This Census-Taker: A Novel

After I saw him kill the dog I was more afraid of being alone with my father than I’d ever been of anything. But over the course of months every fear, however strong, ebbs or changes. My father treated me with the same flustered abstraction with which he always had.

You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won’t be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once. Inherit a second book from someone else, to continue it, and you can have a conversation with what’s already there. Write on scraps and in its margins.

The dog was born to descend this way. Millions of years ago, the stone had split to receive it. My father stared down into the hill with such focus it was as if he had done all of this, this killing, because he had to see an animal fall.

I sat up then because I thought I saw a new green, outlines of tough vegetation, neither needles nor fibrous leaves but spines on bunched and distinct knotty skin, misplaced amid the gray and those dusty greens I knew, swaying, pushing purposefully above the hillside growth at the edge of my sight as if deliberately positioned to be glimpsed agains

That time I didn’t see my father. I didn’t find him particularly subdued or melancholy when we returned. But I suspect from my mother’s rush that this was another occasion when he killed a person.

I knew he was taking the dead bird to the rubbish hole, that he’d throw it up so it would curve as it had to and descend; I knew that day my father was feeding only the darkness.

On some days bigger and more intricate things than birds passed over us through that thin air, bustling and busy too high for me to make them out. If I was in his sight when they did so, my father would try that smile again so I thought he wanted to explain something to me, but he never did.

This is my second book. I started on my first book three years ago, in a distant country, and on my third book a year after that. Now at last it’s time for me to start writing this second book. The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that’s on

He brought me a drink of sweet herby milk while I lay in bed and he stared at me until I drank it. I hoped it wasn’t poison. He watched me with desperate fondness.