Every time I visited, I would find more characters lying out on the desk and on the floor. One afternoon in March, I picked up a two-dimensional figure that had been fashioned from wire and covered with a thin muslin fabric, which looked more like a transparent skin than a dress. The girl doll was on her knees with her arms raised upward in a beseeching gesture. When I saw the C pinned to her chest, I thought of Saint Catherine. "That's one of O's girlfriends," Bill said. "She starves herself to death." Only a minute later, I noticed two small fabric dolls locked in an embrace. I picked up the double figure and saw that the two little boys—one black-headed and one brown—had been attached at their waists and that each child had a letter M sewn to his chest. The blatant reference to Matthew and Mark unsettled me for a moment. I examined the two painted faces for distinguishing features, but the children were identical.
"You've put the boys in it?" I said.
Bill looked up and smiled. "A version of them," he said. "They're O's little brothers."
I carefully lowered them back to their resting place on the glass cube in front of me. "Have you seen Mark's baby brother?"
Bill's eyes narrowed. "Is this free association or are you divining hidden meanings in my M's?"
"I was just wondering."
"No—I've only seen a snapshot of a red wrinkled newborn with a big mouth."
Although O's Journey didn't mirror Bill's life in any of its details, I began to think of the personified letters and their movements from one cube to another as Bill's fabular autobiography—a translation of sorts from the language of the outside world into the hieroglyphs of inner life. Bill told me that by the end of the work O would disappear—not die, just vanish. In the penultimate cube, he would be only half visible—a specter of himself. In the final cube, O would be gone, but in his room the viewer would see a half-finished canvas. What Bill intended to put on that canvas, I didn't know, and I don't think he knew either.
Sometime in December of that year, there was a real disappearance. It was a small one, but mysterious nevertheless. For his eleventh birthday I had given Matt a Swiss Army knife engraved with his initials. The knife had come with a short lecture on its responsible use, and Matt had agreed to every restriction. The most important of them was that he couldn't take it to school. Matt loved that knife. He attached it to a small chain and let it hang from his belt. "I like to have it handy," he said. "It's so useful." Its utility may have been secondary to its symbolism, however. He wore that knife the way some janitors parade their keys, as an emblem of male pride. When he wasn't checking to make sure that his weapon hadn't fallen off him, it was swinging from his belt like an extra appendage. Before he went to sleep he laid it reverently on his bedside table. And then one afternoon, he couldn't find it. He and Erica and Mark and Grace ransacked the closet and drawers and searched under the bed. By the time I returned from work, Matt was in tears and Grace had ripped off the bedsheets to see if the knife had fallen into them during the night. Was he certain that he had put it on the night table? Had he seen the knife that morning? Matt thought so, but the more he thought, the more confused he became. We searched for days, but the knife didn't turn up. I told him that if he still longed for the same knife when his twelfth birthday approached, I would buy him another one.
That year, Matt and Mark decided they wanted to go to "sleep-away" summer camp together. In late January, Bill, Violet, Erica, and I perused a fat book of camp listings. By February we had narrowed our choices and were dissecting the literature sent by seven camps. All our hermeneutic talents were brought to bear on the innocent brochures and xeroxed flyers. What was actually meant by "noncompetitive philosophy"? Did it suggest a healthy lack of a winning-is-all mentality or was it an excuse for laxness? Bill studied the photographs for clues. If their style was too glossy and artificial, he was suspicious. I dismissed two camps because their literature was studded with grammatical errors, and Erica worried about the qualifications of the counselors. In the end, a camp called Green Hill in Pennsylvania won the competition. The boys liked the picture on the cover of its catalogue—twenty boys and girls with Green Hill T-shirts beaming out at the spectator from under a canopy of leafy trees. The camp had everything we had hoped for—baseball, basketball, swimming, sailing, canoeing, and an arts program that included painting, dance, music, and theater. The decision had been made. We sent off our checks.
In April, not long before the Columbia semester ended, Bill, Mark, Matthew, and I drove to Shea Stadium on a Friday evening for a Mets game. The home team came from behind and rallied to win the game in the ninth inning. Matt scrutinized every pitch and every play. After mumbling the statistics for each player aloud, he offered his analysis of the man's prospects at the plate. As the game progressed, he agonized, suffered, and rejoiced, depending on the fate of the Mets at the moment, and because his emotions ran so high, I found myself both exhausted and relieved when it was all over.
It was late when I walked into Matt's room that night with a glass of water to put on his night table. Erica had already left him. I leaned over and kissed his cheek, but he didn't kiss me back. He squinted at the ceiling for a couple of moments and then said, "You know, Dad, I'm always thinking about how many people there are in the world. I was thinking about it between innings at the game, and I got this really funny feeling, you know, how everybody is thinking thoughts at the same time, billions of thoughts."
"Yes," I said. "A flood of thoughts that we can't hear."
"Yeah. And then I got this weird idea about how all those different people see what they see just a little different from everybody else."
"You mean that every person has a different way of seeing the world?"
"No, Dad, I mean really and truly. I mean that because we were sitting where we were sitting tonight, we saw a game that was a little different from those guys with the beer next to us. It was the same game, but I could've noticed something those guys didn't. And then I thought, if I was sitting over there, I'd see something else. And not just the game. I mean they saw me and I saw them, but I didn't see myself and they didn't see themselves. Do you get what I mean?"
"I know just what you mean. I've thought about it a lot, Matt. The place where I am is missing from my view. It's like that for everybody. We don't see ourselves in the picture, do we? It's a kind of hole."