In a spasm of tender brotherly emotion out of nowhere, I resolved to telephone my sister. In the time it took to look for and not find her number the episode passed, to my relief. It wasn't a frothing of conscience, or a gnawing obligation, but a genuine feeling for my sister, for the person that she is, not just her sisterness. Normally this kind of sentiment towards members of my family is only produced by forcing myself to imagine their untimely deaths, in a train derailment, say, or a thermonuclear blast in the atmosphere directly above their house. I then feel a surge of affection, tears well up, I feel an unbearable desire to have seen their shining faces one more time, what a fool I've been to let the years roll by so complacently, that sort of thing. Once in a while correspondence will do it, although there hasn't been much of that lately.

I'm not fooling myself, I know that should something really happen, the feelings will be there, and be "real," whatever that ultimately means. And something always really happens. If I got a call tomorrow all the old attachments (and the clotted emotional ooze that comes with them) will be restored to 1987 levels, just like magic. These are the haunted Indian burial grounds on top of which we merrily erect our gleaming adult personas. You can't go home again because you're never really permitted to leave in the first place.