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he glued his fingers together and had to spend a day with the school matron, who was once in the army and didn’t like classical music.
    George was attracted to the Greek gods because no one believed in them anymore.
    When Matron asked what he liked to do for fun, he went on about language. He told her that language owes its existence and identity to what it can never be, only to what it can point at. For the sound of language is the very embodiment of desire. And despite its greatest efforts, language is destined only to fail. Matron nodded and asked if he had been drinking.
    “I won’t lie to you, Matron,” he said. “I have been.”
    She shook her head in reproach. “Well, don’t let the masters catch you or I’ll be bandaging more than your hands.”
    George loved every aspect of language. He loved to see it written, to hear it used, to feel its sounds in his mouth. What couldn’t be felt in real life could be felt through language—through the experience of another by the setting of marks upon a page. It was unthinkable, yet it worked.
    “We have found a way to record . . .”
    George had once begun one of his term papers.
    “ . . . And for the past 5,000 years there has been a thread running through humanity keeping it together, so that we may know a person’s innermost feelings without ever having known them personally . . .”
    Considering himself something of an expert, George liked to analyze the few letters his mother had written to him at the academy. They required careful examination, for in them (George had convinced himself) there was veiled love.
    George’s parents were like a jigsaw puzzle that came without the parts he wanted most.
    George sometimes took the afternoon off school. There was a churchyard overlooking the sea that he liked to sit in. His boarding school was set high on the edge of town, with fields that sloped to an apple orchard. Beyond the far wall of the orchard, where the older boys met local girls and lied to them, lay the churchyard and then the town of Portsmouth. Beyond that, unknown valleys and fields.
    George loved sprinting through the orchard toward the far wall. In early autumn, sunlight fell golden through the trees. Once across the wall and through the field, he came upon the churchyard.
    Even when George could see his own breath, the bright sun warmed the tops of graves, as if anointing each silent dweller. The flat graves were the oldest. Children’s headstones made the best seats. George liked to sit on them and smoke cigarettes. Sometimes he would chat to the child, and say things like, “Well, if you came to my school, you should take Miss Corday for French . . .”
    The longer George sat on each headstone, the closer he felt to the child beneath him. His “best” friend in the churchyard had died in 1782. His gravestone read:
     
    1778–1782
HERE LIES OUR SON,
TOM COPTHORNE
WHO DIED AGED FOUR YEARS,
EIGHT MONTHS, TWO WEEKS,
THREE DAYS, AND FOURTEEN HOURS.
EVERY MOMENT WITH HIM
WAS OUR HEAVEN ON EARTH.
     
    George wondered if one day, somebody might count the minutes of his life.
    Sometimes he stole a small carton of chocolate milk from the cafeteria and poured some into the ground for Tom.
    Some of the flat tombstones had been split by weather. On another, time had erased whole sections of lettering. One gravestone was completely blank. George imagined it was his.
    In summer, he lay in the dry grass without moving. The sun on his face like the hot cheek of a lover. His eyes closed to a glowing curtain of warm blood.
    He wondered what his father was doing and blamed himself for his father’s departure when he was seven years old. He felt bonded to his mother by deficiency. Somehow, in a way he couldn’t understand, they had all failed as a family.
    George once considered that his father was dead, and that his secret life overseas was a cover-up because George was somehow responsible for his death in a way he couldn’t remember. But the