By now it was late September; I had tracked the passing days in the obsessive belief that if I measured the time, it wouldn’t really be lost. [...]

After two days of reading, I had tottered from the library into the empty husk of “downtown,” across the river from our house, nearly all of whose commerce had been leached away by malls far to the east of the river, out by the interstate. My mother beeped her horn from the parking lot across the street. But I held still for a minute, clutching my bookbag, letting the smallness and meagerness of this forgotten place pour in around me. Rockford, I now saw, was a city of losers, a place that had never come close to being famous for anything, despite the fact that again and again it had tried. A place revered among mechanics for its universal joint was not a place where I could remain. This was clear to me at age twelve: my first clear notion of myself. I was not Rockford—I was its opposite, whatever that might be. I decided this while standing in front of the public library. Then I crossed the street and got in my mother’s car.

But we were grinning. There was no sense of failure; only this giddiness, as if we’d broken free—finally, somehow—from an onerous fate. We swam to the shallow end and looked at the sky. The air and water felt identical in temperature, two different versions of the same substance. It was strange and good to be naked in the pool where normally you had to wear a bathing cap. Clouds floated past the moon, milky, mysterious, and I heard a boat on the river below and thought, I’m happy. This is happiness—why was I looking for anything else? Ellen floated on her back, water pooling around her breasts, and no one had ever looked more beautiful to me. I reached for her. It was as if she had known I would, as if she’d reached for me, too. We stood in the water and kissed. Every sensation of desire I had ever known now amassed within me and fought, demanding release. I touched her underwater. She felt both familiar and strange—someone else, but like me. Ellen flinched and shut her eyes. For once, I had some idea of what to do. She clung to me tightly, then collapsed, trembling, her arms around my neck. When she laughed, I heard chattering teeth. We moved to the pool steps and sat, our bodies underwater, just our heads and necks above, and I took her hand and put it on me. She was tentative, afraid, but I kept my hand on hers until my heart snapped and my head hit the concrete behind me. We lay there, my head pounding, a lump forming on my scalp that would hurt for a week, and when the water made us shiver we got out of the pool and dried ourselves off with our clothes and spread them on the grass and lay on top of them and began again, more slowly now. Still, the intensity was punishing—we’re killing each other, I thought. We’re killing something. Afterward, we lay half-asleep, and finally Ellen said, “We could teach these assholes a thing or two,” and we laughed and got dressed and walked back to Ellen’s house, talking thoughtlessly, as if nothing had changed. We were best friends.

Why didn’t I urge my friends to bring me casseroles and groceries and lounge with me on my sectional couch? Because I was weak. Oh, yes, that is the time when you need people most, I assured myself as the silence thumped at my ears. But you have to resist. Because once they’ve seen you like this, once they’ve witnessed your dull, uneven hair and raspy voice, your hesitancy and cringing need for love, your smell—the smell of your weakness!—they’ll never forget, and long after you’ve regained your vitality, after you yourself have forgotten these exhibits of your weakness, they’ll look at you and still see them.

A few months ago, he told me, a booker at Elite had spotted a beautiful, starving Hutu refugee in Time. Somehow, through Doctors Without Borders, this booker managed to track the refugee down and fly her and her eight children to New York, where “Hutu,” as she was known (her name having been deemed unpronounceable) promptly shot covers for Marie Claire and Italian Vogue and garnered an avalanche of publicity for Elite. Not to be outdone, Laura, the CEO of Femme, noticed a beautiful North Korean girl in a story about famine.

“She says to me, ‘Oscar, get me that girl,’” Oscar said, in a perfect imitation of Laura’s heavy Czech accent. “So I embark on this mad goose chase, coming home from work and ordering dinner for my Korean translator, Victor, so the two of us can start calling North Korea, where it’s already the next day, looking for the girl in the picture. After a week of this we track down her father, and Victor tries to explain that we want to fly the girl in the New York Times picture to New York, her father thinks we’re threatening to kidnap her, he’s begging us, No, please, I have no money … Lord give me strength to go on! Anyhow, she’s living in my guest room as we speak. Five-foot-one.”

There are lots of ways to find casual sex, but I had a favorite routine. It began with dining alone at one of several East Side restaurants near my apartment, places frequented by businessmen and diplomats with some connection to the United Nations. I would order a salad and wait for a glass of wine to arrive at my table. Then I’d either wave my thanks, or, if I found the man attractive, make my greeting slightly warmer, so that he knew he was welcome at my table. I kept conversation to a minimum; if I let it go on long, I’d found, the man ceased to be attractive no matter what he looked like.

“Right,” Harris said gloomily. Forget the odd tidbits he’d saved for their collective amusement: the fiber supplements made from kudzu leaves; the permanent sunscreen. He remained in a state of perpetual astonishment at how efficiently the combined presence of his wife and her brother could transform a business he’d spent the better part of his life creating—a business whose success had attracted pollsters and politicians from every major party; that had bankrolled hand-painted Italian tiles, private schools, Ellen’s new olive-green Lexus and the gargantuan mortgage payments on the house occasioned by Moose’s legal debts—into a lousy, grubby way to make a buck. What are they doing that’s any better? he protested silently.

Then, without warning, the parties stopped. Moose began to read, grinding his unpracticed eyes against page after page, groaning his way through books with an exertion that made him sweat (he’d read so little in his life), and gradually more ease, reading through the night, returning books to the Rockford Public Library in secretive piles. His fixation was the evolution of technology, wheels and gunpowder and smelting, the ramp device the Romans used to board the Carthaginian fleets, the history of clockmaking, the printing press, the chronometer, longitude. And glass—glass he returned to repeatedly, that magically liquid solid that had made possible eyeglasses, telescopes, microscopes, all manner of visual discovery; glass that in myth had surrounded Alexander the Great in the form of a bubble, allowing him to visit the bottom of the sea. For Moose had sensed that a terrible reversal was in progress, a technological disaster whereby the genius of the Industrial Revolution would be turned on people themselves; whereby human beings would be assembled from parts just as guns and boots and bicycles had been once.

Ellen glanced at Moose and found him watching her, but when their eyes met, he looked away. She understood. Looking into her brother’s eyes seemed to confirm an unbearable truth that only the two of them recognized. Of all her many regrets: not getting out of Rockford and seeing the world when she was young and unencumbered; marrying too early; not taking Ricky to the doctor the moment she’d first spotted those fingery bruises on his legs—her mind spasmed late at night in a frenzy of terror and regret when she measured the chasm between the life she’d imagined for herself and the one she was living—of all those regrets, her brother’s transfiguration still felt like the most shocking, most inexplicable loss.

“Down,” Ricky said. Charlotte set him on the grass and took back her sandals. As she paused to put them on, Ricky stampeded toward the grown-ups, yelling something, pitching a pinecone at Jessica, who was walking a little ahead with her sister. It hit the back of her skull, and she shrieked. And now came the inevitable laughter, twirling like ribbons into the warm night. Charlotte looked at the sky, its cryptic, heedless promises filling her with delight. It was already August. In that old orchard where Scott Hess had driven her, the pears must be fully ripe, if not already gone.