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immaturity. Thus, they are more common in children than in adults and are generally outgrown with time. There is often a family history positive for them. Perhaps your mother or your father?
    I don’t have a father, Duncan says. I was born without a father. Just like Jesus. Duncan makes sure not to mention God, but even so, Dr. Mathias’s face has a look of displeasure, as if he’s sucked on something bitter. Duncan only meant to mention Jesus as a comparison; he knows he is not Jesus, and now wishes he could take it back. But then he is angry. If Dr. Mathias cared at all, he never would have mentioned his mother or father. If he knew him in the way that he says he does and has sat here with him twice a week, every week, year after year, then he would know that his mother abandoned him and that she was alone when she did, perhaps as alone as he is now. Briefly he wonders, as he often does, what his mother might be doing at that moment or whether she is dead, and what she looks like inside hercoffin beneath the dirt: pale and still and as beautiful as he remembers from his dreams, twined around in a shroud of white root-tendrils from plants and bushes and small trees above ground.
    Dr. Mathias looks at Duncan, pushes out his bottom lip, and rubs at it.
    It’s not a good or bad thing that you may have inherited this from either one of your parents, Duncan; it just is.
    I don’t have a father, Duncan says.
    Dr. Mathias clears his throat and continues. As a group, these disorders are quite sudden yet predictable in their appearance in the sleep cycle, nonresponsive to environmental manipulation and characterized by—
    He stares at the charts around his room, upon the wall, at the hagiography of ebbing sunlight flickering through the bushes outside the warped glass and at play on his fine mahogany desk, and then he looks at Duncan, one eyebrow raised in unflinching and unforgiving appraisal. Parabolas of light curve and slide across his thick spectacles.
    Yes, he says, and grunts, strokes the air with a stick of unused chalk, quite naturally characterized by a retrograde amnesia. The origin of your disorder may, indeed, be the trauma we spoke of or a greater traumatic event that we have yet to uncover.
    The rain returns and the room darkens and they listen to raindrops pelting the skylight and Dr. Mathias sighs and reaches over to turn on the lamp again.

Chapter 8
    February 1981
    Darkness has fallen and the children are in their beds and it is rapidly growing colder; tonight the temperatures are predicted to plummet to minus twenty degrees, and there has been talk of snow. The children of the Home know the schedule of the furnace as intimately as they do the bell tolling the hours of the Holy Office. They know that if you do not fall asleep before the furnace goes off, you will not sleep because of the cold, and you will not feel a reprieve of warmth again until just before dawn. You learn this, if you are old enough, within your first two weeks at the Home—if you’ve arrived during the summer, you are already prepared for this divine inevitability by everything else the Home has taught you—and you make sure that you are asleep before the cold touches you, that you are asleep before ten P.M., when Brother Wilhelm turns the thermostat down to forty-five, and you pray that you will be asleep by the hourBrother Canice tolls the bell for Vigil, at midnight, or else you will be watching your chilled breath smoking the air for hours to come.
    Duncan is unable to sleep, and instead listens, waiting for morning and for the electric ticking and then the spark that he knows signals the furnace to ignite. His toes feel numb. He rubs at his nose to dispel the cold and to work the hardened snot. He imagines the final hours of the people aboard the Holiday Train during the winter of 1970, the year he was born, and abandoned to the Home. He begins to shiver with the cold and even when the furnace thumps into