What I Loved

who was shoveling a colored cereal with marshmallows into his mouth. He crunched happily on the repellent concoction and gave me a smile. All at once, I felt that I was the one who had gone insane overnight. I looked at my arm. There was no trace of the bite. It happened, I said to myself, but maybe Mark doesn't remember it. Perhaps he had been drugged or even asleep. Erica had held conversations with me while she walked in her sleep. I brought my cup of coffee over to the table.
    "Uncle Leo, you're shaking," Mark said. His limpid blue eyes looked concerned. "Are you okay?"
    I removed my trembling hand from the tabletop. The question in my throat—Do you remember coming into my room and biting my arm last night?—refused to form itself on my lips.
    He put down his spoon. "Guess what?" he said. "I met a girl last night. Her name is Lisa. She's really pretty, and I think she likes me. I'm going to introduce you to her."
    I picked up my coffee cup. "That's nice," I said. "I'd like to meet her."
    In the second week of September, Bill ran into Harry Freund on White Street. Bill asked Harry about the unveiling of the children's project, which was only a week away, and then asked how Mark had been as a worker. "Well," Freund said, "the week he worked for me, he was great, but then he disappeared. I haven't seen him since."
    Bill quoted and requoted Freund's words to me, as if to reassure himself that the man had actually said them. Then he said, "Mark must be crazy."
    I was stupefied. Every day for two weeks Mark had come home and described his days at work to me in elaborate detail. "It's so great that the project's about kids, especially poor kids who don't have anybody to speak for them." That's what he had said to me. "But how did Mark explain it?" I asked Bill.
    "He said the job for Harry was boring, that he didn't like it, so he left and got another one. He worked at some magazine called Split World as a gofer, and he made seven dollars an hour instead of minimum wage."
    "But why didn't he just tell you?"
    "He kept mumbling that he thought I wouldn't like it if he quit."
    "But all those lies," I said. "Doesn't he know that it's much worse to lie than it is to get another job?"
    "I kept telling him that," Bill said.
    "He needs help," I said.
    Bill fumbled with his cigarettes. Extracting one, he lit it and blew the smoke away from me. "I had a long talk with Lucille," he said. "Actually, I did most of the talking. She listened to me, and then after I had been ranting for a while, she volunteered a piece of information she had plucked from some article in a parenting magazine. The author had said that a lot of teenagers lie, that it's part of maturing. I told her that this wasn't just lying. This was an Academy Award-winning performance. This was completely nuts! She didn't answer me, and I stood there with the telephone in my hand, shaking with anger, and then I hung up on her. I shouldn't have done it, but it's like she doesn't understand the magnitude of this thing at all."
    "He needs help," I said again. "Psychiatric help."
    Bill pressed his lips together and nodded slowly. "We're looking for a doctor, a therapist, someone. It won't be the first one, Leo. He's been in therapy before."
    "I didn't know that."
    "He saw a man in Texas, a Dr. Mussel, and then he saw someone in New York for a year. The divorce, you know. We thought it would help..." Bill covered his face with his hands, and I saw his shoulders tremble for a moment. He was sitting in my chair by the window. I was seated beside him and had grabbed his forearm as a gesture of comfort. As I watched the smoke move upward from the cigarette that hung loosely between his two fingers, I remembered Mark's earnest face when he told me about Jesus taking a fall.
    Lies are always double: what you say coexists with what you didn't say but might have said. When you stop lying, the gap between your words and inner belief closes, and you continue on a path of trying to match your spoken words to the language of your thoughts, at least those fit for other peoples' consumption. Mark's lie had departed from ordinary lying because it required the careful maintenance of a full-blown fiction. It got up in the morning, went to work, came home, and reported on its day for nine long weeks. Looking back on my fourteen days with Mark, I saw that the lie had been far from perfect. If Mark had been working outdoors all summer, he wouldn't have been white as an eggshell; he would