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Show 210 "What are verities?" Sean asked. Across the vaulted and raftered dining room, Hunt saw a woman eating alone who he took to be a former friend. The sighting jolted him the length of his spine; blood rushed into his head. His brain felt stammering. "You all right?" His father, across the table, checked. Whatever breath there was to draw, Hunt drew in. "I thought somebody was a friend," he said; "but they weren't." He tried it differently: "Somebody who I thought was a friend wasn't." "Hmm," his father said. "Almost looked like your heart." "Yes," Hunt said abstractly. "Appearances." He looked again. The woman clearly wasn't the woman he had thought her to be. "Losing my sight," he said to his father. "Nonsense," his father said; "it just moves around a little as you get up in years." Still, Hunt felt he was being abandoned by images. They all took cameras, after lunch and rode out in the car, Hunt's forsaken vision seeming to persist. "Antelopes!" Sean announced, pointing, though Hunt could not see them. "Trumpeter swan!" Hunt's father, spreading a hand out, almost magically, down a slope toward a pond. But shadows at best floated on the surface of his father's vision. Hunt felt frightened. He felt threatened in a way that he had never quite felt threatened before: threatened not by too much any more, but by absence, by vacancy, by a hole. Everything sped to vanishing points, and the whole spatial world was distance, "Stop the car!" Hunt heard Sean ask. And not seeing the far, marsh-grazing bison, he pulled to the side. "C'mon, Grampa!" And Hunt heard two |