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For Graeme had not joined us at breakfast. He’d been awake before us, and dressed, and gone. So little Neale had said, wistfully.

Yet Graeme was somewhere in the house. Stubborn in resistance when we called: “Gra-eme! Where are you?”

Since our move to Cross Hill, his old life left behind, Graeme had been plunged into an angry melancholy. His expensive computer equipment could not function in this ruin of a house: there was inadequate wiring. Our parents’ large bedroom at the far front of the second floor, off-limits to us children, was said to contain a lamp with a sixty-watt bulb; and Father’s private office on the third floor contained a telephone, a fax, and one or two low-wattage lamps; though the lights frequently wavered and went out, and Father tried to use them sparingly. (Yet often Father worked through the night. He was involved in preparing extensive legal documents refuting the charges and innuendos made against him, to be presented one day to the state attorney’s office; he was also on the phone frequently with the single attorney still in his hire.) But Graeme’s new-model computer, plugged into one of the crude Cross Hill sockets, displayed a splotched gray screen with virtually no definition. Most of his programs and video games could not be operated. The Cross Hill cyberspace resembled a void; a vacuum; an emptiness like that of the atom, which is said to contain almost nothing; slow-drifting particles like motes in the corner of your eye. It was increasingly difficult to believe, Graeme thought, that such a phenomenon as “cyberspace” existed—anywhere. He’d resumed his E-mail, in defiance of Mother’s warning, but the messages he received from his several friends back in the city were strange, scrambled. One morning Stephen came upon Graeme in his room hunched over his computer keyboard, swiftly typing commands that led again and again, and again, as in a nightmare of comic cruelty, to ERROR! SERVER CANNOT BE LOCATED on a shimmering, fading screen. Stephen was shocked by the sorrow in his brother’s face. “Hey. Why don’t you let that stuff rest for a while? There’s other things we can do. Like bicycling. Into town …” But Graeme didn’t hear. He hunched his thin shoulders farther over the keyboard, rapidly typing out another complex set of commands. The luminous hieroglyphics on the screen floated slowly upward as if channeled from a very great distance through space and time. In the pale clotted light of the overcast June morning, Graeme’s adolescent skin had a peevish green cast, like tarnished metal; his eyes glistened with bitter bemusement. In disgust he said to Stephen, “Look.” Stephen looked: it was Graeme’s E-mail he was scanning, but each of the messages had something wrong with it, as if awkwardly translated from a foreign language, or in code:

graememat ± @ poor shit.///

howzit 2b ded!

“They think I’m dead,” Graeme said, choking back a sob. “The guys are talking about me like I’m dead.”

Stephen said quickly, “The message isn’t coming through right. Once we get more electricity—”

Graeme stabbed angrily at a key, and the E-mail vanished.

“Maybe I am dead. Maybe we all are, and buried at Cross Hill.”

Stephen backed off, shuddering. At such times he didn’t want to deal with his brother’s moods. He didn’t want to think He knows so much more than I do, he’s so much smarter than I am. He went to announce to the others, “Graeme’s getting weird over that computer shit. I think we should pull his plug.”

Then there came the morning they couldn’t locate Graeme, calling for him up- and downstairs; calling for him out the windows, out the terrace doors overlooking the grove of ragged Chinese elms, and the weedy graveled lane known as Acacia Drive (though most of the acacia trees had sickened and died). Mother, her ashy-silvery hair swinging about her face, her girl’s forehead lined with vexation and worry, cupped her hands to her mouth and cried, “Gra-eme! Graeme! Where are you hiding? I insist you come here—at once.” As if it was a game of hide-and-seek she might bring to