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third day—he found himself standing with his older brothers, Andrew and Alexander, and Father in front of the theater. They were banishing sadness. The building had not been altogether destroyed in the earthquake—it was in fact in relatively good shape, but was going to be dynamited along with hundreds of other structures as breaks against the fires. They were using black powder, which created a hundred little fires for every break it might or might not reduce a structure to. Who had told them to use black powder? Who had authorized the use of black powder? Father had angrily asked these questions. But black powder was all they had. The texture of the sky was of dense roiling low clouds, but its color was luminous orange and they were not clouds. Shadows as stark as any cast on the sunniest of sunny days attached themselves strangely to people standing or lying on the street, but they were dark red instead of black. They lit the fuse and waited. No explosion was forthcoming, though many could be heard elsewhere in the city, single tolls of immense bells. Father and a man he knew, an engineer from the Spring Park Water Company, a private holding and distribution system in which Father held a significant number of shares and which seemed, secretly, to be, somehow, at issue, as there wasn’t a whole lot of water to be had, waited incredulously a minute or two more, then walked up the steps to the front door of the building. The other man picked up the dead fuse and examined it just as Father’s hand reached for the doorknoband the powder exploded. The engineer was killed; Father took many shards of glass and splinters of wood in his face and neck and chest, and one big piece nearly eviscerated him and broke his hip, making him fall backward down the steps, taking Charles with him, who passed out and broke an arm in the fall but who was otherwise unhurt.
    When he returned to consciousness, he realized he had been elsewhere. And realized as well that he had not returned to the place he had retreated from. He was lying next to Father in the street and people were shouting in the distance and hovering above him. Father liked to say, quoting someone else, that a man could believe boldly in truth A—that Jesus, for example, had suffered and died for your sins, or that the things around you constituted a reality, a real world—and escape thereby a belief in falsehood B—that Satan owned your fallen soul, or that the things around did not constitute a real world, were not real—but simply disbelieving B did not mean you believed A. In fact, by simply disbelieving B, you could fall into other falsehoods, C or D, that were just as bad as B. Or you might escape B by not believing anything at all, not even the Truth.
    â€œNothing has been lost here,” Father whispered to him, “that cannot be replaced. Easily and swiftly replaced. Not this building, not this city. Not me. Not you.”
    So, Charles thought: nothing had been lost because nothing had been there in the first place. Father continued to croak and bubble and spit: “Virgil confirms this for me: ‘ nothing unreal is allowed to survive .’”
    â€œYes, Father,” Charles whispered, trying to sop of some of Father’s blood with his own shirt, not really knowing what he intended to do with the blood once he’d collected it: wring it out over Father’s intestines and hope it seeped back to places where it would do some good? Wring it out somewhere else, in an effort to tidy up? Point was, he was trying! He was banishing sadness, as far as anyone else could tell. He was clean and cool and clear. And these qualities would surely not be lost on Father, for whom Charles wanted to appear fearless. He was utterly afraid and not at all confused about it, but for Father’s sake, he wanted to appear as something he was not.

PART TWO:
    â€œTHE AMERICAN”

    â€œThe thing is consistently, consummately —