Peripheral Visions: Chance and Necessity

Peripheral Visions: They coalesce in the soft blur of darkest shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.

Chance and Necessity

"Good morning, world... good morning to yew, yew-w-w-w-w! I'm a-wearin' my Levis!"

"Nate! Pipe down with that!" my grand uncle, Pete, yelled from the kitchen.

"Haw haw!" I sang in response. "Lee-hee-hee, lee-hee-hee vies!" The commercial jingle was a favorite from childhood, and I loved singing it at the top of my lungs in the mornings.

"Nate!" Pete yelled again.

Laughing, I made my way down the stairs and into the dining room. Pete banged around the kitchen for a few minutes more while I quickly re-read last night's chemistry homework.

Pete carried two bowls of steaming Cream of Wheat into the dining room and set one in front of me. He'd already set out the milk and a bowl of brown sugar. "You want sliced apples?" he asked.

"No, I'm fine."

"It's better with sliced apples," he said, hovering.

"Nope, I couldn't taste them anyway," I said, waving him away. "I burned the fuck almighty out of my tongue on that stew last night."

"Your own fault," Pete said, sitting down and reaching for the brown sugar. "I told you that soup was hot. But you have no table manners. And your language. Your parents would be so pissed at me if they could hear your gutter mouth."

"Uncle Chester says cussing can be creative," I told him.

"Your Uncle Chester swears like a sailor," Pete said, pouring a dab of milk onto his Cream of Wheat. He liked it thick.

I took mine thin. He handed me the milk and I filled the bowl to the rim and then gingerly stirred the farina into a slurry. After eating a few spoonfuls to make room, I added brown sugar.

Pete kept talking while I tended my breakfast. "Of course, he is a sailor. Thirty years in the Navy. But you are too young to be talking like that."

"I'm old enough! I could enlist in the Navy right now," I said.

"You're sixteen," Pete said. "Not old enough to cuss, not old enough to vote, and not old enough to chase women."

I snorted. "Like that will ever happen."

Pete didn't say anything, but the air in the room changed, growing more somber. I knew how he felt about me being gay. He didn't disapprove; he was gay himself. But he had never had a long-term relationship, and he worried that I would end up like he had. If not for having taken me in after my parents died, he would have been a lonely old man – a "confirmed bachelor" – shuffling around in that big house of his.

I don't know why that memory stands out to me even now, twenty-eight years later. Like a handful of other random moments in my life, it somehow registered with deep and permanent clarity. I think of that morning often when I visit Pete in the nursing home, telling him about my day or describing my work to him while he sits there, staring into nothingness.

Nurse Jane walks into the room and smiles at me. "Good afternoon, Mr. Nate," she says, as warm as she always is, and a little flirtatious – as she always is. I smile back, but with no trace of flirtation in kind. I play the role of the concerned grandnephew to blunt her expectations that I, a single man and, therefore, an eligible bachelor, should take note of her interest in me and reciprocate.

Women seem attracted to me. I am 44, but, like Pete, I look years younger. Nurse Jane probably thinks I am still in my mid-30s. God knows I feel younger than that, and, at the same time, much older.

"Good afternoon, Nurse Jane," I reply. It's a game we have, this mock formality.

"He's not too talkative today, is he?" Nurse Jane asks, giving Pete her usual once-over.

"I'm the chatterbox," I tell her. "Always have been."

On her way out of the room she pauses by my chair, hovering momentarily in a way that reminds me of Pete's gruff solicitude. Her wrist moves slightly, and for a moment I have the thought that she's about to ruffle my hair – something Pete would do once in a while if he thought I was sad or anxious. He was usually right, and it always helped.

"It's sweet, the way you come and visit him," she says.

I smile vaguely and don't look up.

"Did you say that he raised you?"

We've hardly ever spoken about personal stuff. I don't want to go there with her. But she asks kindly, and there's no reason not to answer.

"My parents died when I was twelve," I say. "And he took me in."

"He's your grandfather?"

"My grandfather's younger brother," I explain. "My uncle is a naval officer and he never married. I didn't have any other aunts or uncles. And my grandad was sick at the time. So, Pete stepped up." I gaze at the old man. He's more than eighty at this point, his hair still thick but a metallic silvery gray. His face is hardly lined, except around the eyes, and there are grooves in the shape of parentheses around his mouth. He's always had those. I used to think they were a warning that anything he said might contain a hidden barb or a joke, because that was often the case – but you had to be paying attention to pick up in it. He and I are alike in that way.

"Must be nice to be that peaceful," Nurse Jane said. "Just sitting in the sun, watching the air. Not a worry. Not a thought. A real vacation."

I laugh. "I could use a vacation like that myself, sometimes."

"Well, Mr. Nate, I guess we're all headed that way sooner or later," Nurse Jane says.

"He's earned it," I say, and she smiles at me as she resumes her rounds and leaves the two of us alone in the room.

The late afternoon sunlight starts to fade and redden. The air in the room changes subtly. I notice that Pete is slowly turning his head. His eyes seem to search the room and then he looks right at me. A minute passes as we stare at each other.

"I'm not absent, you know," Peter says, his voice hoarse, almost a whipster. "I'm just... someplace else."

***

It was late spring in 1947, and Peter Halliwell thought he must be in love. Or was it simply a mixture or lust and fascination?

Peter lifted his glass to his lips but paused when the man in uniform glanced over his way. Surprising himself, Peter smiled at the man and raised his glass in a toast. Eyes locked, both men drank; lowering their glasses, both men smiled.

They were at Clyde's on Twelfth, the city's unofficial gay bar... not that the straight patrons knew that. To the city at large, Clyde's was just another popular place where veterans and active-duty servicemen congregated to swap war stories and toast each other's health.

The place was busy. It was a Saturday night, and half the city seemed to wash in and out of the bar's wooden doors with their stained-glass windows as the evening wore on. Peter and the man in uniform worked their way gradually around the bar, eventually sitting next to each other.

"Hey buddy, buy you a drink?" Peter asked.

The man looked him over once more, then smiled. "Sure."

Peter shouted out his order to Teg the barman, who glanced over, raked a quick, assessing look over the two of them, and smiled. A moment later both their glasses were full.

"To the service," Peter said, lifting his glass.

"To America the Beautiful," the man replied.

They drank.

Peter stuck out his hand and said his name.

The man took his hand and revealed his own: "Cyrus Bittner. Most folks call me Sy."

The two fell to talking. Peter explained that he'd been discharged from the Army two years before, after Germany surrendered and following a few months' cleanup in Europe.

Sy recounted the horrors of D-Day on the beach in Normandy. "More than once I thought I was done for. More than once I thought for sure I'd been hit. But..." He looked down at himself. "I got through it just fine. Not a scratch. Guys got their brains blown out all around me, but the angels guided my steps that day, I guess."

"I didn't see that kind of action," Peter said. "But I had a lot of friends who went out on missions and never came back." He took a big swallow of his drink. "Dismal times," Peter said. "But you know something? I kind of miss them. I knew what I was doing; I knew why. And now..." He shrugged. "I just go to work every day and try not to wonder about these things."

The two were quite for a moment. The crowd bustled; music played: The Benny Russell Band with "The Way You Look Tonight."

"When I start to question the why and what-for, I go work it out," Sy said at length.

"Yeah? You're into physical culture?" Peter asked.

Sy smiled, and it send electricity through Peter. "Yeah, more or less."

***

"We were together for more than a year," Pete says, his voice soft and somehow distant, like he's still there, on the night he's been telling me about – February 17, 1947. "That was my year, Nate. It was our year. It was after the war and before all those decades alone. It was the time of my life. The music of that year. The... the weather that spiring and summer, and what a glorious fall."

"So, what happened?" I ask.

"On March 1, 1948, Sy told me he was getting married."

***

Peter stared at his lover... his husband... in disbelief.

"Her name is June," Sy said.

"And you're...?"

"I have to," Sy said. "Or I'll never amount to anything. Her father has connections at the university; he has friends in publishing; he can get my books into print."

"Does anybody want more books about the war?"

"There's so much to tell, and there are so many stories that people won't want to hear right now, but one day they will. Like your experiences, liberating those camps..."

"Liberating? All we did was tear down the fences. The Germans had cleared out before we got there. And so many of them were dead... so many..." Peter shook himself out of the memory, faced with a fresh shock. "And now, after we lived through four years of war, after we came back to a peacetime that we don't really belong in anymore, the noise of battle still ringing in our ears, after we found each other and found a little peace... you want to leave me for some poor girl you don't even love?"

"She's a good woman," Sy said. "I like her a lot. I admire her."

"But you will never love her."

"I think I will. I might never desire her, but..."

"You'll be lying to her, Cyrus."

Sy shrugged. "The world is what it is, Pete."

"How are you even gonna get it hard for her?" Peter asked, his voice nasty with rage and accusation.

"We'll work it out."

"Yeah. You'll work it out." Peter turned his back on Sy in a moment of blind anguish and pique. He waved a hand, gestured vaguely toward the door. "Work yourself out of here while you're at it."

"Pete, I hope you can understand..."

"Just go."

There was a quiet moment. Neither man moved.

"I..." Sy hesitated. "I wanted us to be friends still. I wanted you to be my best man."

Peter laughed scornfully. "All those people who died on that beach that day, and you were spared. You were so brave then, fighting for your country against Nazis. Now you won't fight for yourself against... against..." Peter didn't even have a word for the unreasoning hatred and contempt that their fellow countrymen seemed to harbor against men like them.

"I can't, Pete. I'm done fighting. I want to live, to work, to get on with life."

"And give up love."

"I'll have love. Just not..." Sy's voice trailed off. "I hope you'll reconsider. I hope you'll forgive me."

Peter waved toward the door again, still not turning around to face him. "Go."

***

"And I never did," Pete tells me.

"Never did – what? Reconsider?"

"See him again. Talk to him again. Lie with him again. I never even heard from him again."

"It doesn't sound like you wanted to," I say.

"Of course I wanted to," Pete tells me. "I was just so mad at him, so goddamn mad. And there were times it he'd have called right then, I'd have said: 'Sure! Come on over. Let's find an arrangement, a way to make it work.' But he never did. He must have through he was respecting my wishes. And he was. But that doesn't mean I don't regret it."

"Didn't you ever find anyone else?"

Pete looks me in the eyes, and his own eyes are bright with an incongruous happiness. "I never wanted anyone else. He was it. All. My whole life. After him, I had nothing left for anyone else, and I didn't want anything more... except for a few weekends, that sort of thing. I mean, I was still young. But after twenty years or so, even that was behind me. And then... when I was 50... I took you in. And you became my life."

"It's not the same," I say.

"No, it's not, but I was done with sex and romance and all that. And you know something, it's so much more meaningful to become a parent... and I am your parent..."

I nod in agreement. He smiled, affirmed.

"It's so much more meaningful than some random hook-night."

"Hookup I correct him. He must have heard that on TV or the radio. It's not like he runs with a young crowd these days.

"How lucky you are," Pete tells me. "You can marry anyone you want."

"Only if I move to Massachusetts," I say.

"So, move to Massachusetts." Pete smiles. "Why not? Just don't..." He shrugs. "Just don't live the way I did. It was fine for me. But it isn't for you, Nate. I know you, and the life I lived would make you happy."

***

I came rolling into the house in drunken chaos, scratching at the front door lock with a jittery key ("Hold still, damn you," I giggled) and singing "Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't" as I shed my jacket.

"What is it with you and commercials?" Pete asked, startling me. He was sitting in his armchair, a lamp shining light down on him from above, his face wreathed in shadow. He looked like an interrogator, and it fit; he was probably going to grill me about getting home so late.

I knew I should care about his displeasure, but my high spirits, boosted by cheap vodka, refused to settle. "How about this one? 'I'm a Chiquita banana and I'm here to say – ' " I couldn't manage more than that, I was laughing so hard. That was an oldie but a goodie, one I remembered from when I was about seven years old.

Pete wasn't laughing.

"Aw, come on!" I cried. "It's a classic. Or, let's try this one: 'Ooey gooey nice and chewy inside; golden flaky tender cakey outside. Fig Newton cakes from Nabisco!"

"Nate," Pet sighed irritably.

" 'Oh, you can't do the Newton if a Newton it's not, but if it's by Nabisco a Fig Newton's what you've got!' "

"Nate!"

"Okay, okay." I looked at the floor as if in shame and then turned my best charming grin up toward him. "I think I got the words wrong anyway." I meant for my smile and wit to beam over him, soften him up, but he was staring at me hard, his eyes glinting like a big cat's gaze in the moonlight. "Jesus, okay, I surrender," I said. "I was just having a good time."

"Until one in the morning?"

"Well, I mean, it's not that late."

"It's a school night."

"I'm a senior! It's almost graduation! We're gonna get a whole lot drunker next week."

"No, you're not!" Pete snapped, and it was like he'd thrown ice water over me. I'd never heard this in his voice before: Something more than irritation, more than disappointment. There was a real rage there. I sensed that it wasn't directed at me, but it still shocked me.

"Getting drunk is what killed your mother and your dad," Pete said. "Your dad was three fucking sheets to the wind. That's why they died. Are you trying to get killed too?"

"No, of course – "

"Or kill some little kid's parents?"

"I wasn't driving!" I said, getting angry in turn. Not angry, actually, but kind of scared. At the time, I didn't know why; later, I understood that I didn't want to hear more about what had happened to them, didn't want to hear about my father's sins or feel that they were seeping down through time and lineage to me. "And whatever my dad did isn't my fault. And I'm old enough to make my own decisions and be responsible for them!"

"You're seventeen," Pete said. "Not old enough to drink, not old enough to vote, and not old enough to chase women."

I snorted. "Not this again. You know I'm gay, Pete. And I wasn't chasing anybody, I was just having fun."

Pete sat there in silence, seeming to wrestle with how to answer. Then, saying only "Get to bed," he went upstairs.

I lay down on my bed still fully clothed, seething over what Pete had said to me. "Or kill some little kid's parents" – what else was there to that? "So that his beleaguered great uncle has to take him in, feed him, look after him..."

That wasn't fair to Pete, and I knew it. He loved me, and I knew it. But sometimes I still felt like I was taking up space he would rather not have had to share.

***

"Pete?" I ask.

His burst of clarity seems to have fizzled out; he had slowly become more energetic and animated while talking to me, but now, like a windup toy, he's run down again. He's done this before, though not for a long time – perked up, some back to life, emerged from the shadows of his dementia...

But it's different this time. We've never had a conversation quite like this. He never wanted to talk about the past, and certainly not his love life, or rather his lack of one. I wish he's come back to life longer; I wish he'd told me more.

I watch him for a while longer, not expecting him to speak again. This is how it always ends: He sinks back into listless silence, simply staring into space.

Or, I guess, staring into time past. His own life, in happier days.

I decide to give him a nudge, just in case he might wake up again. "Pete? You want to tell me more about 1947?"

I wait and watch, and finally – to my surprise, to me joy – he stirs. Looking at me with the same sense as before – a sense of slowly dragging himself to the present moment – Pete says, "All I can say is that it's so nice there. Having you in my life for those years, that was the only other time I felt happy... felt connected to someone, felt interested in someone else's life. Seeing you grow up was a blessing. And seeing you grow into a professor, someone who publishes papers and gets himself on the covers of magazines..."

"That was only the one time," I say. It's a source of unending pride for him, much more so than for me. He always used to brag about it. Now here he is, talking about it again.

"You're going to do great things," Pete tells me.

"If I were gonna do great things, I already would have," I say. "Scientists tend to do their important work in their twenties."

"Writers, too." Pete laughed. "That's the funny thing and the stupid thing about it."

"About... being a scientist?"

"No, about Sy, his excuse for breaking it off with me. He wanted to succeed as a novelist. Be another Ernest Hemingway. Well, he was a year older than me... twenty-seven when we met, twenty-eight when he married what's her name. He had written a lot, yes, and I'm sure he went on to write a lot more, but I don't think any of it ever saw print. And I don't know if he was ever even happy with the rest of his life... being a husband and, I would guess, a father. I hope he was."

"Really?" I ask.

"Oh, yes." Pete looks me in the eyes one more time. "I didn't hate him. I wanted him to have a good life, to get the things he wanted. But at the same time, I was so... so hurt, so angry that I couldn't be the one who shared that life with him and made him happy. That rage hurt me, Nate. So did his decision to go marry some poor girl he was never going to love, not the way a husband should love his spouse. It was a terrible thing he did to her... to himself... and to me. It felt wrong. Those people who talk about 'nature' and 'natural law' as if being gay wasn't as natural as being straight... well, they don't know. What he did was unnatural, Nate. He went against his own nature, and mine, and if I believed in God I could tell you for sure he went against God's plan for us. It didn't square with what I felt inside... that we were fit for each other, and only each other."

"Is that why you never...?"

"Yes, of course," Pete sighs. "I found love. I really did. It wasn't enough for him. I had to let him go. It about killed me, but I did it."

"Because you loved him."

"I still do." Pete winks at me, which is funny and sad and out of place, and perfect for the moment.

***

"So, I guess you're gonna forget all about me," Pete said. "But you have to live your own life, and I have to let you go."

"Come on, Uncle Peter, I'll be coming back all the time."

"What's with this 'Uncle Peter' stuff? You think you can fool me, get me nostalgic, make me stupid with sentiment?" Pete scoffed, then threw me a grin. "Here," he said, handing me a small, wrapped package. "Congratulations, valedictorian."

"Salutatorian," I said.

"I don't know what that means," Peter said. "I never even heard it before. So, I'm gonna stick with what I know – valedictorian."

I accepted the package, laughing.

"Go on, open it," Peter said.

I ripped the paper off. I had figured it to be a book, but it was two books stacked together. One looked old. The other was brand new. "Charles Darwin," I said, " 'The Descent of Man.' Is this what got that librarian into so much trouble? The Scoped Monkey Trial?"

"He was a schoolteacher, and yes," Peter told me. "But he stood up for the truth, and somehow – I don't know how or how long it will last – but somehow truth won the day. An old friend gave me that copy. Reading it... well, I'd been in the war, you know, and for a long time the world just didn't seem to make any sense. But the summer I read that book things came back into focus for me, in part because Darwin explained things... he really explained them. He didn't just make up stories that don't make sense. He made arguments, and the arguments fit together. I... well, the world just started to... to make sense again." He paused. It wasn't like him to be so inarticulate. I realized he was in the grip of powerful emotions... because I was graduating? Because reading the Charles Darwin book had been so transformative? He nodded at the other, newer book in my hands. "But that – that book is even better."

"Jacques Monod," I said, examining the book. " 'Chance and Necessity.' I haven't heard of this one."

"It came out about eight years ago," Peter said. "I think it's going to be just as important as Darwin's book. Might even be better than that thing you've been reading."

" 'The Dragons of Eden,' you mean? That's a great book," I said.

"I'm pretty sure you're gonna wrote your own great book," Peter told me. He stepped forward and – unusual for him – he grabbed me up in a long, tight hug.

We were both a little overcome. We both know this was the end of an era on our lives and things would be different from now on. He was right, of course; I would come back home for holidays and summer, but after college I'd be living my own life. This house would always be my home, but from now on I would live here less and less, and he would be more and more in his own.

***

I saw Pete a few times more after that last real conversation we had in the nursing home. He never came out of his stupor again. Nurse Jane told me that was normal. People with dementia can come out of it sometimes and be like their old selves for a while. But those moments get rarer and rarer, until they just don't happen anymore. Then they fade away and die.

Which was pretty much how it happened for Pete. The last time I saw him he has was slumped sideways in his chair, his mouth hanging open, his eyes dull. I wondered if he was back in 1947 in his mind; happy, young, together with Cyrus.

I wondered why they don't just leave him in bed.

I tried to find out about Cyrus, but with no last name I had no luck. If he did get published and turn out to be a major writer, I guess he must have used a pen name.

The day came – not two months after that last conversation – that I got the call letting me know Pete had passed away. It was a blessing. It was a loss. It was, I thought without solace, what Pete would have called the way of things; it was natural, the necessity that closed out this chance situation of life.

Chance and necessity, I thought. I remembered him giving me the book.

A week after the nursing home called to tell me he'd passed away, I was at his house, making a checklist of everything I needed to do to get the place ready for its eventual sale. Clean the place out – that was the first order of business. Pete hadn't been a hoarder, but the place was a little overstuffed with books and record albums and old clothes... and, I found to my surprise, letters. He'd had friends all over the world. He did have a life, after all; a hermit's kind of life, maybe, but a rich and vivid one. Reading the letters, I started to glimpse a side of him he'd never revealed.

In my old bedroom I surveyed the bookshelf and the books that sat on it, untouched for all these decades. I started pulling books off the shelf, looking them over, setting them aside, wondering if I'd find anything among the old Carl Sagan hardcovers and "Doc Savage" paperbacks that I'd want to keep.

And then I found myself holding the book I was really hoping to find: "Chance and Necessity." I'd read it in college – I'd bought a copy at the college bookstore, needing it for class and not wanting to make an extra trip home to fetch the copy Pete had given me.

Thus, the book has sat on my shelf since the day he'd given it to me.

All at once I had another memory. I turned back to the bookshelf and rummaged; a moment later, I held "The Descent of Man" in my hands, thinking about what Pete had told me. Acting on a hunch, I opened the book and checked the date of printing: August, 1946. Then, I looked for an inscription and found one on the title page: "To Pete: The world is what it is, but life is what you make it." The scribbled name underneath this bit of fortune cookie wisdom was brief and looked like it might have been "Sy."

I grinned down at the book. "The summer the world made sense again," I murmured.

Then I noticed something else: The edge of a piece of paper sticking our from the pages. I flipped the book open midway and found a folded sheet of stationery. A love note from Sy? I opened the folded paper, and realized it was Pete's handwriting.

But that was the only that made sense about what was written there.

"October 1, 1947

"But what am I saying. You'll find this letter. You'll hear my words. All of it is real, even if all of it is an old man's imaginings. Even if life, like the song says, is nothing but a dream."

I had to stop. I had to sit there with the letter in my hand, shaking my head... shaking all over. I wiped my face. It didn't matter. I dried my eyes, and they got wet again. A few deep breaths later, I finished reading Pete's note.

"There's someone waiting for you out there. Nothing you have in your whole life so far is worth sacrificing him. You won't know that for yourself until you find him, but if you never take me at my word for anything else, believe me when I tell you this. You're forty-four; not too old, but definitely overdue. Go find someone. Make sure he's the right someone, but find him. And then, damn everything else! Be together. Be happy.

"Your Uncle Pete."

I had to laugh. He hated being called "Uncle." And then I had to re-read the letter, twice; six times. It was impossible; it was miraculous. Pete wrote this letter more than fifty years ago. He knew what would happen, because he'd been there, and then he somehow chose to go back to the one year of his life – other than the years we had together – when he was really, truly happy.

"So, go find someone, huh?" I folded the letter, tapped my lips as if gesturing the world around me to hush, to give me time to accept and revel in this strange moment. "Just like that, Pete?"

And I swear I could almost hear him saying, "Yes. Just like that."

***

"And then what happened?" my grandson, Emile, asks.

"And then," I say, "I did what he asked. I found Philippe. I followed him to France. We lived there very happily for more than thirty years, and we had two beautiful children, and one of them – your dad, Simeon – had you and your twin sister."

Emile and Therese laugh. They are too young to understand all the story's nuances, but they get that it was a happy story and they love that it is, even if indirectly, their own origin story.

"Are they bothering you, papa?" Simeon – Sy – sticks his head into the living room. He is there with his wife, Andrea, to be sure I am settled into my suite at the assisted living center, and that everything is in order.

"These two little angels? Surely, they could never be a bother to anybody." I wink at my grandchildren, and they giggle again.

"Yeah, right," Sy laughs. "Come on, kids, we've got to be going."

"So soon?" I protest. "I thought you'd stay for dinner."

"Sorry, we have to get on the road. But we'll be back next Sunday." Sy smiles at me. I see his father – his other father, Philippe – in his smile. I see thirty-odd years of life and happiness and occasional hardship in that smile – a life he has not lived, but that will echo through him as he lives his own life. I see life... my life, his life, Pete's life, and time, and some quality of the universe – of chance, of necessity...

I feel for a moment as if I am seeing all of human life, everywhere on Earth, throughout all of time. It is this moment, this universal moment, and none other that really matters. Not the way the world is falling apart; not the elections that are tearing nations right down the middle; not the way standards of truth and decency seem to be collapsing every day.

This is the truth, right here, and I understand for the first time how Pete did it – how he returned his mind to 1947 even as his body was failing in 2004.

I understand for a moment. I savor. I smile. And then I let it go. The universe, vast and correct, more natural than any sense we have of nature, doesn't need me to cling to it, sing of it, or lose myself in it.

I am in the room with Sy and his kids again, back in the moment, this moment late in my life, and there is no other moment I would rather be living. Andrea is calling to me from the other room, calling her goodbyes. I put a hand on my son's shoulder and, the kids at our feet – a virtual swarm, just the two of them – I walk with him into the other room to see them off.

Next week we welcome all hallows with the happy smile of a jack'o'lantern and shed some flickering light across the unseen terrors that stumble through the dark regions of the unconscious... not just once, but twice. Do a double take with a Halloween twofer!