What I Loved

through the windows. A bitter nowhere. I turn away from the place as my father did, and I think about the day he stopped looking for their names on the lists, about the day he knew. It's hard to live with nonsense—gruesome, unspeakable nonsense. He couldn't do it. Before she died, my mother shrank. She looked very small in the hospital bed, and her freckled arm over the sheet was like a stick with pale loose skin. It was all Berlin and flight and Hampstead and German and confusion by then. Forty years had vanished from her head, and she called out for my father. Mutti in the dark.
    Violet packed up Bill's work clothes and took them along to Paris. I imagine that she still puts them on from time to time, for comfort. When I think of Violet in Bill's ragged shirt and paint-smeared jeans, I give her a Camel to smoke, and I call the image in my mind Self-Portrait. I never imagine her at the piano anymore. The lesson finally ended with a real kiss that sent her far away from me. It's odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another. Matthew drew an old man many times, and he called him Dave. Years go by, and it turns out that he was drawing his own father. I am Dave now, Dave with patches on his eyes.
    Another family has moved in upstairs. Two years ago, Violet sold the loft for a lot of money to the Wakefields. Every evening I hear their two children, Jacob and Chloe. They shake the light fixtures on my ceiling with their ritual war dances before they go to bed. Jacob is five and Chloe is three, and noise is their business. I suppose if they thumped for hours on end, I would be annoyed, but I've grown accustomed to their routine explosions around seven o'clock. Jacob sleeps in Mark's old room, and Chloe sleeps in what used to be Violet's study. In the living room, there's a plastic slide where the red sofa used to be. Every true story has several possible endings. This is mine: the children upstairs must be asleep, because the rooms above me are quiet. It's eight-thirty in the evening on August 30, 2000. I've had my supper, and I've put away the dishes. I'm going to stop typing now, move to my chair, and rest my eyes. In half an hour, Lazlo is coming to read to me.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    Although this book is a work of fiction and its story and characters are imaginary, the numerous references to hysteria, eating disorders, and psychopathy are taken from a wide range of sources. Among them are Georges Didi-Huberman 's Invention de l' hysterie (Macula); A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War , volume 4, general editors Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, volume editor Michelle Perrot (Harvard University Press), in which I found the barking women of Josselin; Hilde Bruch's Eating Disorders: Obesity , Anorexia Nervosa and the Person Within (Basic Books), which includes the story of the fat little boy who thinks his insides are made of jelly; and Rudolph M. Bell's Holy Anorexia (University of Chicago Press), in which Bell gives an analysis of Catherine Benincasa's extreme fasting. The evolving terminology, checklists, general descriptions, and possible etiologies of what is now called psychopathy or antisocial personality were culled from several works: The Roots of Crime by Edward Glover, M.D. (International Universities Press); the third and fourth editions of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-HI and DSM-IV); Abnormalities of the Personality: Within and Beyond the Realm of Treatment by Michael H. Stone, M.D. (W. W. Norton and Co.); lmpulsivity: Theory , Assessment , and Treatment , edited by Christopher D. Webster and Margaret A Jackson (Guilford Press); Severe Personality Disorders : Psychotherapeutic Strategies (Yale University Press) and Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions (Yale University Press), both by Otto F. Kernberg; the three volumes of John Bowlby's Attachment and Loss (Basic Books); Hervey Cleckley's The Mask of Sanity, fifth edition (Emily S. Cleckley); and the following books by D. W. Winnicott: Deprivation and Delinquency (Roudedge), The Maturatioml Process and the Facilitating Environment (Maresfield Library), The Family and Individual Development (Roudedge), Holding and Interpretation (Grove Press), and Playing and Reality (Roudedge).
    I want to thank Ricky Jay for Jay's Journal of Anomalies, from which I borrowed the hunger artist Sacco, who starved for crowds in London, and