Three times he asked me to finish him off, three times I refused. This was before, before I allowed myself to think anything I want. If I had been then what I’ve become today, I would have killed him the first time he asked, his head turned toward me, his left hand in my right.

God’s truth, if I’d already become then what I am now, I would have slaughtered him like a sacrificial sheep, out of friendship. But I thought of my old father, of my mother, of the inner voice that commands us all, and I couldn’t cut the barbed wire of his suffering. I was not humane with Mademba, my more-than-brother, my childhood friend. I let duty make my choice. I offered him only mistaken thoughts, thoughts commanded by duty, thoughts condoned by a respect for human law, and I was not human.

Bird passes shelf after shelf, slotting his fingers into the spaces where removed books once stood. There are fewer missing here than at the public library, where some shelves had been more gap than books. But still nearly every shelf is missing one, sometimes more. He wonders who decided which books were too dangerous to keep, and who it was that had to hunt down and collect the condemned books, like an executioner, ferrying them to their doom. He wonders if it is his father.

After a minute she gives up. Sits there for a little while, then tries again. She knows by now there will be no response, but she’s after something else. She hears the tinny beep against her ear and it almost physically conjures for her the empty rooms and passages down which it carries. That corner. That ornament. That sill. She closes her eyes, listening. A commotion of longing and revulsion inside. How did it become so complicated? Home used to mean only one Thing, not a blizzard of things at war.

And then he’s got to the house to discover that his father has been using his room for storage, every available surface piled with junk. At this moment he’s holding in his hands a cardboard box filled with paraphernalia from the reptile park, books and pictures and flyers and an old stuffed lizard with glass eyes. He gestures to it with his chin.

Trying to clear out my bedroom, he says.

Hard not to assume it’s deliberate, there’s lots of other space, after all, but Pa wanted to bury me. Piece by piece, Anton has been uncovering himself, carrying each box/object down to the garage and dumping it there. The familiar furniture emerging gradually, bed and desk and chair, the topography of childhood. Long way to go still.

7. The Come-Apart

“Zehrunisa returned to her hut and sobbed, still clutching the rag with which she’d

cleaned her neighbor. She didn’t cry for the fate of her husband, son, and daughter, or for the great web of corruption she was now forced to navigate, or for a system in which the most wretched tried to punish the slightly less wretched by turning to a justice system so malign it sank them all. She cried for the manageable thing — the loss of that beautiful quilt, a parting gift to a woman who had used her own body as a weapon against her neighbors.