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else could see. The fall of the Republic. The Second Coming of Christ. The coming of savagery again to the scattered nations. Explaining and explaining to no one in a whisper. Reaching out in the dark as if to take hold of my wrist—me, because I was the only one who had the patience to listen to her...
    But I wasn't there. No one was. I had begged Mom for years to come live with me. Cathy and I had both begged her. But I think she liked taking care of my brother. Paying his keep, making his bed, his lunch, doing his laundry. I think it gave her a sense of purpose. Of course, he was no good to her when the crisis came. Alan—that's my brother's name—Alan—had been living with her for over a decade by then. A ruined, useless man. A great pontificator on What's Wrong with the World, but incapable of holding down a job or starting a family or putting bread in his own mouth. When he sensed that the end was near, he decided it was time to take what he called a "vacation." He withdrew about forty thousand dollars from Mom's various accounts and went off to Bermuda. As far as I knew, he was still there.
    So she died alone. The maid came in one morning and found her. I wondered—I still wonder—if her whisper had faded to nothing or if she stopped suddenly in the middle of a word. I wondered if she felt relief as the last hoarded breath rattled out of her—relief that it was finally over, that her guardianship of the secret patterns of history was finally done. Or did she die grieving that
there was no one there to hear her, no one else to understand and to take up the sacred burden when she was gone?
    I stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked up into the shadows for a long time. Then I looked away. Confronting the past was all well and good, but there was no chance I was going up there tonight, not with the babbling ghost of her lying there in the darkness. Tonight, I decided, I would sleep in the television room.
    The television room was a strange feature of the place. It was not connected to any other room in the house. You had to get to it by going through the garage. I reached the garage through the door in the kitchen, then edged my way between my mother's old Volvo and the gardening tools hanging on pegboards along the walls. The door to the television room was at the back beside stacked boxes of moldering books. I went through. Turned the light on. Tossed my suitcase onto the floor.
    The room was a long and narrow rectangle. Call it ten feet by twenty. The walls were painted a deep, rich blue. There was a couch on one end, to my right. And to my left, all the way on the other end, taking up almost the entire wall, there was what to these rapidly aging eyes seemed the largest flat-screen rear-projection television set that could ever be conceived by the mind of man. Really, it was a monster, just huge. Seventy inches, if I remember my brother's boast right. Alan had treated himself to the machine about two years earlier, when some of my mother's CDs had rolled over.
    Everything else here—everything else besides the couch and the TV—was incidental. Windows covered with wooden shutters. An ancient shag rug on the floor. Shelves and drawers against the longer walls to hold Alan's collections of old movies, television shows, and video games. A long coffee table in front of the couch, pinewood with ring stains and coffee stains on it. An Xbox on the table. And, of course, an amazingly complex super-duper remote
control that for all I knew could make the sun rise in the morning and part the waters from the dry land.
    I'd always liked this room. I'd always found it peaceful and comforting. All the high-tech stuff was new, of course, but there had always been a TV out here. Nothing as big as this cyclopean beast but some kind of TV or other. When we were kids, Alan and I would carry our cereal bowls through the garage of a Saturday morning, set them on the shag rug—the same shag rug, in fact—and lie belly down,