You make row upon row of Play-Doh pinch pots in your father’s consulting room while he types invoices. He uses a typewriter: it’s 1982 and computers haven’t made their domestic debut. Your father has one—a Commodore 64, with a tape deck for loading programs, and a joystick—but the parameters of its use have only extended to a game of Donkey Kong and one joyous moment when he caused a tiny neon ball of pixilation to bounce across the screen.

The typewriter clacks and you abandon the pinch pots for the sandpit. This is a room designed for children to play in, your father has told you. His job is to observe them; much like a doctor looks in your throat, holds a stethoscope to your heart. Listens. The children who come here to play have been upset in some way, and after some time here—weeks, you think; years are unimaginable, things that stretch out ad infinitum—they feel better. By watching them play, your father explains, he can interpret what it is they are feeling, as a historian can decipher hieroglyphics. Once, a child threw a spade at his head, he tells you.