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And so over time Artie no longer taught with the enthusiasm he’d had for many years; he was assigning Confederate soldiers now, and he did not even really care. He did not go to the soccer games anymore.

He now had students who were using ChatGPT to do their assignments. They simply typed in a prompt and out came a paper. He thought it was worse than plagiarism, in a way. The new principal was in favor of using AI, she held a seminar on how helpful it could be in teaching.

And then one day as he pulled into his parking space at the school, Artie turned off the ignition and he sat there; the car made a few final small pinging sounds. He was flooded with a great understanding: He was not fully himself any longer. He could not have described this to anyone, and he could not describe it to himself, but his mind seemed to be increasingly separated from the world: His mind was here, and the world was there. He was on a downward-sloping path, and no matter how hard he would try, he understood that day as he sat in his car that something was going to happen to him and he would not be able to prevent it.

Almost, a sense of peace arrived with this.

It went through his mind faintly: I will not have the free will to prevent whatever is going to happen to me. And his memory of what seemed to him previously to have been a vigorous wonderment at the concept of free will made him smile just slightly now. He left his car and went inside. Going to my fate, he thought. Just going to my fate, that’s all I can do.

During his senior year, Danny Marino had sometimes stopped by to talk to Mr. Dam if he found him alone in his classroom. “Danny, have a seat, sit down!” But Danny was struck that Damn-dam had missed many of Danny’s home soccer games that year. When Danny received his scholarship to a good college four hours away, Damn-dam was just thrilled for him. And after his first year there, Danny had gone to see Damn-dam in early June. Damn-dam was so proud of him, he said. Danny thought that the man looked strikingly older (he had gained more weight), but Danny thought that was just what happened to people at a certain age.

The next year when Danny went to visit Mr. Dam in the school (Danny was excited to tell him about the Shakespeare class he had taken at college) and went to check in at the front office, the woman—she was the new principal, but Danny thought she was the secretary—this woman just shook her head abruptly at Danny and said, “Mr. Dam does not work here any longer.”

Danny was baffled, and as he left the school a young guy—who had been in the office when Danny went in—came out and yelled, “Hey!” Danny turned and walked toward him, as a school bus pulled out with a weary groan.

“Damn-dam went crazy,” the young guy said to Danny. He put his hand to his ear and made swirly motions. “Lost it.”

Danny stared at him. “When?” he finally said. “When did this happen?”

“Like, a few months ago?” The kid squinted at him, the sun was in his eyes, and he tilted his head. “He was teaching, and the students said he just sat there and became all blank, and then he asked them for help. Nobody knew what to do. He hadn’t looked good for a while, he had those old man dirty glasses, I hate that, Jesus, when I get old if I don’t wash my glasses I’m going to kill myself.”

“But what happened to him?” Danny asked.

“Dunno.”

When Evie had received the call from the school that day in early February, she went to get Artie, who was in the principal’s office, and he looked dazed and said only “I’m very tired.” Apparently, he had been teaching his morning class and he’d sat down at his desk and stopped talking. The students had become nervous, asking him if he was all right. “Maria,” he’d said. And then he had said to the class quietly, a few times, “Can you help me, please?”

The next day Evie checked Artie into an expensive private hospital—Evie had her connections. He was there for two weeks before he came home.

With Artie’s permission, his psychiatrist told Evie the following, sitting at a conference table in the hospital:

That Artie missed Rob and Francesca tremendously—“Well, so do I,” Evie had said—and the psychiatrist nodded once and continued.

That when Francesca had had her miscarriage the month before, it had been especially hard for Artie. Evie was irritated. She wanted to say, “It was very distressing to both of us.” (Evie did not care for the psychiatrist, this older man, bald with a huge nose and an indifferent tone of voice.)

That the death of Hoover Lakeland had crushed Artie, starting him on a downhill slide, then Carl LeBlanc retired, and then Anne Merrill did the same.

That the state of the country weighed on him every day. Artie had said that others seemed able to live with it, but for him—because he had studied history, because he had loved history—it weighed him down always, particularly after those protests in which people were killed in the streets.

Evie drummed her fingers on the conference table.

That the new principal had ultimately—And here Evie cut the psychiatrist off. “I know all this,” Evie said, and the psychiatrist put his hands up. The psychiatrist added, as he got up to leave, that the antidepressants would take a few weeks to kick in. Which made Evie crazy, because she knew that too.

—

When Artie came home from the hospital, he was quiet, mostly sitting in the living room and reading, although Evie soon noticed that a page would go unturned for many days. “Artie, what are you going to do?” She asked him this, and he looked up at her and said, “Oh Evie, I’m just tired. I’ll be all right.”

But he had called Rob early one morning—forgetting to use the burner phone—and he had said, “Rob, turns out I’m real depressed.”

Evie had taken the phone from him and walked away with it while she spoke to their son privately.

“You need your medication adjusted,” she said to Artie one day a few weeks later. And he shrugged.

His medication—she had noticed this—made him seem to exist behind a thick pane of plexiglass, as though she could not quite find his eyes.

Later that day he said to her, “Evie, it has to be very hard living with a depressed man.”