In a sense, his childhood no longer exists. Everything is now a part of what he did as a man. Because of that, I can no longer distinguish the ordinary from the forbidding—trivial events from ones loaded with foreboding. When he was four, and pointed to his belly button and asked what would happen if someone cut it out, was that merely an ordinary question from a child who had begun to explore his own body, or was it a sign of something morbid already growing in his mind?
