with the strange and heartbreaking realization that if this were to fail, and Gregor were to actually die tonight, then this would probably be how he’d wish to do it: gently, slowly, in his sleep, surrounded by his friends. And then she began to cry.
* * *
—
Gregor Dandolo slept.
He was not sure why, or how he’d come to sleep, but he lingered in the shadows, unable to think or feel or move. All he knew was a suffocating darkness, an encroaching void that seemed to drown his very mind…
Then his thoughts began to crumble in, all the memories flashing and crackling as the grand stage of his mind went dark, interactions and moments from all throughout his life bursting in the shadows like sputtering fireworks.
Ah, he thought. I know this now. I am…I am going to die now, aren’t I?
A barrage of moments, of sensation, of textures and emotions. Not simply the epiphanies and the conflicts and the victories and defeats that formed his person, but all the tiny interstitial, forgettable exchanges that make up the sum of one’s life…
The feeling of thick leather in warm sun.
A man’s hand, turning a coin over and over again.
A pebble in the back of a boot.
Birds bursting from the foliage to wheel away into the dawning sun.
Memories upon memories upon memories.
And among them…
* * *
—
Asleep.
Gregor felt cloth under him, over his face and against his body, and all about him was the smell of his mother.
He was asleep in her hanging clothes in her closet again, in that secret place he went when he felt threatened, for in that place he knew he was safe. This place was hers. No one could harm him there.
Then he heard a sound—a splashing from nearby, and someone gasping and spitting.
Gregor opened his eyes. He sat up and slowly emerged from the hanging clothes, and he crouched there on the floor of her closet, listening.
There was a splashing from a room beyond—the bathing room—and a cough, and another bout of spitting. And then there was a sob, miserable and pained.
Gregor stood at the door to the closet, hesitating. Then he opened it and stepped out.
The first thing he saw was his own face, looking back from the reflection of a mirror—he was so young and fragile, not yet six. He looked at himself only for a moment, for then his mother shrieked in fright.
She was on the floor of the bathing room in a nightshirt, kneeling before a bowl filled with rose-pink water, her face and hands dripping. She appeared to have been using it to wash her face—which was, to his shock, badly beaten: her split lip, still dribbling blood, and her blackened eyes, and bruised cheeks.
“Gregor!” she said. “What…What were you doing in there?”
“Momma,” he said. “Momma, what happened to you?”
The rag fell from her hands into the bloody water in the bowl, splashing her nightshirt. “Were you hiding in there? Why would you be hiding in my closet?”
“I…I fell asleep in there.” He felt hot with confusion and shame. “I…I do that sometimes but I…I…” Then he burst into tears.
“Oh God…” she said. “Come here, my love, come here…” She embraced him. “I just…I had a moment, that’s all. That’s all, love.”
“You’re hurt, Momma.”
She sniffed and smiled valiantly. “Oh, it’s not terribly bad. It’s just a few bruises, that’s all.”
He looked at her for a moment. Then he knelt before her and picked up the rag. “Can I help you?”
She smiled at him, her eyes sad and desperate. “All right. If you want.”
She sat still while young Gregor dabbed at her cuts and her bruises with the rag, washing the blood away.
She smiled—this one quite genuine. “When you were little,” she said as he worked, “you used to help me put on my paints. You loved taking the little brushes and putting my lines on, and you