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point, which was that I missed your grandfather already, I missed his goodnight kiss on my forehead, his goodnight kiss had always been like a door clicking open, the door to sleep clicking open in my head, he would kiss me on the forehead and I would fall asleep, like a magic trick. Without it, I did not know how to sleep. In the middle of the night I saw a light outside my window, a bright light that wasn’t the sun. I got out of bed and looked into the front yard, the light hung there at the street, it was a foggy night, the light glowed white, I pulled on some clothes and went downstairs. Officer Mary lay on her back on the sofa, not snoring but breathing deep and loud, her hair sticking out all over the place, her badge resting on the coffee table. I stepped through the front door into the darkness and fog. The bright light stayed where it was and I made my way toward it. All kinds of ideas went through my head, I remember thinking I had seen your grandfather at his typewriter earlier when it had only been Officer Mary, I wondered whether this light could have been a visitation, the goodnight kiss, even, that I had been missing, there seemed to be no other explanation for it. Only when I was past it, only when it wasn’t blinding me any more, only then could I see that it was mounted on a tripod, there was a video camera and a tripod. The bright light was on top, there was a white van, too, with one of those dishes on a pole sticking up from the roof. I went to the front of the van and looked in the side window, two empty seats. I went to the back windows, they were tinted, it was difficult to see through them, there was a whole command center in there, switches and televisions, one of the televisions showed the morning news, or what would be the morning news if anyone was sitting at the desk, and another showed the view from the camera with the light on it, which was a view of lit-up fog with the dim outline of my house in the background. On the floor of the van was a pile of clothes, which turned out to be two people, a man and a woman, doing what men and women do, which is something no one should interrupt, I let them be, I let them go on. I went back to bed wondering why they were in front of my house. As I said, I am a slow absorber. Plus, I had never done anything newsworthy before.
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    I lay in bed and tried to sleep and eventually dawn came, then the sounds of machinery, then the reporter talking to the camera in front of the house, somehow her clothes were not at all wrinkled. From the bathroom window I could see a mini-excavator, they were scraping away the soil, they had come to unbury your grandfather. Officer Mary waited for me at the bottom of the stairs. She had pulled her hair into a ponytail, her shirt was wrinkled, her badge was missing, she had forgotten to reattach her badge, she looked as if all that sleep had tired her out. She said she had tried to stop them, she said they didn’t really want to do it, it was the law, it was the law that made them do it, they were like a big rock at the summit of a steep hill, they had been knocked into motion. I stepped outside, I stepped out the back door. The guy who was operating the mini-excavator, I knew him, he was a friend from Madera, his name was Freddy, one of his legs was shorter than the other, I waved at him but he just lowered his head. People were arriving by the carload, there were people everywhere. The authorities pulled your grandfather’s makeshift coffin, their words, out of the ground and they put it on the back of a flatbed truck, the funeral director didn’t want to get his hearse dirty, the wood was caked with dirt but you could see the craftsmanship, the grapevine stakes held everything together perfectly, anyone could see the work that had gone into it. Most of Madera had come to watch and those who weren’t there were seeing it on the news at home. I caught a glimpse of Wilfredo’s blimplike arm hanging out