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taking another turn on the Ferris wheel. Just inside, Graham and his father had been ushered with a large group into an airless black room, and the lights had dimmed. He’d thought for a moment that there had been some kind of mistake, but then a deep, echoey voice came from overhead, narrating a history of the house and the robber baron who’d owned it, telling how the baron and his wife had been slaughtered by Indians and now haunted the rooms, headless. The door they’d come through was a seamless wall. There was no discernible way out. Graham felt ghost-fingers on the back of his neck.
    He went to sleep that night thinking of the crowded room, the old-fashioned portraits on the wall, and the handsome striped wallpaper. He was worn out from the trip and fell quickly into a heavy sleep. In his experience, even at that young age, there were half a dozen types of sleep, and this was a seductive, serpentine sleep, bent on smothering. He startled breathlessly awake after an hour or so, and something pushed him to rise to his feet. There he stood in his pajamas in the dark. He was middream, still, though he didn’t realize it. In his dream, he stood alone in that suffocating haunted house. The lights had gone off. This had been done deliberately, he understood, to scare him. They knew he was afraid of the dark. He took a few tentative steps, hands out, and touched the wall. He felt his way along the wall, and within a few steps his fingers met the square edge of a frame: a portrait. He continued to edge around the room, bumping into a second frame.
    On Graham’s birthday the year before, his father had handed down to him two of his own cherished possessions: framed prints, one from the 1933 Chicago Fair, and one from the 1948 summer Olympics in London, where his father had watched from the stands as right-handed Hungarian pistol-shooter Károly Takács, whose hand had been destroyed by a grenade, won the gold medal using his left hand. Because Graham’s birthday was in the summer, the prints came to hang in Graham’s bedroom at the cottage, instead of in the apartment in Chicago.
    Graham’s eyes were open in the dark, but he could see nothing, not even shadows. On a night with a moon, the surface of the lake outside his window doubled the light, but on this night there was no moon, no starlight. His heart beat fast. He told himself to stay calm. Distantly, he heard the call of a loon. Some summers were thick with them. When he was fifteen they would disappear entirely for years, but by the time we lived there they’d returned, though he would swear the numbers had thinned.
    It was the loon that pulled him out of it. He felt again for the wall, and this time the glass beneath his fingers, the edge of the picture frame, revealed itself for what it was: one of the prized posters.
    Graham blinked a few times and stood still. The understanding—that he was in his own bedroom, that he’d been asleep and then had woken, or half-woken—came gradually. He didn’t trust it. He clung to the idea of being trapped, as if it were the reality and the physical world the dream. When finally he was fully awake, he made his way to the bed and climbed in. He didn’t sleep. As the sun rose, the weeping willow outside his window made lacy patterns on his walls, and the light glinted off the glass frames.
    After this, he understood that the human brain has the ability to lose its way, like a boy without light.
    When Graham was fifteen—long after the episode in his bedroom on Round Lake—he spent a summer in Cadiz, Spain, as an exchange student. He lived in an apartment with a family who had three boys, and he shared a room with the youngest. They ate chocolate and bread for breakfast and spent all day at the beach. Graham had always had a lot of dreams during his scarce sleep, and he’d always remembered them vividly, and one night he woke sweating in the early morning, the light