For two days they had dressed my father in nice new clothes and walked him through the gardens and sat him in the bright dining hall and filmed him from a dozen angles, generating a whole silent library of footage.

Then they had checked him out, taken him away, and begun the long con: cashing the thirty-five-hundred-dollar checks I wired every month, and rationing out those two days of video, one carefully timed clip at a time, for six months, so that I would go on believing my father was safe and cared for while he lay on cinder blocks by the canal.

I stood in that administrator’s tasteful office, holding the printout of a forty-eight-hour residency I had paid twenty-one thousand dollars to believe in, and I understood that I had been played for a fool by the two people I had trusted most in the world — and that the person I had cast as the villain of my life had been, the entire time, the only one telling me the truth.

There is a particular vertigo to that moment, and I have never found the right word for it.