The Affinities

Chapter 1

I made the decision when I saw the blood in the mirror. The blood was what changed my mind.

I had thought about it, of course. I had clipped the ad out of the back pages of the local entertainment paper, checked out the website, memorized the address of the local test center. I had strolled past the building earlier that afternoon, lingering at the brass-and-frosted-glass door with what I tried to pass off (not least, to myself) as idle curiosity. I pictured myself stepping into the cool, dim lobby behind the InterAlia logo and maybe changing the course of my life forever, but in the end I shrugged and walked on—a failure of courage, the better part of valor, I honestly couldn’t say which.

Tempted as I was, opening that door would have seemed like a confession of my own inadequacy, a confession I wasn’t prepared to make.

The sight of my own bloody face changed my mind.

I walked south from the InterAlia building, on my way to meet my ex-roommate Dex at the ferry docks: we had made plans to ride over to the Toronto Islands for an open-air concert. What I didn’t know, because I had been too self-absorbed to pay attention to the news, was that a large-scale demo was going on in the city’s financial district, directly between me and the lakeshore.

The sound of it reached me first. It was like the sound you hear from an open-air sports stadium when there’s a game on: no discernible content, just the undulant buzz of massed human voices. A couple of blocks later, I thought: angry voices. Maybe a bullhorn or two in the mix. And then I turned a corner and saw it. A mass of protestors filling the street in either direction and about as easy to cross as a raging river. Bad news, because dithering at the door of the InterAlia office had already made me late.

The crowd appeared to be a mix of students and academics and labor union people, and according to their banners it was the new debt laws and a massive University of Toronto tuition hike that had brought them to the streets on a hot late-May evening. A block to the west, where the sky still smoldered with sunset, some kind of serious altercation had begun. Everyone was staring that way, and I guessed the sour tang in the air was a promissory drift of tear gas. But at that moment all I wanted was to get to the waterfront, where the air might be a degree or two cooler, and meet Dex, annoyed with me though he must already be. So I pushed east to the nearest intersection and tried to shoulder through the thick of the crowd at the crosswalk. Bad decision, and I knew it as soon as I was caught in the tidal bore of human flesh. Before I had made much progress, some new threat or obstruction forced everyone closer together.

By craning my head—I’m fairly tall—I caught a glimpse of police in riot gear advancing from the west, beating their sticks on their shields. Tear gas canisters arced into the crowd, trailing smoke, and a woman to the right of me pulled a bandanna over her nose and mouth. A yard from where I stood, a guy in a faded Propaghandi t-shirt climbed onto the roof of a parked car and tossed a Dasani bottle at the cops. I tried to turn back, but it had become impossible to make headway against the pressure of bodies.

A skirmish line of mounted police appeared at the adjoining intersection, and I began to realize it was actually possible that, worst case, I could be kettled into a mass arrest and carted off to a detention cell. (And who would I call, if that happened? My family in New York State would be shocked and angry that I had been arrested; my few friends in the city were hapless art-school types, in no position to post bail.) The crowd lurched eastward, and I tried to veer toward the nearest sidewalk. I took some elbows to the ribs but managed to reach the north side of the street. The building immediately in front of me was a café, locked and barred, but there was a set of concrete steps descending to a second storefront just below ground level—also barred, but I found a place to crouch in the overhang of the concrete stairwell.

I kept my eyes pressed shut against the drifting tear gas, so what little I saw, I saw in blurry glimpses: mostly moving legs at street level, once the face of a woman who had fallen, eyes wide and mouth in a panicked O, as she struggled to stand up. I covered my own mouth with my t-shirt and breathed in gulps as another round of tear gas drifted down from the street. The roar of voices gave way to random screams, the industrial stomp of the police line. Mounted cops passed the niche where I had hidden, a weird chorus line of horse legs.

I had begun to think I was safe when a cop in riot gear came down the steps and found me squatting in the shadows. His face was plainly visible behind the scuffed plastic faceguard of his helmet. A guy not much older than me, maybe one of the foot police who had been roughed up in the struggle. He looked almost as scared as the woman who had fallen a few minutes earlier: the same big, jittery eyes. But angry, too.

I held out my hands in a hey, wait gesture. “I’m not one of them,” I said.

I’m not one of them. It was possibly the most cowardly thing I could have said, though it was also perfectly true. It was practically my fucking mantra. I should have had it tattooed on my forehead.

The cop swung his club. Maybe all he intended was a motivating blow to my shoulder, but the club bounced up and hit the left side of my face across the ridge of the cheekbone. I felt the skin break. A hot numbness that bloomed into pain.

Even the cop seemed startled. “Get the fuck out of here,” he said. “Go!”

I stumbled up the stairs. The street was almost unrecognizable. I was behind the parade line of cops, who had encircled a body of protestors east of the intersection. The block where I stood was empty except for a litter of paper handouts, abandoned backpacks and banners, the still-sizzling husks of tear gas canisters, and the granular glass of broken windshields. A block to the west, someone’s car was on fire. Blood from my face had begun to decorate my shirt in rust-red paisleys. I held my hand against the cut, and blood like warm oil seeped through my fingers.

I turned the nearest corner. I passed another cop, a woman, not in riot gear, who gave me a concerned look and seemed about to ask whether I needed help—I waved her away. I took my phone out of my pocket and tried to call Dex, but he didn’t answer. I guessed he had written me off as a no-show. At University Avenue I stumbled into a subway entrance and caught a train, fending off expressions of concern from other passengers. All I wanted was to be alone in some sheltered place.

The bleeding had mostly stopped by the time I made it home. Home was a bachelor apartment on the third floor of a yellow brick low-rise with a parking lot view. Cheap parquet floors and a few crappy items of furniture. The most personal thing about it was the name on the call-board in the lobby: A. Fisk. A for Adam. The other A. Fisk in the family was my brother Aaron. Our mother had been a committed Bible reader with a taste for alliteration.

The bathroom mirror doubled as the door of the medicine cabinet. I fumbled out a bottle of Advil, closed the door, and stared at myself. I guessed I could get by without stitches. The cut had clotted, though it looked fairly gory. The bruise would be with me for days.

Blood on my face, my hands, my shirt. Blood pinking the water in the basin of the sink.

That was when I knew I was going to call InterAlia. What was there to lose? Book an appointment. Open that brass-and-glass door. And find what?

One more scam, most likely.

Or, just maybe, some new and different version of them. A them I could be one of.

They gave me an appointment for Tuesday after classes. I showed up ten minutes early.

Behind the door, past the tiled lobby of the remodeled two-story building, the local branch of InterAlia was a suite of cubicles divided by glass-brick walls. Cool air whispered from ceiling vents and a polarized window admitted amber-tinted sunlight. There was a steady in-and-out traffic of people, some in business clothes and some in street clothes. Nothing distinguished the employees from their clients but the embossed lapel badges they wore. A receptionist checked my name against an appointment list and directed me to cubicle nine: “Miriam will do your intake today.”

Miriam turned out to be a thirtyish woman with a ready smile and a faint Caribbean accent. She thanked me for my interest in InterAlia and asked me how much I knew about Affinity testing.

“I read the website pretty carefully,” I said. “And that article in The Atlantic a couple of months ago.”

“Then you probably know most of what I’m going to tell you, but it’s my job to make sure potential clients are aware of how we do placements and what’s expected of them. Some people come in with misconceptions, and we want to correct them up front. So bear with me, and I’ll try not to bore you.” Smile.

I smiled back and didn’t interrupt her monologue, which I figured was the verbal equivalent of those caveats in microprint at the bottom of pharmaceutical advertisements.

“First off,” she said, “you need to know we can’t guarantee you a placement. What we offer is a series of tests that will tell us whether you’re compatible with any of the twenty-two Affinity groups. We ask for a small deposit up front, which will be refunded if you don’t qualify. A little more than sixty percent of applicants ultimately do qualify, so your chances are better than even—but we still end up turning away four of every ten, so that’s a real possibility. Do you understand?”

I said I did.

“We also like to remind our clients that failing to qualify isn’t any kind of value judgment. We’re looking for certain clusters of complex social traits, but everyone is unique. There’s nothing wrong with you if you fall outside those parameters; all it means is that we’re unable to provide our particular service. All right?”

All right.

“You also need to be clear on what we’re offering if you do qualify. First off, we’re not a dating service. Many people have found partners through their Affinity, but that’s absolutely not a guaranteed outcome. Sometimes people come to us because they’re in trouble, socially or psychologically. Such people may or may not need therapeutic attention, but that’s also not the business we’re in.”

As she said this she glanced pointedly at the bandage I was wearing. I said, “This isn’t—I mean, I don’t go around getting into fights or anything. I just—”

“None of my business, Mr. Fisk. You’ll be evaluated by professionals, and the tests, both physical and psychological, are completely objective. No one is standing in judgment of you.”

“Right. Good.”

“Should you qualify, you’ll be placed in one of the twenty-two Affinities and offered an invitation to join a local group, called a tranche. Each Affinity has regional and local subdivisions—the regional groups are called sodalities, and the locals are called tranches. A tranche has a maximum of thirty members. As soon as one is filled, we initiate a new group. You might be assigned as a replacement to an existing group or as part of a new tranche—either way, there might be a waiting period before you’re placed. Currently the average is two or three weeks following assessment. Got it?”

Got it.

“Assuming you’re placed in a tranche, you’ll find yourself in the company of people we call polycompatible. Some clients come in with the misconception that they’ll be placed among people who are like themselves, but that’s not the case. As a group, your tranche will most likely be physically, racially, socially, and psychologically diverse. Our evaluations look beyond race, gender, sexual preference, age, or national origin. Affinity groups aren’t about excluding differences. They’re about compatibilities that run deeper than superficial similarity. Among people of the same Affinity as yourself, you are statistically more likely to trust others, to be trusted, to make friends, to find partners, in general to have successful social engagements. Within your Affinity you will be misunderstood less often and you’ll have an intuitive rapport with many of your tranchemates. Understood?”

Understood.

“Again, your deposit will be refunded in full if we fail to place you. But the testing requires a commitment of your time, which we can’t refund. You’ll have to attend five test sessions of at least two hours each, which we can book to suit your schedule—five consecutive evenings, once a week for five weeks, or any other sequence that suits you.” She turned to the monitor on her desk and tapped a few keys. “You’ve already filled out the online form, so that’s fine. What we need from you now, if you choose to proceed, is a valid credit or debit card and your signature on this consent form.” She took a single sheet from a drawer and slid it to me. “You’ll also need to show me a piece of government-issued photo ID. A nurse will take a blood sample before you leave.”

“Blood sample?”

“One now, so we can commence basic DNA sequencing, and one at each session for a drug assay. Apart from bloodwork, all our tests are non-invasive—but the results will be useless if you come in under the influence of alcohol or other intoxicants, so we do have to test. Results are completely confidential, of course. Clients taking prescription medication need to make us aware of it at this point, but according to your application you don’t fall into that category.”

The only drugs I had been taking lately were over-the-counter painkillers, so I nodded.

“All right then. Take your time and read through the agreement carefully before you sign it. I’ll step out for a cup of coffee while you do that, if you’ll excuse me—would you like a cup?”

“Please,” I said.

The logo at the top of the agreement form—

—was the most comprehensible part of it; all else was legal boilerplate, mostly above my pay grade. But I set myself to the task of reading it. I was about finished when Miriam came back. “Any questions?”

“Just one. It says that the result of my tests becomes the property of the corporation?”

“The result, yes, but only after your name and other identifiers have been stripped from it. That lets us use the data to evaluate our client base and maybe focus our research a little better. We don’t sell or share the information we collect.”

So she claimed. Also, the check is in the mail and I’ll pull out before I come. But I didn’t really care who saw my test result. “I guess that’s all right.”

Miriam pushed a pen across the desk. I signed and dated the document. She smiled again.

Dex called me later that night. I saw his number and thought about letting the call go to voice mail, but picked up instead.

“Adam!” he said. “What are you doing?”

“Watching TV.”

“What, like porn?”

“Some reality show.”

“Yeah, I bet it’s porn.”

“It’s a show with alligators in it. I don’t watch alligator porn.”

“Uh-huh. So what happened the other night?”

“I texted you about it.”

“That bullshit about a demo? I almost missed the ferry, waiting for you.”

“I’m lucky I didn’t end up in the emergency room.”

“You couldn’t just take the subway?”

“I was almost there, and I was already late, so—”

“You were already late—that says it all, doesn’t it?”

I had shared my apartment with Dex for six months last year. We took some of the same classes at Sheridan College. The roommate thing didn’t work out. When he moved, he left his bong and his cat behind. He eventually came back for the bong. I gave the cat to the retired librarian in the apartment down the hall—she seemed grateful. “Thank you for your compassion.”

“I could come over. We could watch a movie or something.”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“Come on, Adam. You owe me an evening’s entertainment.”

“Yeah … no.”

“You can’t be a dick twice in one week.”

“I’m pretty sure I can,” I said.

Of course it wasn’t Dex’s fault that I was moody—not that Dex would ever admit that anything was his fault.

I figured I had a couple of good reasons for applying to the Affinities and a few bad ones. The fact that my social life revolved around a guy like Dex was one of the good ones. A bad one? The idea that I could buy a better life for a couple of hundred dollars and a battery of psych tests.

But I had done my research. I wasn’t totally naïve. I knew a few things about the Affinities.

I knew the service had been commercially available for four years now. I knew it had gained popularity in the last year, after The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and BoingBoing ran feature articles about it. I knew it was the brainchild of Meir Klein, an Israeli teleodynamicist who had ditched a successful academic career to work for the corporation. I knew there were twenty-two major and minor Affinity groups, each named after a letter of the Phoenician alphabet, the “big five” being Bet, Zai, Het, Semk, and Tau.

What I didn’t know was how the evaluation process actually worked, apart from the generalities I had read online.

Fortunately I had a talkative tester … who turned out to be Miriam, the woman who had done my initial intake. She grinned like an old friend when I showed up for the first session. I recognized the smile as customer relations, but I was still grateful for it. I wondered whether Miriam was a member of an Affinity.

She escorted me to a nurse’s station in the back hall of the InterAlia office, where I was relieved of another vial of blood, and then to a small evaluation room. The room was windowless and air-conditioned to a centigrade degree above chilly. It contained a teakwood desk and two chairs. On the desk was a fourteen-inch video monitor, a laptop computer, and a chunky leather headband with a couple of USB ports built into it. I said, “Do I wear that?”

“Yes. Tonight we’ll use it to do some baseline measurements. You can put it on now if you like.”

She helped me adjust it. The headband was heavy with electronics but surprisingly comfortable. Miriam plugged one end of a cable into the band, the other into the laptop. The monitor facing me wasn’t connected to the laptop. I couldn’t see whatever Miriam was looking at on the laptop’s screen.

“It’ll take a minute or two to initialize,” she said. “Most of the information we collect is analyzed later, but it takes some heavy-duty number-crunching just to acquire the data.”

I wondered if she was acquiring it now. Was our conversation part of the test? She seemed to anticipate the question: “The test hasn’t started yet. Today, it’s just you looking at a series of pictures on that monitor. Nothing complicated. Like I said, we’re establishing a baseline.”

“And the blood sample? That’s for drug testing, you said?”

“Drug testing plus an assay for a range of primary and secondary metabolites. I know this must seem scattershot, Mr. Fisk, but it’s all connected. That could be InterAlia’s slogan, if we needed another one: everything’s connected. A lot of modern science is concerned with understanding patterns of interaction. In heredity, that’s the genome. In how DNA is expressed, we talk about the proteinome. In brain science it’s what they call the connectome—how brain cells hook up and interact, singly or in groups. Meir Klein invented the word socionome, for the map of characteristic human interactions. But each affects the others, from DNA to protein, from protein to brain cells, from brain cells to how you react to the people you meet at work or school. To place you in an Affinity we need to look at where you are on all those different maps.”

I said I understood. She consulted her laptop once more. “Okay, so we’re good to go. I’ll leave the room, and the monitor will show you a series of photographs, like a slide show, five seconds per slide. Twenty minutes of that, a coffee break, then twenty minutes more. You don’t have to do anything but watch. Okay?”

And that was how it went. The pictures were hard to categorize. Most showed human beings, but a few were landscapes or photographs of inanimate objects, like an apple or a clock tower. The photographs of human beings were drawn from a broad cross section of cultures and ages and were gender-balanced. In most of them, people were doing undramatic things—chatting, fixing meals, working. I tried not to overanalyze either the pictures or my reaction to them.

And that was it: session one of five.

“We’ll see you again tomorrow evening,” Miriam said.

The next day’s test used the same headset but no photographs. Instead, the monitor prompted me with displays of single words in lowercase letters: when the word appeared, all I had to do was read it aloud. A few seconds later, another word would appear. And so on. It felt awkward at first, sitting alone in a room saying things like, “Animal. Approach. Conciliation. Underwater. Song. Guilt. Vista…”—but before long it just seemed like a job, fairly tedious and not particularly difficult.

Miriam came back for the midpoint break, carrying a cup of coffee. “I remembered how you liked it. One cream, one sugar, right? Or would you prefer a glass of water?”

“Coffee’s great. Thank you. Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Personal question?”

“Try me.”

“Do you belong to an Affinity? I mean, if you’re allowed to say.”

“Oh, I’m allowed. Employees can take the test for free. I did. I know my Affinity. But no, I never joined a tranche.”

“Why not?”

She held up her left hand, the ring finger circled by a modest gold band. “My husband was tested too, but he didn’t qualify. And I don’t want to commit to a social circle he can’t join. It’s not an insurmountable problem—tranches organize spouse-friendly auxiliary events. But he would have been shut out of official functions. And I didn’t want that. That’s why the existing Affinities are a little bit skewed toward young singles, divorcees, widowers. Over time, as people meet and mate inside their own Affinity groups, we expect the imbalance to even out. It’s trending that way already.”

“You ever regret not joining?”

“I regret not having what so many of our clients find so useful and empowering. Sure. But I made my decision when I married my husband, and I’m happy with it.”

“Which Affinity did you qualify for?”

“Now that’s a personal question. But I’m a Tau, for what it’s worth. And I take some comfort from knowing I have a place to go, if I ever need to call on people I can really trust. But let’s get on with business, okay?”

The next day I got a call from Jenny Symanski.

Some people thought of Jenny as my girlfriend. I wasn’t sure I was one of those people. That wasn’t a dig at Jenny. It was just that our relationship had a perpetually unsettled quality, and neither of us liked to name it.

“Hey,” she said. “Is this a good time?”

She was calling from Schuyler, my home town. Schuyler is in upstate New York, and all my family were there. I had left Schuyler two years ago for a diploma program in graphic design at Sheridan College, and since then I had seen Jenny only on occasional visits home. “Good a time as any,” I said.

“You sure? You sound kind of distracted.”

“I kind of am. I think I told you I’m up for an internship at a local ad agency, but I haven’t heard back. Classes this morning, but I’m home now, so…”

“I don’t want to be a nuisance when there’s so much else on your mind.”

She was being weirdly solicitous. “Don’t worry about it.”

“You seem to be dealing with the situation pretty well.”

“What situation? The internship? The job market sucks—what else is new?”

Long pause.

“Jenny?”

“Oh,” she said. “Shit. Aaron didn’t call you, did he?”

“No, why would Aaron call me?” Another silence. “Jen, what’s up?”

“Your grandmother’s in the hospital.”

I sank onto the sofa. Dex and I had snagged the sofa when a neighbor put it out for the trash. The cushions were compacted and threadbare, and no matter how you shifted around you could never get comfortable. But right then I felt anesthetized. You could have pierced me with a sword. “What happened?”

“Okay, no, she’s basically all right. Okay? Not dead. Not dying. Apparently she woke up in the night with pain in her chest, sweating, puking. Your dad called 911.”

“Jesus, Jen—a heart attack?”

I pictured Grammy Fisk in her raggedy old flannel nightgown, white with a pink flower pattern. She loved that nightgown, but she wouldn’t let any of us see her in it before nine at night or after six in the morning—and strangers never saw her in it. The prospect of paramedics invading her bedroom would have horrified her.

“That’s what everybody thought. But I was over at your dad’s house this morning and he said now the doctors are telling him it was her gallbladder.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it sounded slightly less terrifying than a cardiac condition. “So what do they do, operate on her?”

“That’s not clear. She’s still in the hospital for tests, but they think she can come home tomorrow. There’s something about diet and medication, I don’t really remember…”

“I guess that’s good…”

“Under the circumstances.”

“Yeah, under the circumstances.”

“I’m really sorry to be the one to tell you.”

“No,” I said. “No, I appreciate it.”

And that was true. In some ways, it was better getting the bad news from Jenny than from Aaron. My brother didn’t entirely approve of me or Grammy Fisk. My father had underwritten Aaron’s MBA, and Aaron currently co-managed the family business. But the only one willing to pay for my graphic design courses had been Grammy Fisk, and she had done it over my father’s objections.

A question occurred to me. “How did you find out about it?”

“Well—Aaron told me.”

The Fisks and the Symanskis had been close for decades. Jenny and I had grown up together; she was always at the house. Still: “Aaron told you but not me?”

“I swear, he said he was going to call. Have you checked your phone for messages?”

I rarely had to check my phone for messages. I didn’t get a lot of calls or texts, outside of a few regulars. But I checked. Sure enough, two missed calls from a familiar number. Aaron had tried to get hold of me twice. Both attempts had been yesterday evening, when I had turned off my phone for my session at InterAlia.

I called Aaron and told him I’d heard the news from Jenny. I apologized for not getting back to him sooner.

“Well, turns out it’s not such an emergency after all. She’s home now.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“She’s sleeping, and she needs her rest, so better not.”

It was easy to picture Aaron standing at the ancient landline phone in the living room back home. It was hot in Toronto and probably just as hot in Schuyler. The front windows would be open, curtains dappled with the shade of the willow tree in the yard. The inside of the house would be sultry and still, because my father didn’t believe in air-conditioning before the first of June.

And Aaron himself: dressed the way he always dressed when he wasn’t doing business, black jeans, white shirt, no tie. Dabbing a bead of sweat from his forehead with the knuckle of his thumb.

“How are Dad and Mama Laura taking it?”

Mama Laura was our stepmother.

“Ah, you know Dad. Taking charge. He was practically giving orders to the EMT guys. But worried, of course. Mama Laura’s been in the kitchen most of the day. Neighbors keep coming by with food, like somebody died. It’s nice, but we’re up to our asses in lasagna and baked chicken.”

“What about Geddy?”

Geddy, our twelve-year-old stepbrother, Mama Laura’s gift to the family. “He seems to be dealing with it,” Aaron said, “but Geddy’s a puzzle.”

“Tell Grammy Fisk I’ll be there by tomorrow morning.” I would have to rent a car. But the drive was only five hours, if the border crossing didn’t slow me down.

“She says not.”

“Who says not?”

“Grammy Fisk. She said to tell you not to come.”

“Those were her words?”

“Her words were something like, You tell Adam not to mess up his schoolwork by running down here after me. And she’s right. She’s hardy as a hen. Wait till end of term, would be my advice.”

Maybe, but I would have to hear it directly from Grammy Fisk.

“You’ll be paying us a visit sometime in the next couple of months anyway, right?”

“Right. Absolutely.”

“All right then. I’ll put Dad on. He can fill you in on what the doctors are saying.”

My father spent ten minutes repeating everything he’d learned about the nature and function of the gallbladder, the sum-up being that Grammy Fisk’s condition was non-trivial but far from life-threatening. By that time she was awake and able to pick up the bedroom extension. She thanked me for my concern but urged me to stay put. “I don’t want you ruining the education I paid for, just because I had a bad night. Come see me when I’m feeling better. I mean that, Adam.”

I could hear the fatigue in her voice, but I could hear the determination, too.

“I’ll see you in a few weeks, no matter what.”

“And I look forward to it,” she said.

My third test session was the most uncomfortable. They strapped me under the dome of an MRI scanner for half an hour. Miriam said the scan would be combined with EEG data from my earlier sessions to help calibrate the results.

The next evening it was back to the headband, this time listening to recorded voices speak a series of bland, cryptic English sentences. If it rains, you can use my umbrella. We saw you at the store yesterday.

“In the end,” Miriam said, “the point of all this is to locate you on the grid of the human socionome.”

I took her word for it. The details were a well-kept secret. Meir Klein, who invented the test, had done basic research in social teleodynamics when he was teaching at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, outlining what it would take to construct a taxonomy of human social behavior. But the meat of his work had taken place after he was hired by InterAlia, and the details were locked behind airtight nondisclosure agreements. The process by which people were assorted into the twenty-two Affinities had never been fully described or peer-reviewed. The best anyone could say was that it seemed to work. And that was good enough for me.

I liked the idea of it. I wanted it to be true. We’re the most cooperative species on the planet—is there anything you own that you built entirely with your own hands, from materials you extracted from nature all by yourself? And without that network of cooperation we’re as vulnerable as three-legged antelopes in lion territory. But at the same time: what a talent we have for greed, for moral indifference, for wars of conquest on every scale from kindergarten to the U.N. Who hasn’t longed for a way out of that bind? It’s as if we were designed for life in some storybook family, in a house where the doors are never locked and never need to be. Every half-baked utopia is a dream of that house. We want it so badly we refuse to believe it doesn’t or can’t exist.

Had Meir Klein found a way into that storybook house? He never made that claim, at least not explicitly. But even if all he had found was the next best thing—well, hey, it was the next best thing.

The final test session was four hours in front of a monitor with my body hooked up to some serious telemetry. Miriam appeared during breaks, bearing gifts of coffee and oatmeal raisin cookies.

The program running on the monitor was a series of interactive tests, using photographs, symbols, text, video, and occasional spoken words. The computer correlated my test performance with my facial expressions, eye movements, posture, blood pressure, EEG readings, and the beating of my heart.

The tests themselves were pretty simple. There was a spatial-relations test that worked like a game of Tetris. There was an animated puzzle involving a runaway train full of passengers headed for certain destruction: do you throw a switch that causes the train to change tracks, saving all the passengers but killing a couple of pedestrians who happen to be in the way, or do you let the train roll on, dooming everyone aboard it? Some of the tests seemed to touch on identifiable themes (ethnicity, gender, religion), but the majority were pretty obscure. At the end of four hours it began to seem like what was really being tested was my patience.

Then the screen went blank and Miriam popped in, smiling. “That’s it!”

“That’s it?”

“All done, Mr. Fisk, except for the analysis! You should get your results within a couple of weeks, maybe sooner.”

She helped me peel off the headset and the telemetry patches. “Hard to believe it’s over,” I said.

“On the contrary,” she said. “With any luck, you’re just getting started.”

I stepped out of the building into a hot, humid night. The last of the business crowd had gone home, abandoning the neighborhood to speeding cabs and a couple of sparsely populated coffee shops. I walked to the College Street subway station, where a homeless guy was propped against a wall with a change cup in front of him. He gave me a look that was either imploring or contemptuous. I put a dollar coin in his cup. “Bless you,” he said. At least I think the word was “bless.”

By the time I got back to my apartment a drilling rain had begun to fall. The short walk from the subway left me drenched, but that didn’t seem like such a bad thing once I had a towel in my hand and a roof over my head. In the bathroom I looked at my cheek where the cop had clubbed me. The bruise was fading. All that was left of the gash was a pale pink line. But I dreamed of the incident that night, when the room was dark and the rain on the window sounded like the roar of massed voices.

Ten days passed.

Two interviews for a summer internship went nowhere. I finished an end-of-term project (a Flash video animation) and handed it in. I fretted about my future.

On the tenth day I opened an email from InterAlia Inc. My test results had been assessed, it said, and I had been placed in an Affinity. Not just any Affinity, but Tau, one of the big five. My test fees would be debited to my credit card, the email went on to say. And I would be hearing from a local tranche shortly.

I was headed to school when my phone burbled. I didn’t let it go to voice mail. I picked up like a good citizen.

It was Aaron. “Things took a turn for the worse,” he said. “Grammy Fisk’s back in the hospital. And this time you really need to come down and see her.”

Chapter 2

The town of Schuyler was situated at the northeastern corner of the New York State county of Onenia. “Onenia” was a corruption of the Mohawk word onenia’shon:’a, meaning “various rocks,” and for more than a century Schuyler’s primary business had been its quarries: pits carved into the fragile karst that underlay the county’s unproductive farmland. Since the 1970s most of those quarries had grown unprofitable and had been shut down, left to fill with greasy brown water that rose in the spring and evaporated over the course of the long summers. As a child I had been warned never to play around the old quarries, and of course every kid I knew had gone there as often as possible, biking down county roads where grasshoppers flocked in the heat like flurries of buzzing brown snow.

On the way to my father’s house I drove past trailheads I still recognized, hidden entrances to pressed-earth roads where trucks had once carted limestone to stoneworks across the state. Stone from Onenia County had helped build scores of libraries and government buildings, back when libraries and government buildings still commanded a certain respect. On Schuyler’s main street there were a few remnants of that era: an old bank, gutted to house a Gap store but still wearing its limestone façade; a Carnegie library in the Federal style, with a tiny acreage of public park to separate it from the liquor store on one side and the welfare office on the other. All dark now: I had left Toronto in an afternoon drizzle and reached Schuyler just after a rainy sunset.

Despite hard times there was still a “good” part of Schuyler, where the town’s diminishing stock of prosperous families kept house: families like the Fisks, the Symanskis, the Cassidys, the Muellers. The windows of their houses glittered as if their wealth had been compressed into rectilinear slabs of golden light, and the houses seemed to promise ease, comfort, safety, all the consolations of family—though this was often false advertising.

I pulled into the driveway of my father’s house and parked next to Aaron’s Lexus and behind my father’s Lincoln Navigator. The same comforting light spilled out of the house’s windows, painting the rain-slick leaves of the willow in the yard. But no one was happy inside. The family crowded around as I came through the door: my father, my brother, my stepmother Laura. Twelve-year-old Geddy stood behind Mama Laura, and when I approached him he offered his hand with a solemnity that might have been funny under other circumstances. I noticed his hair had been cut into a military-style buzz, probably as a result of my father’s crusades to make Geddy “more masculine.” I had been the subject of my father’s attention often enough that I recognized the symptoms.

“We waited dinner for you,” Mama Laura said. “Come in and wash up. Geddy’ll take your suitcase up to your room, won’t you, Geddy?”

Geddy seemed pleased to take charge of the duffel bag into which I had thrown a couple of changes of clothes. “Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t be too long,” my father said. He hadn’t changed since the last time I’d seen him. Same crisp blue shirt, same crumpled black tie loose around the collar. He was a tall man, but not fat. People said I looked like him, and I guessed I did, but the only time I saw the resemblance was when I was tired or angry. As if some perpetual discontent had left its mark on his face.

At the table we didn’t talk about Grammy Fisk—at least not right away. We had had the essentials of that conversation already, by phone. A second health crisis had awakened Granny Fisk in the small hours of the night, one that had nothing to do with her gallbladder. This time, Grammy Fisk hadn’t apologized for the trouble she was putting everyone to, hadn’t insisted on getting dressed before the EMT guys showed up. She had woken up unable to move or feel the right side of her body; she was blind in one eye; her speech was slurred and indistinct; and she could communicate nothing but a groaning, awful terror.

By the time she reached Onenia County Hospital she had lost consciousness. Scans revealed massive intracranial bleeding—a stroke, in other words. She had been comatose for the last two days, and while my father couldn’t bring himself to say it (“Prospects don’t look so good” was the closest he could come), she wasn’t expected to recover. The hospital had promised to call if there was any change in her condition; we would all drive there in the morning to keep vigil by her bed.

“Not that she seems to notice,” my father added. “I don’t think she knows we’re even there, to tell the truth.”

Mama Laura had prepared a huge meal, including sweet potatoes in brown sugar and roast chicken, but no one had much appetite, least of all me. We watched each other pick at our plates. At forty-two, ten years younger than my father, Mama Laura still had the timid demeanor she had brought to the family when she married him: an instinctive caution that showed in her body language and in her face, always turned a shy quarter-angle away. Concealed under this deference was a genuine love of the work that embedded her in the family. We could have afforded all kinds of help, but Mama Laura refused to consider hiring a maid or a cook. It was not that she thought of herself as a servant. She expected to be appreciated for what she did. But it was also her way of demonstrating her right to be among us. She fed us and cleaned our house, and that entitled her to a certain non-negotiable minimum of respect, both for herself and for her son Geddy. Tonight she gazed forlornly at the platters of untouched food on the table, though she had taken little of it herself.

“All that trouble in the South China Sea,” my father said, “and the Persian Gulf. It’s not doing our business any good. Or this town.”

That was his idea of something neutral to talk about. He aimed his remarks at my older brother, Aaron. Aaron sat next to me, shoulders squared, knife and fork poised over his plate—Aaron’s appetite seemed relatively intact. And as always, he knew what was expected of him. “The Chinese,” he said, nodding, “the fucking Saudis…”

The dynamic was so familiar I hardly had to listen to the rest of it: my father’s opinions, amplified by my brother. Not that Aaron was faking it. He shared my father’s conviction that America was a fallen Eden and that what lay beyond its gates was a wilderness of veniality, poverty, and low cunning. Mama Laura spoke up once, to ask me if I wanted more mashed potatoes. I thanked her, but no.

“How are your courses coming?” she asked during a lull.

“Not bad.”

“I can’t imagine how that works. I mean graphic design school. Do you draw a lot of pictures?”

“There’s a little more to it than that.”

“I’m sure there must be.”

Aaron and my father exchanged impatient glances and went back to the subject of the Middle East, the skyrocketing price of oil. I looked at Geddy, who was sitting across from me, but Geddy’s attention was entirely focused on his plate, where he was rearranging his food without eating much of it. He looked tired. His face was bloated. He was easily frightened, and his best defense, now as ever, was to retreat into himself. Grammy Fisk had always been kind to Geddy, as she had always been kind to me—what would Geddy do without her? His mother would look after him, but who would understand him?

We all turned in after the living room clock chimed eleven. I slept in the room that had been mine for years. I raised the sash of the window an inch or so. The rain had come through Onenia County with a cold front on its heels, and the breeze that lifted the hem of the curtain was fresh and moist. Every sound was familiar: the front-yard willow tossing in the wind, rainwater gushing from the downspouts, the four-cornered echo of a known space. It was the rest of the house that felt hollowed-out, heartless.

In the morning we went to visit Grammy Fisk.

We camped out in the visitor’s lounge and took turns spending time with her. I went into the room after my father and Aaron left it.

Grammy Fisk was unresponsive, and a doctor had told us as diplomatically as possible that there was very little higher brain function going on, but it was still possible—or so we told ourselves and pretended to believe—that she might be aware of our presence. I doubted it as soon as I saw her. Grammy Fisk wasn’t in that room. It was her body on the bed all right, intubated and monitored, her cheeks sunken where her dentures had been removed (an indignity she would never have tolerated), but she was gone. Just plain gone. When I took her hand it felt inert, like something made out of pipe cleaners and papier-mâché.

Still, I thanked her for everything she had given me. Which was much. Not least, the idea that I might not be entirely alone in the world.

Jenny Symanski arrived at the hospital late in the afternoon. We hugged, but there was time for only a few words before Jenny spent a few minutes of her own with Grammy Fisk. While we waited, Mama Laura hinted that it would be all right if I took Jenny out to dinner. The rest of the family would make shift with the hospital commissary, but she thought Jenny deserved something a little classier now that I was back in town. And I agreed.

We took my car. I drove Jenny away from the hospital, past the outlet malls and down the old main street of Schuyler, to what had been our hangout for years, a Chinese restaurant called Smiling Dragon. Green linoleum floors, a desperately unhealthy ficus in the window, no pretensions.

Jenny’s dad had been my father’s friend and drinking partner for more than thirty years. Both had started out with a modest family grubstake, and both had achieved modest fortunes by Onenia County standards. Jenny’s dad owned a vast acreage of hardscrabble farmland north of town, which he had developed into housing tracts and strip malls during Schuyler’s better days; my father had turned the hardware store he inherited into a statewide chain of Fisk’s Farm Supply outlets. The families had grown up together. I had spent a lot of time at Jenny’s place when we were younger, until her mother’s alcoholism made my presence there uncomfortable; after that, Jenny had become an honorary Fisk.

Jenny and I talked about Grammy Fisk over egg rolls. “She was always the family beatnik,” I said. “She showed me her high school yearbook one time. Class of fifty-seven. Some school in Allentown.” Which was where my grandfather had found her, a few years later, tending a booth at the Allentown Fair. “She was pretty amazing looking, actually. Long black hair, lots of attitude. She dropped out of state college and spent a couple of years doing the bohemian thing—big into folk music, at least until she got married, and even then she would sometimes sneak out to shows with her old girlfriends. There were all these ticket stubs tucked into her photo album.”

“Seriously? She never mentioned any of that to me.”

For obvious reasons. My grandfather had venerated Barry Goldwater, and there had never been a word of dissent from Grammy Fisk. By the time my father was born, her Charlie Parker and Bob Dylan records had gone into permanent storage. But she saw things the other Fisks were blind to. If the world was a puzzle, she was drawn to the pieces that didn’t fit. “You know how she was.”

“Yeah.”

Jenny was five-foot-three in stocking feet and dressed as if she wanted to be ignored: jeans and a cotton shirt and blond hair tied back so tightly it hurt to look at. A mouth that gave out smiles like party favors but had been made somber by Grammy Fisk’s illness. She cocked her head at me. “How are you really doing, up there in Canada? And what happened to your face?”

I told her about the incident at the demo. At the end she said, “So are you a cop-hating lefty now?”

“Honestly? What I remember about that cop is how he looked. Pissed off, obviously, you know, all wound up, but also scared. Like what he did to me was something he might not be proud of. Maybe something he wouldn’t mention when he went home to his wife.”

“Or maybe he was just an asshole.”

“Maybe.”

“He had a choice. He could have told you to move on.”

“Sure, but the situation was pushing him hard in one direction. Which made me think about how fucked up and really arbitrary it is, the way we conduct ourselves with other people. There has to be a better way.” And because this was Jenny, to whom I could say almost anything, I told her I had taken the Affinity test.

After a pause she said, “Those Affinity groups … they’re what, some kind of dating service?”

“No, no, nothing like that.” I explained about Meir Klein and InterAlia. “Basically, I was tired of not having anybody to talk to except a couple of guys from my classes at Sheridan.”

“So they sort of design a social circle for you?”

“Not exactly, but yeah, you end up with a bunch of new friends.”

“Uh-huh. And it really works?”

“Supposedly. I don’t know yet.”

“Well, well, well.” Which was classic Jenny. It meant, I don’t like what I’m hearing but I’m not prepared to argue about it. “Maybe I should join one of those groups.”

“There might not be any in Schuyler just yet.”

“Mm. Bad luck for you, then. When you move back home.”

“Which won’t be anytime soon.”

Her eyebrows went up. “But I thought—”

“What?”

“With Grammy Fisk and all—”

“I’ll be here a few days more, but I can’t stay much longer than that. I need to set up a summer internship, for one thing.”

“But Grammy Fisk was paying your tuition.”

Because my father had refused to. He didn’t approve of what he called my “artistic side,” and he considered any degree that wasn’t an MBA a concession to limp-wristed liberalism. But Grammy Fisk had fought him on that one. She couldn’t dictate how he spent his money, but she had money of her own, and she had been determined to spend it on my education, even if that caused trouble in the family—which it needn’t, she inevitably added, if my father would take a step back and allow her to do her youngest grandson this simple favor. What was wrong with Adam setting out on a career of his own, even if it did involve drawing pictures?

Jenny put her hand over mine. “I’ve been at the house. I hear the talk. I don’t know what arrangements Grammy Fisk might have made. But she’s not legally competent anymore. She signed a power of attorney after the gallbladder thing. Your dad’s in charge now.”

I drove Jenny home. Visiting hours were over and Grammy Fisk had been left alone with the night nurses and the cleaning staff at Onenia General. Jenny’s house, a dozen streets away from my father’s, was dark except for a single light in the office above the garage. Ed Symanski must have been awake in there, doing his accounts, maybe reading or watching Netflix. Jenny’s mom was probably asleep. “Drunk by eight, dead drunk by ten,” as Jenny had described her. But that didn’t preclude the possibility of night events: unprovoked midnight arguments, objects thrown against walls. “You can sleep over at our house tonight,” I said. I knew she had been doing so for the last few days, on the grounds that the Fisks needed a hand with their family crisis.

She shook her head. “I have to be here sometimes. My dad can’t handle it all by himself. But thanks.” And we shared a half-hearted kiss.

Back at the house I checked my phone for messages and found an email from a name I didn’t recognize: Lisa Wei.

Hi Adam. My name is Lisa and I’m hosting the next Tau get-together. You’ll be invited in a general mailing, but since you’re new I wanted to introduce myself and make the invitation personal. The time is two Saturdays from now. Show up at 4 if you want to help set up, 6 if you want dinner, 8 if you just want to socialize. The tranche house is close to the Rosedale subway station and details will be in the mailing. Anyhow, please come!!! The first meet-up always seems intimidating but it’s really not, take my word for it. Can’t wait to meet you!

It was nice, and under other circumstances I would have welcomed it. But given the question mark hovering over my future, I had to send a noncommittal response.

I grieved for Grammy Fisk in my sleep that night. I couldn’t grieve by daylight because she wasn’t dead. But in my dream the loss was complete. I woke up calling her name. No one heard me, fortunately, and the sound of the wind at the window was lonely but oddly comforting, and eventually I was able to drift back to sleep.

Grammy Fisk’s presence had operated in the family the way carbon rods function in a nuclear reactor: she damped down a potentially explosive force and turned it to useful work. Without her, we were bound to reach critical mass. The unstable radioactive core was, of course, my father.

But most of my week in Schuyler passed relatively quietly. Each day began with a trek to the hospital, some visits longer than others because my father was getting briefings about options for Grammy Fisk’s extended care, either in a dedicated facility or at home (an option he ruled out pretty quickly). The sessions by Grammy Fisk’s bedside grew more brief as the reality of her situation began to sink in.

She never registered our presence in any meaningful way. Her eyes were motionless behind the papyrus of her eyelids. Still, I talked to her. I told her about school, I shared my ambivalence about Jenny and our future, I even mentioned the Affinity I’d joined. These were the kinds of things I had once discussed with her and with no one else. Sitting beside her vacant body, I was able to imagine her responses. She spoke to me the only way she could, through the medium of memory and longing.

I also made a point of spending time with my stepbrother, Geddy. Grammy Fisk would have approved, but I didn’t need to be pushed. I liked Geddy. At twelve, he was chubby and quiet and easily intimidated and more bookish than he liked to let on, all of which reminded me of how I had been at his age. (Except for the chubbiness: I had been one of those kids who needs to be encouraged to eat.) On the Wednesday before I left, Geddy took me up to his room to see the posters Mama Laura had grudgingly allowed him to tack up on the wall.

Geddy would probably have placed on the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, had he ever been diagnosed. His serial obsessions (which included kites, architecture, LEGO, stories about heroic animals, and the band My Chemical Romance) were what he preferred to talk about, which was why my father had banned all these subjects as dinner table conversation. The posters Geddy had been allowed to put up were a picture of Rockefeller Center (“It was designed by the architect Raymond Hood. He also did the Tribune Tower in Chicago.”) and a concert photo of Gerard Way. A small wooden bookcase housed his subscription copies of Popular Mechanics, the only magazine my father let him read, and a few ancient Albert Payson Terhune novels, also donated by my father. In one corner was the meticulously tidy desk on which Geddy did his homework. He owned a laptop for school purposes, but he was allowed Internet access only an hour a day and under supervision. He cherished an old click-wheel iPod, which neither my father nor Mama Laura had yet learned how to police for forbidden files, loaded with slightly out-of-date goth and emo bands.

At one point Geddy said he wished he had more bookcases and more books to put on them. I guessed he was getting a little tired of Terhune’s collies. But he didn’t have unguarded access to downloads, and I knew from experience how difficult it was to buy and keep paperbacks without my father’s surveillance. “Geddy,” I said. “You want to see something?”

He shrugged and stared, which meant yes.

The house had an old-fashioned attic, with a ladder you tugged down from the ceiling of the third-floor hallway. The attic was the family’s memory hole, rarely visited. We waited until the coast was clear, then clambered up the ladder. The attic was where I kept books during my adolescence, hidden in the far corner of the room, where the roof slanted down to the floor, under a layer of exposed pink fiberglass insulation.

The books I stashed there had never been discovered, and Geddy’s eyes widened when he saw them. Their spines were curved and in some cases broken—they were mostly used books from a secondhand shop on Main, now closed—but the colors were bright, the covers intact. Nothing special, mostly science fiction and mysteries straight out of the fifty-cent bin. But Geddy gave me an awed look. “Can I see them?”

“See them, read them—whatever you want, bro.”

“But they’re yours!”

“I’m finished with them. You can have them if you want.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Just don’t get caught. But if you do, it’s okay to blame me. I’m the one who brought them into the house.”

It was as if I had offered him a cache of jewels. It was funny but sad, the gratitude that came brimming out of his eyes. They’re just old books, I wanted to say. But that would have been disingenuous. There were some good stories in there. Stories big enough to hide inside. And I imagined Geddy needed all the hiding places he could find.

The family achieved critical mass the night before I left.

That afternoon, driving back from the hospital with Aaron while the rest of the family rode in my father’s big-ass Navigator, I had raised the subject of the family’s finances. I was under no illusion that my brother had my best interests at heart. Aaron was five years older than me, more athletic, better-looking, arguably smarter, and a vastly better exemplar of what my father considered the family’s core values. He could also be a colossal dick. But I needed to know what was going on, and I thought I might get a slightly more objective answer from Aaron than I would by asking my father.

“The thing is,” I said, “I’m going to need to know about tuition and expenses for next year. I have arrangements to make.” Or not make.

“You’ll have to talk to Dad about that. But this isn’t a good time for him. So be considerate, Adam. You’re not the only one who loved Grammy Fisk. Dad didn’t always see eye-to-eye with her, but she’s his mother. And basically, he’s lost her. It would pretty callous to start talking about money at this point.”

“I know. Obviously. But—”

“And it’s not just that. The business is looking a little shaky these days. We’ve got the crisis in the Gulf pushing gas prices up, which means cartage costs are killing us. Farms aren’t upgrading equipment, and we’ve got chain stores undercutting us everywhere. I mean, it’s fucking ruthless out there. We’ll survive, I think, but we’re on real slim margins. As for the family, if Grammy has to go into a full-time care facility, that’s going to be a gigantic expense.”

I told him I knew all that and understood it. I just needed a heads-up on my own future.

“Well, true,” he admitted. “And it would help clarify things for Jenny, too.”

“Jenny?”

“Yeah, Jenny. Sooner or later you’re gonna need to fish or cut bait, Adam. No offense.”

Jenny and I had been friends since grade school, but we weren’t engaged, though Aaron and my father may have drawn their own conclusions. I was far from sure I wanted to marry Jenny, and I wasn’t sure Jenny wanted to marry me. In fact we had avoided the subject as if it were radioactive.

And I resented Aaron for pressing me on it. But it was true that Jenny had an interest in knowing what was in store. “Then I should talk to the old man tonight,” I said.

“Okay … but cut him some slack, is all I’m saying. You might not like what you hear, but he’ll be honest with you, give him that.”

I gave him that.

But in the end it wasn’t my financial problems that pushed us into a meltdown, it was Geddy—or my father’s contempt for him.

The weather had been warm and sunny for a couple of days now, and Aaron had proposed a family barbecue as a therapeutic change from hospital cafeteria meals. So my father stoked the grill, lofting clouds of fragrant hydrocarbons over the grassy plain of the backyard, and Mama Laura brought out slabs of raw ground beef from the kitchen on a plastic platter. Geddy, in his bathing suit, had been running through the sprinkler as it watered the lawn. My father watched him with a somber expression. And when Geddy came running over to check the progress of the hamburgers, my father said, “Laura, look at the boy. Look at your son there.”

Mama Laura turned to see. “What about him? Come here, Geddy. I’ll fix you a burger soon as they’re ready.”

“He’s almost thirteen years old. Pardon my French, but it looks like he’s growing himself a fine pair of boobs. Is that normal?”

Geddy had an amazing ability to go stone-faced and silent when confronted with criticism, but he was self-conscious about his weight and this one took him by surprise. His face turned red, then white. I saw the tendons stand up in his neck as his jaw clenched. Impressively, he managed not to cry.

Mama Laura winced. “He’s a little portly but it’s just baby fat.”

“You should get his hormones checked. See if he’s normal.”

I said, “Of course he’s normal.”

My father shot me a hostile glare. Aaron, across the patio table from me, rolled his eyes: Oh fuck, here it comes.

“Is that your diagnosis?” my father asked. “What happened, did you get a medical degree without me knowing about it?”

For most of my life I had revered or feared my father, depending on his moods or mine. Even after I grew out of the fear, I never argued with him. It had never seemed worth the trouble. And Grammy Fisk had always been there to rein him back when he stepped out of bounds. He would never have said what he just said had Grammy been at the table with us.

“Get on inside,” Mama Laura told Geddy in a tight voice. “Put on a shirt for supper. Something short-sleeved out of your closet. Go on now. Go.”

Geddy hurried into the house, shoulders hunched.

My father dug a spatula under a beef patty and turned it. “Thank you for your opinion,” he said to me. “Not that I asked for it.”

“You humiliated him.”

“You think I hurt his feelings?”

“You think you didn’t?”

“And do you imagine that boy can go through life without getting his feelings hurt once in a while? He needs toughening up if he’s ever going to make it through school. I guess you think you’re protecting him—”

“I guess I’m thinking I shouldn’t have to.”

“What you have to do is show some respect. We need to get that straight, if you’re coming back to Schuyler.”

And I said, “Am I coming back to Schuyler?”

“Aaron told me you talked to him about this. You know the situation, Adam. Your grandmother had some money, and that worked out to your benefit—and that’s fine, but whatever Grammy had tucked in the bank needs to help with her expenses now. I know we’ve disagreed on certain things, you and I, but I also know you’re not selfish enough to want that money for yourself. So I’m afraid you’re homeward bound, unless you can make some other arrangement on your own hook. And you’re welcome here and always will be. But that doesn’t entitle you to pass judgment on me. Not when I’m setting the table you’re eating from. Which is what we need to do right now. Laura, pass out the paper plates. Everybody line up! Aaron, get the corn out of the boiler.”

Mama Laura, who had sat through all this with an inscrutable expression and her small fists clenched, said, “Shouldn’t we wait for Geddy?”

“Once he’s in his room it can be hard to pry him out,” my father said.

So I offered to go get him.

I found Geddy on his bed with his face buried in a pillow. He sat up and wiped his eyes when I came in. I helped him change into jeans and a fresh shirt. Then I took him out to the KFC on Main Street. I figured that way we could eat without choking on the food.

At the restaurant I told Geddy a secret: my father had asked the same question (Is that normal?) about me. More than once.

I had never carried the kind of extra weight Geddy did, and boob-droop had not been among my otherwise comprehensive suite of adolescent concerns. But there had been plenty of is-this-normal moments when I was growing up. My incessant reading of books, my disinterest in high school sports. My father had never quite accused me of being (to use his word of preference) “queer,” but that inference had never been far away. I was not, as it happened, queer (at least, not in the sense he intended), but neither was I what he believed or expected any son of his should be. And for him, that was a distinction without a difference.

“Did he hate you?” Geddy asked.

“He doesn’t hate either of us. He just doesn’t understand us. People like us make him uncomfortable.”

“Is that a thing?”

“What?”

“People like us. Are there people like us?”

“Well, yeah. Of course there are,” I said.

And Geddy beamed at me. It was a little heartbreaking, how badly he wanted it to be true.

I left Schuyler the same night. Only Jenny Symanski (and Geddy, of course) seemed genuinely sorry to see me go. Jenny wrapped her arms around me and we exchanged a kiss, sincere enough that Mama Laura blushed and looked away.

And I had to admit, it was nice to be reminded how Jenny felt and tasted. There were years of familiarity folded into that hug. Jenny and I had made love (for the first time, for both of us) when we were fifteen, fooling around in Jenny’s bedroom on a hot August Saturday morning when her parents were out at an estate sale. Our lovemaking that day and afterward had been driven more by curiosity than passion, but it was a curiosity we could never quite satisfy. There were times—especially during the interminable Fisk-Symanski dinners our families used to hold—when Jenny would catch my eye across the table and communicate a lust so intense that my resulting boner required serious stealth measures to conceal.

We couldn’t keep that kind of relationship secret forever, and my father complicated the whole thing by approving of it, at least up to a point. I think he felt it established my heterosexual bona fides. And he liked the idea of marrying his spare son to a Symanski, as if the families were royal lineages. It was Grammy Fisk who took me aside and quietly made sure I grasped the basics of safe sex: “If you marry that girl, it ought to be because you want to, not because you have to.”

“I’m so sorry about your tuition,” Jenny whispered as we hugged. “But if you do have to come back to Schuyler, it won’t all be bad. I’ll make sure of that.”

“Thanks,” I said. And that was all I said.

Because I had no intention of coming back. Not if I could help it.

Chapter 3

I saw the tranche house for the first time on a clear, hot evening at the end of August. Because it would come to mean so much to me—because I learned and forgot and gained and lost so much in that building—I’m tempted to say it seemed special from the moment I first glimpsed it.

But it didn’t. It was one house on a street of many houses, not very different from the rest. It was large, but all these houses were large. It was sixty or seventy years old, as most of these houses were. Its garden was lush with marigolds, coleus, and a chorus line of hostas. A maple tree littered the front lawn with winged seeds the color of aged paper. I walked past the house three times before I worked up the courage to knock at the door. Which opened almost before my knuckles grazed it.

“You’re Adam!”

“Yeah, I—”

“I’m so glad you could make it. Come in! Everyone else is here already. Whole tribe. Buffet in the dining room. I’ll take you there. Don’t be shy! I’m Lisa Wei.”

The same Lisa Wei who had sent the email invitation. Maybe because of the tone of her message, I had imagined someone my age. In fact she appeared to be around sixty—about as old as the house she lived in. She was a little over five feet tall, and she squinted up at me through lenses that looked like they should have been fitted to a telescope. She couldn’t have weighed much: I imagined she couldn’t go out in a windstorm without an anchor. But she was a small explosion of smiles and gestures. The first person she introduced me to was her partner, Loretta Sitter.

Loretta owned the house, but she and Lisa had lived here for more than thirty years. “We’re that rare thing,” Lisa said, “a Tau couple. We decided we’d take the test together, and if we didn’t place in the same Affinity we’d forfeit the fee and forget about it. But it turned out we’re both Taus. Isn’t that great?”

I said it was pretty great. Loretta was a little younger than Lisa and taller, her long, dark hair just beginning to go white. She pulled me into a hug, then stood back and said, “You look like you have something on your mind, Adam Fisk.”

I would eventually get accustomed to this kind of shoot-from-the-hip psychoanalysis, but I was new here, and it startled me. Something on my mind? I had quit my courses at Sheridan College, given notice to my landlord, and would probably be back in Schuyler, tail between my legs, before the week was out. But I didn’t want to say so. “Well,” Loretta said before I could answer, “whatever it is, forget about it for a couple of hours. You’re among friends.”

Thirty people made a tranche. It was rumored that Meir Klein and InterAlia set it up that way after the model of Neolithic tribes—thirty people supposedly being an ideal number for a social unit: big enough to get things done, small enough to be governable, and containing as many familiar faces as the average human psyche can easily sort out.

Maybe so. I met twenty-three strangers that night. (Some tranche members were away on vacation or otherwise too busy to attend.) Twenty-three faces and names were too many for my post-Neolithic brain to absorb all at once, but some were memorable. Some of the faces would become intimately familiar to me, and some of the names would eventually show up in newspaper headlines.

Lisa Wei led me to a long table in the dining room. “You’re late for the best stuff,” she said, “just pickings left,” but I wasn’t even remotely hungry; I took a lukewarm egg roll. She introduced me to a couple of stragglers also grazing at the table. “What I can do,” Lisa said, “is show you through the house and you can meet folks as we go, how about that?”

I was grateful to her for making me feel slightly less ridiculous. It wasn’t just that I was nervous about meeting strangers: I felt like an imposter. I was a Tau, but I’d probably be back in the States before the next scheduled tranche meeting, and I was uneasy about making friends I couldn’t keep. But as I trailed this small, effusive woman through her big, cheerful house, I began to feel genuinely welcome. Every room seemed to frame a mood, contemplative or whimsical or practical, and the people I met and whose names I struggled unsuccessfully to remember seemed perfectly suited to the house. When I was introduced to them they smiled and shook my hand and looked at me curiously while I tried not to let on that I was a one-timer bound for an Affinity-less quarry town in upstate New York. It made me bashful.

But I began to forget about that. I dropped into a half dozen interesting discussions. No one resented my presence, and when I added a few words people paid attention. I spent a few minutes listening to a guy with a faint Hungarian accent debating Affinity politics with a couple of other Taus in a downstairs room. The talk was too lively to interrupt, but Lisa took my arm and whispered, “That’s Damian. Damian Levay. He teaches law at the University of Toronto. Very bright, very ambitious. He’s written a book or two.”

He looked pretty young for a tenured professor, but he talked liked someone accustomed to an audience. He had issues with the way InterAlia exercised control over Affinity tranches and sodalities. “If being a Tau is a legitimate identity, aren’t we entitled to self-determination? I mean, InterAlia may own the algorithms, but it doesn’t own us.”

Lisa smiled as she interrupted him: “‘When in the course of human events…’”

“Don’t laugh,” he said. “A declaration of independence might be exactly what we need.”

“If not precisely a revolution.”

Damian looked at me and gave Lisa a quizzical glance. She mouthed something back at him—it might have been the word “newb.” I introduced myself and shook his hand.

As we walked away Lisa said, “Damian’s been with us for more than a year now. He’s one to watch. Pay attention to that one, Adam.”

A kind of happy exhaustion eventually set in. I made more friends over the course of an evening than I had made in the last six months, and every connection seemed both authentic and potentially important—the escalation from hi-my-name-is to near-intimacy was dizzying. Even the conversations I overheard in passing tugged at my attention: I kept wanting to say yes, exactly! or me too! Eye contact felt like a burst of exchanged data. Maybe too much so. I wasn’t used to it. Could anyone get used to it?

I had lost track of Lisa, but when she found me again she said, “You look like your head is swimming. I’m sure it is—I remember the feeling. Handed around like a new toy. It’s great, but if you need to get away for a few minutes—”

She showed me a room in the basement, furnished with a leather sofa and a big-screen TV. The only person in the room was a young woman who appeared to have Down syndrome. She wore a blue sweatshirt and drawstring pants, and she was watching SpongeBob SquarePants with the sound off.

“This is Tonya,” Lisa said. “Everyone calls her Tonya G. Her mother is Renata Goldstein—you met her upstairs. Tonya’s not actually a Tau, but we make room for her at the tranche gatherings. Because we like her. Right, Tonya?”

Tonya hollered out, “Yes!”

“Hey,” I said. “Enjoying the show?”

“Yes!”

“Can you hear it?”

She turned her head and fixed her eyes on me. “No! Can you?”

“Mm … no.”

“Watch it with me?”

Lisa gave me a you-don’t-have-to-do-this look, but I waved her off. “Sure, I’ll watch it with you. Some of it, anyway.”

“All right.”

Lisa patted my shoulder. “I’ll let Renata know you’re down here. She’ll check in in a little while. But Tonya will understand if you want to get back to the party—right, Tonya?”

Tonya nodded emphatically.

So we watched SpongeBob with the sound off. It wasn’t clear to me why Tonya preferred to see it in silence, but she rejected an offer to turn up the volume. And it was still funny this way. Tonya seemed startled when I laughed, but she inevitably followed with a big peal of laughter of her own. After a while I started making up my own dialogue for the characters, doing crazy voices, which she liked. “You’re joking!”

“I’m a joker,” I admitted.

“What’s your name?”

“Adam.”

“Adam’s a joker!”

Among other things.

The credits were rolling when I noticed that someone had come into the room. A woman, maybe my age, leaning against the doorframe, watching us. South Asian features. Close-cropped dark hair. A Chinese dragon tattooed in three colors around the meat of her upper arm. She wore a sleeveless blouse and faded blue jeans. A belt with a purple metallic buckle.

“Getting late, Tonya,” she announced. “Your mom’s upstairs saying good-bye. I think you’d better go find her.”

“Okay,” Tonya said.

“Say good-bye to Adam first.”

“Good-bye, Adam Joker!”

“Bye, Tonya SpongeBobWatcher.”

Tonya ran from the room giggling. Her summoner stayed behind. I said, “You know my name, but—”

“Oh, sorry. I’m Amanda. Amanda Mehta.” She put out her hand. I stood up and took it. “You’re Adam. Lisa told me you were down here keeping Tonya company. Sorry, I couldn’t resist having a look at the new guy.”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that, given that I’d probably never see Amanda Mehta again. I just smiled.

“Lisa said she already showed you around. But I bet you didn’t see the roof.”

“The roof?”

“Come on.” She tugged my hand. “I’ll show you. And maybe you can tell me what’s bothering you.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Just come with me. Come on!”

What could I do but follow?

“What makes you think something’s bothering me?”

Amanda didn’t answer, just gave me a hold-your-horses look. She led me to one of bedrooms on the third floor, where a dormer window looked south over a wooded ravine. The window opened onto the part of the roof that connected the house to the garage. She climbed out deftly—obviously, she had done this before—then turned back and said, “You won’t fall. If you’re careful.”

So I stepped out onto the shingles. The slope was gentle enough that there was no real danger, but we were high enough to see across the backyard and over the ravine to the city—condo towers on Bloor Street, the headstone apartment slabs of the Cabbagetown district.

“Safest thing is to lie down,” Amanda said.

She stretched out with her head butting the low sill of the window. I did the same. “You know the house pretty well,” I said.

“I lived here for a few months.”

“Are you related to Lisa or—” I had forgotten the name of Lisa’s partner.

“Loretta. No, but they put me up when I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I finally got my own place last May.”

“They put you up because you’re a Tau?”

“Well, yeah. I’m not the only one they’ve helped out, and they liked having me here. Loretta inherited this place back in the eighties. The house is too big for them, really, so they’re always putting people up. It’s a place to go when you don’t have anywhere else to go. If you’re in the tranche. Or at least a Tau.”

“Must be nice.”

She gave me a searching look. “Of course it’s nice.”

“I think—”

“No, hush, be quiet a minute. Listen. I love the way it sounds out here. Don’t you?”

I would have said there was nothing to hear. But there was, once I paid attention. The tidal bass note of the city, the massed noise of air-conditioner compressors, car engines, high-rise ventilator fans. Plus animal sounds from the ravine and human voices from this or the neighboring house. Homely sounds that hovered over the dark backyard like phantom lights.

“And the way it feels,” Amanda said. “Late August, you know, even on a hot day you get that little chill after dark. The leaves on the trees sound different in the wind.” A wind came up as if she had commanded it. “This corner of the roof is completely private. No one can see you. But you can see the city.”

“That’s why you like it here?”

“One reason.” She unzipped a pocket on her vest and took out a glass pipe, unzipped another pocket, and extracted a tiny plastic bag. “Do you smoke?”

“Not often.”

“But you have smoked.”

“Sure.” In high school, in the back of a friend’s beat-up Ford Taurus, out at the quarry, and occasionally with Dex, my erstwhile roommate—more than occasionally if you count secondhand smoke.

She used her fingernails to pick apart a nugget of weed and fill the bowl. “So do you want to smoke now?”

“Lisa and, um, Loretta don’t mind?”

“They don’t like people smoking anything indoors, but if they weren’t so busy they might have joined us out here.”

I didn’t want to disappoint her. And how many chances would I have to smoke weed on the roof of a Rosedale mansion? So I took the pipe and the lighter and even managed to hold down a toke without coughing. At which point, in the ordinary course of things, I would have succumbed to my usual cannabis-induced self-consciousness; but for whatever reason I remained reasonably coherent—though the night seemed to inflate like a party balloon and the chorus of crickets became operatic in its complexity.

“So,” she said, “you want to talk about what’s bothering you?”

“Why does everyone say that? How do you know something’s bothering me?”

“You spent a half-hour watching TV with Tonya, for one thing.”

“I like Tonya.”

“Of course you do. She’s a sweetie. But she’s not a Tau.”

“You’re reading a lot into—”

“It’s also your body language, how you react when you shake hands with somebody, things like that.”

“You must have been watching me pretty closely.”

“It’s just tranche telepathy. I mean, that’s what people call it. It isn’t really telepathy, obviously. We read each other better than ordinary people. So we can tell you’re worried about something. You don’t have to tell me about it, but we’re tranchemates. Maybe I can help.”

I felt a little tingle when she called me her tranchemate, though it was the first time I had heard the word. Did she know that about me, too? Something in her smile suggested she did. We had quite a complex little silent conversation going on, in fact.

So I gave her a quick summary of the family curse. I told her about Grammy Fisk’s stroke, my awkward relationship with my father, the tuition money. I told her I had dropped out of my Sheridan courses and given notice at my apartment—I had to be out by the end of the month. No money and nowhere to go but back home. I had been curious about tonight’s meeting but I was embarrassed to admit that I’d never be back.

“Not worth worrying about, Adam. You’re a Tau, you’re welcome even for one night. But the thing about going back home—I gather you’d prefer to stay in Toronto?”

Before I came here for school I hadn’t given the city a second thought. I had wanted to study in New York City, but my father was convinced that even a brief exposure to Manhattan would turn me into a gay-marrying Democrat-voting liberal, and not even Grammy Fisk could overcome his objections. He had agreed to Toronto because he imagined Canada to be a well-mannered country, suspiciously socialistic but hardly radical. I had agreed because Sheridan offered world-class graphics and media curricula. Did I want to stay here? Sure. But no job, no work permit, no crib. She said, “You’re studying graphic design?”

“Was, before I dropped out.”

“So you should talk to Walter.”

“Who?”

“Walter Kohler. Lisa must have introduced you. Big guy? Six foot, two hundred fifty pounds, in his forties, wears a suit?”

I vaguely recalled such a person. He had smiled and shaken my hand, that was all.

Amanda tucked away her pipe and baggie. “Really, you need to talk to him.”

“Do I?”

“Walter used to work for one of the big ad agencies in town, but he’s starting his own business—come on, we’ll go see him.”

“What, now?”

“Of course now. Come on!” She practically vaulted back inside the dormer window. I was a little reluctant to leave the roof—it was a good place to be stoned: safe, scenic, undemanding—but I staggered after her.

Kohler was in the game room in the basement, knocking balls around a pool table for his own amusement. He was big enough that the cue looked small in his hands. Amanda re-introduced me and, mortifyingly, told him I was looking for a job.

“Actually I’m not,” I said. “I mean, I can’t. I have a student work permit, but I’m not a student anymore. I don’t even have a visa.” I explained again about my family situation.

“Finished three years at Sheridan?” Kohler asked.

“Yeah, but—”

“Tell me what courses you took.”

I listed them.

“Okay,” he said. “Promising. What kind of grades were you pulling down?”

I told him.

“Sounds like someone you could use,” suggested Amanda.

Kohler said, “What I’m setting up is basically a media-access and marketing business. People come to us, we give them what they want at whatever price point they can afford—TV, Internet, direct mail, anything from a full-court integrated ad campaign to a guy handing out leaflets on a street corner. So yeah, Amanda’s right, I’m looking to hire folks with the appropriate skills. If you’re up to speed on CSS and JavaScript, I can start you next week.”

“That’s amazingly generous, and it’s tempting, but like I said, I don’t have a valid work permit—”

“I have a legal guy who can expedite the paperwork. And I’m willing to advance you your salary until you’re authorized. Do you want to talk about salary?”

He cited numbers that seemed ridiculously generous. I nodded and said, “But, wait—I would love to do this but I’m kind of—”

“He’s new,” Amanda said, as if this explained something.

“I’d have to find a place to stay—”

“Lisa!” Kohler roared. He was a big man. Big chest cavity. He could roar pretty impressively. I tried not to flinch. “Loretta! Amanda, are the Sob Sisters upstairs?”

Lisa Wei came into the room before she could answer. “Keep your voice down, Walter; I’m sure they can hear you in Vancouver. What is it?”

“Homeless waif. A loose Tau.”

“Really?” Lisa took my hand and gave me a motherly look. Or what I imagined was a motherly look. I didn’t remember my own mother very clearly. “Well, then, you have to stay with us! There are a couple of rooms you can choose from. Tonight isn’t too soon, you know, if you don’t have anywhere to go.”

“My lease is good to the end of the month, but—”

“Then you can move in anytime. Welcome home, Adam! I’ll tell Loretta we have a new roomer.”

The next sound I heard was Amanda, laughing at the expression on my face.

“We call them the Sob Sisters,” Amanda said, “because they don’t mind if you cry on their shoulders. You don’t need to worry about imposing. Lisa and Loretta love having company. Tau company, anyway. So maybe I’ll see you next time, Adam.”

“Are you leaving?”

“Soon. It’s pretty late. I need to say my good-byes.” She hugged me and walked away.

But that was fine. A small miracle had taken place: somehow, over the course of a few hours, I had internalized the idea that I was among family—not the messy modus vivendi my Schuyler relations had arrived at, but family in a better and truer sense of the word. And for another forty-five minutes I drifted through the thinning crowd with a sheepish and slightly stoned grin on my face, striking up conversations that inevitably seemed to begin and end in mid-sentence. “Newbie euphoria,” someone called it. Fine. Yes. Exactly.

I caught a last glimpse of Amanda Mehta as she left the house. Dismayingly, she was on the arm of someone I hadn’t been introduced to. A big guy—huge, actually—with a shaved head and black Maori-style tattoos all over his face.

“Is that her boyfriend?” I asked Lisa Wei, who had come to stand beside me, looking at the end of the evening like a slightly tattered apple doll.

“That’s Trevor Holst. Amanda’s roommate.”

Lisa registered my questioning look but wouldn’t say more. Amanda waved to the room as the door was closing—at everyone, but I chose to take it personally.

“I should have thanked her,” I said.

“Thank her next time.”

“And, I mean, you, too. And Loretta. And Walter. For, well, everything.”

“You’d do the same in our place,” Lisa said calmly. “And sooner or later, you will.”

Chapter 4

The first big storm of the winter announced itself on a Friday in December. For two days a low-pressure cell rotated over the city like a millstone, grinding clouds into snow. All weekend, those of us who lived in the house and a handful of our tranchemates took turns excavating the driveway. Lisa and Loretta could have afforded a removal service, but we wouldn’t let them pay for labor any able-bodied Tau could perform. By Monday morning the streets were mostly passable and I was able to get to work; at the end of the day I made my way home under streetlights that bled a muddy orange glow, the color of pill bottles and chronic depression.

But I wasn’t depressed, just tired. Tired enough to slow down for the familiar quarter-mile walk from the subway; tired enough to be, as Amanda liked to say, in the moment, thinking about nothing in particular and paying casual attention to the street, the sidewalk, the few flakes of snow silting from a cloud-locked sky. I cataloged the cars parked by curbside, some still cloaked in the white burqas of the weekend blizzard. Which is how I happened to notice a Toyota Venza idling in the curb zone not far from the house. The skin of snow adhering to it suggested it had been in place for at least an hour. Much of its glass was opaque with condensation, but the moisture had been swiped from the side windows and windshield. Which meant I could see the shape of the car’s sole occupant: a man in a navy-blue parka who quickly turned away when he saw me looking.

There was nothing very unusual about this, but the long shadows of the streetlights gave it a film-noir ambience, a hint of mystery, enough so that I mentioned it to Lisa when I came into the house and found her in the kitchen fixing a paella de marisco so fragrant I wished I had something better in store for my own dinner than ramen and bagged salad. “There’s enough for three,” she said, tranche telepathy operating at optimum sensitivity, but I shook my head and asked whether she knew anybody who drove a green Venza.

She put her spoon on the counter and gave me her full attention. “Why do you ask?”

Which caused my own tranche telepathy to emit a cautionary buzz. “Because it’s outside idling, and the guy at the wheel looks,” I tried to make this light-hearted, “furtive.”

“Oh. I see.” Lisa exchanged a look with Loretta, who had come in from the next room with her finger marking her place in a hardcover novel.

“What? Is it somebody you know?”

“Adam, did you happen to notice the license number?”

“No—why would I notice the license number?”

Like two gray-feathered birds of distinct species cohabiting a single telephone wire, Lisa and Loretta frowned in concert. Lisa, ordinarily the voluble one, seemed reluctant to speak. Loretta, who seldom opened her mouth unless a word seemed urgent, said, “I’ll call Trevor. Should we tell Mouse?”

“Maybe not,” Lisa said. “I mean, until we’re sure…”

“Sure of what?” I asked. “What’s this all about? What did I miss?”

“I’ll let Trevor explain,” said Lisa.

I had learned some basic truths about what it meant to be a Tau in the three and a half months since I moved into the tranche house. One of those truths was Taus don’t gossip.

Much. We were human beings; we talked about each other. But given how much time we spent together, I had heard very little malicious talk—and none that was really malicious. Our boundaries were pretty carefully respected, in other words, which was why I didn’t know a whole lot about Mouse, the woman who lived in the basement.

Lisa and Loretta currently had three tenants including me, all Taus. One was a middle-aged used-bookstore owner with an income so sporadic that the money he saved by boarding here made the difference, some months, between eating and going hungry. I liked him, but we weren’t especially close. The third tenant was Mouse. She was maybe thirty years old, and Mouse was a name she had given herself; I knew her by no other.

But she wasn’t “mousy” in the ordinary sense of the word. She said she had taken the name because she was shy and liked enclosed spaces. (She had chosen her basement room over a more comfortable third-floor bedroom.) She was so obviously working her way through some deeply personal crisis that I had been careful not to ask about it. I had seen her in close conversation with Loretta several times, but they generally clammed up when I passed by. Which was fine: it was really none of my business.

Nor was this. While Lisa got on the phone to Trevor Holst, I set about fixing myself dinner. Lisa and Loretta were generous with living space but they weren’t running a boarding house, and apart from a few planned communal meals it was pot luck and fend for yourself. Although I was allotted a few square inches of the big kitchen refrigerator, I was saving money for a bar fridge of my own. More space for palak paneer and freezer bags of homemade chili. All I heard of Lisa’s conversation was the worried tone of her voice.

She handed me the phone as I forked the last noodle into my mouth. “Talk to Trevor,” she instructed me.

Back at the end of August, when I saw Trevor leaving the tranche party with Amanda, I had guessed they were lovers. (And I had felt a pang of jealousy so unjustifiable that I was instantly ashamed of it.)

But I was wrong about their relationship. In my first month in the tranche I learned that (a) Amanda was as interested in me as I was in her, and (b) Trevor wasn’t just her roommate, he was her gay roommate. Trev himself had detected my surge of jealousy and thought it was wonderfully funny, and I eventually managed to see the humor in it too.

Which wasn’t too difficult, because I liked Trev. I liked everybody in the tranche, of course, but I felt a more immediate connection to some, and Trev was in that category. Not that we were much alike. He worked by day as a freelance physical trainer and on weekends as a bouncer at a Queen Street dance club, and his facial tattoos, which he called kirituhi, reflected his Maori ancestry on his mother’s side. In fact he was so many things I was not that our friendship felt almost supernatural, as if each of us had befriended a creature from Narnia or Middle Earth. All we really had in common, beyond our Tauness, was our love for Amanda Mehta.

So I took the phone. “What’s up? Something about Mouse?”

“Yeah,” he said. “And we might need your help. Are you okay with that?”

“Sure, yeah.” Of course I was. He didn’t really have to ask, and I didn’t really have to answer.

“So take your phone up to the second-story bedroom facing the street.”

Lisa and Loretta’s bedroom. “Why?”

“It’s kind of urgent, so just do it and I’ll explain as we go.”

I hurried upstairs.

Lisa and Loretta’s room was a shady cave of deep-pile broadloom and Egyptian cotton sheets dominated by an oak-frame four-post bed. The window facing the street was as old as the house, single-paned and frosted with ice. Drafty, but they had never replaced it with something more modern—I guessed they preferred snuggling under the comforter on winter nights.

“You can see the street?”

I used my sleeve to scrub away a lacework of frost. “Yeah, I can see the street.”

“The car still there?”

The Venza was still idling under the streetlight, yes.

“Send me a picture.”

Trev liked to mock the out-of-date Samsung smartphone I carried around, but it was good enough to capture a shot of the street, even on a dark winter evening.

“Huh,” Trevor said. “That’s pretty sure his car…”

“Whose car?”

“It belongs to a guy named Bobby Botero, and I need to have a talk with him.”

I perched on the edge of the bed as Trev told me the story of Bobby and Mouse.

Mouse had been working in the human resources department of the Ontario Ministry of Labour when she first met Bobby Botero. Mouse’s parents had died within six weeks of each other the previous year, and her only other close family member—an older sister—lived in Calgary, more than a thousand miles away. Uneasy with strangers and slow to make friends, Mouse had been understandably lonely. Her loneliness caused her to resort to the digital crapshoot of eHarmony, which had come up serial snake eyes, until the online dating service placed her in the hands of Bobby Botero.

Botero impressed her on their first evening out by ordering chilled lobster salad and yuzu aioli at a restaurant called Auberge des Pêches. He was everything her other dates had not been: tall, confident, adequately groomed. The reason he was so well received at Auberge des Pêches was that he ran the city’s most successful restaurant-supply business: the plates from which they spooned their chocolate ganache and croustade aux pommes had come from Bobby’s east-end warehouse. Clearly this was a man who knew what he was doing.

What he was doing was seducing her into a hasty marriage. Only after six months of aggressive courtship and a lightly attended exchange of vows did Mouse finally begin to sense the presence of a deeper, truer, darker Bobby Botero. Bobby, it turned out, liked to be in control. Mouse was expected to phone him at least twice daily when he was in his Danforth Avenue office, keeping him posted on her whereabouts. Eventually he convinced her to quit her job at the Ministry of Labour and take a secretarial job at Botero Food Service Supplies, where she prepared and filed invoices within shouting distance of his office door. Early in her tenure he fired a male accountant for “getting too friendly” with her, which was how he characterized what Mouse had perceived as harmless flirting. Bobby had no social life, and Mouse began to suspect she would never have any real friends of her own … unless she counted Bobby as a friend, which, increasingly, she did not.

“You’ll need to borrow Lisa’s car,” Trev said into my ear. “What we’re going to do, the two of us, is box in Bobby’s vehicle, make it so he can’t just drive off. Then I’ll have a word with him.”

“Okay, wait,” I said, liking this less by the minute.

“Just go get in the car.”

Mouse’s marriage to Bobby lasted as long as it took for a few of his secrets to float up from obscurity. A furtive phone call to Mouse from Bobby’s aunt Caprice revealed the existence of not one but two ex-wives, both of whom had at various times caused restraining orders to be placed on Bobby, and both of whom, when Mouse eventually contacted them, shared similar stories: unwarranted jealousy and tight surveillance escalating to verbal and physical abuse. Mouse saw a grim future hurtling toward her like an ICBM.

And there was the matter of Bobby’s business. Botero Food Service Supplies was a self-evidently successful enterprise: goods flowed from the warehouse in a reliable stream and invoices were paid promptly and in full. But from her position at the account desk it seemed to Mouse that something was—well, off.

“Because it isn’t entirely a legitimate business,” Trev explained as I shrugged into a jacket and borrowed the keys to Lisa’s five-year-old Accord. “Botero uses it to launder money for some local guys with a trade in stolen vehicles and connections to the ’Ndrangheta—the Calabrian Mafia.”

“Mouse figured this out?”

“Mouse noticed some irregularities in the invoices, but she found solid evidence in Botero’s desk one afternoon when he was out talking to a corporate buyer. And there’s more to it than that.”

This was what I learned on the way from the back door to the carriage-house garage where Lisa’s Accord and Loretta’s ancient Volvo brooded together in wintry silence:

Mouse had asked for a divorce. Bobby refused her request and threatened her with a beating or worse if she so much as glanced at a passing trial lawyer. He explained that he himself was thoroughly lawyered-up, and if she insisted on starting proceedings she would come out of it with nothing to show but an aching hollow where her self-respect used to be. And, he insisted, he loved her, and he wanted to prevent her from making a terrible mistake.

Mouse bowed her head and meekly agreed. The next day she left work at noon, drove home, packed a few essentials, and moved to a motel room on the Queensway strip. She emptied a bank account she had never told Bobby she possessed and sold to a pawnbroker the few items of gold and silver she had inherited from her mother.

Over the course of the next six months Mouse managed to find herself a new clerical job, moved into an apartment in the basement of a midtown row house, humanized that space with a selection of funky thrift-shop furniture, and saved as much as she could from her weekly paycheck. As soon as she had built up a useful surplus she did two more things: consulted a divorce lawyer and signed up for Affinity testing.

Before long she was a registered Tau with a pending application for divorce. Bobby was well-lawyered, but the law left little room for maneuver; in the end he chose not to contest the proceeding. Mouse had brought very little personal property to the marriage and wanted nothing from Bobby, which made it easier.

“You in the car?”

“Yes,” I said. “But, Trev—”

“Good. I’ll let you know when I’m at the corner, then you pull out of the garage. Come at Botero’s car from behind, park up close to his bumper. I’ll be right behind you, and I’ll cut him off from the front.”

“What happens then?”

“Then I have a conversation with him. That’s all.”

Mouse, though shy by nature, thrived in her Tau tranche. She had almost convinced herself that her bad marriage was behind her when a series of envelopes without return addresses began arriving in the mail. Sometimes the envelopes contained brief hand-scrawled messages. WHORE was a repeat favorite, as was SICK FILTHY CUNT. Sometimes the envelopes contained photographs of Mouse taken without her knowledge: Mouse coming home from work in a yellow summer frock, Mouse dressed up for a tranche party, Mouse fidgeting in the line outside the restroom at a local movie theater.

There was not enough evidence linking these threats to Bobby Botero for the police to get involved, and although Mouse’s lawyer applied for a generic restraining order, Mouse wasn’t convinced that it would change Botero’s behavior. He was obviously nursing a massive grudge, and Mouse knew he was capable of engineering acts of vengeance beyond her power to avoid.

She moved across town, which was how she ended up attached to our tranche. She requested and obtained a transfer from the Ministry office where she worked to a location closer to downtown. She invested in industrial-strength locks for her doors and windows and signed up for a free tae kwon do class at the local community center. And when, despite these precautions, the letters began to arrive again (CUNT, WHORE, FILTH), she accepted Lisa and Loretta’s invitation to move into the Rosedale house, where she wouldn’t be alone.

“And now he showed up again.”

“Again,” Trev confirmed. “But this time it’s different.”

“How so?”

“This time Mouse has friends on her side. Us, plus everyone in her old tranche, plus all the local Taus we’ve ever networked with.”

“Strength in numbers.”

“Yeah, and more than numbers: experience, skills, connections.”

“Even so, you really think it’s a good idea to get up in the face of a guy with Mafia connections?”

“Well, that’s the interesting part. Like I said, Mouse has friends in two Tau tranches, and the Tau network in this city is pretty big. For instance, there’s a woman, a Tau, lives out in Scarborough, who works for a cleaning service called Daily Maid. And ever since he split up with Mouse, Botero has been a Daily Maid customer. The upshot is that we managed to acquire copies of the contents of the backup drives of Botero’s home computers. Including some very ineptly encrypted financial records, which indicate that Botero has been inflating expenses and skimming some of the cash he launders for his mob friends. He puts this down as ‘transaction expenses,’ but it’s a blatant skim. That’s our leverage.”

“You’re still talking about confronting somebody with money and dangerous friends and an obviously unstable, uh, personality—”

“I’m not talking about it, I’m doing it. Or I will be in about sixty seconds. Get on out here, Adam.”

We can’t live in fear of this guy forever, Trevor said at some point in our conversation, and I thought, We? But he was right. Mouse was a Tau, and one intimidated Tau was one too many.

The street was slick with snow and the Accord chunked into anti-lock mode as I left the driveway. Botero’s car was still parked where I had seen it. Probably he was waiting for Mouse to come home, either for reconnaissance or to frighten her by advertising his presence. When I pulled in behind him, almost kissing his bumper with the grille of the Accord, he gave me a sour look in his rearview mirror. His brake lights lit up as he started the Venza’s engine and put it in gear.

But Trev came up fast in his Subaru, cutting off Botero and making it impossible for him to move. The Venza’s brake lights went dark. A moment later, Botero opened the driver-side door.

He was tall, lean guy. He got out of the car like a flick knife unfolding. He wore a Canada Goose jacket over a logger shirt and faded jeans, a blue-collar-guy-made-good look. His jaw was thrust forward, his mouth bent into a perfect bell curve.

Trevor left his car at the same time. Not as tall as Botero, but broader across the chest, big arms, sure of himself.

“You need to get out of my way,” Botero said.

“I’d be happy to do that,” Trevor said. “Soon as we have a talk about Mouse.”

“I don’t know anybody named Mouse.”

“I think you do. I think you know a lot of people. Like Jimmy Bianchi? Carl Giordano?”

The names meant nothing to me, but they could only have been Botero’s mob connections. Botero’s breath hissed into the cold air like steam from a defective radiator. “If you know those names, you know you’re playing out of your league.”

“If you continue to harass Mouse, there will be consequences.”

“And if you continue to harass me, there will sure as fuck be consequences. You’re a member of that club she joined, right? The League of Losers or whatever. Do you really think that entitles you to stand between a man and his wife?”

“I don’t want to have to go to Mr. Giordano about this.”

“Oh, that’s your threat? You’re going to tell on me? As if Bianchi or Giordano gives a flying fuck about what I do regarding my family?”

“They might give a flying fuck about the five grand you siphon out of their pockets every six months.”

Botero did a pretty good job of concealing his shock. But there was no ignoring the gulp of air that hitched in his throat.

Meanwhile, neither Trevor nor Botero saw what I saw: a police cruiser had turned onto the street and was moving toward us with a slow deliberation.

Botero said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. And if you go to Giordano or anybody else with this bullshit story, you will be fucked beyond belief.”

“All you need to do is stay away from Mouse. Just forget she ever existed. Do that, and Giordano won’t hear a word from me. He especially won’t see a copy of that Excel spreadsheet you have on your Mac, the one with all the notations you made. Ten grand a year for, what, seven years now? Eight?”

The police car pulled abreast of the Venza. A bored-looking cop rolled down the side window. “Is there a problem here?”

Botero was still working on recovering his composure. “No,” Trevor said, “no problem.”

“You know, you can’t park here—not at that angle.”

“Just getting ready to leave.” Trev headed back to his car.

“And you,” the cop said. “You’re blocking a hydrant. Move along, Mr. Botero.”

Botero went wide-eyed again. “What, do I know you?”

“No, sir, not personally. Move along, please. And if you’re talking to Carl Giordano, tell him hello.”

Tipped off by Lisa about Botero’s presence, Mouse had bought herself dinner at a downtown restaurant while she waited for the all-clear.

Trev and I were in the living room when she got home. She didn’t say thank you. She didn’t have to. She stood on her toes and gave each of us a solemn peck on the cheek.

I met the cop again a few days later, at a multi-tranche Christmas party. His name was Dave Santos, and he belonged to a North York tranche. It was Lisa who had called him to the scene to back up Trevor. We shook hands and smiled. He didn’t need my thanks, any more than I needed Mouse’s. It was a Tau thing.

Chapter 5

At the end of February, not unexpectedly and after a long decline, Grammy Fisk died.

Aaron called and told me the news. (I hadn’t spoken to Jenny Symanski since the week after Christmas, when I had told her as delicately as possible that I would be moving in with Amanda Mehta.) “Funeral’s Wednesday,” my brother said. “If you want to come.”

“Of course I’ll come. We can be there by Tuesday afternoon.”

“We?”

“Amanda and I.”

“You want to bring your girlfriend?”

“Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”

He sighed. “Do what you want, Adam. You always have.”

So we drove to Schuyler and rented a room at the Motel 6. We could have stayed at the family house, but Mama Laura wouldn’t have approved of us sharing a room, and I didn’t want to expose Amanda to more of my father’s attention that was strictly necessary. But there was no way to dodge the family dinner the night before the memorial ceremony.

The family was polite and Amanda was studiously gracious. “I’m so sorry for your loss” was the first thing she said when we came into the house, shedding our winter coats. Mama Laura hugged her; Aaron shook her hand; Geddy was awkward in the presence of strangers but gave her a forced smile and a “Hello, pleased to meet you” that sounded unrehearsed. My father nodded curtly from across the room, our first hint that trouble might be brewing.

We sat down to dinner. Mama Laura had baked a ham the size of a dinosaur thigh, plus peas and candied yams, food to ward off the sound of a cold wind scratching willow branches against the mullions of the dining room window. We made careful conversation. Aaron talked about the work he was doing for the county Republican Party. I talked about my job at Kohler Media, the job that had rescued me from Schuyler, though I didn’t describe it that way. We all talked about the story that had dominated the news for two days: the explosions in Riyadh and Jeddah, the mine or missile that had sunk a gushing Sinopec tanker in the Straits of Hormuz. Gas prices were already spiking, and there were lines at some stations: would I be okay for the drive back? (I said I’d manage.)

My father was silent through most of this, but he had been giving Amanda a series of long, cool looks. Now he said, “The Persian Gulf, that’s your neck of the woods, no?”

Amanda smiled. “No, not really.”

“No? Oh, that’s right—you’re Indian. Indian from India, correct?”

“I was born in Bramalea, actually.”

“What part of India’s that?”

“It’s a suburb of Toronto. But my grandfather was from Gujarat.”

“And what’s that a suburb of?”

“It’s a state, in the west of India.”

Amanda’s grandfather had immigrated in the 1960s and married a Canadian woman. Amanda’s father had raised her in a secular household, though the family still celebrated some Hindu festivals—I had helped them light candles for diwali. My own father was putting on his redneck act, probably hoping to draw Amanda into an argument that would make her appear shrill or condescending. His racism was selective: he did business with Indian wholesalers, and a sales rep named Banerjee had been a dinner guest on occasion. “Dad’s been to India,” I said. “That trade show, what was it, 2009?”

“Twenty-ten,” my father said levelly, his eyes still on Amanda.

“Mumbai, right?”

“As I recall.”

Amanda’s smile looked more genuine that it could possibly have been. “And how did you find Mumbai, Mr. Fisk?”

“It was outside the airport.” He unclenched a little and added, “Hot. Crowded. Real bad traffic.”

“I’ve never been,” Amanda said. “I’d like to visit someday.”

Mama Laura asked about Amanda’s family, and Amanda gave her the short version: her father was an architect, close to retirement but still doing design and consultation for a Toronto firm. Her mother was an engineer for a forestry company. Her older brother was a physician, currently living in Vancouver. I had been invited often to her family’s house in Bramalea, and I had been received with a graciousness that made my father’s attitude all the more infuriating.

“And you?” Mama Laura said. “Adam tells us you work at a restaurant of some kind?”

“A vegetarian café,” Amanda said, at which Aaron smiled and my father repressed a derisive snort.

Amanda had taken the job when she dropped out of the University of Toronto. She’d been taking pre-law courses at the urging of her family, excelled at research but hated the career prospects. She liked to say she was being educated by Tau: she had learned more from a couple of tranche meetings than she had in six months at school. Tau would find a place for her, she liked to say. And maybe that was true. One of our tranchemates, Damian Levay, was trying to set up an all-Tau investment fund, and Amanda was keen to work with him. I imagined she wouldn’t be serving kale and spirulina much longer.

“And you met Adam through that, uh, interest group?”

“Affinity group,” Amanda said. “Yes.”

“People say it’s, you know—”

“I’m not insulted by what people say.”

“A cult,” Mama Laura finished in an apologetic whisper.

“It’s not a cult. There’s no doctrine, no creed, no leader. Nothing we have to believe in or swear allegiance to.”

“It costs money, though, doesn’t it?” my father asked.

“For evaluation, plus an annual membership fee.”

“Like a cult because it breaks up families, too.”

“I don’t believe that’s the case, Mr. Fisk.”

Amanda put a hand on my knee to let me know she wasn’t rattled.

“Well,” he said, “all I know is, I hear things. People develop a loyalty to these Affinity groups.”

“They do,” Amanda said. “But not for any sinister reason. The whole point is that it’s a group of people you can trust, who trust you.”

“That’s all?”

“Think about it this way. Everything human beings do—everything worthwhile—depends on cooperation. We cooperate better than any other species. But cooperation can get derailed pretty easily. People lie, people cheat, people misunderstand each other. So we learn to be wary and mistrustful. Once burned, twice shy, no?”

“Happens in business often enough.”

“Sure. It happens to everyone, and it slows you down, it costs you time and money, it leaves you cynical.”

“That’s just human nature, Miss Mehta.”

“But an Affinity group is a place where that logic doesn’t apply. It’s a place where you don’t have to watch your back. Where people like you, for sensible reasons. A place where—”

“Where everybody knows your name?” Geddy asked. Followed by his own goofy rendition of the old Cheers theme song.

Amanda returned his grin. “Yeah, like that,” she said, laughing. “But in real life.”

“Can’t replace family,” my father said, looking pointedly in my direction.

“Some of the people in our tranche come from pretty unpleasant families, Mr. Fisk. Some of them need a replacement.”

“Do we seem that bad to you?”

“I don’t mean this family. Is that a blueberry pie, Mrs. Fisk?”

“Boysenberry,” Mama Laura said, beaming.

“It looks great.”

“Bless you for saying so. I think we’re about ready for dessert and coffee, now that you mention it.”

“Dessert,” Geddy agreed, nodding.

After the meal we adjourned to the living room. And the conversation turned to the subject of Grammy Fisk. We told our favorite stories and shared the poignant business of missing her. Amanda had nothing to contribute, but she listened attentively and put an arm around Mama Laura when she started to cry.

Displays of emotion made Geddy uneasy, and he excused himself early and went up to his room. A little while later a sound echoed down the stairs, a brassy hoot that made me think of geese heading south in autumn. “Oh, Lord, Geddy’s saxophone,” Mama Laura said. “It’s way too late for him to be practicing.”

“Geddy took up an instrument?”

“For band, at school. Yes. And not just the instrument! He brought Grammy Fisk’s old record player down out of the attic and set it up in his room. Plus maybe a hundred or so of her dusty old records.”

It was getting on time to leave, so I headed up to Geddy’s room to say good night and investigate his newfound interest. Geddy’s enthusiasms tended to monopolize his conversation and most of his waking thoughts, and when he opened his door I saw this was no exception. Grammy Fisk’s fifty-year-old turntable and receiver covered most of the free space on his desk. The cloth-grille speakers were set up at the foot of his bed, and Grammy Fisk’s record collection (mostly old jazz, folk, rock) snaked along the floorboards under the window.

Geddy put down his sax and waved me in. He told me about the instrument—a Yamaha alto sax, secondhand from Schuyler’s only pawn shop—and about the music he’d been listening to. Forget My Chemical Romance, he was all about horns and reeds now. His favorite saxophone player was Paul Desmond. (“Because of his tone. He plays a real pure note. Only a little vibrato. He doesn’t fancy up the sound. I want to learn to play a pure note like that.”) Geddy was daunted by the difficulty of the instrument, but he honked out a scale for me, and I thought I could hear what he was aiming at. Years later I would admire his skill, but what I heard that night was more ambition than talent.

He grimaced when a high C went sour. “I’m just learning.”

“Yeah, but I can tell you’re getting better at it.”

He gave me a tight smile that was both a thank-you for the compliment and an acknowledgment that I couldn’t possibly know what I was talking about.

“I guess it’s a way of remembering Grammy Fisk, too—all this,” I said.

He thought about it. “Maybe.”

“There might be some crying at the memorial service tomorrow. Are you okay with that?”

He shrugged.

“I’ll be there if you need me.”

“Amanda is nice,” Geddy said.

“Thanks.”

“Is it true, what she said about the Affinity groups?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Maybe I’ll join one. When I’m older.”

I didn’t know whether there was an Affinity he would qualify for, but I hoped so.

In the morning Aaron drove me to a family meeting prior to the memorial service. I was a pallbearer, and a deacon at the Methodist church explained what was expected of us: how to support the weight of the coffin, where the hearse would be waiting. After the briefing Aaron drove me back to the motel so I could take Amanda to the service. And while we were alone in the car he raised the subject of Jenny Symanski: ten earnest minutes of how-could-you-do-this and she-deserves-better.

“I mean,” Aaron said, “what’s she supposed to do now? Pretty girl like that, smart but no college, parents both drinking, the family business drying up in this shitty economy, and no marriage prospects because for most of her adult life she’s been waiting for you to grow a pair and ask her. What the fuck is she supposed to do?”

I didn’t have an answer.

Jenny was at the funeral, of course.

I was up front with the immediate family, in a church crowded with my father’s business associates and his buddies from the local Republican committee. Snow melted snow from shoes and boots puddled on the oaken floorboards and made the air humid. Psalm 23, a hymn, the eulogy, a benediction, and I couldn’t help wondering what Grammy Fisk would have made of all this. (“I don’t know where you go when you die,” she had once confided in me. “I don’t think you go anywhere at all except the grave.”) After the memorial service we got in our cars and trailed the hearse to Schuyler’s big nondenominational cemetery, where a machine had gouged a perfectly rectangular hole into the frozen earth. It was a gray end-of-winter day, a few flakes of snow riding on a wet wind. We stood in silence as the coffin was lowered. Blessed are the dead. They will rest from their labors. Mama Laura leaned into my father’s shoulder, weeping quietly. My father stood immobile, his features locked into a sculpture expressing, somehow, both anger and loss. Geddy stood with his head down, probably pretending he was somewhere else.

Jenny stood on the far side of the grave with her father and mother. Jenny’s mother had surfaced, though not completely or for long, from her alcoholic submersion. Her father wore a suit that must have been ten or fifteen years old, and he stared at his feet while we said the Lord’s Prayer. They bookended Jenny, who avoided my eyes—or maybe it was Amanda, standing next to me, she didn’t want to look at.

The pastor finished his go forth with God’s peace and we adjourned to the reception hall for finger sandwiches and Kool-Aid in Dixie cups. When I saw Jenny I started toward her but her parents, thin-lipped and sweating, took her arm and steered her away.

She looked back at me once, her expression unreadable.

What I wanted to say to her was this:

Like you, Jenny, I always figured there must be a place in the world for me. You know what I mean. Walking down some street on a winter night so cold your footsteps on the snowy sidewalk sound like glass being ground to sand, yellow light leaking from the windows of the houses of strangers, you catch a glimpse of some sublimely ordinary moment—a girl setting a table, a woman washing dishes, a man turning the pages of a newspaper—and you get the idea you could walk through the door of that house into a brand-new life, that the people inside would recognize and welcome you and you would realize it was a place you had always known and never really left. Like we talked about on Birch Street that one time, remember? The night of the big snowstorm, walking home in the dark after band practice.

The thing is, Jenny, there really is a door like that. There really is a house full of kind and generous voices. It exists, and I was lucky enough to find it. And that’s why I can’t come home and marry you.

I know you think it’s bullshit. I know you think I bought a sales pitch, swallowed a line, joined a cult. You think I gave myself to Tau the way people give themselves to Scientology or Mormonism or the Communist Party. But Tau isn’t like that.

It’s a bright window on a cold night, Jenny. It’s shelter from the storm. It’s everything we envied from the enclosure of our loneliness. It’s what we tried and failed to find in each other’s arms.

These were the words I couldn’t say.

During the hour-long reception my father circulated through the crowd, acknowledging business acquaintances and shaking their hands and the hands of their spouses and children. It was only when we stepped out into another flurry of wet snow that he allowed himself to indulge his grief.

Because he was both stoic and fanatically private, the signs would have been easy to miss. But I saw him turn and look back at the cemetery, where Grammy Fisk’s burial place had become invisible among the ranks of Schuyler’s dead; I saw him mouth something inaudible and swipe the palms of his hands across his eyes. My father talked about his childhood so seldom that it was almost impossible to imagine him having had one—but he had, and Grammy Fisk would have been the heart of it. He had buried his mother today, and with her a little of himself.

We headed back to our cars. I helped Amanda into the passenger seat, then walked over to where my father was still standing. We weren’t a touchy-feely family—Grammy Fisk and Mama Laura had doled out all the hugs any of us ever got—but I was moved to put my hand on his arm. I felt the gnarled density of muscle under his winter jacket. The smell of him was poignantly familiar: the aftershave he habitually used, the greasy black polish he swabbed on his shoes. Melting snow had plaited his hair across his scalp.

He gave me a startled look, then pushed my hand away. “I don’t need your sympathy,” he said. “And I don’t want it. Why don’t you just take your Arab girlfriend and go back to wherever it is you call home?”

So I said good-bye to Mama Laura and Geddy and Aaron, and we drove out of Schuyler late that night. The roads were slick with snow and there were line-ups at every gas station that was open, but we managed to fill up at a truck stop on I-90. “The craziness of the world,” Amanda said as we pulled back onto the interstate. “You know?”

Warring nations, paranoid politics, my fucking family. I knew all about it.

“Before I was a Tau,” she said, “it just seemed so overwhelming. Salute the flag. Praise God. Honor your father and your mother. These big abstractions—God and country and family. They used to have power over me, as if they were real and important. But they’re not. They’re just words people use to control you. It’s bullshit. I don’t need a family or a country or a church. I have my tranche.”

I said, “We have each other.”

“We have more than each other. We have Tau. Which is what makes it okay to admit that your dad is a racist asshole.”

The wind was blowing rags of snow across the highway, and I had to slow down. “Well, he’s more than just—”

“I know, it’s complex. It’s always complex, out there in the world. But the truth can’t hurt us anymore and we don’t have to hide from it. Your dad is many things, and one of them is—”

“A racist asshole?

“You disagree?”

No. The evidence was abundant, and I had seen much more of it than Amanda had.

She said, “How does that make you feel?”

“I guess, ashamed. Embarrassed.”

“Ashamed of what?”

“Do I have to say it? Ashamed of being his son. Of being a Fisk.”

“But you’re not a Fisk! That’s the point. You don’t belong to those people. Their sins aren’t on you. That house is not your home, and Fisk is just your name.”

I drove a while more. The highway was mostly empty, just a couple of semi trailers on the northern horizon, and when the sky cleared I could see a few chilly stars.

“You know I’m right,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “You’re one of us.”

After we crossed the border Amanda took the wheel and I checked my phone for voice mail.

There was a single message, from Lisa Wei.

“Trevor is in the hospital,” she said. “Call me as soon as you can.”

By the time we reached the city limits I had woken Lisa with a callback and managed to get the whole story.

Trev was in a hospital called Sunnybrook, north and east of downtown, and we drove there directly and shared a nervous breakfast in the cafeteria while we waited for visiting hours. Then we made our way to his room.

As early as we were, we weren’t the first to arrive. Damian Levay was already there, standing at Trev’s bedside and saying something quiet and urgent. Trev spotted us and broke into a grin, or what would have been a grin if not for the hardware attached to his face.

Damian Levay was the closest thing our tranche had to a leader, though none of us would have used that word. He was an early adopter, a Tau almost since the first assessments were offered three years ago. He was also lawyer, and in that capacity he had helped Taus all over the city, adjusting his fees to suit his clients’ income. He was full of ideas about the purpose and future of Affinity groups, and Amanda thought he was brilliant. What he had been discussing with Trev was probably the subject of Bobby Botero: it was Botero who had put Trev in the hospital.

Trev’s plan for defending Mouse had been ironclad, except for one thing: it presumed Botero would not continue to harass Mouse if it meant putting himself and his business in mortal danger.

What we had not reckoned on was Botero’s obsessive rage, which was beyond all rational constraint. Botero had no doubt wiped his computer drives, tidied up his financial loose ends, and convinced himself he could talk his way of any trouble with his ’Ndrangheta clients. He had then undertaken a more circumspect surveillance of Lisa and Loretta’s house, and yesterday, after he had seen L & L leave on a shopping expedition and he was sure Mouse was alone, he had come to the door with an aluminum baseball bat in his hand. When Mouse refused to let him in, he shattered a ground-floor window, climbed inside, and began a systematic room-by-room search for her.

Mouse, meanwhile, barricaded herself in her basement room and phoned Trev, who in turn called Dave Santos, the Tau cop who had helped us out in December. Both of them hurried to the house, but Trev was the first to arrive.

Mouse still had her phone, and she told Trev that Bobby was in the basement hammering on the locked door of her room. Trev had no weapon, but he let himself in and hurried down the stairs. In exchange for this act of heroism he took a blow across the face that broke his nose and dislocated his jaw, but he was far enough inside Botero’s swing radius that when he fell he took Botero down with him. Botero was strong, but so was Trev, and the lessons he had learned as a club bouncer served him well even as he was dazed and blinded by the blood flowing into his eyes.

They were still wrestling when Dave Santos crept down the stairs with his handgun drawn. Botero dropped his bat, and at that point it was all over except for the police car that took Bobby away to be booked and the ambulance that carried Trev to the hospital.

Trev’s jaw was supported by a wire brace that made it difficult for him to speak, and the bandages across his face were rusty-brown with blood. His eyes seemed a little vague—he was probably on industrial-strength painkillers—but he was more or less alert. He took a pad and pen from the bedside table and wrote,

—which caused Amanda to laugh and leak a tear.

“We’ve been talking about what happened at the house,” Damian said. “Trev’s going to need to sign a statement. With any luck, Botero is headed to prison for a stretch. The only possible complication is what you guys did—stealing his drives and threatening to expose him. We don’t want that coming out in court. Hopefully, neither Botero nor his lawyer will want to expose his mob connections. So we’re probably okay, but it could have been cleaner.”

We had acted carelessly, in other words, and Trev had paid for it. “I understand,” I said contritely. “What we did about Mouse and Botero—we need to stop doing things like that.”

Damian startled me by laughing.

“Stop it? Fuck no! We have to learn to do it better.”