The Illusion of Separateness by Simon van Booy Page A

kitchen table drawing curved lines. Then he joined those lines and made shapes. The shapes together made words and formed the contents of a letter, which began:
    Dear Mr. Hugo,
    You may not remember, but you once saved a child . . .
    He drank coffee and read the letter over and over until he knew it by heart.
    Then he went outside and sat by the pool.
    One of his dogs trotted out and settled at his feet.
    He thought of the canal, the piles of litter, the old furniture softened by rain, the weeds in summer, the black water upon which barges once entered and left the city. He saw trucks reversing into the loading bays behind the supermarket. He heard the balcony door slide open and felt the aluminum handle, cold in winter. He remembered his old bedroom in Manchester, the racing-car pajamas, the squeaky slippers he wore until his toes poked through, his mother’s low voice and the lullabies that sailed him off to sleep. Jumping on the bed. Playing cars on the rug. Deciding which teddy to get him through the night.
    He stood over the small boy and touched his hair. But the boy did not move—could not feel that he was being remembered.
    Danny sat on the bed and traced the outline of cartoon shapes on the duvet. He stared at the plain sleeping face and felt the churn of dreams within.
    And then Danny felt a sensation he had never before known, an intense pity that relieved him of an incredible weight. And the boy he reached for in the half dark, the head he touched was not his—but the soft, wispy hair of his sleeping father, as a child, alone, suffering, desperate, and afraid.

 
    AMELIA
    E AST SUSSEX, ENGLAND,
    2010

 
    I.
    M OM MADE SURE Philip was home before she came over to break the news about Grandpa John. Dad was there too, and Dave came later with flowers.
    We don’t know exactly the moment, but I talked to him the day before and he sounded fine. We spoke for a long time about the new show that was opening with American photographs lost in Europe during World War II.
    I told Grandpa John how my job was to make the exhibition accessible to the blind. He wanted to know more, so I explained how one of the photographs was described to me as a young American woman posing on a wall at Coney Island, wearing a dress from Lord & Taylor. I would then find a similar vintage dress for the visitors to feel and smell while explaining to them how the photograph was sent in by Hayley and Sébastien Dazin of St. Pierre, France, after they found it as children in the wreckage of an American B-24 bomber in the woods behind their farm. I told Grandpa John about that photo because he flew in a B-24. I explained how I was going to use the model of the B-24 I had in my room—and boast about how it was the plane that my own grandfather had flown in.
    I told him that the museum director loved the name I came up with for the exhibition, and how one of the interns told me she saw a MoMA ad on the side of a New York City bus with the show’s name, THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATENESS , in huge letters. I told Grandpa John all this, and he listened and told me how proud he was. I had no idea that it was the last time we would ever speak.
    P hilip met Grandpa John only once at our wedding in Southampton. They sat talking about the kinds of fish his parents served at the diner growing up.
    He wanted to hear Philip’s story about how we met, and then couldn’t believe it because Harriet proposed to him in Montauk near where Philip’s boat docks. That’s one of the things I loved about Grandpa John—he was always asking questions and trying to make connections.
    P hilip and I flew to England the day after my parents. Dad picked us up at Heathrow Airport and then drove us to Grandpa John’s estate in East Sussex. I was fine on the flight, but when I walked through the front door and could actually smell the house, I realized Grandpa John had died and we were there to bury his body next to Grandma’s.
    Dad and Philip went grocery shopping in the