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their faces like boot prints. They looked old beyond their years, sitting forward with elbows on knees, or with legs flung out, an arm over the back of the chair, eyes turned up to the ceiling and a cigarette always burning between their fingers. They startled easily and sought refuge in street drugs and alcohol, and their symptoms would later be tied to posttraumatic stress disorder—a term that didn’t exist then. They’d seen their buddies die and wanted to know why it wasn’t them. They felt defiled. They felt, many of them, that they were already dead.

    It was three weeks before she visited me again. I had not tried to contact her. I preferred to test my solitude to the limits of endurance, and those I had yet to reach. But the hours I’d spent with her the night of my mother’s funeral had awoken in me what I could only think of as a hunger:

    Agnes was the only woman I had ever properly
loved
. I had often thought about what I meant by the word
love
with regard to Agnes, and found it easier to discard other competing emotions and define it in the negative. For sure it had something to do with sex, but my desire for Agnes was also driven by a further wealth of feeling that wasn’t affinity, or not merely affinity, nor was it a twinning, although this idea did at least begin to approximate what I was after.
There
was
a feeling of twinship, not least because we resembled each other physically, and could have passed for brother and sister. So what was I to make of the fact that it was the death of her real brother that destroyed our marriage? I remembered telling her, in the immediate aftermath of Danny’s death, that she would be better off without me, better able to get on with her life. The inadequacy of this as justification for leaving her was made very clear to me. I tried to explain how corrosive it would be, her conviction of my responsibility for Danny’s death.
    “Then change my conviction,” she said.
    I was silent. I opened my hands, a gesture of helplessness. I couldn’t do it, I told her. It was during that conversation, or one identical to it—they blur together in my memory now—that I remember her pummeling my chest with her fists, weeping with frustration, and me standing there with my arms by my sides in a posture of stoic mortification.
    That was all behind us now. The most potent charge of emotion weakens over time, unless it’s repressed. Then it can wreak havoc in the psyche for years to come, which was what had happened to Danny and his buddies. Their buried material was throwing up nightmares and other symptoms, and would continue to do so until the trauma could be translated into a narrative and assimilated into the self; this was our working assumption, Sam Pike’s and mine. But Agnes didn’t repress. She remembered in vivid detail the events surrounding Danny’s death and my own subsequent departure, for it had kept her effectively out of touch with me for seven years.
    But the day I buried my mother she had waited for me afterward and then come home with me.

Chapter Three
    M y apartment was on the eleventh floor of a building on West Twenty-third Street. After I moved out of Fulton Street I spent a couple of years in a cramped little studio in the Village before moving up to Chelsea. It was a big corner apartment, not as spacious as the apartment on West Eighty-seventh, which by then I knew was going to Walt, but a good-sized two-bedroom with a view of the river and, to the south, all the way down to the twin towers. My living room, the one with the views, had a broad arched opening halfway down and a kitchen at the far end with a counter and high stools. Two walls were given over to bookshelves, floor to ceiling, crammed full and spilling out. There was a good stereo system and some framed reproductions of works by the surrealists, holdovers from my Baltimore days that I’d never troubled to replace. The dining table was always heaped high with papers and journals, and