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bright and full of love and terrifying. Now he saw her sitting straightbacked in a chair, smoothing out the wrinkles in her skirt the way she did when she was worried, her blond hair sticking straight up like a boy’s. She’d heard about his escape by now, been called by the police or by the school, most likely even seen the note he’d left. He wondered whether she had understood it. He hoped that she had, and that she was proud of him—secretly and defiantly, the way a mother should be of her son— but by the look of her ghost she wasn’t proud at all. Her ghost looked sad and desperate and pale.
       
    A long time gone, almost too long to think about, there had been a gargantuan bed. His father and mother had slept in it. The bed was square and high up off the floor and patterned in rustcolored flowers. Her hippie sheets, Violet had called them. What he’d liked best was to crawl to the bottom, in the early morning when they were both still asleep, to that tight and airless hollow where their four feet came together. The cotton had been rough against his face, like the sail of a ship, and the smell of his parents had made the air turn colors. Red for the father, green for the son. Violet for Violet. She wore a nightshirt that said flatbush is for lovers across the back and his father wore madras pajamas. One time the pajamas had come undone, and his father had said something under his breath, and Violet had laughed and slid her hand inside them. When he thought of it now his tongue stuck to his mouth and he felt so much love that he had to spit part of it out. Everything had happened easily back then, in such a simple ordinary way. The world hadn’t yet even dreamed of ending.
    But that had been once, and today was November 11. Today he was sitting on a bench in a subway station, counting from one up to seven, lonelier than any prophet in the desert.

     
    . . .
    The name of the station was museum of natural history. He’d passed through it times without number on his way to the park, strolling with Violet past the dog runs and the ballfields and the chainlink fence around the reservoir, his arm in her arm back at the beginning, later her arm confidingly in his. A man stood on the opposite platform now, shoulders hunched and buckled, face turned toward the corner like a dunce. He wavered and sidestepped like somebody on a train. Between the man’s head and Lowboy’s there was nothing but air and humidity and the steady clicking of the argon lights.
       
    Lowboy looked up the platform, remembering. Set into the tiled wall—lined up in a row, like headstones in a mausoleum—were sixteen skeletons cast in matted bronze. He turned his back on them indifferently. The skeletons belonged to animals long since vanished from the world: it was plain to see that they had been mistakes. He covered his eyes and tried to forget them and after a while he succeeded. When they were finally gone he took his hand away and made sure that the Sikh’s voice had quieted. Then he looked at the platform again.
       
    As soon as his eyes came open he regretted it. The objects around him flickered for an instant before coming clear, as though he’d caught them by surprise, and their outlines began to twitch and run together. Oh no, he thought. The argon lights were stuttering like pigeons. There was some kind of intelligence behind them. He tried to convince himself that what he saw made no difference, that it was none of his business, but it was too late to convince himself of anything. He clutched at the bench, breathing in little sucks, and forced himself to look things in the eye. The bench was smooth, the wallwas bright, the skeletons were as dull and dead as ever. Everything was as it should have been, inanimate and still. Even the people waiting for the train seemed perfectly assembled and composed; but that was wrong again. It was as though he’d caught a glimpse behind the curtain in a theater, behind the canvas