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but not in my favor. What I’ve done is terrible and I’ve seen far worse, and I have no desire to keep limping around like a wounded animal, trying to evade God or whatever there is.
    The question of where to begin is a difficult one. In life, time is stupidly linear. Always in joint, however arthritic that joint may be. In the mind, time looks like a chunk. Let me put it this way:
    Your past is like an abstract sculpture outside the building where you work. Say, a giant white cube. Pockmarked and cantilevered. You walk by it in the morning. Peering beyond it at a pretty girl, you tilt your head. You eat your lunch on a bench beneath it, sometimes under its shadow, depending on the time, the weather, the calendar, and which seat happens to be free. How big and unmovable it is, you marvel. You snigger that it is a sham, a child could have created it, it does not symbolize anything. That someone could be permitted to exhibit it in public—could be paid to do so—shows just how much is wrong with society. Many days you do not notice it at all. It can be moved, but not by you.
    So, like the most confused of storytellers, I will begin at the beginning.
    3:45 a.m. May 12, 2012
    I was born in 1947, the middle of three children. My older brother, Paul, was eight years my senior. In early childhood one bathes in knowledge more than acquires it, and the knowledge I was bathed in was that Paul was going to be a great baseball player. Paul spent hours every day practicing, doing push-ups, doing pull-ups from a bar stretched across his doorway; I remember very strongly the sound of his grunting, a sound often accompanied by the muffled thud of crutches as my father observed and circled. (My father had lost a foot at Guadalcanal, and within a matter of months had returned to law school, from which he graduated third in his class. The two men ahead of him, he was fond of pointing out, didn’t have to subtract an hour from studying every time they confronted a building without an elevator.) Often, when there was company over for dinner, my father would ask Paul to stand up, so that his body from neck to ankles could be admired and commented upon, with particular fawning attention paid to shoulders, biceps, and calves. “Paul is what I could produce when I was complete,” my father often said, not caring that I was sitting at the table. My brother tended to sulk during these displays, though I don’t know whether the sulking was the result of the display or of the care with which my father oversaw everything he ate. My father had somehow come under the influence of a diet fad that aggressively promoted fruit at the expense of most other breeds of food, and the underpinning of Paul’s diet was the daily consumption of seven apples, four pears, three oranges, and two bananas. It is difficult to date these things, but I believe that my first discrete memory is of Paul’s attempt to shove an apple core down my throat.
    â€œAttempt” is not quite the word, since Paul was as successful in this endeavor as he wished to be; his object was subjugation rather than suffocation. First he pushed me into the scratchy-soft cream-colored sofa cushion, then he lifted me up and shoved the core in my mouth. Cushion fibers mingled with the apple to create a taste I can still recall. Balling my fists into his forearms did little, as I was most likely four years old and he was a preternaturally powerful eleven, so my ventures into punching probably felt, to me and to him, like faint knocks on a thick locked door. “Say: Paul is king,” he said. Of course I couldn’t say anything at all, because there was an apple core in my throat, but ordering me to say something that I couldn’t say was exactly his idea. He was not looking for compliance, exactly; he was looking for an excuse to shove an apple core down my throat (as Orwell notes in “Such, Such Were the Joys” and elsewhere, an