Excerpt from Rot:
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    I don't worry about my father. He and Irene are in cahoots, and it's something like spying. They whisper. They follow people, they report back. They touch each other on the arm and communicate without speaking. They track whatever is making tracks. She wears him out, but when I caution him on that, he says, Thank god.
    He tells me that, like a Mennonite joining the old church, he’s turning plain, for the end of his life. He will turn plainer and more plain, and when he will disappear. He wants to do nothing. Nothing important, nothing of consequence.
    Purposelessness is next to godliness, he writes on a page of leaves. And he passes the sketchbook across the table for me to see.
    Irene stands behind him and pets his hair. She’s an accomplice to hi drawing, his doing-of-nothing these days. An accompanist. She touches him on the shoulder, she blows at the hair around his ear. My father has such fine hair, Irene uses the word silken and she is right. His hair looks casual, careless. A contradiction to his arms, which are narrow, hard carved things, a twist of muscle down to the wrist from the motion of fieldwork.
     "How can you not love that phrase," Irene says, "manual labor?" She drags her fingers like disks down the back of his hand.
    Sometimes when he sketches a tobacco leaf, just a solitary leaf, Irene says to him, " Draw your hand, too."
    And that's the whole page: the leaf on top; under it, the skeletal back of his hand.
    You can see how she sees. She’ll point to a couple of things and say, "Now that adds up."
    My father says, I could listen to her all day.