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severed from their rumps and stuffed down their throats.
    Total silence. Not one word.
    We entered the elevator, pushed 30 . The car made a sudden, rapid ascent, like a pearl diver clambering toward the air: second floor, seventh, twelfth...
    "How are you feeling?" I said at last.
    "Not good," Helen replied.
    "'Not good' — is that all? 'Not good'? I feel horrible."
    "In my case, 'horrible' would not be a truthful word."
    "I feel all knotted and twisted. Like I'm a glove, and somebody's pulled me inside out" — a bell rang, the numeral 30 flashed above our heads — "and all my vital parts, my heart and lungs, they're naked and—"
    "You've been reading too many of the poems you deconstruct."
    "I hate your coldness, Helen."
    "You hate my candor."
    I left the car, started down the hall. Words haunted me, little ghostly vocables, scenes from an unwanted future.
    — Dad, what are these lumps under my arms?
    — Swollen lymph nodes.
    — Am I sick, Dad?
    — Sicker than you can imagine. You have Xavier's Plague.
    — Will I get better?
    — No.
    — Will I get warm?
    — No.
    — Will I die?
    — Yes.
    — What happens when you die, Dad? Do you wake up somewhere else?
    — There's no objective evidence for an afterlife, and anecdotal reports of heaven cannot be distinguished from wishful thinking, self-delusion, and the effects of oxygen loss on the human brain.
    The apartment had turned against me. Bits of Toby were everywhere, infecting the living room like the virus now replicating in his cells — a child-sized boot, a dozen stray checkers, the miniature twelfth-century castle he'd built out of balsa wood the day before he went to camp. "How do you like it, Dad?" he'd asked as he set the last turret in place. "It's somewhat ugly," I'd replied, flinching at the truth.
    "It's pretty crooked," I'd added, sadly noting the tears welling up in his eyes. On the far wall, the picture window beckoned. I crossed our rugless floor, pressed my palms against the glass. A mile away, a neon sign blazed atop the cathedral in Thomas More Square. ASSUMING GOD EXISTS, it said, JESUS
    MAY HAVE BEEN HIS SON.
    Helen went to the bar and made herself a dry martini, flavoring it with four olives skewered on a toothpick like kabobs. "I wish our son weren't dying," she said. "I truly wish it."
    An odd, impossible sentence formed on my tongue. "Whatever happens, Toby won't learn the truth."
    "Huh?"
    "You heard Prendergorst — in the Nightmare Era, terminal patients sometimes tapped their bodies' natural powers of regeneration. It's all a matter of attitude. If Toby believes there's hope, he might have a remission."
    "But there isn't any hope."
    "I'll go to him and I'll say, 'Buddy, soon the doctors will ... the doctors, any day now, they'll ... they'll c-c...'"
    Cure you — but instead my conditioning kicked in, a hammerblow in my skull, a hot spasm in my chest.
    "I know the word, Jack. Stop kidding yourself. It's uncivilized to carry on like this." Helen sipped her martini. "Want one?"
    "No."
    I fixed on the metropolis, its bright towers and spangled skyscrapers rising into a misty, starless night. Within my numb and disordered brain, a plan was taking shape, as palpable as any sculpture I'd ever criticized at the Wittgenstein.
    "They're out there," I said.
    "What?"
    "They can lie. Maybe they can teach me to lie."
    "You're talking irrationally, Jack. I wish you wouldn't talk irrationally." It was all clear now. "Helen, I'm going to become one of them — I'm going to become a dissembler." I pulled my hand away, leaving my palm imprinted on the glass like a fortune teller's logo. "And then I'm going to convince Toby he has a chance."
    "I don't think that's a very good idea."
    "They've gotten around the burn. And if they can, I can." Helen lifted the toothpick from her martini glass and sucked the olives into her mouth. "Toby's hair will start shedding in two weeks. He's certain to ask what that means."
    Two weeks. Was that all I had? "I'll say it