What time was it when I opened my eyes, sensing someone or something nearby? Was it an odd-numbered hour?

　　The room was soft and webby. I stretched my legs, blinked- slowly focused on a familiar object. It was Wilder,standing two feet from the bed, gazing into my face. We spent a long moment in mutual contemplation. His greatround head, set as it was on a small-limbed and squattish body, gave him the look of a primitive clay figurine, somehousehold idol of obscure and cultic derivation. I had the feeling he wanted to show me something. As I slippedquietly out of bed, he walked in his quilted booties out of the room. I followed him into the hall and toward thewindow that looks out on our backyard. I was barefoot and robeless and felt a chill pass through the Hong Kongpolyester of my pajamas. Wilder stood looking out the window, his chin about an inch above the sill. It seemed I'dspent my life in lopsided pajamas, the shirt buttons inserted in mismatching slits, the fly undone and drooping. Wasit dawn already? Were those crows I heard screaming in the trees?

　　There was someone sitting in the backyard. A white-haired man sitting erect in the old wicker chair, a figure of eeriestillness and composure. At first, dazed and sleepy, I didn't know what to make of the sight. It seemed to need a morecareful interpretation than I was able to provide at the moment. I thought one thing, that he'd been inserted there forsome purpose. Then fear began to enter, palpable and overwhelming, a fist clenching repeatedly in my chest. Whowas he, what was happening here? I realized Wilder was no longer next to me. I reached the doorway to his room justin time to see his head sink into the pillow. By the time I got to the bed, he was fast asleep. I didn't know what to do.

　　I felt cold, white. I worked my way back to the window, gripping a doorknob, a handrail, as if to remind myself of thenature and being of real things. He was still out there, gazing into the hedges. I saw him in profile in the uncertainlight, motionless and knowing. Was he as old as I'd first thought—or was the white hair purely emblematic, part ofhis allegorical force? That was it, of course. He would be Death, or Death's errand-runner, a hollow-eyed technicianfrom the plague era, from the era of inquisitions, endless wars, of bedlams and leprosariums. He would be an aphoristof last things, giving me the barest glance—civilized, ironic—as he spoke his deft and stylish line about my journeyout. I watched for a long time, waiting for him to move a hand. His stillness was commanding. I felt myself gettingwhiter by the second. What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gatheryou in? I was scared to the marrow. I was cold and hot, dry and wet, myself and someone else. The fist clenched inmy chest. I went to the staircase and sat on the top step, looking into my hands. So much remained. Every word andthing a bead-work of bright creation. My own plain hand, crosshatched and whorled in a mesh of expressive lines, alife terrain, might itself be the object of a person's study and wonder for years. A cosmology against the void.

　　I got to my feet and went back to the window. He was still there. I went into the bathroom to hide. I closed the toiletlid and sat there a while, wondering what to do next. I didn't want him in the house.

　　I paced for a time. I ran cold water over my hands and wrists, splashed it in my face. I felt light and heavy, muddledand alert. I took a scenic paperweight from the shelf by the door. Inside the plastic disk floated a 3-D picture of theGrand Canyon, the colors zooming and receding as I turned the object in the light. Fluctuating planes. I liked thisphrase. It seemed the very music of existence. If only one could see death as just another surface one inhabits for atime. Another facet of cosmic reason. A zoom down Bright Angel Trail.

　　í turned to immediate things. If I wanted to keep him out of the house, the thing to do was go outside. First 1 wouldlook in on the smaller children. I moved quietly through the rooms on bare white feet. I looked for a blanket to adjust,a toy to remove from a child's warm grasp, feeling I'd wandered into a TV moment. All was still and well. Wouldthey regard a parent's death as just another form of divorce?

　　I looked in on Heinrich. He occupied the top left corner of the bed, his body tightly wound like the kind of trickdevice that uncoils abruptly when it's touched. I stood in the doorway nodding.

　　I looked in on Babette. She was many levels down, a girl again, a figure running in a dream. I kissed her head,smelling the warm musty air that carried up from sleep. I spotted my copy of Mein Kampf in a pile of books andjournals. The radio came on. I hurried out of the room, fearing that some call-in voice, some stranger's soul-lament,would be the last thing I heard in this world.

　　I went down to the kitchen. I looked through the window. He was there in the wicker armchair on the wet grass. Iopened the inner door and then the storm door. I went outside, the copy of Mein Kampf clutched to my stomach.

　　When the storm door banged shut, the man's head jerked and his legs came uncrossed. He got to his feet and turnedin my direction. The sense of eerie and invincible stillness washed off, the aura of knowingness, the feeling heconveyed of an ancient and terrible secret. A second figure began to emerge from the numinous ruins of the first,began to assume effective form, develop in the crisp light as a set of movements, lines and features, a contour, aliving person whose distinctive physical traits seemed more and more familiar as I watched them come into existence,a little amazed.

　　It was not Death that stood before me but only Vernon Dickey, my father-in-law.

　　"Was I asleep?" he said.

　　"What are you doing out here?""Didn't want to wake you folks.""Did we know you were coming?""I didn't know it myself till yesterday afternoon. Drove straight through. Fourteen hours.""Babette will be happy to see you.""I just bet."We went inside. I put the coffee pot on the stove. Vernon sat at the table in his battered denim jacket, playing with thelid of an old Zippo. He had the look of a ladies' man in the crash-dive of his career. His silvery hair had a wan tingeto it, a yellowish discolor, and he combed it back in a ducktail. He wore about four days' stubble. His chronic coughhad taken on a jagged edge, an element of irresponsibility. Babette worried less about his condition than about thefact that he took such sardonic pleasure in his own hackings and spasms, as if there were something fatefullyattractive in this terrible noise. He still wore a garrison belt with a longhorn buckle.

　　"So what the hell. Here I am. Big deal.""What are you doing these days?""Shingling here, rustproofing there. I moonlight, except there's nothing I'm moonlighting from. Moonlight is allthat's out there."I noticed his hands. Scarred, busted, notched, permanently seamed with grease and mud. He glanced around theroom, trying to spot something that needed replacing or repair. Such flaws were mainly an occasion for discourse. Itput Vernon at an advantage to talk about gaskets and washers, about grouting, caulking, spackling. There were timeswhen he seemed to attack me with terms like ratchet drill and whipsaw. He saw my shaki-ness in such matters as asign of some deeper incompetence or stupidity. These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care aboutthem was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than aman who couldn't fix a dripping faucet—fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? Iwasn't sure I disagreed.

　　"I was saying to Babette the other day. 'If there's one thing your father doesn't resemble, it's a widower.'""What did she say to that?""She thinks you're a danger to yourself. 'He'll fall asleep smoking. He'll die in a burning bed with a missing woman athis side.

　　An official missing person. Some poor lost unidentified multi-divorced woman.'"Vernon coughed in appreciation of the insight. A series of pulmonary gasps. I could hear the stringy mucus whippingback and forth in his chest. I poured his coffee and waited.

　　"Just so you know where I'm at, Jack, there's a woman that wants to marry my ass. She goes to church in a mobilehome. Don't tell Babette.""That's the last thing I'd do.""She'd get real exercised. Start in with the discount calls.""She thinks you've gotten too lawless for marriage.""The thing about marriage today is you don't have to go outside the home to get those little extras. You can getwhatever you want in the recesses of the American home. These are the times we live in, for better or worse. Wiveswill do things. They want to do things. You don't have to drop little looks. It used to be the only thing available in theAmerican home was the basic natural act. Now you get the options too. The action is thick, let me tell you. It's anamazing comment on our times that the more options you get in the home, the more prostitutes you see in the streets.

　　How do you figure it, Jack? You're the professor. What does it mean?""I don't know.""Wives wear edible panties. They know the words, the usages. Meanwhile the prostitutes are standing in the streetsin all kinds of weather, day and night. Who are they waiting for? Tourists? Businessmen? Men who've been turnedinto stalkers of flesh? It's like the lid's blown off. Didn't I read somewhere the Japanese go to Singapore? Wholeplaneloads of males. A remarkable people.""Are you seriously thinking of getting married?""I'd have to be crazy to marry a woman that worships in a mobile home."There was an astuteness about Vernon, a deadpan quality of alert and searching intelligence, a shrewdness waitingfor a shapely occasion. This made Babette nervous. She'd seen him sidle up to women in public places to ask somedelving question in his blank-faced canny way. She refused to go into restaurants with him, fearing his offhandremarks to waitresses, intimate remarks, technically accomplished asides and observations, delivered in thelate-night voice of some radio ancient. He'd given her some jittery moments, periods of anger and embarrassment, ina number of leatherette booths.

　　She came in now, wearing her sweatsuit, ready for an early morning dash up the stadium steps. When she saw herfather at the table, her body seemed to lose its motive force. She stood there bent at the knees. Nothing remained buther ability to gape. She appeared to be doing an imitation of a gaping person. She was the picture of gapingness, thebright ideal, no less confused and alarmed than I had been when I saw him sitting in the yard, deathly still. I watchedher face fill to the brim with numb wonder.

　　"Did we know you were coming?" she said. "Why didn't you call? You never call.""Here I am. Big deal. Toot the horn."She remained bent at the knees, trying to absorb his raw presence, the wiry body and drawn look. What an epic forcehe must have seemed to her, taking shape in her kitchen this way, a parent, a father with all the grist of years on him,the whole dense history of associations and connections, come to remind her who she was, to remove her disguise,grab hold of her maundering life for a time, without warning.

　　"I could have had things ready. You look awful. Where will you sleep?""Where did I sleep last time?"They both looked at me, trying to remember.

　　As we fixed and ate breakfast, as the kids came down and warily approached Vernon for kisses and hair-mussings, asthe hours passed and Babette became accustomed to the sight of the ambling figure in patched jeans, I began tonotice the pleasure she took in hovering nearby, doing little things for him, being there to listen. A delight containedin routine gestures and automatic rhythms. At times she had to remind Vernon which foods were his favorites, howhe liked them cooked and seasoned, which jokes he told best, which figures from the past were the plain fools, whichthe comic heroes. Gleanings from another life poured out of her. The cadences of her speech changed, took on a ruraltang. The words changed, the references. This was a girl who'd helped her father sand and finish old oak, heaveradiators up from the floorboards. His carpenter years, his fling with motorcycles, his biceps tattoo.

　　"You're getting string-beany, daddy. Finish those potatoes. There's more on the stove."And Vernon would say to me, "Her mother made the worst french fries you could ever hope to eat. Like french friesin a state park." And then he'd turn to her and say, "Jack knows the problem I have with state parks. They don't movethe heart."We moved Heinrich down to the sofa and gave Vernon his room. It was unnerving to find him in the kitchen at sevenin the morning, at six, at whatever grayish hour Babette or I went down to make coffee. He gave the impression hewas intent on outfoxing us, working on our guilt, showing us that no matter how little sleep we got, he got less.

　　"Tell you what, Jack. You get old, you find out you're ready for something but you don't know what it is. You'realways getting prepared. You're combing your hair, standing by the window looking out. I feel like there's some littlefussy person whisking around me all the time. That's why I jumped in the car and drove headlong all this way.""To break the spell," I said. "To get away from routine things. Routine things can be deadly, Vern, carried toextremes. I have a friend who says that's why people take vacations. Not to relax or find excitement or see new places.

　　To escape the death that exists in routine things.""What is he, a Jew?""What's that got to do with it?""Your roof gutter's sagging," he told me. "You know how to fix that, don't you?"Vernon liked to hang around outside the house, waiting for garbagemen, telephone repairmen, the mail carrier, theafternoon newsboy. Someone to talk to about techniques and procedures. Sets of special methods. Routes, timespans, equipment. It tightened his grip on things, learning how work was done in areas outside his range.

　　He liked ............