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those misunderstandings.  But there are two sides to every story.  You change your perception, you change your life.”
    “My life was changed for me.”  I don’t even mean to say the words.  They escape me while I’m preoccupied.
    “Then your perception’s about to change, too,” Judas says.  “I guarantee it.”

4
    Ode to the Levant
     
    One of us has to be there for the house closing—Mom and Dad’s house, I mean.  If I’m not living there anymore—and I can’t—then I can’t call it my own.
    “I’ll go without you,” Judas says.  He puts our breakfast bowls in the sink.  “You shouldn’t have to go back to that place so soon.”
    I don’t want to.  I can’t.  Mom and Dad have been living in that house all these years; and if I walk into that house and it’s empty, devoid of everything that made it home…
    Judas grips my shoulder.
    “Jeez.”  I try to smile.  “Is this ever going to feel…not-weird?”
    “Doubt it,” he says.
    I laugh.  I have to.  I’ll go insane if I don’t.
    Judas leaves early the next morning.  He leaves me with notes on the refrigerator and the square, chrome-topped kitchen table.  I retreat into my bedroom with one of his notes— Don’t run the kitchen fan, it’s busted —and open up my paints.  I mix them with old coffee and try—try—to ignore the tingling in my hands.
    If I’m going back to school, I have to paint.  There’s no getting around it.  I prop up a bulk canvas against my closet door.  I don’t have an easel, but that’s okay; I sit on the floor, legs folded.  I’ll start with something easy, I think: a sunrise.  I plant my wood palette on my lap and mix red and white.  I slather my badger brush in pink paint and touch it to the canvas.
    From the start, it’s a disaster.  My hand won’t stop shaking.  The paintbrush trembles on the canvas.  The pink paint blots.
    I drop the brush on the palette.  I drop my head in my hands.
    The headache starts.
    It starts at the back of my head—the base of my skull and the tip of my spine.  It crawls into the space behind my ears, throbbing, dull.  It creeps across my scalp and into my forehead.  And that’s where it explodes.
    Knives.  Fire.  The pain’s so bad it blinds me, excruciating, white-hot nothingness filling my eyes.  My fingers stiffen, icy and numb.  I brace myself, my hands on the floor.  I can’t see the floor.  I can’t see anything.  I can’t see anything but pain.
    My chest spasms in dry retches.  The back of my throat tightens, choking me.  I draw one gasping, desperate breath—
    —and the pain subsides.
    Faint, frightened, I sit up on my knees.  The room is dim and blurry, my eyes stinging.  My head feels light on my shoulders.
    What was that?
    Brain damage.  I keep forgetting.  Why do I keep forgetting?
    The pulsing aftershock echoes in my lobes.  I don’t think I can paint right now.  I seal the lids on my paint cans, pull the covering over the canvas.  I pick up my palette.
    Something doesn’t feel right.  I don’t mean my head, I mean the space around me.  It looks changed, somehow, but I can’t describe how.  As far as I know, the door’s the same; the floor’s the same.  I run my fingers along the edge of the palette.
    —Didn’t I lay my paintbrush on the palette?
    I put the palette down and crouch on the floor.  I peek under the bed.  There’s nothing there but dust and springs.  I turn around ease open the rolling closet door.  There’s nothing there but wire hangers and clothes.
    I sit on my knees a second time, puzzled, lost in thought.
    A loud bang resounds through the apartment.  Somebody’s knocking on the front door.
    I pull myself off the hardwood.  I feel like I’m floating toward the ceiling.  I drag myself out into the sitting room.  I unlock the door, pull it open—
    “So it is you!”
    I step back.
    I don’t recognize the boy on the other side of the door.  He’s as skinny as a telephone