At this point we had a small miracle. I awoke one Saturday morning to the sound of strenuous packing and Parsifal on the stereo. Mutti was back, in charge, shouting orders. We kids were marshaled into action, as well as two guys I’d never seen before, German speakers, probably war criminals in hiding that Mutti had dug up somewhere. It was Regensburg 1945 again, Hitler was gone, the Reds were coming, and life had to be whipped into shape from the ruins. I understand that Ukrainian villages cheered the arrival of the Nazis in 1941, and we kids were in somewhat the same state-anything had to be better than what we’d recently experienced, and maternal fascism was at least a known quantity. The Germans had a truck too, and it moved us from our comfortable brick house in Flatbush to a cramped two-bedroom in a high-rise public project out by the Queens borderline.

So our lives continued without Dad. The salary from the job Mutti obtained as a clerk at King’s County Hospital was just enough to keep us in underwear and bratwurst. We kids thereafter devoted ourselves to living the lives we thought would most piss Dad off: Paul became a stupid rather than a clever criminal; I became a star student (i.e., a schmuck); and Miri, not to mince words, became a slut. In short order, Paul got nailed for a liquor store holdup and went off for his jolt upstate, Miri ran off with a playboy, and I graduated with honors, aced my SATs, and went to Columbia, where I met Mickey Haas. I hope this connects all the dots.

But I started this long digression by describing my children, and I see I have not yet said anything about my son, Nicholas-Niko, as we call him. For a long time we thought, or rather I thought, that there was something wrong with Niko, some form of autism perhaps, or one of the other childhood syndromes lately invented to provide the drug companies with fresh markets. He failed to walk or talk at the usual times, and I insisted on taking him to various specialists, although his mother maintained that there was nothing seriously wrong with him. In time, his mother was proven correct. He began to talk at around four, and from the start in perfect paragraphs, and demonstrated at around the same time that he had taught himself to read. He is some kind of prodigy, but we’re not really sure what kind. I admit now that I have never felt entirely comfortable in his presence. To my shame. When he was six, before our home dissolved, he used to come into the little room that I used as a study or den and stand staring at me and would say nothing at all when I asked him what he wanted. Eventually, I used to ignore his presence, or try to. I imagined sometimes that he could see into me, into my deepest thoughts and desires, and that he, alone of my family, knew then how perfectly rotten I was.

He goes to Copley Academy with Imogen and has special tutoring in mathematics and computer science, at both of which he excels. Izzy the Book thus struck, in a fashion, across the generations, skipping me, for I never received more than a B- in the few math courses my education required. Niko is a solid, grave little man, and in his features he has already started to resemble his paternal grandfather, the dark, canny, opaque eyes, the schnoz, the wide mouth, the thick curling dark hair. As far as I know, he has never learned anything from me. The last time I tried it was at the pool, when I attempted to teach him to swim. Not only did I fail, but my efforts sent him into a hysteria so profound and long lasting that no one has ever tried to teach him again, and he remains a terrified sinker. On land I suppose he is reasonably happy; Copley is the kind of place where, if you are not disruptive, they leave you alone. They don’t give out grades, and they charge twenty-eight-five a year. I don’t begrudge this in the least, as I make a good living. I bill on average seven-fifty an hour, and my annual billings are usually well in excess of two thousand hours per annum. You may do the math. I have no expensive hobbies (or only one, I should say), I dislike travel, and I have moderate tastes. I bought a loft in Tribeca before the prices went nuts, and Amalie also leads a fairly simple life and has a substantial income of her own, although given free rein she would surrender our entire substance to the poor and suffering and live with the children under an elevated highway instead of in a nice brownstone on East Seventy-Sixth Street.

I love my children as much as I love anything, which I have to say is not all that much. I am able to maintain the simulacrum of a good father simply as an act of imagination, as previously I maintained that of a good son, a good brother, a friend, and so on. It is more easy than you might think to fool people, and until I met Amalie I thought everyone was like that, I thought people picked a script from a cultural box and played it out, I thought that, really, there was no difference between Jake Mishkin playing Mercutio and Jake Mishkin playing Jake Mishkin, except that Mercutio was better written.

That was, by the way, why I didn’t go into acting professionally. I told myself that I gave up the theater (and what a gross self-pitying phrase that sounds!) because I required a sure source of income to support my family, but in fact it was because once I got into a part it was nearly impossible for me to get out of it. What was funny-eccentric in high school became funny-peculiar when I got a little older, and then not funny at all. I imagined myself spending my days in a locked ward, stuck in Macbeth or Torvald Helmer. Or Estragon. And there was also, I don’t know, something seriously toxic about the people who were involved with theater, or maybe I just projected that because I was scared. So I switched to prelaw and have had little reason to regret it since. I don’t go to plays.

I’ve returned after a break to drink some coffee and have a doughnut. I bought two dozen at a place in Saranac Lake and have been living off them and coffee for some time. The house is well stocked with canned goods and staples, some of them of considerable age, and there is a freezer with fish and game in it. Mickey said I could stay here indefinitely, although he added that in the event of a nuclear attack I would have to share it with him and whichever of his three wives he decides to bring along. There is a town twenty-six miles off, New Weimar, but I have not visited it. I thought it best if no one local knew I was here. The house is quite isolated, standing at the end of a long dirt driveway that comes off a gravel road, that diverges from a secondary state road that comes off Route 30 west of Saranac Lake. The isolation is purely physical, however, for some years ago Mickey installed a satellite dish, and so you can get the usual two hundred channels, and more significantly there is broadband Internet access via the dish. I like to feel that with a few button pushes I can send this out to the whole world. This may be a bargaining chip at some point, with whom I don’t yet know.

Reading this over I see I have screwed up the line of the narrative beyond all repair. It might have been better had I simply set out to write out my life story straight up, as if, like Bracegirdle, I were on my deathbed, instead of merely dwelling in the probability of meeting some violent end in the not-too-distant future. Death, I suppose, concentrates the mind, assuming one has a mind left. The problem is that I started out to tell a simple story like you used to find in cheap thrillers, the electronic equivalent of the last-gasp message, the cryptic scrawl on the plaster, the note in blood-“the emeralds are in the p [illegible scrawl]”; or “It wasn’t Har.” And from this arises the plot. But it seems that my life has become mixed up with the story, as was Bracegirdle’s, viz.:

Though God did not call mee to stande among the greate still I am a man not a clod & my story bears telling if onlie to holpe in the breding of my sonne: who needs muste rise to manhoode lacking what ever poore model I might have supply’d.