The rooftop was littered with broken glass and scummy puddles of meltwater and little pebbles and a slurry of decomposing leaves, and there, yes, there were the footprints, just as advertised. He patted the antenna box absently, feeling its solidity, and he sat down cross-legged before the footprints and the beaks and the legs. There were no tooth marks on the birds. They hadn’t been eaten, they’d been torn apart, like a label from a beer bottle absently shredded in the sunset. He pictured Davey sitting here on the synagogue’s roof, listening to the evening prayers, and the calls and music that floated over the Market, watching the grey winter nights come on and slip away, a pigeon in his hand, writhing.
He wondered if he was catching Bradley’s precognition, and if that meant that Bradley was dead now.
Bradley was born with the future in his eyes. He emerged from the belly of their mother with bright brown eyes that did not roll aimlessly in the manner of babies, but rather sought out the corners of the cave where interesting things were happening, where movement was about to occur, where life was being lived. Before he developed the muscle strength and coordination necessary to crawl, he mimed crawling, seeing how it was that he would someday move.
He was the easiest of all the babies to care for, easier even than Carlo, who had no needs other than water and soil and cooing reassurance. Toilet training: As soon as he understood what was expected of him—they used the downstream-most bend of one of the underground rivers—Benny could be relied upon to begin tottering toward the spot in sufficient time to drop trou and do his business in just the right spot.
(Alan learned to pay attention when Bruce was reluctant to leave home for a walk during those days—the same premonition that made him perfectly toilet-trained at home would have him in fretting sweats at the foreknowledge that he has destined to soil himself during the recreation.)
His nightmares ran twice: once just before bed, in clairvoyant preview, and again in the depths of REM sleep. Alan learned to talk him down from these crises, to soothe the worry, and in the end it worked to everyone’s advantage, defusing the nightmares themselves when they came.
He never forgot anything—never forgot to have Alan forge a signature on a permission form, never forgot to bring in the fossil he’d found for show-and-tell, never forgot his mittens in the cloakroom and came home with red, chapped hands. Once he started school, he started seeing to it that Alan never forgot anything, either.
He did very well on quizzes and tests, and he never let the pitcher fake him out when he was at bat.
After four years alone with the golems, Alan couldn’t have been more glad to have a brother to keep him company.