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into the finest tissue lines, like the scars on my wrist where I cut myself with a pencil-sharpener blade as a boy, letting out droplets of blood. I most often frame the way light strikes objects or landscapes. People are harder to frame. They meet my eye when I stare at them and cause me to turn away. If I frame a person, it is fleeting, when he or she is unaware, caught at a strange angle, or in repose. Animals are easier. They move more predictably. I know this because the Prague Zoo is just down there, on the far bank of the Vltava. I can see the cages strung along the riverbank (when the floods came, they carried off a Persian leopard, which miraculously made it, bedraggled, to the shore downstream, where it prowled the flooded meadows for months afterward). On clear mornings I can frame the sea lions parting the waters of their kidney-shaped pool, but it is too dark now to make out the sea lions or to discern the whiteness of the polar bear; it is too dark even to see the tiger burning bright.
    I lean over the railing. I measure the space between the deck and the sloping garden. I feel gravity coming up at me, as if with hands, to pull me underwater. I am drawn to the edge of things, to margins and borders. I stand beside windows. I hike up to escarpments and teeter at the lip of limestone quarries. In 1961 my mother was on a team of architects who built the noted swimming pool in the Podolí district of Prague. She designed the high-diving platform. We venture to Podolí once or twice each summer, as a family. The point is not to weave a front crawl through the crowds in the pool, or to sunbathe beside the pool, but to admire the form of her tower, rising slender, yes, like a giraffe. I climb to the top of the platform on such outings. I stand at the edge, at the head of the giraffe, my toes out in space, my hands at my sides. It is my intention to dive. I look out. There is a fine view of Prague up there — not planetary black and gold, but green and blue. I look down at the pool, far below. Invariably, I see a few faces upturned toward me, looking at me, as did the elderly couple when I appeared to them in the triptych of my imagination. It is only then that I experience vertigo. Dizziness overcomes me. I know vertigo has a hemodynamic explanation: It is nothing more than restricted flow through my vertebral artery. Still, I cannot let go. Fictional Emil would dive. He would do a swan dive. Pip would dive. He would be amazed and humbled, but he would dive. He would carefully take off his jacket and laborer’s boots and set them on the platform, and he would fall without understanding, grabbing the air, snatching at it as he fell, in trousers and shirt, calling out for a blacksmith. I stumble backward from the edge. I grab railings, inspired by the railings I grip now. I persuade myself that I am being sensible, that I would drift in my dive under a gust of wind and strike concrete, ending up with a broken neck, paralyzed, with nothing to frame but a ceiling, and not even the cathedral ceiling of Kant. But there is no wind in our ČSSR. There is not even the faintest zephyr to stir the flags of the Communist moment. I teeter, I peer down. But in the end I am about safety; I make the safe choice.
     
     
     
     
    I MOVE BACK from the railing and step dizzily to the study at the far end of the roof terrace. I switch on a lamp. I arrange my giraffe papers and the ring binder from the shipping company on the desk and lay out the diagrams of blood flow on the floor: all the capillaries and shunts I have so far traced through the mesh of the giraffe’s wonder net.
    The study is three walls of glass and one of brick. There are two black-and-white photographs on the brick wall that have never changed position. I know them as openings, other types of windows into past and future moments. The first is of Prague Castle in 1932. It was taken from high up on a south-facing flying buttress of St. Vitus’s Cathedral, our national