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me about?”
    But he ignored her question, and on the corner of First Avenue in a light rain, with his shoulders slumped against the onslaught of the future, Leo pressed the calculator function on his BlackBerry and ran some numbers, then sighed in a dramatic manner and said yes, yes, he thought they could actually do it, at least for a while. “It’ll probably be a big mistake,” he warned. “And we may have to pull him out later, when it will be much harder.”
    Leo made a fine income by most American professional standards, and yet as a salaried associate at a small, second-rate firm—not a partner, not a rainmaker—his earnings placed them at the crux of the city’s striving and diminishing middle class. The school that Mason eventually attended seemed almost a direct rebuke to the unhappiness of the morning that they had spent in that dark cafeteria. It was beautiful, orderly, all-boy. Close attention was paid by thoughtful teachers. But Amy and Leo were shocked when it came time to pay Mason’s tuition twice a year, and when the American Express bill appeared in the mail as thick as a long, torrid novel, its many pages detailing the folly of the previous month. They spent too much at every turn, writing checks and charging meals and purchases, throwing bills and hailstorms of coins at cab drivers and handymen and the tolerant Hispanic waiters at the Golden Horn. Here, they seemed to cry, take it all. Money was forced away from them in the wind tunnel, but then the wind eventually shifted so it blew the other way, bringing more money with it.
    In his own bedroom in the apartment now, Mason slept on obliviously. Over his head, warplanes hung on fishing wire, and on his shelves were stacks of board games that were barely used. By now almost all children had made the transition into games played upon screens, though their parents and grandparents still stubbornly kept buying them the latest editions of Battleship and Stratego, trying to seduce them back toward the last embers of the pre-microchip world.
    “Mason, honey,” Amy said in the softest voice, as if in penance for all the shouting. “It’s time to get up.”
    She looked into his wide, beautiful face, at the slender nose and deer-brown hair. His eyes batted open and he said, thickly, “Five minutes?”
    “No, sweetness, sorry,” Amy said. “I already gave them to you.”
    “Oh.” He blinked a few times, then said, “Can you name all the U.S. presidents who were left-handed?”
    “What? No, I can’t.”
    “Try.”
    “I can’t try. It’s not something you try.”
    “James Garfield Herbert Hoover Harry Truman Gerald Ford Ronald Reagan George Bush the first one and Bill Clinton,” he said in a big release.
    “Well. Well. That’s very good,” she said, and truly she thought it was, though it left her with nothing much to say in response. He sometimes just came at her like this with facts ; to her they seemed random, but to him they were part of a beautiful system in which an array of presidents sashayed back and forth across his consciousness, grasping pens or quills in their left hands.
    He sighed now and lifted himself from the bakery warmth and human smell that churned below his covers. She wanted to pull him back onto the bed and heave him into her lap, though he was ten years old and his legs were long and gangly, and it would have been approaching incest at this point if she had done that. But she longed for him, as well as for the version of herself that had been his mother when he was small. Remember when we saw the Magritte painting of the man with the green apple? Amy wanted to say now, and perhaps he would remember, and inexplicably both of them would begin to cry.
    But Mason was finally out of bed, standing and urinating in the tiny slice of a bathroom connected to his bedroom, making a sound as loud as glass being struck with a hammer. He was awake and in no need of cuddling from his mother, and was already thinking about what