in that moment. Sitting in a worn chair in the shiny-mustard-colored-walled living room of his family’s house in Broad Channel, Queens, Brandon felt at once rooted to the faded fabric and painfully restless. as if his body wanted to leap up, vault over the three stacks of newspapers and magazines in front of him, throw open the door, and run; run through streets he had no idea how to navigate, run until the vaguely sulfuric odor of the nearby mud flats faded, run until no one could find him. It was an irrational thought; an insane thought. (This, at least, is how he would characterize it years later, when time and a more articulate voice allowed him the dubious pleasure of emptying the contents of his mind into an othetwise peaceful therapist’s office).

In a few hours, his father would arrive. His father, and Helga, who was technically and in fact his stepmother, a fact that he loathed. They would ring the doorbell; his mother would stiffen herself and open it; they would, thin-lipped, enter, taking silent and covert inventory of the clutter, the shabbily painted walls (which, as hitherto stated, were indeed mustard-oolored), the worn and in places stained remnant of carpet.