My old neighborhood had become a hollow place of blackened brick and faded gray clapboard, peopled by phantoms from my past, by vanished friends, by deceased neighbors, by the aging effigies of my parents in their final, precipitous plunge into decrepitude—by everything I thought I had broken free of, the dust I thought I’d stirred for the last time, the chains I thought I’d cast off one evening, ten years before,
