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three seconds you were granted, no more. Like the sliding doors of airport trains. Like a maximum-security prison. For already the figures waiting just inside pressed forward. There were three of them. Dad won’t be among them, my brother had promised. Yet my heart began to clamor, I felt sweat breaking out in all the pores of my clumsy body.
    Hel-lo? Hel -lo?
    Son? Son? Son? Son?
    Sidelong my brother regarded me gauging how I was taking this, knowing me for a risk. His hand on my arm guiding me. He’d warned me not to look yet I could not not look. For the voices were calling to us, pleading. My instinct was to stop, to stare. An elderly woman with white hair lifting from her skull like electrified wire filings, a sunken-chested elderly man with a singed-looking face, a gnome-sized individual of no evident sex leaning on a walker and piping like an eager parrot, Hel-lo? Hel-lo? while the elderly woman began to scold, Dear? Dear? Here I am, dear! and the sunken-chested elderly man teetered forward on a cane managing to position himself in front of the others, blocking their entreaties pleading, Take me? Take me? Boys? Sons? I’m ready now. My things are ready. Take me with you? On his bony skull thick-lensed glasses were secured by an elastic band. The smell of them was acrid as goats. The befouled wettish-rotting straw in which goats dwell.
    My brother yanked at me. Jesus! I told you come on.
    Yet somehow in that instant I stood stone-still, unmoving. For these elderly strangers seemed to know me—how? They were pleading, scolding, bleating. Their faces were familiar to me in some way I could not comprehend. The white-haired woman had a fattish fallen body soft as a pudding but her eyes were vigilant, alert to insult. Here was a mother’s voice—Dear? Dear? Come back here! Don’t you walk away while I’m talking to you! Don’t you walk away while I’m talking to you!—you could not ignore. And the others were crying to me, calling me Son. Son!
    My brother pulled me away. Blindly we walked along the corridor. Even now I wanted badly to look back. I wanted to explain, apologize. I’m not your son, I am no one you know. My face burned, I was ashamed of myself. A deep visceral shame. To turn away unheeding from another who begs you. Those strangers with weirdly familiar faces. Ruins of faces. Desperation in those faces. It seemed to me that I did know, I’d once known, the sunken-chested old man with the singed face, but my brother was muttering in my ear, Keep moving. They won’t follow us. They do this with everybody, I told you. It shook me up the first time, too. But you get used to it. They won’t remember, see. They won’t remember five minutes from now. Alreadythey’re forgetting. When we leave it will happen again, for them it will happen for the first time because they won’t remember us. Just don’t make eye contact with them and you’ll be fine.
    I pushed my brother’s fingers from my arm. Coldly I said, I don’t like to be rude to old people.
    We’re not being rude for Christ’s sake! It’s what you have to do.
    I was pissed, my brother had put his hand on my arm.
    I asked if the old people were anyone we knew.
    My brother bared his teeth in a savage smile. Not really. Come on.
     
    T HE VISIT WITH Dad. My first at the Manor.
    I’d stayed away for as long as I could but now I was here. Hadn’t prepared for the visit beforehand and now it was too late, I was here. Of Dad I will not speak. Of Dad I refuse to speak. Of the visit I can say, yes it happened. On our way driving to the Manor my brother remarked casually that Dad had tried to escape, at first. This remark was met with silence. It might have been a sad, or a stunned, or a confused silence. It was not an indifferent silence and yet I didn’t inquire how many times Dad had tried to escape nor did I ask what tried to escape literally meant. How much effort, with what emotion, cunning, desperation, force. Nor did I inquire with what