It's a matter of seeing what is there. He saw patterns there, moments in the flow.His pain was radiant, almost otherworldly. He seemed to be in touch with grief, as if it were a layer of being he'd learned how to tap. He expressed things out of it and through it. Even his laughter had a desolate edge. If it was all sometimes too impressive, I never doubted the unsparing nature of whatever it was that haunted his life. Many hours we spent in conversation, the three of us. I used to study Owen, trying to figure him out. He had an unsettling mental force. Everyone was affected by it to one degree or another. I think he made us feel we were among the fortunate ordinary objects of the world. Maybe we thought his ruinous inner life was a form of devastating honesty, something unique and brave, a condition we were lucky to have avoided.Owen was a naturally friendly man, lank, with a long-striding walk. My son enjoyed spending time with him and I was a little surprised at how quickly Kathryn developed a fondness, a warm regard, whatever a woman in her mid-thirties feels toward a sixty-year-old man with a western voice and a long stride.Her eagerness to work amazed and confounded him. She went at it like someone half her age. This was inconsistent with the style of a fading operation. It was a dig that would never be published. From forty people, the first time I visited, they were down to nine. Still, she worked and learned and helped keep things going. I think Owen enjoyed being shamed. He'd emerge from one of his midday swims to find her at the bottom of an abandoned hole, swinging a railroad pick. The high sun funneled in on her, the wind passed over. Everyone else was in the olive grove, eating lunch in the shade. Her attitude was a precious dissonance, something as intimate, pure and unexpected as a moment from his own past, flaring in the mind. I picture him standing at the edge of the pit with a bath towel fastened at the waist, in torn tennis sneakers, breaking out in abandoned laughter, a sound that always struck me as a cue to some deep and complicated passion.