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cigarettes, which she burned through as if the fate of the Earth depended on her chain-smoking even through meals, which she usually took on a TV tray in the living room. She prided herself on being a fine housekeeper, by which she meant that she efficiently delegated all the work to Amalia and me.
    The king and queen of our little lower-middle-class castle spoke to each other so seldom, you might well have assumed they primarily communicated telepathically. If that were the case, then judging by their demeanor, they detested virtually every exchange of their psychic conversations. Amalia said that something profound must have happened between our parents long ago, that they had hurt each other, that they’d said all they had to say about it, and that they couldn’t bring themselves to forgive each other, and that, therefore, they found it painful to talk to each other about
anything
. Amalia didn’t like to think the worst about anyone until they had proved themselves irredeemably vile.
    My sister had played the clarinet since she was eight, when a kid in the next block,having been forced into lessons by his folks, finally rebelled and convincingly threatened to hang himself. She’d been given the instrument for nothing, and she had wanted to learn to play it largely because she knew that it would annoy our parents. She hoped that her playing would get on their nerves so much that they would insist that she practice in the detached one-car garage, where she wouldn’t have to see them so determinedly not talking to each other, where the air smelled of grease and tire rubber and mildew instead of Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes. Her hope was fulfilled, and the remaining years that we lived in the house, the words most often spoken by our mother and father were, “Take it to the garage,” not only when we practiced the clarinet and saxophone, but also when our mere presence became a distraction from their TV shows, their drinking, and their committed smoking.
    Amalia became pretty darn good on the clarinet, but I proved to be a prodigy on the saxophone, self-taught and self-polishing, always working to get a little better. Playing the sax was the one thing I could do that was graceful.
    With a 4.0 grade-point average and considerable writing talent, Amalia was an amateur musician with bigger things than a dance band in her future. Although our distracted mother and father didn’t consider it much of an achievement, Amalia received a full scholarship to a major university based on her grades but also based on several cool short stories that she’d written and with which she’d won prizes in various competitions.
    I was proud of her, and I wanted her to succeed big-time, and I wanted her to escape the cancer clouds and the gloom and our parents’ bitterness that made the Pomerantz place so like Poe’s House of Usher just before it sank into the swamp. At the same time, I couldn’t imagine what my life would be like when, at the end of that summer, she went far away to school, leaving me as the only member of the family who didn’t want to eat dinner off a TV tray.
    In early June, nearly a month before I heard Jonah Kirk rocking that Fats Domino tune at his grandfather’s house, across the street from our place, a weird thing happened next door. The residence in question was not to the east, not the Janowski place, where my mother and Mrs. Janowski regularly shared gossip, most of it delusional fantasy, about the marital relations of other people who lived on our block. It was instead one door west of us, at the former Rupert Clockenwall place, which had been unoccupied ever since old Mr. Clockenwall died of a massive heart attack a month earlier.
    The strangeness started at 3:00 one morning, when an unusual sound awakened me. As Isat up in bed, I didn’t think the noise had been in my room. I was pretty sure it came from beyond the window, although it might have been the last sound in a dream that, by its very