"Not so much a dig this time, Dad. But it is a dinosaur hunt. It may take a couple of weeks."

After a long, long time he says softly, "I see."

"I’m sorry to have to leave you."

Silence again.

"If you don’t want me to go, I won’t."

He rolls his crab-apple head to look at me. He knows I have just lied to him. He knows I am going anyway. What kind of son am I, leaving behind a dying father?

"I’ve got to be on my way now," I say at last. I touch his shoulder, a bony thing covered by thin pajamas. Once the color of summer sky, they’ve been washed and dried to the pale blue-gray of an old woman’s hair rinse.

"Will you write? Send a postcard?"

"I can’t, Dad. I’ll be cut off from the rest of the world out there. I’m sorry."

I pick up my trench coat and head for the door, resisting the urge to look back, to say something — anything — else.

"Wait."

I turn. He adds nothing more, but, after a few eternal seconds, he beckons me closer, closer still, until I am leaning over him, his ragged breath pungent in my nostrils. Then, at last, he speaks, faintly but clearly. "Bring me something to put an end to all this pain. That stuff you’ve got in the lab. Bring me some."

In the comparative-anatomy lab at the museum we’ve got chemicals for killing wild animals: painless clear death for the rodents; amber death for the larger mammals; an incongruous peach-colored death for the lizards and snakes. I stare at my father.

"Please, Brandon," he says. He never calls me Brandy. Brandon was the name of his favorite uncle — some guy from England that I’d never met — and nobody had ever called him Brandy. "Please help me."

I stumble out of the ward, somehow find my car. By the time I realize what I am doing, I have driven almost all the way to the house where Tess and I used to live, where Tess still lives. I turn around, go home, and get very drunk, feeling no pain.