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In intertwining with her distracting influence, in allowing her into The New Existence , he believed Joanne was drawing him closer to a feeling of empathy and understanding, leading to a flattening of life’s ambitions and hopes, connecting him with the velvet hammer of assumed and perhaps welcomed responsibility.
    What he wanted at a deep level was to flush irony from his vocabulary, to tear down that essential wall that kept him from actually living life. He was looking elsewhere for inspiration without being fully cognizant of doing so, where the stated goal was not actually the stated goal, and that, in the margin of anxiety, perhaps genius would find root and surface.
    There was, of course, the practical care and keeping of Grace that Joanne could provide. It wasn’t all about his own mania, his own interest. Grace survived as the singular event that could not be undone. What he tried to convince himself, in the distancing of Kenneth’s absence, in the silence of days, then weeks, and now months, was that Grace represented the watershed of a personal commitment toward ideas of hope and humanity, toward ideals that outlasted the flame of passion or intimacy. She was exerting a needed influence on his life, changing him for the better, normalizing him.
    What Joanne Hoffmann was teaching him, what he was seeing when he stared into her image in the hallway mirror, was the power of the accumulation of small actions, an atomized life.
    He noted Joanne’s attentiveness when she dressed Grace, matching socks and color-coordinating outfits. He would come upon them in the kitchen, Joanne cutting food into bite-sized bits, steamed broccoli, cauliflower, sprouts, and spinach to be eaten before there was even a mention of dessert. Joanne inflexible in her resolve, her arms folded in stand-offs that could last a half-hour. At times Joanne sent Grace to her room to think about ‘making good choices’ ( gc ), when Norman would have simply given in, not out of love, but expediency.
    He wanted to put Joanne on the spot about her own apparent bad choices ( bc ), but managed to quell the cynical reflex. He was beginning to see how, through the act of talking and an associated pantomime of actions, a child might eventually navigate the world.
    He wrote it all down in its exact details, revising and adding to his new formulary for life’s grand equation. Was this, in fact, how you raised a child? He thought of Romulus and Remus. Raised by wolves, they had founded the city of Rome. He considered the question under the working title – What if Joanne Hoffmann had raised Romulus and Remus?
    And he could catalog a series of other distractions. Joanne said that Grace would need to be kitted out with a new coat and boots for the walks she, Joanne, and Randolph took along the lake, so Norman was obliged to turn from his own preoccupations to notice the bare outline of defoliated trees, to see that winter had already settled upon them.
    Since the purchase, there was the added equation – Joanne and Grace’s pre-walk routine. Grace demanding that she be allowed to change out of her Princess Jasmine underwear into Princess Aurora underwear, or Belle underwear, the demand made with such petulance that the formula was skewed by a tantrum ( t ), as Grace thrashed her legs on the floor like something out of The Exorcist . A tantrum ( t ), could rise exponentially, denoted by ( t) X .
    The tantrums and the socio-political reality beneath them – the polyester underwear purchased at Walmart – shot to hell his stand against globalization and child labor exploitation. It was, he reflected in his most sanguine moment, part of the new poverty. This was economic life under The New Existence , in which princess underwear could be bought for the price of a Big Mac.
    He had his working formulae, seeking what he called the elusive dark matter of the human condition. He felt himself on the far reaches of a profound understanding, where there might be no