WCXX

"Where is Pete?" her son cried out at visits she made alone, his face scarlet with acne, swollen and wide with the effects of medications that had been changed then changed again, and she said Pete was busy today, but soon, soon, maybe next week. A maternal vertigo beset her, the room circled, and the cutting scars on her son's arms sometimes seemed to spell out Pete's name in the thin lines there, the loss of fathers etched primitively in an algebra of skin. In the carousel spin of the room, the white webbed lines resembled coarse campfire writing, as when young people used to stiffly carve the words peace and f--- in park picnic tables and trees, the C three-quarters of a square. Mutilation was a language. And vice versa. The cutting endeared her boy to the girls, who were all cutters themselves and seldom saw a boy who was one as well, and so in the group sessions he became popular, which he seemed neither to mind nor perhaps really to notice. When no one was looking he cut the bottoms of his feet with crisp paper from crafts hour. He also pretended to read the girls' soles like palms, announcing the arrival of strangers and the progress toward romance –"toemances!" he called them – and detours, sometimes glimpsing his own fate in the words they had cut there.

Now she and Pete went to see her son without the jams but with a soft deckle-edged book about Daniel Boone, which was allowed, even if her son would believe it contained messages for him, believe that although it was a story about a long-ago person it was also the story of his own sorrow and heroism in the face of every manner of wilderness and defeat and abduction and that his own life could be draped over the book, which was noble armature for the revelation of tales of him. There would be clues in the words on pages with numbers that added up to his age: 97, 88, 466. There were other veiled references to his existence. There always were.

They sat at the visitors' table together and her son set the book aside and did try to smile at both of them. There was still sweetness in his eyes, the sweetness he was born with, even if fury could dart in a scattershot fashion across them. Someone had cut his tawny hair – or at least had tried. Perhaps the staff person did not want the scissors near him for a prolonged period and had snipped quickly, then leaped away, then approached again, grabbed and snipped, then jumped back. At least that's what it looked like. It was wavy hair and had to be cut carefully. Now it no longer cascaded down but was close to his head, springing out at angles that seemed to matter to no one but a mother.

"So where have you been?" her son asked Pete, giving him a hard stare.

"Good question," said Pete, as if praising the thing would make it go away. How could people be mentally well in such a world?

"Do you miss us?" the boy asked.

Pete did not answer.

"Do you think of me when you look at the black capillaries of the trees at night?"

"I suppose I do." Pete stared back at him, so as not to shift in his seat. "I am always hoping you are OK and that they treat you well here."

"Do you think of my mom when staring up at the clouds and all they hold?"

Pete fell quiet again.

Her son continued, studying Pete. "Have you ever watched how sparrows can kill the offspring of others? Baby wrens, for instance? I've been watching out the windows. Did you know that sparrows can swoop into the wrens' house and pluck out the fledglings from their nests and hurl them to the ground with a force you would not think possible for a sparrow? Even a homicidal sparrow?"

"Nature can be cruel," said Pete.

"Nature can be one big horror movie! But murder is not something one would expect – from a sparrow. All things can be found in the world – but usually you have to look for them. You have to look! For instance, you have to look for us! We are sort of hidden but sort of not. We can be found. If you look in the obvious places, we can be found. We haven't disappeared, even if you want us to, we are there to –"

"That's enough," she said to her son, who turned to her with a change of expression.

"There's supposed to be cake this afternoon for someone's birthday," he said.

"That will be nice!" she said, smiling back.

"No candles, of course. Or forks. We will just have to grab the frosting and mash it into our eyes for blinding. Do you ever think about how at that moment of the candles time stands still, even as the moments carry away the smoke? It's like the fire of burning love. Do you ever wonder why so many people have things they don't deserve but how absurd all those things are to begin with? Do you really think a wish can come true if you never ever ever ever ever ever tell it to anyone?"

On the ride home she and Pete did not exchange a word, and every time she looked at his ageing hands, clasped arthritically around the steering wheel, the familiar thumbs slung low in their slightly simian way, she would understand anew the desperate place they both were in, though the desperations were separate, not joined, and her eyes would then feel the stabbing pressure of tears. The last time her son had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor's words, morbidly ingenious. He might have succeeded but a fellow patient, a girl from group, had stopped him at the last minute. There had been blood to be mopped. Once her son had only wanted a distracting pain, but then soon he had wanted to tear a hole in himself and flee through it. Life was full of spies and preoccupying espionage. Yet the spies sometimes would flee as well and someone might have to go after them in order, paradoxically, to escape them altogether, over the rolling fields of living dream, into the early morning mountains of dawning signification.

There was a storm in front and lightning did its quick, purposeful zigzag between and in the clouds. She did not need such stark illustration that horizons could be shattered, filled with messages, broken codes, yet there it was. A spring snow began to fall with the lightning still cracking, and Pete put the windshield wipers on so that they both could peer through the cleared semicircles at the darkening road before them. She knew that the world was not created to speak just to her, and yet, as with her son, sometimes things did. The fruit trees had bloomed early, for instance, and the orchards they passed were pink, but the early warmth precluded bees, and so there would be little fruit. Most of the dangling blossoms would fall in this very storm.

When they arrived at her house and went in, Pete glanced at himself in the hallway mirror. Perhaps he needed assurance that he was alive and not the ghost he seemed.

"Would you like a drink?" she asked, hoping he would stay. "I have some good vodka. I could make you a nice White Russian!"

"Just vodka," he said reluctantly. "Straight."

She opened the freezer to find the vodka, and when she closed it again, she stood waiting there for a moment, looking at the photos she'd attached with magnets to the refrigerator. As a baby her son had looked happier than most babies. As a six-year-old he was still smiling and hamming it up, his arms and legs shooting out like starbursts, his perfectly gapped teeth flashing, his hair curling in honeyed coils. At 10 his expression was already vaguely brooding and fearful, though there was light in his eyes, his lovely cousins beside him. There he was a plumpish teenager, his arm around Pete. And there in the corner he was an infant again, held by his dignified, handsome father, whom her son did not recall because he had died so long ago. All this had to be accepted. Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected change of the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same regardless. Tenderness did not enter except in a damaged way and by luck.

"You don't want ice?"

"No," said Pete. "No thank you."

She placed two glasses of vodka on the kitchen table and there they sat.

"Perhaps this will help you sleep," she said.

"Don't know if anything can do that," he said, with a swig. Insomnia plagued him.

"I am going to bring him home tomorrow," she said. "He needs his home back, his house, his room. He is no danger to anyone."

Pete drank some more, sipping noisily. She could see he wanted no part of this, but she felt she had no choice but to proceed. "Perhaps you could help. He looks up to you."

"Help how?" asked Pete with a flash of anger. There was the clink of his glass on the table.

"We could each spend part of the night near him," she said.

The telephone rang. The Radio Shack wall phone brought almost nothing but bad news, and so its ringing sound, especially in the evening, always startled her. She repressed a shudder but still her shoulders hunched and curved. She stood.

"Hello?" she said, answering it on the third ring, her heart pounding. But the person on the other end hung up. She sat back down. "I guess it was a wrong number," she said, adding, "Perhaps you would like more vodka."

"Only a little. Then I should go."

She poured him more. She had said what she'd wanted to say and did not want to have to persuade him. She would wait for him to step forward with the right words. Unlike some of her meaner friends, who kept warning her, she believed there was a deep good side of him and she was always patient for it. What else could she be?

The phone rang again.

"Probably telemarketers," he said.

"I hate them," she said. "Hello?" she said more loudly into the receiver.

This time when the caller hung up she glanced at the number on the phone, in the lit panel where the caller ID was supposed to reveal it.

She sat back down and poured herself more vodka. "Someone is calling here from your apartment," she said.

He threw back the rest of his vodka. "I should go," he said and got up and headed for the door. She followed him. At the door she watched him grasp the front knob and twist it firmly. He opened the door wide, blocking the mirror.

"Good night," he said. His expression had already forwarded itself to someplace far away.

She threw her arms around him to kiss him, but he turned his head abruptly so her mouth landed on his ear. She remembered he had done this evasive move eight years ago, at the beginning, when they had first met, and he was in a condition of romantic overlap.

"Thank you for coming with me," she said.

"You're welcome," he replied, then hurried down the steps to his car, which was parked at the curb out front. She did not attempt to walk him to it. She closed the door and locked it, as the telephone began to ring again. She turned off all the lights, including the porches'.

She went into the kitchen. She had not really been able to read the caller ID without reading glasses, and had invented the part about its being Pete's number, though he had made it the truth anyway, which was the black magic of lies, good guesses, and nimble bluffs. Now she braced herself. She planted her feet. "Hello?" she said, answering on the fifth ring. The plastic panel where the number should show was clouded as if by a scrim, a page of onionskin over the onion – or rather, over a picture of an onion. One depiction on top of another.

"Good evening," she said again loudly. What would burst forth? A monkey's paw. A lady. A tiger.

But there was nothing at all.

After VN

***

Interview: Lorrie Moore tells Gaby Wood that her story began life as a shadow of Nabokov's tricksy tale 'Signs and Symbols'

"Every story has to work on its own, even if it's leaning on another," Lorrie Moore told me earlier this week, speaking about "Referential", the story published above.

Moore is a master, the author of four story collections and three novels, and needs little introduction. But you may have wondered, as you reached the end of "Referential", what the words "After VN " meant. Others among you will have heard echoes of Vladimir Nabokov's story "Signs and Symbols" (1948) straight away.

"I had read the story many times before," Moore explained, "but then suddenly one day I read it and it inspired a kind of shadow story inside my head."

In the Nabokov story, an elderly Russian couple sets off to visit their son in a sanatorium. They never see him; when they arrive they are told he has attempted to take his own life and that a visit might disturb him.

"I wondered what would happen if the parents actually made the visit to the son or if the adult couple weren't actually married, etc," Moore said. "So I wrote something that tracked the Nabokov closely but also did its own thing. I wasn't sure if this was even proper or permitted as an homage. I included some language from the story, since I didn't want anyone to think I was hiding something. I only wanted to honour the original and its power both as story and as inspiration."

Nabokov's story begins: "For the fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind." Moore's story begins: "Mania. For the third time in three years they talked in a frantic way about what would be a suitable birthday present for her deranged son."

What is that first word – that first sentence, "Mania" – doing there? Apart from providing a wonderfully staccato opening, and setting up the "frantic" nature of the visitors' concerns, it is part of something else. You might say the story doesn't open there, but begins instead with the title, the gap between that and the first sentence operating as a line break would in a poem: "Referential/ Mania".

Referential mania is the name of the syndrome Nabokov's unseen character suffers from. An invented disease, it is described in "Signs and Symbols" as a delusion that makes the patient believe everything around him refers to his own existence. Among the cryptanalytic interpretations of that story is the suggestion that referential mania is contagious, and has been passed on to the story's readers, who are compelled to read clues into its every aspect (the title, of course, being nothing but an encouragement). So Moore's story might be thought of as a brilliant late stage of the disease – it expresses, as she put it, "a contagion brought about by another story".

While some borrowings are direct, others are lovely or grim transpositions.

In many ways Moore's story is darker, more intimate, less resolved. There is a broader range of bad news the final phone call might bring. The mother is split between difficult relationships – with a troubled son and an outgoing lover; in that sense, "Referential" also refers to other work of Moore's.

There is a footnote-like link between Moore and Nabokov beyond their stories. Moore did the graduate work that led to her first story collection at Cornell University, where Nabokov had taught decades earlier. "I'm not old enough to have been at Cornell at the same time Nabokov was," she said. "Though I once attended a dinner where the food was prepared in a saucepan supposedly owned previously by one of Nabokov's mistresses (then sold in a yard sale)." Moore admitted that this might have been apocryphal. "But it made for a fun dinner."

The Telegraph bookshop (books.telegraph.co.uk; 0844 871 1514) is offering Bark (Faber, £14.99) for £12, and 25 per cent off all of Lorrie Moore's backlist