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parents.
    “Because he always has them lately. I just wondered, you know, what he might have told you one way or the other.”
    Lianne didn’t know what she was talking about. She looked into the broad and florid face of the man behind the counter. The answer wasn’t there.
    “He shares them with my kids, so that’s not it, because their father promised them a pair but we haven’t gotten around, you know, binoculars, not the highest priority, and my Katie’s being supersecret and her brother’s her brother, loyal to a fault.”
    “You mean what are they looking at, behind closed doors?”
    “I thought maybe Justin.”
    “Can’t be much, can it? Maybe hawks. You know about the red-tails.”
    “No, it’s definitely something to do with Bill Lawton. I’m sure of this, absolutely, because the binoculars are part of the whole hush-hush syndrome these kids are engulfed in.”
    “Bill Lawton.”
    “The man. The name I mentioned.”
    “I don’t think so,” Lianne said.
    “This is their secret. I know the name but that’s all. And I thought maybe Justin. Because my kids totally blank out when I bring up the subject.”
    She didn’t know that Justin was taking the binoculars on his visits to the Siblings. They weren’t his binoculars exactly, although she guessed it was all right for him to use them without permission. But maybe not, she thought, waiting for the man to call her number.
    “Aren’t they doing birds in school?”
    “Last time it was clouds.”
    “Turns out I was wrong about the clouds. But they’re definitely studying birds and birdcalls and habitats,” she told the woman. “They go trekking through Central Park.”
    She realized how much she hated to stand in line with a number in her fist. She hated this regimen of assigned numbers, strictly enforced, in a confined space, with nothing at the end of the process but a small white bow-tied box of pastry.
     
     
     
    He wasn’t sure what it was that woke him up. He lay there, eyes open, thinking into the dark. Then he began to hear it, out on the stairs and along the hall, coming from a lower floor somewhere, music, and he listened carefully now, hand drums and stringed instruments and massed voices in the walls, but soft, but seemingly far off, on the other side of a valley, it seemed, men in chanted prayer, voices in chorus in praise of God.
     
    Allah-uu Allah-uu Allah-uu
     
     
     
    There was an old-fashioned pencil sharpener clamped to the end of the table in Justin’s room. She stood at the door and watched him insert each pencil in the slot and then crank the handle. He had red-and-blue combination pencils, Cedar Pointe pencils, Dixon Trimlines, vintage Eberhard Fabers. He had pencils from hotels in Zurich and Hong Kong. There were pencils fashioned from tree bark, rough and knotted. There were pencils from the design store of the Museum of Modern Art. He had Mirado Black Warriors. He had pencils from a SoHo shop that were inscribed along the shaft with cryptic sayings from Tibet.
    It was awful in a way, all these fragments of status washing up in some little kid’s room.
    But what she loved to watch was the way he blew the microscopic shavings off the pencil point after he finished sharpening. If he were to do it all day, she’d watch all day, pencil after pencil. He’d crank and blow, crank and blow, a ritual more thorough and righteous than the formal signing of some document of state by eleven men with medals.
    When he saw her watching he said, “What?”
    “I talked to Katie’s mother today. Katie and what’s-his-name. She told me about the binoculars.”
    He stood and watched her, pencil in hand.
    “Katie and what’s-his-name.”
    “Robert,” he said.
    “Her little brother Robert. And his older sister Katie. And this man the three of you keep talking about. Is this something I should know about?”
    “What man?” he said.
    “What man. And what binoculars,” she said. “Are you supposed to take the binoculars