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radically changed your life—especially if said child is your child—you feel you can break the rules. The boy recalibrates the world. The crisis of so-and-so’s unhappiness about her job or his inability to meet a woman who will pay him what he considers to be a sufficient degree of attention pales next to the crisis of how to stop Walker from beating his own brains out. The opinion of other people matters less and less the more you walk down the street with a boy whose lumpy looks attract attention, stares and smiles alike. One’s life is suddenly marked by other exigencies.
    I use the word retarded , for instance, though never to describe a disabled person: it’s insufficiently descriptive applied to a human being. But it’s evocative if you’re describing an inanimate design, or an especially recalcitrant aspect of bureaucratic behaviour. Sometimes I’ll use it at a party, and I can sense the person I am speaking to rearing back, however imperceptibly, at the sudden presence of what is supposed to be an unusable word; I can see him note the usage, and I can see him decide not to react, because he knows I have a disabled son: he must think, well, if anyone can use it, he can use it. It needs to be repurposed.
    He loved women, the prettier the better. Even as an infant he would raise his arms to be picked up—he couldn’t sit up on his own until he was nearly a year old—or, later, climb into a woman’s lap and immediately peer down her neckline. Then he would feel her up. I thought it was accidental, but Johanna’s friends remarked how intentional it seemed. He loved anything shiny, fingering it close to his wonky eyes. Our friends called him “the jeweller.”
    Our close friends, that is. To others, at least for the first few years, I never mentioned Walker’s difficulties. I wasn’t ashamed of him. But I didn’t want sympathy and I didn’t want him to feel he needed it either.
    He stayed in my mind. Not only darkly, or as worry, but as a mental talisman. So did my daughter, of course. But I was always catching up to Hayley, whereas Walker moved slowly and could be tracked from standing. His aura, the fact of his existence, turned up everywhere, unexpectedly: in the lyrics of a Neil Young song at the gym (“ Some are bound to happiness / Some are bound to glory / Some are bound to loneliness / Who can tell your story ?”), between the lines of a Norman Mailer essay read during one of my bouts of insomnia. He turned up in other people’s conversations. Once, at a cocktail party—this would have been the summer Walker turned three—I overheard a man I had known well for a long time trying to explain to another friend how people communicated with my son. “It’s hard to describe,” he said. He had a drink in his hand. “His father has his own babbling language. It seems to work as well as anything else.” I couldn’t tell if he approved or not, but it was the first time I heard what Walker and I did with each other described as language.
    I often wondered if we were imagining Walker’s progress, inventing the connections we thought he was making. Did he really say “Heh-Heh” when Hayley was nearby? Or was he just breathing? When I said goodbye to him, and leaned over and kissed him, did he really say “Bye”? Or was he just breathing ? Johanna heard it too: “He just said goodbye!” she would say, followed by “I’m going to cry,” experiencing yet again the instantaneous hyperplasia that marked our days. He made people feel things. But did he feel anything? Did the outline of a boy I saw beneath his stolid surface, beneath the dead-calm pond of his mind, actually exist? Or was it wishful thinking? I was often convinced our effort to perceive a whole being in his stunted parts was an act of almost reckless faith, no different from that of any other zealot—from, say, the mother of the Houston TV evangelist I once met, who told me in no uncertain terms that heaven existed, that she was