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and frustrating when the one thing I wanted was for him to concentrate on what was going on closest to his face. In some ways, it was easy to understand, already, what he would be like after he was dead.
    The apples tumbled around in the sack, shaking the rickety scale, and as it shimmied there next to the cash register I noticed that Philip was gone. The farmer pointed toward the central tower, beneath which several guards had gathered. They cupped their hands to their faces, shouting up to the top, where Philip clung.
    “Just let go easily,” they called up. “You’ll slide down. You won’t be hurt.”
    Philip did not move. He pressed his face into the cool, marbled beef. He was trying to make himself faint. This was what he did instead of crying. He was high up, into the slender neck of the tower, where the meat was frozen, its surface caked over with shining, granular frost.
    “What’s he doing?” one of the guards asked.
    “Might be hungry,” the other guard answered. And then he shouted, “Hello? We can give you food down here, buddy. Lots of, like, chocolate for you? Candy canes, fudge bars, the whole shot.”
    “Your hands are going to freeze right off, champ,” the other one joined in. “Or you’ll get your hands permanently stuck. We’ll have to — I’ll tell you, we’re going to have to cut big cubes of meat where your hands are, and that meat will be permanently attached to you, so then you’ll have to go to school with these, like, big hunks of meat all over your hands.”
    “No one’s going to want that,” said the other one.
    “No sir. You’ll be known as the boy with meat for hands. At school — everywhere. They’ll look at you and point and say, ‘Hey, isn’t that the boy with meat for hands?’ And they’ll know you’re the one because of the big mittens you’ll have to wear to cover up the rotting chunks of meat.”
    “Big mittens, son. Burlap mittens.”
    Philip responded by burrowing his head farther into the meat. He was up to his ears. Even from where I stood, I could see his little knuckles going white with concentration.
    I started toward the tower. I remember thinking clearly that this was a time when something motherly should come to me. I should have been able to conjure up a string of delicate, loving phrases that would turn Philip into an obedient boy, a soft pastry of a child who would loosen his grip just enough to drop contritely to the foot of the tower and bury his small head, fiery with apology, in my lap. But all that came out of me was air, water, heat — the elements of speech without the speech itself, as if my head had not come with a proper instruction manual, or I had not read the one with which it was issued. Suddenly it was as if I no longer had a head at all, as if my body had always held in suspicion the organ that had commanded it with Manichaean accuracy for all these years, and the ugly, perforated case in which it was housed, and a wholesale rejection was, just then, coming to light.
    As Philip lost consciousness and began to slide down the slick face of the meat tower, slowly, comically, like a drunk collapsing on a greasy lamppost, the men below advancing with lumbering steps, wielding orange safety blankets and oxygen machines, I thought about my husband, lying there on the bed, how long he had been there, how we would find him, later that day, after having put away the groceries, lying on the bed, in the same position that we’d left him, only smaller, like a doll, his face gruesomely split in half, a tiny, blue handgun nestled in the twisted sheets, still warm, the contents of his head spread out across the pillows like an anatomical diagram — how, even with this degree of detail, the events of his life would remain so distant and abstract to us as never to have really happened at all.

The Boyish Mulatto
    W hat I wanted, during those years, was to drive a robot. They weren’t letting me do that.
    “This job does not involve a