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How right he’d been, all those months, to conceal the many Warning Signs from Caroline! How accurate his intuition that a putative deficit of Neurofactor 3 would sap the legitimacy of his moral arguments! Caroline was now able to camouflage her animosity toward him as “concern” about his “health.” His lumbering forces of conventional domestic warfare were no match for this biological weaponry. He cruelly attacked her person; she heroically attacked his disease.

Building on this strategic advantage, Caroline had then made a series of brilliant tactical moves. When Gary drew up his battle plans for the first full weekend of hostilities, he assumed that Caroline would circle the wagons as she’d done on the previous weekend—would adolescently pal around with Aaron and Caleb and incite them to make fun of Clueless Old Dad. Therefore on Thursday night he ambushed her. He proposed, out of the blue, that he and Aaron and Caleb go mountain-biking in the Poconos on Sunday, leaving at dawn for a long day of older-male bonding in which Caroline could not participate because her back hurt.

Caroline’s countermove was to endorse his proposal enthusiastically. She urged Caleb and Aaron to go and enjoy the time with their father. She laid curious stress on this phrase, causing Aaron and Caleb to pipe up, as if on cue, “Mountain-biking, yeah, Dad, great!” And all at once Gary realized what was going on. He realized why, on Monday night, Aaron had come and unilaterally apologized for having called him “horrible,” and why Caleb on Tuesday, for the first time in months, had invited him to play foosball, and why Jonah, on Wednesday, had brought him, unbidden, on a cork-lined tray, a second martini that Caroline had poured. He saw why his children had turned agreeable and solicitous: because Caroline had told them that their father was struggling with clinical depression. What a brilliant gambit! And not for a second did he doubt that a gambit was what it was—that Caroline’s “concern” was purely bogus, a wartime tactic, a way to avoid spending Christmas in St. Jude—because there continued to be no warmth or fondness for him, not the faintest ember, in her eyes.

“Did you tell the boys that I’m depressed?” Gary asked her in the darkness, from the far margin of their quarter-acre bed. “Caroline? Did you lie to them about my mental state? Is that why everybody’s suddenly being so agreeable?”

“Gary,” she said. “They’re being agreeable because they want you to take them mountain-biking in the Poconos.”

“Something about this doesn’t smell right.”

“You know, you are getting seriously paranoid.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

“Gary, this is frightening.”

“You’re fucking with my head! And there is no lower trick than that. There’s no meaner trick in the book.”

“Please, please, listen to yourself.”

“Answer my question,” he said. “Did you tell them I’m ‘depressed’? ‘Having a hard time’?”

“Well—aren’t you?”

“Answer my question!”

She didn’t answer his question. She said nothing more at all that night, although he repeated his question for half an hour, pausing for a minute or two each time so that she could answer, but she didn’t answer.

By the morning of the bike trip, he was so destroyed by lack of sleep that his ambition was simply to function physically. He loaded three bikes onto Caroline’s extremely large and safe Ford Stomper vehicle and drove for two hours, unloaded the bikes, and pedaled mile after mile on rutted trails. The boys raced on far ahead. By the time he caught up with them, they’d taken their rest and were ready to move again. They volunteered nothing but wore expressions of friendly expectation, as if Gary might have a confession to make. His situation was neurochemically somewhat dire, however; he had nothing to say except “Let’s eat our sandwiches” and “One more ridge and then we turn around.” At dusk he loaded the bikes back onto the Stomper, drove two hours, and unloaded them in an access of ANHEDONIA.

Caroline came out of the house and told the older boys what great fun she and Jonah had had. She declared herself a convert to the Narnia books. All evening, then, she and Jonah chattered about “Aslan” and “Cair Paravel” and “Reepicheep,” and the online kids-only Narnia chat room that she’d located on the Internet, and the C. S. Lewis Web site that had cool online games to play and tons of cool Narnian products to order.

“There’s a Prince Caspian CD-ROM,” Jonah told Gary, “that I’m very much looking forward to playing with.”

“It looks like a really interesting and well-designed game,” Caroline said. “I showed Jonah how to order it.”

“There’s a Wardrobe?” Jonah said. “And you point and click and go through the Wardrobe into Narnia? And then there’s all this cool stuff inside?”