At the time, Miles was in his second year of law school at the University of Chicago and living with Jack Stevens, who had a job in banking. Their mother visited often—dating someone in Chicago, she told Miles, who liked that she kept the refrigerator stocked with fresh fruit. But the person she was sleeping with, it turned out, was Jack Stevens.
“Are you sure?” Alfred asked when Miles hurled this thunderbolt over the phone from a Holiday Inn he’d decamped to immediately upon discovering the truth.
“I can never think about high school again,” Miles slurred. “Or home. Everything is ruined. It’s… finished. Because it was all leading up to this.”
“Look,” said Alfred, thrust into the uncharacteristic role of Calming Agent, “it’s not like anyone died.”
“It is… One. Hundred. Percent. Like someone died,” Miles said, tightroping the words. “It’s like all of us died. You. Me. Mom. Dad.”
“What about Ames?” Alfred asked, in an effort at levity. They all had a tendency to forget Ames.
Miles’s enraged yell made him hold the phone away. “You don’t get it, Alf! You’re too weird, you’re like Mom. Nothing means anything to you.” And Miles began to weep, the first time Alfred could remember hearing his older brother cry. “They ruined everything,” Miles sobbed. “There’s nothing left.”
The next day, Alfred received an email from Miles: “Hey Alf, sorry about the emotionalism on the phone. Who would’ve taken me for a nostalgic? Life goes on. Yours, Miles.”
Miles didn’t speak to their mother for over a year, at which point her relationship with Jack had ended. In the eight years since, Jack Stevens’s name had not been spoken in Alfred’s hearing. But he’d heard Miles cry in pain, and treasured the memory.
In some middle school science class there had been a unit on pain. Scientists studying pain had to inflict it without causing bodily harm, which they did using cold; hands thrust into frigid water hurt unbearably but are not damaged. This detail had so fascinated Alfred that he’d filled a bucket with water and ice cubes in the family basement and held his forearms under the surface until their acute aching almost made him puke. Yet none of it left so much as a mark.
Not long after the Maple Tree pre-K debacle, Alfred heard a scream outside his West Twenty-eighth Street window—not a yelp or a cry but a full-throated shriek that swamped him with shivery fear. He sprinted outdoors and found a woman cradling a brown Labrador puppy that had slipped its leash and run amid the wheels of a truck before managing to bumble free unscathed. Alfred stared at the puppy and its owner. There had been volume, emergency, terror. But not even the dog was hurt.
3
Alfred began, on occasion, to scream in public: on the L train; in Times Square; at Whole Foods; at the Whitney. He can recall, with remarkable clarity （for someone who was screaming）， the tableaux of chaotic reaction that followed, although these descriptions are curiously inert for the listener, like hearing someone recount a dream. The exception is Duane Reade on Union Square, because of what happened after: Escorted brusquely from the store by two security guards, Alfred encountered a girl whose look of rapt curiosity had stood out among the panicked shoppers inside. Now she leaned against a wall, apparently waiting for him.
“What were you doing in there?” she asked, the very question thrilling Alfred. Most people would have said he’d been screaming, but Kristen had seen beyond that.
Over latkes and hot apple tea at Veselka, Alfred explained his screaming project. Kristen’s enormous pale blue eyes blinked at him like the wide-open beaks of baby birds as she listened. She was twenty-four, still in the adventure phase of her move to New York City to work for a graphic design firm. Alfred was almost twenty-nine.
“How often does it happen?” she asked. “The yelling. On average.”
“I prefer ‘screaming,’？” Alfred said. “Sometimes twice in a week. Sometimes not for a couple of months. Overall… maybe twenty times a year?”