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By Root 420 0

youth. But he was not trying to recapture a thing. He was only trying to endure the heat for a while. If he could have recaptured his youth, his youth as it actually was, with the pattern of the next twenty years intact and waiting for him, would he have? Maybe so. But a whole new youth, with its own set of dreams and uncertainties, would only have exhausted him. People often talked about wishing they could return to the moment just before a tragedy and begin again, repairing the rupture in their lives, setting off down a different path, the right path, the path that should have been theirs all along, but then, as time passed, they healed and moved forward in ways that depended upon exactly that rupture, and it became harder and harder to justify abandoning what they had gained for the sake of what they had lost. Jason knew, though, he knew without question, that if he could have returned to the day of the accident and prevented it (don’t leave home, don’t leave home), he would have. He would have taken everything he had learned since then, every moment of the life he had created, and destroyed it. It was his gift to Patricia, his tribute—to create the kind of life he would be willing to burn to ashes.

Often it was nearly dark by the time he got home. He would find the answering machine winking up at him with its red eye. He had stopped returning the calls he received, but he continued to listen to his messages.

“Mr. Williford, this is Karen at Dr. Sutter’s office. We’re phoning to see why you’ve missed your last two appointments. Is anything wrong?”

His crutches were propped against the wardrobe in his bedroom, but he no longer bothered to use them. He would not be keeping any more of his appointments.

Beep. “Hey, dude, where you been? The whole crew is getting together for the game this weekend. Tim reserved a skybox at the stadium. We wanted to see if you could come along. No need to chip in, it’ll be on us. Just give me a call.”

He had friends—of course he did—but he presumed that if he kept ignoring their entreaties, they would eventually forget about him. He would be free of their kindness, of their pity. He was tired of jokes that stopped short in his presence, gazes that remembered the way he used to be.

Beep. “Jason. Paul here. We’re flying Trieschmann out on assignment to the West Bank, and we need a camera to accompany him. You’ve been shooting some good stuff for us lately, and I wanted to see if you would be up for the job. Should get you a lot of attention, if you can do it. They’re dropping like dominoes over there.”

The truth was that the entire Middle East might have vanished in a single gleaming detonation, and he would not have noticed. Every morning he forced himself to leave the house and take a picture or two for the Gazette. That was all the scrutiny he could bear to give the world. No matter where he looked, he saw nothing but pain. An evangelist handing out pocket editions of the New Testament, a star-shaped kidney stone illuminating his urinary tract. An old woman whose arthritic fingers looked like brown twigs coated in ice. A horse trailer hauling a single young Appaloosa, its left eye glowing white as a Ping-Pong ball. In spite of everything, his instincts had not abandoned him.

He looked forward to the hours he spent with Melissa and her friends. With them he visited parts of the city that he had never seen before: the undersides of bridges, the pine chases behind housing developments. One afternoon, they were loitering in the playground of an elementary school when he saw Christman, from the paper, taking pictures of the bare flagpole. God only knew what he found interesting about the subject. There he was in the courtyard, though, firing off shot after shot, standing beneath the aluminum rod in a circle of compressed dirt.

He noticed Jason sitting on one of the climbing platforms and came over. “Williford,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I was just thinking of photographing that flagpole over there fourteen or fifteen times.”

It took Christman a second to