Phillip looks down from the balcony at Kenny as though he were a picture at an exhibition and asks himself what the title of the painting would be, if he were allowed or inclined to name it. The small boy reaches up with his right hand as if to touch the pieces of art that appeal to him: the corrugated floating pieces of a mobile or anything brightly coloured. It is a busy hand, one that has already been thrust indiscriminately and against Phillip’s repeated warnings through the opened window of an uptown cab on the way to the museum, so to wave to passersby or empty alleys. The security guards in the museum are accustomed to someone like Kenny and step forward to dissuade him from making contact; with a little head fake straight from the basketball court they convince Kenny, who puts his hand back down at his side and hurriedly walks past them. But Kenny cannot be stopped, not for long. Phillip can see that from his vantage point overlooking the foyer through which the small boy now roams.  
      “Kenny,” he says, with enough authority to stop the boy in his tracks. He thinks that perhaps it is not the tone but the sound of a voice from nowhere that freezes him. “Stay right there, Kenny.”
      He ducks down a stairway so if and when Kenny looks up he will not see anyone and perhaps remain amazed and immobile for another five seconds, which he has budgeted as travel time down the hallway and across the Inuit sculpture exhibit, not taking into account the possibility of the security guard’s caution for running through the museum. Kenny is still planted there, looking around for the voice in the vast space of the hall, eyes seeming to swell in his large head as he recognizes Phillip emerging from the crowd.  
      “Where were you Bud?” he says and pats him on the shoulder, the contact like a game of tag for Phillip, tension released now that he has found him again and can begin to relax. He checks Kenny to see if he has been in any scrapes in the twenty minutes they have been separated. Old scar over the bridge of his nose, chocolate ice cream stain on his windbreaker, newly acquired as of this afternoon, but not bad, not bad at all—evidence of a little indulgence. Kenny wipes the dew-drop of saliva from his lower lip, quivering now with what Phillip hopes is excitement.  
      “I saw colours.”  
      “Yeah, they’re pretty, aren’t they?”  
      “Yeah.”  
      “Where did you go, Kenny?”  
      “To see more colours.”  
      They are linked again. Phillip focuses on the zipper at the base of the windbreaker that he is trying to fasten. Kenny’s eyes are fixed on Phillip’s downward glance.  
      “I only have one rule, Kenny. You know that, don’t you?”  
      Kenny, worry entering his face, stares back, as if fearing he has been caught; there are many rules, but what is the one rule?  
      “The one rule is that you listen to me when we are out like this. You enjoy the colours, don’t you?”  
      “Yes.”  
      “And you’d like to see more, wouldn’t you?”  
      He nods.  
      “Well, if your Mom finds out how you’ve been acting she won’t allow us to come out like this.”  
      Phillip then raises his hands as if to gesture calm down because Kenny begins to hyperventilate and gives warning of imminent, seismic crying.  
      “No, no, no. I won’t tell her. Don’t worry. Not if you promise to be good.”  
      Kenny nods again, folding one hand into the other as if he were trying to make something disappear.  
      Phillip looks at his watch and suspects that the minute hand may be broken, but that’s museum time he thinks, that’s Kenny time. Another hour and by then they will be in the cab and once there the day is over really, because Cheryl will be back at the apartment by that time, smiling and waiting for them, not upset at the stain of chocolate ice cream. These things come off in the wash, she will say, kissing Kenny on the forehead and glowing at him.  
      He and Kenny have this rhythm, he says to himself, as if practicing for Cheryl, this cadence of the day. He gives Kenny the ground rules and then allows him to explore to his heart’s desire. He reins him in if there is something that appears to be dangerous, or in this situation, if he becomes rambunctious around priceless works of art.  
      “You should have been a dad.”  
      “Hasn’t been in the cards,” he said, doing up the windbreaker that morning as she left for the office to finish up some work for the Alvarez deposition. She was apologetic; it was, after all, unplanned, and she wanted Phillip to know that she wasn’t trying to take advantage of him. Phillip replied with magnanimity that it was no problem, that he and Kenny needed to spend more time together, and checked his watch.  
      The great hall of the museum is full today, echoing confidences and whispered asides until there is that tunneling roar, a level of diffuse noise that has always been considered an efficient means of torture. He feels it now inside his head, a billowing sensation, perhaps because he slept-in this morning; a migraine grumbles near the surface, caressing his left eyeball. Kenny sits beside him on the bench, watching the older kids walk past them and into the sculpture gallery. A squadron of girls laughs about something, not Kenny though, and the indifference is mutual as Kenny is now re- interested in his watch. He takes it off and begins waving it, the strap flapping, now whipping the watch more furiously and giggling with delight.  
      “Kenny.”  
      He helps Kenny put the watch back on, not an easy task as Kenny wants to help and twists his hand around enough so that the maneuver demands increasing patience and dexterity .  
      “Don’t move your hand, Kenny. That’s it, keep it still.”  
      He notices the delicacy of Kenny’s hands, how the last two fingers are even smaller, part of the overall picture. He turns the hands over to find the extra crease along the palm that should be there, if what he’s read is correct, and there it is. He draws his finger along the fold, the Simian crease, a name out of a zoological museum. Kenny has all the other lines, of course, perhaps not as long or well developed but certainly a fairly normal inventory of loops and markings. To Phillip, Kenny doesn’t look like a lot of other kids with Down’s syndrome. His eyes are more normally shaped and his mouth opens only when he is tired.  
      The watch is secured and they sit in silence. Out of the throngs Phillip watches two women emerge: one older and the other in her twenties, a granddaughter likely, given their resemblance. For a moment he thinks that he meets the glance of the younger one, fine-boned and in any other era doomed to be called patrician, but no eye contact is made. The pair continues arm in arm, staring out at nothing, blind planets moving in space. Phillip returns his gaze to the far wall and feels the muscles of his face form an impassive smile.  
      Phillip prides himself on his inscrutability. It was Delores, only months before she left, who remarked on his lack of emotion as she confided to him the details of her mother’s recent surgery (a colostomy revision or bowel obstruction as he recalled; something viscerally painful and recurring, like the harridan herself). She was wrong, of course. It was less of an exercise in control than sincere indifference (and even then probably not indifference but simply perplexity at being chosen a confident), but he thought about it and concluded that Delores was half-right and perhaps even complimentary: maybe he did have an inner editor, mulling the input and pulling the skin tight on his face. It was not that he was insensitive—no, he felt things as deeply as anyone, it was just that one had to admit that he was an ever-fixed mark, an iceman. That reticence had been most recently challenged when he first went to pick up Cheryl and was introduced to Kenny without warning. With the boy grabbing him by the fingers and dragging him to see his room, he understood that this was a test, that his facial expressions and body language would be as closely monitored as whether or not their knees touched in the cab ride or the position of her head as they said goodnight. He said nothing about it; he was determined to maintain an absolute air of nonchalance, a naturalistic kind-hearted indifference as though she had told him her child had allergies or dyslexia.  
      “He wants to play opposites with you, “ Cheryl said as Phillip was plunked down at Kenny’s play-table, “you say something and he will say the opposite.”  
     “I don’t understand.” 
   “It’s a game, he’s learning about opposites.” 
     Phil paused, a playful smile brought to his lips for her to see. Sure, he would play. “The dog runs across the yard.”  
    Kenny stopped, intense effort easing into an answer.  
    “Two cats sit under the pool,” the boy said and clapped his hands, “go, go.”  
     “Then you do the opposite to his sentence.” Cheryl prompted, smiling at the two of them.  
      Christ, he thought, trying to remind himself of what Kenny had said, she needs to get out more. “No birds fly above the desert.” 
      “All bees fall below my dinner.”  
      The child roared with a paroxysmal laughter that frightened Phillip, who rose from the chair with the studied look of a good loser, the boyfriend beatified. He smiled at her and she beamed back.
      He could feel her eyes on him all through the meal and it wasn’t until dessert arrived that she addressed the topic. What did he think of Kenny? He remembered saying that he thought he seemed like a good kid. He was going to have to bring it up; not to would mean that he was simply too proficient an actor, no doubt with an eye cast toward the offstage door, or an ignoramus. He told her that it must be difficult raising him alone, especially with her job at the law firm and then asked if he went to school close by. She smiled.  
      His head is filling with water, the hydraulic pressure evenly transmitted now to every part of the inner table of his cranium. His eye is especially animated now, toggling in its socket with each heartbeat. He reaches into his jacket pocket, promising grand things for the first deity that will help him procure a tablet of tylenol,fiorinal, butorphanol, anything, but his fingers flutter through the darkness and space and find nothing.  
      Kenny likes him but Kenny likes anything that isn’t threatening or comes with a day- glow super ball or a day out. It takes his complete energy to spend the afternoon with Kenny because with Kenny comes many subsidiary considerations: general appearance upon return, risk of damage (to or by Kenny) and risk of loss. This is the most grievous because all others can be explained by his ward’s Kennyness. Something shatters or rips and all Cheryl has to do is look at him, and he could be doing anything, laughing, simpering, idling in obliviousness, and she melts; all infractions forgotten. It is, of course, not as simple between Cheryl and him, he thinks, and more than ever he finds himself re-examining every line of dialogue, cross-referencing their conversations with those of mutual friends and monitoring his gestures to eliminate anything that would make her wary of continuing with him, of talking about moving in and making it official.  
      It is not the way he imagined it was going to be. Even before he met Delores he had allowed himself a theoretical family: a boy and a girl with ages beyond infancy or toddlership, avoiding the aching ears but with nothing yet hormonal. They were not faces seen as much as situations: soccer games and other recorded incremental triumphs. After his divorce he was increasingly less able to conjure domestic scenes and finally, when pressed, could only summon memories of fellow summer campers, vague histories of bed wetters and small animal torturers and the placid, interminable boredom of childhood.  
      He should have channeled his anger, focused his energy on his job, but had neither anger or energy to muster and so one dull misery shadowed the other. He drifted from a job writing advertising copy, where he already had a cardboard box packed and sitting in his desk drawer in acknowledgement of evolving mutual disaffection, to something a friend of his set up for him writing text for new web pages, which lasted the two months it took for him to cultivate a withering contempt for what he felt were the conspicuously body- pierced and minimally brain-damaged teenagers introduced to him as his coworkers. Now he taught English to people who had to learn the language to stay in the country and would stare at him with their own vague and disquieting hunger. Behind him, he left a trail of addresses of diminishing prominence: second floor greystone to condo sublet and finally a studio with a midget fridge that he did not bother to stock with beer, as he had vodka in the cupboard. He woke up when he met Cheryl. She saved him and he knew it. He looked around and saw squalor and how far he had fallen and if he did not take control, he told himself, he would eventually wake up to a life he could not change.  
      And so Kenny would be his family, eventually, or so he hoped. He was spending every weekend with them, sometimes just with Kenny, like this, when Cheryl had a deposition to prepare and sometimes all three of them, as Kenny did not take being left with his aunt with any sentiment less than a face of rage and betrayal that would haunt Cheryl for the rest of their weekend together. And so he cleaned up Kenny’s split lips and took him to the men’s washroom when they were all out together and felt through it all that Cheryl was watching and surveying a future that he hoped to share.  
      His pulsating head is now only worsening and if he does not find anything to calm it he will be spending the cab ride home with his head out the window. He turns to Kenny to convince him to go to the gift shop where they must sell analgesia (the place was, after all, loaded with children) and finds the bench empty, its cushion slightly dimpled in the middle.  
      He stands up to find his head has acquired a gravitational center of its own, wobbling on his neck as if expressing a desire to separate itself, hop off the shoulders and role into a patch of quiet darkness under a chair. He looks around for Kenny, who cannot run that fast—this is what he has been reduced to: calculating search perimeters like a warden with a pack of hounds in tow—and thinks he may hear the voice, the little nasal grunt, in the exhibit of surrealist art. The halls of granite and marble begin to scintillate as though they were aberrantly electrified: a beauty, a travesty, something not up to code. Lines appear like tungsten grills in the center of his field of vision before they fan out and pulsate. He walks through the central hall where the works would be prominently displayed if he could see them, which he can partially, he thinks. The colours shimmer and disperse and might be the drippings of surrealists for all he cares. Cheryl has talked him into this exhibit before, something to which he has agreed under the ‘expand your horizons’ clause of blossoming relationships— a thorough tour of the Berlin dadaists, the subtle changes in composition that defined Arp’s later works, Tanguay’s use of colour, blah blah blah. He now knew one experience that was improved by a head full of pulsatile agony. In a darker moment, one spent smiling into a wine glass and absorbing the nuances of recent changes in the tax code from one of Cheryl’s associates, he had fancied a quicker exit: the supernova of an aneurysm for which they could have carted him out with some dignity under a nice quiet death shroud. Phillip generally bemoans his chattiness because his silences play like a car alarm and he must not have concealed his antipathy well that night. Cheryl was upset and was quiet all the way home that night—thinking, reconsidering—he supposed. He was appalled when he caught a glimpse of himself in the rear-view mirror of the cab that night; did he look like this to her? He saw an expression that he imagined gave away too much, a face like Kenny’s, of someone familiar and pitiable.  
      She told him to let go of her but he did not want to let go. He grabbed her wrist and she told him to left go of her. But it was her; she pulled away from him, twisting the wrist and visiting upon it a mark that they used to call an Indian burn but now was just an abrasion. It was just an abrasion. She wrapped her hand around her wrist and told him to leave, and that’s all he could remember of her until she called later that week. What had come over him? she wanted to know. He thought about the sequence of events that had led them to this; Kenny was in the next room: there were no words. It was difficult for him to recall it, it took on the feel of a physics problem of many tricky steps. She turned away from him and he did not want her to. He grabbed her wrist because he did not want her to turn away. She turned away because she was finished speaking to him. Not the word but the lack. An extra foot-pound of torque applied—he thought of the situation in its most physical sense, because how did anything else make sense? An extra chromosome and not the lack of love, a spreading depression in his brain, easing him into a migraine, an extra-foot pound and an abrasion. There was no intent in it, he told her, and he felt she believed him, after a time.  
      Kenny was his savior; a happy lump of a kid lodged in his gullet. As part of his rehabilitation after the wrist he took him to the Thanksgiving’s Day parade, fighting the crowd and the oppressive gaiety to place Kenny at curbside as the comic dirigibles floated over them, penitently introducing the boy to the characters that were before his time. No, Bullwinkle and Rocky were not brothers, not that he knew of. A large cartoon cat, the one that is forever seeking lasagna, was pulled off course by a gust of wind that had tunneled down the avenue. Phillip recoiled and prepared to bolt, thinking the balloon was coming down on top of them but Kenny just stood and squealed approval at the floppy shell.  
      The world is larger. The people are reduced to cartoon characters and then ants scuttling along the floors of this vast palace. Around him the walls inflate and the little globs of art fold into themselves. He hears the wind, as though emergency doors have been thrown open and the museum is flooded with sweet, stinging air. In the distance the gift shop flutters like an oasis. He walks toward the shop, the world swirling slow around him, his arms weightless in the eddy currents. He can hear it all now: every conversation they have had, the point and counter point, the sound of her breathing as she dreams. He can hear Kenny, who after evading his search now spontaneously materializes at his side in the gift shop, asking for dollyclocks. Dollyclocks, he repeats and looks at Phil as though he were the idiot, because he cannot understand. Is it a toy? Is it a happy meal from one of those movies he is now forced to sit through? What is a dollyclock? he says to Kenny, trying to keep him in his visual field. Kenny points to a bin of remaindered books with torn covers and out-of-date calendars, mouthing the words that he now cannot hear.  
      He looks toward the desk because that is where the analgesia should be sold but Kenny is on his sleeve, tugging and continuing his chant. I understand, he says, but he cannot understand this little boy with his face and his mysterious needs. In the center of the scintillations his vision bleaches to a neural grey and Kenny’s face is gone, blanked out like an innocent in the gaze of the camera. He locates the boy among the milkiness and colours. He reaches for the windbreaker and pulls.  
      “Let’s go.”
     He is visited with a magnificent agony: there is blood in each step. It hurts so much that he is giddy, and he laughs at the very thought of frog-marching the little runt out from under the discriminating gaze of the local art doyennes, through the rows of tchotchkes poised only an axe-handle’s length from him, away from books that promise culture but deliver pictures. He wonders to what type of provocation the security staff respond most proficiently. It cannot be the caterwauling child, common currency in these halls, nor is it the tantrum or gestures of physical force; these are mere accoutrements of guardianship. It may be the haste with which they leave, suggesting theft of a particularly valuable coffee table book or worse yet, child abduction, but the staff cede passage when they see him because they know that look, the visage of blood and ache.  
      The little boy bawls in the darkness of the cab with Phil hunched over beside him, listening to the arteries pound and the city muffling its roar. He feels the sway of the cab as it negotiates traffic. The swelling subsides and he can again open his eyes. Outside his head the world has become quiet, even with the boy sobbing for his dollyclocks. His vision begins to clear and he leans over to Kenny, rubbing the boy’s arm and examining the windbreaker with its tear at the shoulder and cursing the sharp edges of cabs and doorways and the like.