The Shadow at the Bottom of the World

Purity

We were living in a rented house, neither the first nor the last of a long succession of such places that the family inhabited throughout my childhood years. It was shortly after we had moved into that particular house that my father preached to us his philosophy of “rented living.” He explained that it was not possible to live in any other way and that attempting to do so was the worst form of delusion. “We must actively embrace the reality of non-ownership”

he told my mother, my sister, and me, towering over us and gesturing with his heavy arms as we sat together on a rented sofa in our rented house. “Nothing belongs to us. Everything is something that is rented out. Our very heads are filled with rented ideas passed on from one generation to the next. Wherever your thoughts finally settle is the same place that the thoughts of countless other persons have settled and have left their impression, just as the backsides of other persons have left their impression on that sofa where you are now sitting. We live in a world where every surface, every opinion or passion, everything altogether is tainted by the bodies and minds of strangers.

Cooties—intellectual cooties and physical cooties from other people— are crawling all around us and all over us at all times. There is no escaping this fact.”

Nevertheless, it was precisely this fact that my father seemed most intent on escaping during the time we spent in that house. It was an especially cootie-ridden residence in a bad neighborhood that bordered on an even worse neighborhood. The place was also slightly haunted, which was more or less the norm for the habitations my father chose to rent. Several times a year, in fact, we packed up at one place and settled into another, always keeping a considerable distance between our locations, or relocations. And every time we entered one of our newly rented houses for the first time, my father would declaim that this was a place where he could “really get something accomplished.” Soon afterward, he would begin spending more and more time in the basement of the house, sometimes living down there for weeks on end. The rest of us were banned from any intrusion on my father’s lower territories unless we had been explicitly invited to participate in some project of his. Most of the time I was the only available subject, since my mother and sister were often away on one of their “trips,” the nature of which I was never informed of and seldom heard anything about upon their return. My father referred to these absences on the part of my mother and sister as “unknown sabbaticals” by way of disguising his ignorance or complete lack of interest in their jaunts. None of this is to protest that I minded being left so much to myself. (Least of all did I miss my mother and her European cigarettes fouling the atmosphere around the house.) Like the rest of the family, I was adept at finding ways to occupy myself in some wholly passionate direction, never mind whether or not my passion was a rented one.

One evening in late autumn I was upstairs in my bedroom preparing myself for just such an escapade when the doorbell rang. This was, to say the least, an uncommon event for our household. At the time, my mother and sister were away on one of their sabbaticals, and my father had not emerged from his basement for many days. Thus, it seemed up to me to answer the startling sound of the doorbell, which I had not heard since we had moved into the house and could not remember hearing in any of the other rented houses in which I spent my childhood. (For some reason I had always believed that my father disconnected all the doorbells as soon as we relocated to a newly rented house.) I moved hesitantly, hoping the intruder or intruders would be gone by the time I arrived at the door. The doorbell rang again. Fortunately, and incredibly, my father had come up from the basement. I was standing in the shadows at the top of the stairs when I saw his massive form moving across the living room, stripping himself of a dirty lab coat and throwing it into a corner before he reached the front door. Naturally I thought that my father was expecting this visitor, who perhaps had something to do with his work in the basement. However, this was not obviously the case, at least as far as I could tell from my eavesdropping at the top of the stairs.

By the sound of his voice, the visitor was a young man. My father invited him into the house, speaking in a straightforward and amiable fashion that I knew was entirely forced. I wondered how long he would be able to maintain this uncharacteristic tone in conversation, for he bid the young man to have a seat in the living room where the two of them could talk “at leisure,” a locution that sounded absolutely bizarre as spoken by my father.

“As I said at the door, sir,” the young man said, “I’m going around the neighborhood telling people about a very worthy organization.”

“Citizens for Faith,” my father cut in.

“You’ve heard of our group?”

“Not actually, I’m afraid. But I think I comprehend your general principles.”

“Then perhaps you might be interested in making a donation,” said the young man prematurely.

“I would indeed.”

“That’s wonderful, sir.”

“But only on the condition that your principles might be construed, advanced, and propagated as exactly the opposite of what they are.”

So ended my father’s short-lived capitulation to straightforwardness and amiability.

“Sir?” said the young man, his brow creasing a bit with incomprehension.

“I will explain. You have these two principles in your head, and possibly they are the only principles that are holding your head together. The first is the principle of nations, countries, the whole hullabaloo of mother lands and father lands. The second is the principle of deities. Neither of these principles has anything real about them. They are merely impurities poisoning your head. In a single phrase— Citizens for Faith—you have incorporated two of the three major principles–or impurities—that must be eliminated, completely eradicated, before our species can begin an approach to a pure conception of existence.

Without pure conception, or something approaching pure conception, everything is a disaster and will continue to be a disaster.”

“I understand if you’re not interested in making a donation, sir,” said the young man, at which point my father dug his hand into the right pocket of his trousers and pulled out a wad of cash that was rolled into a tube and secured with a thick rubber band. He held it up before the young man’s eyes.

“This is for you, but only if you can take those heinous principles of yours and clean them out of your head.”

“I don’t believe my faith to be something that’s just in my head.”

To this point, I thought that my father was taunting the young man for pure diversion, perhaps as a means of distracting himself from the labors in which he had been engaged so intensely over the past few days. Then I heard what to my ears was an ominous shift in my father’s words, signifying his movement from the old-school iconoclast he had been playing to something desperate and unprincipled with respect to the young man.

“Please forgive me. I didn’t mean to suggest that anything like that was only in your head. How could such a thing be true when I know quite well that something of the kind inhabits this very house?”

“He is in every house,” said the young man. “He is in all places.”

“Indeed, indeed. But something like that is very much in this particular house.”

My suspicion was now that my father made reference to the haunted condition, although barely so, of our rented house. I myself had already assisted him in a small project relevant to this condition and what its actual meaning might be, at least insofar as my father chose to explain such things. He even allowed me to keep a momento of this “phase-one experiment,” as he called it. I was all but sure that this was the case when my father alluded to his basement.

“Basement?” said the young man.

“Yes,” said my father. “I could show you.”

“Not in my head but in your basement,” said the young man as he attempted to clarify what my father was claiming.

“Yes, yes. Let me showyou. And afterward I will make a generous donation to your group. What do you say?”

The young man did not immediately say anything, and perhaps this was the reason that my father quickly shouted out my name. I backed up a few steps and waited, then descended the stairway as if I had not been eavesdropping all along.

“This is my son,” my father said to the young man, who stood up to shake my hand. He was thin and wore a secondhand suit, just as I imagined him while I was eavesdropping at the top of the stairs. “Daniel, this gentleman and I have some business to conduct. I want you to see that we’re not disturbed.” I simply stood there as if I had every intention of obediently following these instructions. My father then turned to the young man, indicating the way to the basement. “We won’t be long.”

No doubt my presence—that is, the normality of my presence— was a factor in the young man’s decision to go into the basement. My father would have known that. He would not know, nor would he have cared, that I quietly left the house as soon as he closed the basement door behind him and his guest. I did consider lingering for a time at the house, if only to gain some idea of what phase my father’s experimentation had now entered, given that I was a participant in its early stages. However, that night I was eager to see a friend of mine who lived in the neighborhood.

To be precise, my friend did not live in the bad neighborhood where my family had rented a house but in the worse neighborhood nearby. It was only a few streets away, but this was the difference between a neighborhood where some of the houses had bars across their doors and windows and one in which there was nothing left to protect or to save or to care about in any way. It was another world altogether… a twisted paradise of danger and derangement… of crumbling houses packed extremely close together… of burned-out houses leaning toward utter extinction… of houses with black openings where once there had been doors and windows… and of empty fields over which shone a moon that was somehow different from the one seen elsewhere on this earth.

Sometimes there would be an isolated house hanging onto the edge of an open field of shadows and shattered glass. And the house would be so contorted by ruin that the possibility of its being inhabited sent the imagination swirling into a pit of black mysteries. Upon closer approach, one might observe thin, tattered bed sheets in place of curtains. Finally, after prolonged contemplation, the miracle would be revealed of a soft and wavering glow inside the house. Then one of the bed sheets moved slightly, and the voice of a woman called out to me as I stood teetering on the broken remnants of a sidewalk.

“Hey, you. Hey, boy. You got any money on you?”

“Some,” I replied to that powerful voice.

“Then would you do something for me?”

“What?” I asked.

“Would you go up to the store and get me some salami sticks? The long ones, not those little ones. I’ll pay you when you come back.”

When I returned from the store, the woman again called out to me through the glowing bed sheets. “Step careful on those porch stairs,” she said. “The door’s open.”

The only light inside the house emanated from a small television on a metal stand. The television faced a sofa that seemed to be occupied from end to end by a black woman of indefinite age. In her left hand was a jar of mayonnaise, and in her right hand was an uncooked hot dog, the last one from an empty package lying on the bare floor of the house. She submerged the hot dog into the mayonnaise, then pulled it out and finished it off without taking her eyes from the television. After licking away some mayonnaise from her fingers, she screwed the lid back on the jar and set it to one side on the sofa, which appeared to be the only piece of furniture in the room. I held out the salami sticks to her, and she put some money in my hand. It was the exact amount I had paid, plus one dollar.

I could hardly believe that I was actually standing inside one of the houses I had been admiring since my family moved into the neighborhood. It was a cold night, and the house was unheated. The television must have operated on batteries, because it had no electrical cord trailing behind it. I felt as if I had crossed a great barrier to enter an outpost that had been long abandoned by the world, a place cut off from reality itself. I wanted to ask the woman if I might be allowed to curl up in some corner of that house and never again leave it. Instead, I asked if I could use the bathroom.

She stared at me silently for a moment and then reached down behind the cushions of the sofa. What she brought forth was a flashlight. She handed it to me and said, “Use this and watch yourself. It’s the second door down that hall. Not the first door—the second door. And don’t fall in.”

As I walked down the hall I kept the flashlight focused on the gouged and filthy wooden floor just a few feet ahead of me. I opened the second door, not the first, then closed it behind me. The room in which I found myself was not a toilet but a large closet. Toward the back of the closet there was a hole in the floor. I shined the flashlight into the hole and saw that it led straight into the basement of the house. Down there were the pieces of a porcelain sink and commode, which must have fallen through the floor of the bathroom that was once behind the first door I had passed in the hallway. Because it was a cold night, and the house was unheated, the smell was not terribly strong. I knelt at the edge of the hole and shined the flashlight into it as far as its thin beam would reach. But the only other objects I could see were some broken bottles stuck within the strata of human waste. I thought about what other things might be in that basement… and I became lost in those thoughts.

“Hey, boy,” I heard the woman call out. “Are you all right?”

When I returned to the front of the house, I saw that the woman had other visitors. When they held up their hands in front of their faces, I realized that I still had the shining flashlight in my hand. I switched it off and handed it back to the woman on the sofa.

“Thank you,” I said as I maneuvered my way past the others and toward the front door. Before leaving I turned to the woman and asked if I might come back to the house.

“If you like,” she said. “Just make sure you bring me some of those salami sticks.”

That was how I came to know my friend Candy, whose house I visited many times since our first meeting on that fortuitous night. On some visits, which were not always at night, she would be occupied with her business, and I would keep out of her way as a steady succession of people young and old, black and white, came and went. Other times, when Candy was not so busy, I squeezed next to her on the sofa, and we watched television together. Occasionally we talked, although our conversations were usually fairly brief and superficial, stalling out as soon as we arrived at some chasm that divided our respective lives and could not be bridged by either of us. When I told her about my mother’s putrid European cigarettes, for instance, Candy had a difficult time with idea of “European,” or perhaps with the very word itself. Similarly, I would often be unable to supply a context from my own life that would allow me to comprehend something that Candy would casually interject as we sat watching television together. I had been visiting her house for at least a month when, out of nowhere, Candy said to me, “You know, I had a little boy that was just about your age.”

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“Oh, he got killed,” she said, as if such an answer explained itself and warranted no further elaboration. I never urged Candy to expand upon this subject, but neither could I forget her words or the resigned and distant voice in which she spoke them.

Later I found out that quite a few children had been killed in Candy’s neighborhood, some of whom appeared to have been the victims of a child-murderer who had been active throughout the worst neighborhoods of the city for a number of years before my family moved there. (It was, in fact, my mother who, with outrageous insincerity, warned me about “some dangerous pervert” stealthily engaged in cutting kids’ throats right and left in what she called “that terrible neighborhood where your friend lives.”) On the night that I left our rented house after my father had gone into the basement with the young man who was wearing a secondhand suit, I thought about this child-murderer as I walked the streets leading to Candy’s house. These streets gained a more intense hold upon me after I learned about the child killings, like a nightmare that exercises a hypnotic power forcing your mind to review its images and events over and over no matter how much you want to forget them. While I was not interested in actually falling victim to a child-murderer, the threat of such a thing happening to me only deepened my fascination with those crowded houses and the narrow spaces between them, casting another shadow over the ones in which that neighborhood was already enveloped.

As I walked toward Candy’s house, I kept one of my hands in the pocket of my coat where I carried something that my father had constructed to be used in the event that, to paraphrase my irrepressibly inventive parent, anyone ever tried to inflict personal harm upon me. My sister was given an identical gadget, which looked something like a fountain pen. (Father told us not to say anything about these devices to anyone, including my mother, who for her part had long ago equipped herself with self-protection in the form of a small-caliber automatic pistol.) On several occasions I had been tempted to show this instrument to Candy, but ultimately I did not break my vow of secrecy on which my father had insisted. Nevertheless, there was something else my father had given me, which I carried in a small paper bag swinging at my side, that I was excited to show Candy that night. No restrictions had been placed on disclosing this to anyone, although it probably never occurred to my father that I would ever desire to do so.

What I carried with me, contained in a squat little jar inside the paper bag, was a by-product, so to speak, of the first-phase experiment in which I had assisted my father not long after we moved into our rented house. I have already mentioned that, like so many of the houses where my family lived during my childhood years, our current residence was imbued with a certain haunted aspect, however mild it may have been in this instance. Specifically, this haunting was manifested in a definite presence I sensed in the attic of the house, where I spent a great deal of time before I became a regular visitant at Candy’s. As such things go, in my experience, there was nothing especially noteworthy about this presence. It seemed to be concentrated near the wooden beams which crossed the length of the attic and from which, I imagined, some former inhabitant of the house may once have committed suicide by hanging. Such speculation, however, was of no interest to my father, who strongly objected to the possibility of spooks or spirits of any kind or even the use of these terms.

“There is nothing in the attic,” he explained to me. “It’s only the way that your head is interacting with the space of that attic. There are certain fields of forces that are everywhere. And these forces, for reasons unknown to me as yet, are potentiated in some places more than others. Do you understand? The attic is not haunting your head—your head is haunting the attic. Some heads are more haunted than others, whether they are haunted by ghosts or by gods or by creatures from outer space. These are not real things. Nonetheless, they are indicative of real forces, animating and even creative forces, which your head only conceives to be some kind of spook or who knows what. You are going to help me prove this by allowing me to use my apparatus in the basement to siphon from your head that thing which you believe is haunting the attic. This siphoning will take place in a very tiny part of your head, because if I siphoned your whole head … well, never mind about that. Believe me, you won’t feel a thing.”

After it was over, I no longer sensed the presence in the attic. My father has siphoned it away and contained it in a small jar, which he gave to me once he was through with it as an object of research, his first-phase of experimentation in a field that, unknown to other scientists who have since performed similar work, my father was the true Copernicus or Galileo or whomever one might care to name. However, as may be obvious by now, I did not share my father’s scientific temperament. And although I no longer felt the presence in the attic, I was entirely resistant to abandoning the image of someone hanging himself from the wooden beams crossing the length of a lonely attic and leaving behind him an unseen guideline to another world. Therefore, I was delighted to find that the sense of this presence was restored to me in the portable form of a small jar, which, when I cupped it tightly in my hands, conveyed into my system an even more potent sense of the supernatural than I had previously experienced in the attic. This was what I was bringing to Candy on that night in late autumn.

When I entered Candy’s house, there was no business going on that might distract from what I had to show her. There were in fact two figures slumped against the wall on the opposite side of the front room of the house, but they seemed inattentive, if not completely oblivious, to what was happening around them.

“What did you bring for Candy?” she said, looking at the paper bag I held in my hand. I sat down on the sofa beside her, and she leaned close to me.

“This is something…,” I started to say as I removed the jar from the bag, holding it by its lid. Then I realized that I had no way to communicate to her what it was I had brought. It was not my intention to distress her in anyway, but there was nothing I could say to prepare her. “Now don’t open it,” I said.

“Just hold it.”

“It looks like jelly,” she said as I placed the jar in her meaty hands.

Fortunately, the contents of the jar presented no disturbing images, and in the glowing light of the television they took on a rather soothing appearance. She gently closed her grip on the little glass container as if she were aware of the precious nature of what was inside. She seemed completely unafraid, even relaxed. I had no idea what her reaction would be. I knew only that I wanted to share with her something that she could not otherwise have known in this life, just as she had shared the wonders of her house with me.

“Oh, my God,” she softly exclaimed. “I knew it. I knew that he wasn’t gone from me. I knew that I wasn’t alone.”

Afterward, it occurred to me that what I had witnessed was in accord with my father’s assertions. Just as my head had been haunting the attic with the presence of someone who had hanged himself, Candy’s head was now haunting the jar with a presence of her own design, one which was wholly unlike my own. It seemed that she wished to hold on to that jar forever. Typically, forever was about to end. A nondescript car had just pulled up and stopped in front of Candy’s house. The driver quickly exited the vehicle and slammed its door behind him.

“Candy,” I said, “There’s some business coming.”

I had to tug at the jar to free it from her grasp, but she finally let it go and turned toward the door. As usual, I wandered off to one of the back rooms of the house, an empty bedroom where I liked to huddle in a corner and think about all the sleeping bodies that had dreamed there throughout innumberable nights. But on this occasion I did not huddle in a corner. Instead, I kept watch on what was happening in the front room of the house. The car outside had come to a stop too aggressively, too conspicuously, and the man in the long coat who walked toward the house moved in a way that was also too aggressive, too conspicuous. He pushed open the door of Candy’s house and left it open after he stepped inside.

“Where’s the white kid?” said the man in the long coat.

“No white people in here,” said Candy, who held her eyes on the television. “Not including you.”

The man walked over to the two figures across the room and gave each of them a nudge with his foot.

“If you didn’t know, I’m the one who lets you do business.”

“I know who you are, Mr. Police Detective. You’re the one who took my boy. You took other ones too, I know that.”

“Shut up, fat lady. I’m here for the white kid.”

I took the pen out of my pocket and pulled off the top, revealing a short, thick needle like the point of a pushpin. Holding the pen at my side and out of sight, I walked back down the hallway.

“What do you want?” I said to the man in the long coat.

“I’m here to take you home, kid.”

If there was anything I had ever known in my life as a cold, abstract certainty, it was this: if I went with this man, I would not be going home.

“Catch,” I said as I threw the little jar at him.

He caught the jar with both hands, and for a moment his face flashed a smile. I have never seen a smile die so quickly or so completely. If I had blinked, I would have missed the miraculous transition. The jar then seemed to jump out of his hands and onto the floor. Recovering himself, he took a step forward and grabbed me. I have no reason to think that Candy or the others in the room saw me jab the pen into his leg. What they saw was the man in the long coat releasing me and then crumbling into a motionless pile. Evidently the effect was immediate. One of the two figures stepped out of the shadows and gave the fallen man the same kind of contemptuous nudge that had been given to him.

“He’s dead, Candy,” said the one figure.

“You sure?”

The other figure rose to his feet and mule-kicked the head of the man on the floor. “Seems so,” he said.

“I’ll be damned,” said Candy, looking my way. “He’s all yours. I don’t want no part of him.”

I found the jar, which fortunately was unbroken, and went to sit on the sofa next to Candy. In a matter of minutes, the two figures had stripped the other man down to his boxer shorts. Then one of them pulled off the boxer shorts, saying, “They look practically new.” However, he stopped pulling soon enough when he saw what was under them. We all saw what was there, no doubt about that.

But I wondered if the others were as confused by it as I was. I had always thought about such things in an ideal sense, a mythic conception handed down over the centuries. But it was nothing like that.

“Put him in the hole!” shouted Candy, who had stood up from the sofa and was pointing toward the hallway. “Put him in the goddamn hole!”

They dragged the body into the closet and dropped it into the basement. There was a slapping sound made by the unclothed form as it hit the floor down there.

When the two figures came out of the closet, Candy said, “Now get rid of the rest of this stuff and get rid of the car and get rid of yourselves.”

Before exiting the house, one of the figures turned back. “There’s a big hunk of cash here, Candy. You’re going to need some traveling money. You can’t stay here.”

To my relief, Candy took part of the money. I got up from the sofa and set the jar on the cushion beside my friend.

“Where will you go?” I asked.

“There are plenty of places like this one in the city. No heat, no electricity, no plumbing. And no rent. I’ll be all right.

“I won’t say anything.”

“I know you won’t. Good-bye, boy.”

I said good-bye and wandered slowly home, dreaming all the while about what was now in Candy’s basement.

By the time I arrived at the house it was after midnight. My mother and sister must have also returned because I could smell the stench from my mother’s European cigarettes as soon as I took two steps inside. My father was lying on the living room sofa, clearly exhausted after so many days of working in the basement. He also seemed quite agitated, his eyes wide open and staring upwards, his head moving back and forth in disgust or negation or both, and his voice repeatedly chanting, “Hopeless impurities, hopeless impurities.” Hearing these words helped to release my thoughts from what I had seen at Candy’s. They also reminded me that I wanted to ask my father about something he had said to the young man in the secondhand suit who had visited the house earlier that night.

But my father’s condition at the moment did not appear to lend itself to such talk. In fact, he betrayed no awareness whatever of my presence. Since I did not yet feel up to confronting my mother and sister, who I could now hear were moving about upstairs (probably still unpacking from their trip), I decided to take this opportunity to violate my father’s sanctions against entering the basement without his explicit authorization. This, I believed, would provide me with something to take my mind off the recent events of that night.

However, as I descended the stairs into my father’s basement, I felt my mind and senses being pulled back into the dark region of Candy’s basement. Even before I reached the bottom of the stairs, that underground place imposed upon me its atmosphere of ruin and wreckage and of an abysmal chaos that, I was thankful to discover, I still found captivating. And when I saw the state of things down there, I was overcome with a thrilling awe that I had never experienced before.

Everything around me was in pieces. It looked as if my father had taken an ax and hacked up the whole apparatus on which he had once placed all his hopes of accomplishing some task that only he cared to envision. Wires and cords hung from the ceiling, all of them chopped through and dangling like vines in a jungle. A greasy, greenish liquid was running across the floor and sluicing into the basement drain. I waded through an undergrowth of broken glass and torn papers. I reached down and picked up some of the pages savagely ripped from my father’s voluminous notebooks. Meticulous diagrams and graphs were obscured by words and phrases written with a thick, black marker. Page after page had the word “IMPURE” scrawled over them like graffiti on the walls of a public toilet. Other recurring exclamations were: “NOTHING BUT IMPURITIES,” “IMPURE HEADS,” “NOTHING REVEALED,” “NO PURE CONCEPTION,” “IMPOSSIBLE IMPURITIES,” and, finally, “THE FORCES OF AN IMPURE UNIVERSE.”

At the far end of the basement I saw a hybrid contraption that looked as if it were a cross between a monarch’s throne and an electric chair. Bound to this device by straps confining his arms and legs and head was the young man in a secondhand suit. His eyes were open, but they had no focus in them. I noticed that the greasy, greenish liquid had its source in a container the size of a water-cooler bottle that was upended next to the big chair. There was a label on the container, written on masking tape, that read: “siphonage.” Whatever spooks or spirits or other entities that had inhabited the young man’s head—and my father appeared to have drained off a sizeable quantity of this stuff—were now making their way into the sewer system. They must have lost something, perhaps grown stale, once released from their container, because I felt no aura of the spectral— either malignant or benign—emanating from this residual substance.

I was unable to tell if the young man was still alive in any conventional sense of the word. He may have been. In any case, his condition was such that my family would once again need to find another house in which to live.

“What happened down here?” said my sister from the other side of the basement.

She was sitting on the stairs. “Looks like another one of Dad’s projects took a bad turn.”

“That’s the way it looks,” I said, walking back toward the stairs.

“Do you think that guy was carrying much money on him?”

“I don’t know. Probably. He was here collecting for some kind of organization.”

“Good, because Mom and I came back broke. And it’s not as if we spent all that much.”

“Where did you go?” I said, taking a seat beside my sister.

“You know I can’t talk about that.”

“I had to ask.”

After a pause, my sister whispered, “Daniel, do you know what a hermaphrodite is?”

I tried my best to conceal any reaction to my sister’s question, even though it had caused a cyclone of images and emotions to arise within me. That was what had confused me about the police detective’s body. In my imagination, I had always pictured a neat separation of parts. But it was nothing like that, as I have already pointed out. Everything was all mixed together. Thank you, Elisa. Despite her adherence to my mother’s strict rule of silence, my sister always managed to give away something of what they had been up to.

“Why do ask that?” I said, also whispering. “Did you meet someone like that when you were with Mom?”

“Absolutely not,” she said.

“You have to tell me, Elisa. Did Mom… did she talk about me… did she talk about me to this person?”

“I wouldn’t know. I really wouldn’t,” said Elisa as she rose to her feet and walked back upstairs. When she reached the top step, she turned around and said, “How’s this thing between you and Mom going to end? Every time I mention your name, she just clams up. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“The forces of an impure universe,” I said rhetorically.

“What?” said my sister.

“Nothing that drives anybody makes any sense, if you haven’t noticed that by now. It’s just our heads, like Dad’s always saying.”

“Whatever that means. Anyway, you better keep your mouth shut about what I said.

I’m never telling you anything ever again,” she finished and then went upstairs.

I followed my sister into the living room. My father was now sitting up on the sofa next to my mother, who was opening boxes and pulling things out of bags, presumably showing what she had bought on her latest trip with Elisa. I sat down in a chair across from them.

“Hi, baby,” said my mother.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, then turned to my father. “Hey, Dad, can I ask you something?” He still seemed a bit delirious. “Dad?”

“Your father’s very tired, honey.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I just want to ask him one thing. Dad, when you were talking to that guy, you said something about three … you called them principles.”

“Countries, deities,” said my father from a deep well of depression. “Obstacles to pure conception.”

“Yeah, but what was the third principle. You never said anything about that.”

But my father had faded out and was now gazing disconsolately at the floor. My mother, however, was smiling. No doubt she had heard all of my father’s talk many times over.

“The third principle?” she said, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke in my direction. “Why, it’s families, sweetheart.”