is that they have insidiously debauched the public mind, though we still control the larger cities. I myself have killed many bugs in my time, though of course I have never slain wantonly, only in self-defense, when no compromise could be a cure.

Well, what the hell. The situation is the same. While we have life, we have hope. While we have hope, we have courage. While we have courage, we have ingenuity. While we have ingenuity, we have flame-throwers. A state of war now exists between us and the bugs.

My job here is a strange one. The description I found in the classifieds read: “Overnight counselor-in-residence for developmentally disabled teenagers with behavior problems.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant. But it went on to read: “Some meal preparation required; counselor is able to sleep during shift.”

At the time it seemed that it might suit me, the sleeping part in particular.

“Hey!” I shouted, “slow down!”

“Dad!” he was calling. “There’s a guy!”

“What?”

“There’s a guy in the creek.” He was gulping.

“What are you saying?”

“It’s like he’s stuck under the bridge. He’s not moving.”

He led me on his bike back to the park. I didn’t call out to anyone to follow us. I think, like many others, I resist being alarmed until there’s no other choice.

The girl, once she had reached the priest where he stood at the foot of the altar, took the host in her hand in the modern way. But instead of putting it in her mouth, she covered it with her other hand as if it were alive, like a grasshopper, and might escape. She walked away like this, and then, rather than turning down the aisle to return to her pew, she went straight ahead and pushed through the side door with her shoulder.

Even as they entered, he could feel the place envelop him like a vapor with a smell of heavy, overcooked food, privation and dust. The lady taking tickets, old and wigged, with big bosoms, conspicuously switched from Yiddish to German, putting the interlopers on notice that they had been spotted. Eyeing the overblown placard for the play, showing a giant Jew with maniacal eyes throttling some stricken Gentile, he again wondered, Why did they huddle so, these people? And all the while he kept hearing this coarse, splattery jargon, so animated, with that catarrh as though a fishbone were stuck in the throat. There was a man selling hot tea from a samovar and another vending sticky cakes and ices. And the eating—everybody eating, gnawing apples and chewing sweet crackling dumplings from greasy sheets of brown paper. And that marshy barn-warmth of people huddling. It was too close for him.

At least Russell felt he had allies and forebears. Unlike Wittgenstein, he saw himself as part of a tradition, one of a line of thinkers who had stared at various walls, wondering what remained to be done—or more likely demolished.

By persistence or brute force a wall might be assaulted, but it would not be breached by imagining it was not really so high or formidable. Still, even Wittgenstein would wonder at times if a given wall even existed—that is, if a problem was truly a philosophical problem, and not instead one of the wards of psychology or science. Russell, by contrast, was more wily. Philosophy, he would say with a wink, was traditionally a case of weighing theft—the theft of assumptions and givens—over honest toil. Wittgenstein despised this attitude. He said the problems must be squarely confronted, not sent a Trojan horse. And here Wittgenstein would see himself as both the betrayed and the betrayer, knowing, as Russell did not, that their walls were really quite different. Shameful arrogance, but true, Wittgenstein would think. Russell did not have his ear to this wall, and if he did, he could not hear it surging with the outer sea.

Looking out the window as the train crept into Vienna, Wittgenstein could see the massive city huddled under clumps of low winter clouds. A smoky bluish gray in his memory, Vienna now seemed singed at the edges like an old photograph, everything begrimed from the cheap coal they were forced to burn, when coal was available at all. In the station, with its resounding marble ceilings, the lights flickered ominously and the marble stairs echoed with wooden-soled shoes, leather, like most other commodities, being increasingly unobtainable. By the men’s room, a pudgy man with a soiled suit darted out from a vestibule. Sir, he hissed. Do you have any cocoa, spirits or other foodstuffs you might like to sell or trade? The man opened a valise crammed with cans and packages. Look. I have some lovely bacon and tinned milk. Choice tobacco? Silk for your girl?

Roy stored his ammunition in a metal box he kept hidden in the closet. As with everything else hidden in the apartment, I knew exactly where to find it. There was a layer of loose .22 rounds on the bottom of the box under shells of bigger caliber, dropped there by the handful the way men drop pennies on their dressers at night. I took some and put them in a hiding place of my own. With these I started loading up the rifle. Hammer cocked, a round in the chamber, finger resting lightly on the trigger, I drew a bead on whoever walked by—women pushing strollers, children, garbage collectors laughing and calling to each other, anyone—and as they passed under my window I sometimes had to bite my lip to keep from laughing in the ecstasy of my power over them, and at their absurd and innocent belief that they were safe.

Whenever I was told to think about something, my mind became a desert. But this time I had no need of thought, because the answer was already there. I was my mother’s son. I could not be anyone else’s. When I was younger and having trouble learning to write, she sat me down at the kitchen table and covered my hand with hers and moved it though the alphabet for several nights running, and then through words and sentences until the motions assumed their own life, partly hers and partly mine. I could not, cannot, put pen to paper without having her with me. Nor swim, nor sing. I could imagine leaving her. I knew I would, someday. But to call someone else my mother was impossible.

When I opened my eyes I was still on my back. I heard voices calling my name but I did not answer. I lay amidst a profusion of ferns, their fronds glittering with raindrops. The fronds made a lattice above me. The voices came closer and still I did not answer. I was happy where I was. There was movement in the bushes all around me, and again and again I heard my name. I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t laugh and give myself away, and finally they left.