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Ohio, anymore. About one hundred thousand people died. That was roughly the population of Athens during the Golden Age of Pericles. That is two-thirds of the population of Katmandu.
    And I do not see how I can get out of asking this question: Does it matter to anyone or anything that all those peepholes were closed so suddenly? Since all the property is undamaged, has the world lost anything it loved?
    •   •   •
    Midland City isn’t radioactive. New people could move right in. There is talk now of turning it over to Haitian refugees.
    Good luck to them.
    •   •   •
    There is an arts center there. If the neutrons were going to knock over anything, you might think, it would have been the Mildred Barry Center for the Arts, since it looks so frail and exposed—a white sphere on four slender stilts in the middle of Sugar Creek.
    It has never been used. The walls of its galleries are bare. What a delightful opportunity it would represent to Haitians, who are the most prolific painters and sculptors in the history of the world.
    The most gifted Haitian could refurbish my father’s studio. It is time a real artist lived there—with all that north light flooding in.
    •   •   •
    Haitians speak Creole, a French dialect which has only a present tense. I have lived in Haiti with my brother for the past six months, so I can speak it some. Felix and I are innkeepers now. We have bought the Grand Hotel Oloffson, a gingerbread palace at the base of a cliff in Port au Prince.
    Imagine a language with only a present tense. Our headwaiter, Hippolyte Paul De Mille, who claims to be eighty and have fifty-nine descendants, asked me about my father.
    “He is dead?” he said in Creole.
    “He is dead,” I agreed. There could be no argument about that.
    “What does he do?” he said.
    “He paints,” I said.
    “I like him,” he said.
    •   •   •
    Haitian fresh fish in coconut cream: Put two cups of grated coconut in cheesecloth over a bowl. Pour a cupof hot milk over it, and squeeze it dry. Repeat this with two more cups of hot milk. The stuff in the bowl is the sauce.
    Mix a pound of sliced onions, a teaspoon of salt, a half teaspoon of black pepper, and a teaspoon of crushed pepper. Sauté the mixture in butter until soft but not brown. Add four pounds of fresh fish chunks, and cook them for about a minute on each side.
    Pour the sauce over the fish, cover the pan, and simmer for ten minutes. Uncover the pan and baste the fish until it is done—and the sauce has become creamy.
    Serves eight vaguely disgruntled guests at the Grand Hotel Oloffson.
    •   •   •
    Imagine a language with only a present tense. Or imagine my father, who was wholly a creature of the past. To all practical purposes, he spent most of his adult life, except for the last fifteen years, at a table in a Viennese café before the First World War. He was forever twenty years old or so. He would paint wonderful pictures by and by. He would be a devil-may-care soldier by and by. He was already a lover and a philosopher and a nobleman.
    I don’t think he even noticed Midland City before I became a murderer. It was as though he were in a space suit, with the atmosphere of prewar Vienna inside. He used to speak so inappropriately to my playmates, and to Felix’s friends, whenever we were foolish enough to bring them home.
    At least I didn’t go through what Felix went through when he was in junior high school. Back then, Father used to say “Heil Hitler” to Felix’s guests, and they were expected to say “Heil Hitler” back, and it was all supposed to be such lusty fun.
    “My God,” Felix said only the other afternoon, “—it was bad enough that we were the richest kids in town, and everybody else was having such a hard time, and there was all this rusty medieval shit hanging on the walls, as though it were a torture chamber. Couldn’t we at least have had a father who didn’t say ‘Heil Hitler,’ to