One son walked out the door never to return as another son walked in. Albert, now sixty years old, had been threatening to kill himself for months. This was no ordinary call for attention; in fact, quite the opposite. Suicide was the logical solution to his greatest mathematical problem, the next unknown in a series of unknowns pursued over a lifetime of unacknowledged brilliance and isolation. Ned was slumped on the cat-piss sofa when Henry poked his head inside the house, where mice danced on store-brand butter in the fridge as the old man washed down their poops with Chardonnay from a high-stemmed plastic wine glass. Ned, now blind and ninety-one years old, possibly knew the mouse poops were there but didn’t care. Henry joked with his sister Lucy that mouse poops and cheap wine must be the key to longevity.

What a fall for the Pendergast family! This was what Henry always felt when visiting this house that had never been a home to him. Imagine if Ned’s dead father George could see this. The squalor, Ned hanging onto what little remained: rusty pliers from the sixties that had to be kept right next to the beer; piles of oldScience magazines from the seventies stacked under the coffee table; fruit flies feasting on discarded mango skins; the bed sheets and clothes orange from iron in the well water (Ned too cheap to hook up to town water), and piles of pocket-sized notebooks containing his important daily logs and every lousy stock transaction stretching back to 1974. As if anyone would ever read them. But Ned did not live his life for others. He was the most self-centered person Henry knew: a wealthy only-child of divorce raised in neglect, a toxic mix for those kind souls now eagerly offering their help, including the many visiting nurses Ned had sent off in a huff after crossing the line. Henry had suggested not insulting those offering help (many refusing pay from the World War II hero) and this invariably quieted the old man for awhile.

Ned may have been ninety-one years old but other than his lack of eyesight, was pushing on strong, determinedly grinding his way up the same creaky stairs he had been ascending since he and Vicki built this small country home following their exile from Providence. (Yes, both the city and that alleged place above.) Ned never did much of anything with his life but inherited just enough money from subsequent wives to keep a roof over his head and his wine glass full, without ever having to actually work. Those other women were long gone but their children came sniffing around on occasion in disbelief that the old man was still ticking, holding up their inheritance. As is true for us all, but some more than others, Ned had created a survivable fiction that kept him going, although his fiction was more detached than most from any plausible reality. Of course, there were those times when the truth insisted on poking up its nasty little head, as Ned drowned himself in self-sorry and wine, the old man going on and on about what a “fuck-up he had been,” to which Henry could offer no spoken reply. Because that was indeed the truth. Henry was not sure which made him more uncomfortable: the retrospective delusions of grandeur or the maudlin fuck-up monologues. “I need you to find a CEO to take my latest invention to market, which will change the way people heat their homes for generations to come.” Henry would writhe in his seat, knowing the “invention” consisted of combinations of hazardous chemicals that would blow up the first person who