Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

When the boy returned, he announced that he’d looked in the bathroom mirror and couldn’t see any love in his eyes. Without saying goodbye to the social worker, he picked up his broken umbrella, tapping the chrome spike across the carpeted floor on his way outside to smoke.

“Are you a believer?” Drummond asked.

“No,” the young woman said.

“He suffers,” Drummond said. “The suffering—”

The woman nodded. Drummond told her how the boy saw faces disintegrate before his eyes, faces that fell to pieces, then disappeared, leaving a hole. He told her how in the early days of the illness they’d taken the beloved family dog to the pound because it was talking to Pete and could read his mind and Pete was afraid the dog would tear him apart. Two weeks ago it was the shop radio, an old Philco that had been Drummond’s father’s — they couldn’t listen anymore. When the announcers laughed, Pete thought they were laughing at him. They would say exactly what he was thinking, predicting his thoughts. Last week the boy was so afraid that he’d only walk backward in public, convinced that someone was following him. He stumbled in reverse up the steps of the bus, and walked backward down the aisle.

Drummond said, “It’s Friday, so, what — Wednesday night, I guess — he smelled burning flesh in the house. I always check on him before I go to bed, just to make sure he’s okay.” He sighed. “When I went in that night, he had raw eggs all around his bed. So I thought it was time to call you.”

“You said your wife is gone?”

“I think so,” Drummond said. Even though he knew the interview was over, he let the matter drift because he was uncomfortable with sympathy. “If anything happened to me,” he said, “I don’t know—”

“That’s got to have you worried,” the woman said. She was very professional and understanding and Drummond realized how little conversation he’d had since his wife left. The interview, though, was a botch. When the social worker mentioned a waiting list, halfheartedly, Drummond saw that his growing need for help was exactly the thing disqualifying him for help from this woman.

“These things don’t really bother me,” he said feebly. “Because — because I understand him, you see.”

Drummond taped a sign on the door and locked the shop. He and the boy walked in the rain to the drugstore. Pete twirled his ragged, useless umbrella over their heads.

“I decided against a halfway house,” Drummond said.

“You have to forsake me,” the boy said. “I see that eventually happening.”

“You don’t see, not if that’s what you think.”

“Maybe I just see better. I’m like a prophet. And you’re sort of unevolved.”

“Okay,” Drummond said. “All right, maybe. I’m unevolved. Sure.”

They picked up a bottle of hand lotion and then at the rack by the register Pete tried on a pair of glasses. The gold-rimmed frames sat cockeyed on his nose, and the left lens was stamped with the manufacturer’s name: Optivision. The large square lenses themselves were neutral, as clear as windowpanes. Pete looked longingly at himself in the mirror, blinking his green eyes. Drummond wasn’t sure whether to dissuade him; from a distance the boy, bespectacled, looked oddly more balanced, his elusive deranged face suddenly pulled into focus.

“You don’t really need glasses,”Drummond said.

“I do.”

“Your eyes were fine last time we had them checked.”

Pete said he wanted these glasses, these, with the gold frames, so that people would see the love. In the end, it was only another of the seemingly endless list of lunatic errands Drummond had grown accustomed to, and he gave up, paying for the glasses. They stepped next door and bought their usual lunch of doughnuts, of crullers and old-fashioneds, from the Greek. Drummond was still wary of the Greek, since the day, several months ago, when he’d asked Pete, rather loudly and obviously playing to an audience, if he wanted the psycho special. Drummond had been standing right beside Pete, but the Greek hadn’t realized they were together. Pete’s illness chipped away at the family resemblance and people often took them for strangers. The Greek had apologized, and Pete had forgotten the incident — if, indeed, he’d ever noticed it — but the day lingered in Drummond’s mind, a slight defensive hitch, every time he walked through the door of Dunkin’ Donuts.

“I love Seattle,” Pete said, as they started back to the shop. He held the tattered umbrella in one hand and the white sack of doughnuts in the other. “I think Seattle’s one of the most happening places on the face of the globe at this point in time. We’re gonna determine civilization in the next century. I’ve never met so many movie stars — this is where it’s at. Literally, one of the hot spots of the nation is Seattle, USA.” He looked at his father through the rain-beaded, fogged lenses of his new glasses, which hung askew on the tip of his nose. “Just the other day, I ran into John Denver in the street. I said, ‘Oh, John, I’m writing an album and mailing it to you. It’s called Donuts. ”

Drummond let the conversation blow away in the rain. He hooked his arm through his son’s and hurried him on, but Pete shrugged him off. People glanced sideways at the two men as they made their strange way down Second Avenue. The boy’s umbrella was a blasted tangle of snapping fabric and flailing spokes. Drummond’s smock flew out behind him. He lowered his head against the wind and the rain and the faces. His fondest boyhood memories were of walking down this same street with his father, strolling and waving as if the elder Drummond were the mayor of the avenue. Now his father was dead and he was the father, and this was his son.

“I love finding stuff in the street. Like this umbrella. .” The boy lurched along, planting each foot directly in front of the other. “I went to a sculpture show. That’s what the umbrella’s all about. It didn’t occur to me until I was walking up the street and it broke. I knew it was going to break, but I didn’t know what I would do with it after. Then I thought, A sculpture. Of course. A sculpture. What else? I call it Salvador. After Salvador Allende, the city Salvador, and Salvador Dalí. It’s a triumvirate piece of sculpture. Covering all three bases.”

About a block from the shop, as they were crossing Bell Street, the boy knelt down in the intersection. He took up a storybook prayer posture, kneeling, his hands folded together in the shape of a candle flame and his head solemnly bowed with his lips touching the tips of his fingers. The sack of doughnuts split open in the rain and the umbrella skittered away in the wind. People paused to look down at the odd penitent praying in the crosswalk. Drummond saw a shiny patch on the asphalt turn from red to green, and then a few cars drove around, slowly. On either side of the crosswalk, a waiting crowd of pedestrians jostled one another at the curb for a view, and Drummond had a familiar passing urge to explain. It seemed the boy would never get up, but then suddenly he made the sign of the cross, rose, and resumed walking, contemplatively, toward the shop.

They had not made much progress when the boy again fell to the sidewalk, again crossing himself and praying, the whole thing repeated like a liturgical rite, as if the boy were kneeling for the Stations. A moment of prayer, the stream of people parting, the stares so blank they seemed to Drummond like pity or hatred, then the boy rising and picking his way cautiously along a fixed, narrow path, again dropping like a supplicant to the sidewalk. Drummond fell to his knees beside his son, imploring him to get up. The boy’s glasses were gone and his thin, oily hair was pasted flat on his scalp. Drummond’s long smock, saturated, clung darkly to his back. Pete rose again and put his foot down on a seam in the concrete and followed the cracked path and again began praying. Women in the beauty salon next to the shop watched at the window as Drummond knelt with his son in the rain. He tried to hoist him up by his armpits, but the boy was a heavy dead weight. He lugged him across the sidewalk, heaving him a few feet at a time, until they made it safely to the shop door.