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diminished by the square’s storming of the senses and detected malevolence or Promethean impudence in the molten progress of the news tickers and in the fifty-foot visages that looked down from vinyl billboards and in the twinkling shouted advertisements for drinks and Broadway musicals, I always regarded these shimmers and vapors as one might the neck feathers of certain of the city’s pigeons—as natural, humble sources of iridescence. (It was Chuck, on Broadway once, who pointed out to me how the rock dove’s gray mass, exactly mirroring the shades of the sidewalk concrete and streaked with blacktop-colored dorsal feathers, gratuitously tapers to purple glitter.) Perhaps as a result of my work, corporations—even those with electrified screens flaming over Times Square—strike me as vulnerable, needy creatures, entitled to their displays of vigor. Then again, as Rachel has pointed out, I’m liable to misplace my sensitivities.
    Lying on her side in the darkness, Rachel said, “I’ve made up my mind. I’m taking Jake to London. I’m going to talk to Alan Watson tomorrow about a leave of absence.”
    Our backs were turned to each other. I didn’t move. I said nothing.
    “I can’t see any other way,” Rachel said. “It’s simply not fair to our little boy.”
    Again, I didn’t speak. Rachel said, “It came to me when I thought about packing up and going back to Tribeca. Then what? Start again as though nothing has happened? For what? So we can have this great New York lifestyle? So I can keep risking my life every day to do a job that keeps me away from my son? When we don’t even need the money? When I don’t even enjoy it anymore? It’s crazy, Hans.”
    I felt my wife sit up. It would only be for a while, she said in a low voice. Just to get some perspective on things. She would move in with her parents and give Jake some attention. He needed it. Living like this, in a crappy hotel, in a city gone mad, was doing him no good: had I noticed how clinging he’d become? I could fly over every fortnight; and there was always the phone. She lit a cigarette. She’d started smoking again, after an interlude of three years. She said, “It might even do us some good.”
    There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. Mornings we awoke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself overnight. Evenings, after Jake had been put to bed, we quietly ate watercress and translucent noodles that neither of us could find the strength to remove from their cartons; took turns to doze in the bathtub; and failed to stay awake for the duration of a TV show. Rachel was tired and I was tired. A banal state of affairs, yes—but our problems were banal, the stuff of women’s magazines. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women’s magazines.
    “What do you think? Hans, say something, for God’s sake.”
    My back was still turned to her. I said, “London isn’t safe either.”
    “But it’s safer, Hans,” Rachel said, almost pityingly. “It’s safer.”
    “Then I’ll come with you,” I said. “We’ll all go.”
    The ashtray rustled as she stubbed out her cigarette. “Let’s not make too many big decisions,” my wife said. “We might come to regret it. We’ll think more clearly in a month or two.”
    Much of the subsequent days and nights was spent in an agony of emotions and options and discussions. It is truly a terrible thing when questions of love and family and home are no longer answerable.
    We talked about Rachel giving up her job or going part-time, about moving to Brooklyn or Westchester or, what the hell, New Jersey. But that didn’t meet the problem of Indian Point. There was, apparently, a nuclear reactor at a place called Indian Point, just thirty