This boy, thought Lewis. I would whip him with my belt.
          I would whip him with my belt if I had lived to see him grow up. This boy is older than me. This boy, my son, this disappointment, is older than me.
          I am 29 years old. My son is 49, and has lived his life in the same town he was born into, in which he went to school, and in which he still lives. He’s an egghead, an accountant. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but almost fifty, no wife, nothing, what a fairy, what a water lily. Two weeks ago I shot three SS officers in the brains, and in an unthinkable glow as the members of my squad aged from boys to men to cadavers to mummies, I hurled myself through the Hölletor and pressed the detonator. Before I blacked out my eardrums burst and I saw the Nazis boil.
          They fingerprinted me when I came out—must have been a hard job with all those burns. The fingers came off later. I was on file from the war. Serious men visited me. They ran tests. They have lady doctors and boy nurses now. A period of adjustment, they announce. I adjust.
          I have a son, they tell me. We’ve told him about you. Have they? Why the fuck would they do that? Declassification protocol. This all seems like a bad idea. They have already told me that my wife is dead. She gave birth six months after I disappeared, she didn’t remarry, she died young. They announce all this as if it’s a comfort. I’m puzzled. I imagine the scenes. The boy went to his grandmother, of course I remember her, she died in some year they tell me, okay, I could make a joke about the old bat, but honestly I respected her, that bitch. Jesus Christ, she hated me.
          I wonder what they’ve told my son about me, and why they bothered. He sits by my bed, piously. He looks confused, like a rabbit. Solicitously he adjusts my pillows, although I haven’t and cannot ask him to do that. In the atmosphere hangs the odor of my Army pension, of special operations and special bonuses hashed out in unrecorded meetings, summarized in classified codicils and guaranteed for a thousand years or the life of the Republic. There’s some money there, boy! Money! If I had a tongue or fingers I could tell him, A million dollars, son, or whatever a million dollars means now. Negotiate! They’ll pay you or they’ll kill you.
          Lewis Junior, eyes wide, clasps one of his father’s stumps in his hands.
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