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insides of my thighs, between my legs which was chafed and ravaged as with the incisors of a devouring rat—but my neck was not broken and my memory dim and retreating and therefore consoling. You can’t remember, whatever did or did not happen is on the far side of a chasm of memory which you cannot cross. Soon then seeking out Harvey whose shallow breathing and pallid skin worried me, at first glimpse my brother appeared to be scarcely alive as if flung across his rumpled bed where his poker-friends had left him and I’d managed to wake him out of that stuporous suffocating sleep and he’d cursed me wanting badly to remain in that sleep and lamenting oh Christ!—first memory that came to him, he’d lost more money; and I asked, How much, how much money did you lose to them and he said, Too much. And then he said, Don’t ask, you don’t want to know.

Chapter Seven
    H e’d become shorter. Losing height. In the crook of his arm was a deep gash, slowly healing. He claimed it was from the IV line the ER nurses had put into his arm, that had become infected.
    On a battered calendar of Harvey’s I saw a pattern of red x ’s. Less frequently, blue x ’s.
    I asked him what the red x ’s meant and Harvey shrugged. None of my concern.
    I asked him what the blue x ’s meant and Harvey said, Rehab.
    But the blue x ’s were only scattered through a month. The red x ’s were several times a week.
    Getting high?—red had to mean an Up Mood.
    Blue?—the Down Mood.
    I told Harvey, please let me drive you to the rehab clinic. You must have a schedule of treatment there, you can’t afford to miss.
    (Was Harvey trying to cure himself of his drug addiction? Or had Harvey some other, medical condition, for which he was being treated? I’d gathered from careless remarks he’d made that he had infusions at the clinic—his white blood count was “low” and he was anemic.)
    I knew to urge my brother to drink water. Several glasses of water a day.
    “There’s a danger of dehydration. You don’t eat, drink, sleep, take care of yourself properly.”
    “ ‘De-hy-dra-tion.’ ”
    Harvey contemplated the word as if tasting it on his tongue. But the taste didn’t interest him.
    “Harvey, you could die.”
    “ ‘Harvey, you could die.’ ” Harvey considered this phrase, dubiously. “It doesn’t scan. It doesn’t fly. Though the vowels exude a kind of dull-anxious concern. A kind of mock concern . Not that this fictitious ‘Harvey’ will die but merely could die . Which is a fact for all who live— could die .”
    Harvey seemed to be paying only a peripheral attention to me, absently caressing his mutilated ear that flamed when so touched.
    “ ‘How scale walls of Hades’—this came to me last night. In the night. Note the short ‘a’ sound. Vowels are a sort of string upon which words are strung. I think so. I think this is my discovery, but it may perish with me.” Harvey laughed, scratching the flaming ear.
    It was late morning. I saw that Harvey would not speak to me in any serious way. Another day lost to us. Unless I worked on the Eweian translation in which, in fact, I had lost faith. Yet working diligently and even obsessively without faith did not seem to me a terrible fate, when the alternative was yet more terrible.
    In the apartment there were strange languidly wafting odors.
    Each day, new odors emerged of faint decay, rot. I’d thought it was the ancient refrigerator but even after I’d cleaned and scrubbed the interior, the smells remained. When I was gone from the apartment, to work in the little library for instance, and returned, the odors were always slightly different, as if the air had been agitated in my absence. Especially if I was away for some time. The apartment might show signs of visitors—rearranged chairs, boxes of books shoved from one place to another. And Harvey sprawled on a small sofa in the living room, notebook on his knee like one who has made a refuge for himself in the