Owen's earliest memories were of flying in the airplane, of his father piloting and Owen riding in the other seat and craning his head to see out. He remembered the clouds, the bumpy ride, the worn upholstery, his father's hands on the controls. Marshall had married late and Owen had been a trailer, born long after his sister and brother, so Marshall was old for a man with such a young son, and his hands had ropy veins and swollen knuckles, although he had never done manual labor; he had been a lawyer all his life. Owen was the last child, and when he arrived the old man cut back on his work and started to take time off. He hadn't done that with the first two children, who were already becoming alienated from their father when Owen's arrival surprised the family. When the older children went off to college Marshall started combining his great pleasures: being with his young son, and being in his aircraft. They'd fly off somewhere on Saturday, in any direction, as far as they could go, camp out at a little airstrip, and come back the next day. He knew that Nina worried, but he got such pleasure from these weekend jaunts that he took them regardless. He wondered what was becoming of him to be so irresponsible late in life, after always planning everything with exacting care, and then executing those plans with careful precision. But there was a grace and finality about flying that was missing from the law, and the weekend adventures with his son were more than he was willing to give up.

Marshall was proud of the boy, who had an energy and liveliness and especially a determination the two older children lacked. Though the older ones were probably more intelligent, and Marshall had always valued intelligence, Owen showed from the start an attitude Marshall admired even more: daring: a willingness to risk himself. Owen was a gifted athlete, too, and the old man spent time playing catch and shooting baskets with him. He taught him to play golf, and paid for tennis and swimming lessons. What interested Owen most was karate, but Marshall found that he was reluctant to give permission for it. Finally, when Owen was thirteen, Marshall let the boy sign up. The lessons only lasted a few months. The instructor called Marshall to explain that he wanted Owen to leave. He was talented, but brutal. He enjoyed hurting the other students.

Marshall explained to Owen why he couldn't continue the lessons, but Owen thought that giving and taking punishment was the reason for practicing a martial art. Marshall knew the boy had a high tolerance for pain, but he was shocked at his attitude. He told Owen he wouldn't be taking any more lessons until he grew up a little.

Besides this callousness to other people's suffering, the boy's impatience disturbed him. He suffered many broken bones, and responded to them only with irritation. On several occasions Marshall found him hammering at casts, trying to break them so he could be free. Marshall discussed all this with Nina, as he discussed everything; he hoped that the fears he felt for the boy's future were illusory, but she had no comfort for him. She worried about the boy more than Marshall did.

"He wants to be a good son," Nina said to her husband. "He wants your approval. But I don't understand him. He does things on impulse. Pain doesn't bother him. Breaking things doesn't bother him. He wants to feel things, even painful things. It doesn't matter who he hurts. I don't know what to do. The other children weren't that way."

"Yes," Marshall said, and nodded, although he hadn't understood. Silence fell, and in a few minutes he heard her steady breathing. He was awake late, turning over what she'd said. He finally concluded that the boy was young and that there was plenty of time for him to grow out of it (whatever "it" was) given proper guidance and attention. He was confident that he and Nina were up to the job. There was plenty of time.

Owen never knew that his parents thought this way about him. His self-regard was unmarred by doubt. He took for granted a firmly fixed place in the world. Nothing would ever dislodge him from that place. He was attached to his family, his possessions, his friends. He assumed that all these attachments would grow and deepen with time, and that others would be added. Everything would come to him, if he was patient and followed the rules and was shrewd and hard-working. But beyond these conventions, anything was permitted. He never realized that his ruthlessness broke the ethics his parents tried to teach him. Born into another caste, he would have become a criminal: he believed that the world owed him what he desired. There were practices to be honored, but if you followed them in public, then you were entitled to break them in private. The forms were what mattered -- that, and the opinion of other people. No one existed alone, everyone existed in the eyes of those around him. You had to please them. Then they would give you what you wanted. What you could get away with in private was another matter, as long as you managed to keep it secret.

When Owen was nearing his fourteenth birthday, Marshall was broadsided by a tow truck at a red light. He died before the sun's next rise. Everyone of any importance in local society came to the funeral. The cortege of cars stretched for a mile. Admiring words were spoken. The man had been an example to everyone, in his honesty and hard work and generosity and concern for others. Perhaps he had lacked imagination, though no one said this, perhaps he had been the soul of convention, though no one said this either, but that scarcely mattered in the balance. Everyone had admired him, and many had loved him. The older children, still alienated but now feeling guilty, had flown in from Denver and Chicago. They tried to comfort their mother. She was incapacitated. Her family, especially her husband, had been her life. She wondered vaguely what she was to do with this youngest child, outwardly so tractable, but inwardly anarchic. She was in too much pain to think the problem through. The boy was suffering as much as she was, and she tried to comfort him. She told him that his father was in heaven. He turned away.

In the next week the house emptied as the older children, who were children no more, went back to graduate school and to work -- back to their homes, she thought with a pang -- and as the relatives left, and the flowers wilted and were thrown out. She woke up one morning alone, in the bed she had shared for thirty years of her life with a man who now existed only as a yearning in her empty heart, and she went downstairs and saw Owen off to school, and then she lingered in the kitchen for an hour talking to the maid. It occurred to her that she didn't know this person, who had been with the family for nearly ten years. When Nina stepped through the dining room into the front hall, it was strangely empty, and she noticed the squeak of her shoes on the tile. In the library, Marshall's correspondence was neatly lined up on the side table.

There were many things she had to do. She would have to sell the airplane. She would have to find someone who wanted the bird dogs. She would have to manage the family money alone. It wasn't that she felt unprepared. She had always done what needed to be done, or Marshall had done it after discussing it with her. But it would be a lonely, unrewarding job without him. She had expected to live a long life together. She had expected him to live to a great age, like his parents; she had expected him even to outlive her: though she was younger, her parents and grandparents had been short-lived. It was unfair of him, to leave her alone.

She looked at the unopened mail sitting on the table, at the leaded glass windows and the built-in bookshelves with the glass covers to keep the dust from the books, at the family portrait above the mantel, at the old rolltop desk Marshall had inherited from his grandfather the judge, the vases, the heavy furniture and Oriental rugs, the diplomas on the wall, the gun case with the engraved shotguns, the golf trophies, his Boy Scout memorabilia, the photographs of friends and ski trips to Europe... The house, the house she had always loved, had turned into nothing but a thing, a thing wrapped around her, a thing enclosing her, a thing full of other things that now meant nothing. The beautiful place they had made together was gone, replaced by this facsimile. The light in the window, on the walls, everywhere, was cold, the interiors vacant, the space too large.

She changed from her good clothes, intending to work in the garden. When she had pulled the few weeds, she remained on her knees, crumbling the dirt between her fingers and weeping. Her tears stained the bare brown ground. She turned her back to the house so the maid wouldn't see her loss of self-control.

In the year it took her to wake from her dream of grief, her care for Owen was punctilious, but distracted. He began to spend his time at his friends' houses. Their mothers, to help Nina, were glad to take him in. A split between his inner and outer self emerged, a new kind of self-awareness, a self-watching. It had always been there, and now claimed its place as primary. He lived neither inside nor outside himself, but on the cusp, between. He began to indulge himself in destructive tantrums, glorying in the sensation of letting go, of summoning up a flood of rage and unleashing it and watching himself get caught up in the tide. When the police caught him smashing windows at a school and called his mother, he knew he'd gone too far. The split he felt remained, but became a master instead of an observer. He would be more careful. In later years, on the occasions he found himself carried away, he would be embarrassed at his lack of self-control. But the impulsiveness continued to plague him occasionally. It was the shame he never told anyone about, the secret he couldn't trust anywhere outside his own chest.

One night he was in the back seat, headed north with two friends to a party in the country. Owen had pulled a beer from the sack on the floor and was about to open it. He saw an old man walking along the side of the road and threw the bottle. It struck the back of the man's head and he toppled as if his muscles and nerves had stopped working. Owen's friends in the front seat were preoccupied talking to each other and appeared not to have noticed. Owen said nothing. He read the newspaper the next day. The man was in a coma, something about being hit in exactly the wrong place on his head. Owen was surprised, but felt no guilt. It was too late now. He didn't tell anyone: what would have been the point? He watched the newspaper, and the TV news, but he never found out whether the man recovered or died.

From then he was even more determined to discipline himself. He would be perfect; his mother would have every reason to to be proud of him. He excelled in study and sports. His senior year he applied to the University of Chicago, his father's school, and was accepted. He attended for three years, until he decided to change his major from engineering to urban planning and business. He transferred to Lawrence, to enter the program there, and to be closer to home and the contacts he wanted to make.

His second year in Lawrence Owen was fucking a black girl. He already had a girlfriend, but fidelity was a formality to be observed in public. Everything was permitted in private. There was a stigma attached to interracial dating, and above all to interracial sex, however much everyone pretended there wasn't. There weren't many people bold enough to carry it off, and only because they were making a statement of contempt for the conventions. Owen believed in honoring the conventions, and that meant that any cheating, and especially any miscegenation, had to be hidden.

He loved having the secret, though. He felt hip. But that wasn't the reason for seeing her: she had skin unlike any white woman he'd ever touched. She was in a category by herself, there was no way to describe it; her skin was so soft, it was as if she didn't have pores. Skin so flawlessly frictionless it was beyond anything he'd imagined. He would have run his hands over her for hours, but she hated him to; she thought it was weird, and always made him stop. So he had to make the foreplay last a long time. Then she didn't care how much he touched her. After they came, he'd stop touching her. He was especially careful not to run his hands over her.

He couldn't comprehend why she was fucking him. Maybe she got off on the idea of having a white society boy in secret. Maybe her motives were the same as his, the pleasure of the illicit. She had a boyfriend, a revolutionary, almost as black as she was. He spent most of his time planning trips to the Bay Area, then taking the trips. He was going to flunk out soon if he kept this up, and the idea pleased Owen, who wouldn't have to fit his time with Cheryl around her boyfriend's schedule.

The night of the incident he went to a party and she was there. He was surprised, because they didn't have any friends in common. She said that Claude had just left, and wouldn't be back until Sunday night. A big political conference in St. Louis. She was grinning.

"Baby," she said, and grabbed his elbow. "Let's play house for a couple of days."

Her head was cocked to the side and she was wearing mirrored sunglasses, although the party was indoors. She was probably tripping again. Sometimes when she was really wasted she would call him and they'd meet and have sex in his car, or anywhere convenient. Sometimes they drove out to the country and fucked in the middle of a field -- wheat, corn, whatever. The sex was weird when she was tripping, but at least she didn't care how much he touched her skin. She enjoyed it.

"Come here," she said, and pulled him toward the door. She laughed loudly. "You're ashamed of me, aren't you? Come on." She took his hand and led him out of the house.

At the tiny bungalow where she lived with Claude they got naked and got in bed and smoked a joint. Owen lay on his right side and put his leg on top of hers and admired the contrast between their skin colors. She was as dark as anyone he'd ever seen. He noticed from far off that he had an erection, but although he saw it, he scarcely felt it. He was split in half. His mind watched his body like a movie.

"On your back," she said. "I'm horny. That Claude has been worthless lately. You get two holes tonight. I eat you. Then you eat me. Then you fuck me in the ass, for dessert."

"Yes, ma'am," he said. "You're the boss."

She licked his cock like an ice-cream cone and he started coming back to the sensations he should have been feeling all along. The cock quivered.

"Look at that," she said, pushing the sunglasses up onto her forehead. "Isn't that pretty, all red and pink and purple like that? It's just so Goddamned cute. You can see the veins. All those different colors. This is like, whadda they call it?, Neapolitan? Claude's is just chocolate. It always looks like it was buried in my ass. Same color as my shit."

She let the shades drop over her eyes again. She popped her mouth over the glans and moved her head slowly down. She had on the sunglasses, and her boots, but nothing else, and the sight of her was making his cock painfully hard. It was reflected in the mirrored lenses as her head bobbed up and down. Her lips rolled in as they moved down, his cock disappearing into her mouth, and then her lips rolled out as her mouth moved up and his cock reappeared. He groaned and closed his eyes. If he kept watching, he was going to come too fast.

After a while she stopped and took off the shades and looked at the wall behind him, mumbling something about ancient Egypt. Now he knew she was tripping; her pupils were enormous. She sat back on her heels and stared at the wall. She'd forgotten him. Her breasts were large; they sagged out to the sides. His erection remained, but he lost interest. There was plenty of time.

He rolled another joint, crumbling some hash into it, and they smoked it. Killer dope. His head was totally -- what? He couldn't finish a thought. Or start one. All thoughts simultaneous. Simultaneous. Great word. Unformed. Incipient. What else? There were a lot of others, too, all bumping together, out of reach. Out of sight. Where was the dictionary? The word was in there somewhere, unreachable among all the others, but at least it wasn't -- dissolved? no, what was the right word? lost? -- the way it was in his brain.

He was very, very hungry. The refrigerator was very, very far away. When he rolled sideways and put his feet on the floor, it took a long time, and he wondered how his body managed the trick, how the parts of his body coordinated what they did together at the right times and with the right amounts of effort. Who was working the marionette? He was only the audience. His legs were long and rubbery, but they went on automatic. Now it was time to send the vehicle to the kitchen. In a moment he was there, surprised. He hadn't noticed himself cross the intervening space. He stared at the refrigerator, its marvelous smoothness, the highlights reflected from its unmarred white. When he opened the freezer door, it did its little trick -- the light switch stayed stuck for an eyeblink, then popped out with an audible click. The interior light came on like an announcement written in Sanskrit, illuminating all the different foods. They looked as unintelligible as the light. Encrypted. Describing themselves in characters he didn't recognize -- Tibetan, Burmese, Nordic runes? They weren't really there, they were just implied, but he could write them down if he tried. If he imagined them. He wished he could understand their reports, but he didn't know the alphabets, or the vocabulary. Everything was unintelligible, but he didn't mind. The food was a set of advertisements for itself, richly and meaninglessly hilarious.

He took out a container of frozen strawberries. He couldn't figure out how to open it. It was one of those oval cardboard containers. Finally he cut the top off with a knife and dumped the strawberries in a bowl and took them back to the bedroom. Cheryl was asleep. He dumped the bowl on her snatch. She woke with a scream. She saw what he'd done, and said, "Eat them. Eat me. Both." He smeared the juice on her and licked it off. He put the strawberries in her vagina and sucked them back out, one after another. Hot pussy, cold strawberries. Cheryl moaned and grabbed his hair. She was tearing it out at the roots, but it wasn't painful, it was happening to someone else's head. In a while he stopped eating the strawberries and concentrated on eating her pussy. After she came, she rolled over to the edge of the bed and sighed and fell asleep with one arm hanging off the edge. He ate the rest of the strawberries from the bed with his hand. His fingers were sticky with a mixture of strawberry juice and Cheryl juice. His face was sticky with them, too, like some sort of soda fountain concoction: "I'll have a black and red". He laughed. The taste of the strawberries and Cheryl's pussy was weird. He pulled a pubic hair out of his teeth. Maybe he could talk her into shaving her cunt; then he could get a really good look at it. The sheets were a mess. The carpet next to the bed was spotted red. Cheryl was asleep again. Her mouth was open. He stood with his penis an inch from her mouth and masturbated. When he came, he watched the cum as it hit her mouth and nose. Some of it went in her mouth. She woke up and saw his penis in front of her eyes, dripping, and brushed her hand against her lips and felt his semen. She spit.

"Come here." She beckoned, smiling. When he leaned down, she punched him in the eye. "You're a freak," she said.

He laughed and got back in bed. She fell asleep again. Fun and games. There was always tomorrow morning. He looked forward to some Technicolor dreams in the meantime. His last thought before falling asleep was to hope she hadn't given him a black eye. Probably not. It was a weak punch because the angle was bad.