“Are you all right?” his friend Liston will ask him.
He will lift his head; he will clap his hands once. Everyone will look at him.
In a moment, David will tell his favorite riddle: the famous one, the family one, the one about truth and lies. The one that Ada will tell her daughter, a generation later, as a puzzle before bed.
I can stop the story here. I can pause it, in the Unseen World. I can halt the action before David blunders, fails; I can save them all from what comes next.
I never do. I let him speak. Look: he is speaking.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks, most importantly, to my father, Stephen Moore.
Thank you also to Christine Parkhurst, Rebecca Moore, Donald Moore, and all of the Caseys, for your support; to Seth Fishman, Jill Bialosky, Maria Rogers, and Will Scarlett for your guidance; to Patricia Mitchell, Nancy Connor, Tom Williams, Dan Afergan, Rob Geller, Chris Yap, Sumi Wong Yap, Max O’Keefe, Chiara Barzini, David Morris, Adriana Gomez-Juckett, Becky Auld, Geoff Parkhurst, Dave Cole, and most especially Brian Glusman, for your knowledge, advice, and expertise, any flaws in the translation of which are entirely mine; to the American Academy in Rome, for the time and space to write; and, as always, to Mac, for everything.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmothers, Cheryl Parkhurst and Susan Moore.