Albatross

"I take up the little dog-eared, black and white photograph and gaze at it yet again. He could be anybody: but I know he's of me, mine. As I put it down again on the rough table by the bed, lines from a Chinese poem are in my mind - 'Let me go down next year with the spring waters And search for you to the end of the white clouds in the east.'" Barnaby Marechal knows he has a choice: search for the son he abandoned as an infant many years ago, or risk psychological meltdown under the burden of an unpaid moral debt.