Seize the Night

mats in the center. She is deep into homeopathic medicine, consequently, the bookshelves are filled with neatly ordered bottles of vitamins, minerals, herbs—plus, for all I know, powdered wing of bat, eye-of-toad ointment, and iguana-liver marmalade.
    Her extensive book collection lined the living room at her former place.
    Here it is shelved and stacked all over the house.
    She is a woman of many passions: cooking, music, exercise, books, and me. Those are the ones I know about. I would never ask her to rank her passions in order of importance. Not because I'm afraid I'd come in fifth of the major five. I'm happy to be fifth, to have any ranking at all.
    I circled the dining room, touching her guitars and cello, finally picking up her sax and blowing a few bars of “Quarter Till Three,” the old Gary U. S. Bonds hit. Sasha was teaching me to play. I wouldn't claim that I wailed, but I wasn't bad.
    In truth, I didn't pick up the sax to practice. You might find this romantic or disgusting, depending on your point of view, but I picked up the sax because I wanted to put my mouth where her mouth had been.
    I'm either Romeo or Hannibal Lecter. Your call.
    For breakfast I ate three plump cheese enchiladas with a third of a pint of fresh salsa and washed everything down with an ice-cold Pepsi.
    If I live long enough for my metabolism to turn against me, I might one day regret never having learned to eat for any reason but the sheer fun of it.
    Currently, however, I am at that blissful age when no indulgence can alter my thirty-inch waistline.
    In the upstairs guest bedroom that served as my study, I sat at my desk in candlelight and spent a couple of minutes looking at a pair of framed photographs of my mom and dad. Her face was full of kindness and intelligence. His face was full of kindness and wisdom.
    I have rarely seen my own face in full light. The few times I've stood in a bright place and confronted a mirror, I've not seen anything in my face that I can understand. This disturbs me. How can my parents' images shine with such virtues and mine be enigmatic?
    Did their mirrors show them mysteries?
    I think not.
    Well, I take solace from the realization that Sasha loves me perhaps as much as she loves cooking, perhaps even as much as she loves a good aerobic workout. I wouldn't risk suggesting that she values me as much as she does books and music. Though I hope.
    In my study, among hundreds of volumes of poetry and reference books my own and my father's collections combined is a thick Latin dictionary.
    I looked up the word for beer .
    Bobby had said, Carpe cerevisi . Seize the beer. Cerevisi appeared to be correct.
    We had been friends for so long that I knew Bobby had never sat through a class in Latin. Therefore, I was touched. The apparent effort that he had taken to mock me was a sign of true friendship.
    I closed the dictionary and slid it aside, next to a copy of the book I had written about my life as a child of darkness. It had been a national best-seller about four years ago, when I'd thought I knew the meaning of my life, prior to my discovery that my mother, out of fierce maternal love and a desire to free me from my disability, had inadvertently made me the poster child for doomsday.
    I hadn't opened this book in two years. It should have been on one of the shelves behind my desk. I assumed Sasha had been looking at it and neglected to put it back where she'd found it.
    Also on the desk was a decorative tin box painted with the faces of dogs. In the center of the lid are these lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
    Therefore to this dog will I,
Tenderly not scornfully,
Render praise and favor:
With my hand upon his head,
Is my benediction said
Therefore and forever.
    This tin box was a gift from my mother, given to me on the day that she brought Orson home. I keep special biscuits in it, which he particularly enjoys, and from time to time I give him a couple, not to reward him for a trick learned, because I don't teach him tricks, and not to enforce any training, for he needs no training, but simply because the taste of them makes him happy.
    When my mother brought Orson to live with us, I didn't know how special he was. She kept this secret until long after her death, until after my father's death. When she gave me the box, she said, “I know you'll give him love, Chris. But also, when he needs it—and he will need it—take pity on him. His life is no less difficult than yours.”
    At the time, I