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Livia’s children were numerous and quarrelsome as those dragon’s-teeth sown by Cadmus, and Livia herself was something of a hydra, impossible to kill, prone to ridiculously unbelievable recoveries: from cancer, coma, drowning, childbirth. The character of Livia was equally immortal, but my mother had shed her Shakespearean aspirations with as little thought as a snake sheds its skin. She reveled in Livia, collected her Emmys and displayed them proudly in the living room beside infant photographs of her only daughter and a silver-framed picture of my father and Axel Kern at the Oscar ceremonies, the year Kern won for directing Die by Night. My mother loved her daily treks to the city, thrived on them; and while she claimed to love Kamensic, she is the one person who always seemed immune to its disquieting charm.
    I grew up in Kamensic; everyone I knew grew up in Kamensic. Our parents worked in the city, as actors or directors or designers or dancers; but I had seldom been to the city alone, without my parents. Our houses were very old—those fieldstone fortresses left by the Dutch patroons, a few colonial farms left unburned by Warrenton’s raid—or else they were aggressively new, futurist machines designed by Vuko Taskovich or Michael Graves, the approximate shape and color of battleships. My family lived in one of the colonials, set within a broad swathe of lawn in that part of town known as The Hamlet. This was where the Constance Charterbury Library was, and Schelling’s Market. On Sundays we had brunch with our parents’ agents at the Village Inn. When my father was rehearsing for the Avalon Shakespeare season, groceries were delivered via bicycle from Schelling’s. Every year at my birthday party, my father would make a surprise entrance as Unk, which would send my guests into gleeful fits and me into an absolute rigor of embarrassment.
    Still, while having Uncle Cosmo as a parent was mortifying, a lot of my friends had it worse. Duncan Forrester’s father had remarried a famous feminist sculptor who filled their rose garden with enormous bronze castings of her vulva. Linette Davis’s mother, Aurora Dawn, had been a model and actress in the Warhol Factory who was famous now for drunk driving. Sport and Jacey Finn had six sons with golden hair and emerald eyes, all addicted to heroin. In a lot of ways Kamensic seemed like a throwback to medieval times, a walled fortress with a high child-mortality rate. There were not many children in Kamensic, certainly not as many as in the neighboring towns of Goldens Bridge and Mahopac and Pawkotan. Children were at once cherished and expendable; families were large, so that even if one or two of the older kids were lost to drugs or madness or the Ivy League, the younger ones could always be found hanging out in front of the library, or fidgeting in the back of the Congo Church during benefit performances of new works by Beckett or John Guare. The Vietnam War swept by us like an Angel of Death distracted by other things: there were enough Kamensic boys of age to fight, but somehow no one was ever drafted. Our parents were unilaterally against the war, the town was against the war; and that seemed to be enough to protect us.
    We were all wild things there. Indulged or ignored by famous parents who traded psychiatrists, agents, drug dealers, spouses; shielded by the miles of wood and mountain that stood between us and the city to the south, the desultory suburbs all around. Kamensic itself stood guard against the darkness I sensed sometimes on a June day, the sun glaring off the surface of Lake Muscanth as though off a blue-lacquered plate, crimson dragonflies lighting upon my bare knees as Hillary and I lay naked in the summer warmth.
    But still we knew something was there, waiting. Sometimes I imagined I could hear it—a sound that was just barely audible, an engine thrumming somewhere deep below the water like that faerie mill that grinds salt into the sea. Ali heard it,