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keep moving. He scaled the streaks along the wall cast by the nightlight, past the blankets in the windows and the boy-eating sofa, until he reached the coat closet by the front door. It was not locked, to his delight. There was a pile of coats and sweaters on the floor that had been there since the morning he’d lunged inside and pulled them from their hangers. He went in and closed the door behind him.
    The darkness was complete, compressed. A safe dark. He sat on the heap of clothes cross-legged, listening to his heart beat. He thought of all the times when his mother would hold him to her cushiony chest, with her big legs hanging out of the open door, him kicking at the tops of her knees and shins with the heels of his feet. She would not let him go. He would get tired of screaming and struggling and grow quiet enough to hear the clouds move across the sky. In that kind of quiet, sometimes his mother would begin to cry. He knew that one thing for sure (what crying was and what it sounded like). He would rise and fall with the heaves of her great chest and listen to her sniffle. He never wanted her to cry, but he didn’t know how to get her to stop. “It’s OK,” he wanted to say.
    One of Sephiri’s legs was going numb, and he shifted position. He listened to the roof rafters and the floorboards creak. And then he felt the tight space widen around him. The walls, floor, and ceiling seemed to rise higher and away from him. He lost the close-up sense his breathing had before. It was no longer the pressed-­together sound he was used to, like when his mother cornered him there and they both panted in exhaustion on the floor. There was the sensation that height width depth had elongated, like a tunnel, pushing farther and farther out.
    He held his breath in the thickening silence. Then, far off, he saw a sliver of light drip into the pitch black. It was a faint, fuzzy light, like the television static he had never been able to get in his hand. The blackness was widening and lengthening still, until he could no longer hear even his heartbeat. He had the urge to stand up and start walking, but he was too frightened. But he couldn’t stay in the same place forever, could he? That’s what the Great Octopus once said to him. He had to do something if he was ever going to find out about the light, about the voice.
    There were a lot of things Sephiri wanted to know. For example, he wanted to know if he could will himself to shrink down to the size of ants and follow them down to their kingdom or if he could will himself to be so tall that he could have a look at what was inside the bird nests he saw at the tops of trees. Then there were the practical matters he wanted to know about. Where did music go when a radio was clicked off? Was it possible just to stay awake, to decide that no more sleep was ever needed, and to go about the night as he would the day? How could he save the things he had lined up and organized and delivered from disarray, from being sullied by the meddling hands of the world?
    There were many things he did not understand. And it seemed as if the things he was most certain of had no place in Air. Once when he was urinating (this time into the toilet bowl), he had looked through the small window that was set in the wall above the toilet and out into the driveway of one of the neighbors. This way of observance did not disturb him, since peering through a glass window was the same as looking through the windows of the castle in his snow globe, only the objects were bigger, and he could see them better. A blue car pulled up and stopped. A woman got out, talking and talking, and there was that smile on her face.
    Sephiri heard the engine turn off and watched the man come around the side of the car. He let out a bellowing laugh before he opened the rear door. He was fiddling in the backseat with something, and then Sephiri watched him lift out a small child. They’d all broken