The eye man came to town with a group of doctors and nurses who carried suitcases filled with medicine and Bibles. They were accompanied by a troupe of boys and girls who dressed up like daisies and frogs and sang religious songs in English. The eye man wasn’t a doctor himself. And neither the doctors and nurses nor the boys and girls who dressed up like daisies and frogs knew, or would tell me, what he was. He was simply “the eye man.” He made eyes.

On a hot summer day when my brother was eight months old, my father carried him to the top step of the back porch, lifted him over his head, and tossed him into the weeds. Benny wasn’t hurt badly, considering: his left wrist and elbow were broken, his shoulder was dislocated, and he had a serious concussion. My father took him to the hospital and sat up with him all night. We didn’t find out until about six months later that, besides the broken bones, Benny was deaf.

It was 4 A.M. and I was walking home from the bar with another man’s wife. I’d been in love with her since she was a little girl, but my good friend had snapped her up very young. I never had a chance. They’d been married ten years, had two boys, and were settled in a house in the town where I grew up. Her husband worked long hours, swam Olympic laps of beer. I’d been traveling, hadn’t seen her in a long time. My parents had just separated, abruptly and disastrously, and I’d taken my father’s side. My mother had left him for another man.

Most of us twiddled our thumbs in childhood — that is, interlaced our fingers and rotated our thumbs around each other — unconscious of our participation in an ancient practice dating back centuries within the Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Sufi traditions. Khalil Patuknon, fourth-order Sufi and Confucian adept, will instruct in the proper method of twiddling, based on his twelve-year retreat in the Khartoum Mountains.

Sheila says the truckers yell awful things, things would make me turn red as a beet if I heard, but I never hear. Sheila says sometimes they even punch me a little, but I just write faster. I don’t know. I never remember anything that happens once my Talent grabs hold.