This is the morning the guerrillas will struggle down from the alps of childhood, onto the great divide. Royal’s asleep. It’s always a surprise to catch him at it. Charles watched. His younger brother sleeps like a man of affairs. Royal’s bad luck came early; now everything else can be arranged. And will be, handily. With all his excuses in the best order of any of us. He’ll leave this house the way he slides from Lexie’s lap. It’s the father and mother who make the enclosure, anyway. Charles is going to tell Lexie that in the morning. And write his father wherever he’s gone off to again. I feel nothing, when you’re not here. No obligation. No boundaries. The front door here opens too easy to the riverbank; the back wall has collapsed into Spain. I’ll tell her that in the morning. I’ll write Ray. The time-wheel he’d constructed to show his father’s travel-zones is still hung down in the kitchen. He’s ashamed to have it there, a signal plain, showing the scientific gap between his one-sided romance with his father, and the latitude to which a father can desert.
