five long years after his sisters left him , and his girl left him , blaise had been stuck with his old man , who was stuck in his own inertia , brought on years before by the death of his wife and the sudden replacement of vacuum tube electronics with solid state circuitry - for he was a tv repair man - and the events conspired to make a man whose brain had grown up dancing on electrons and unraveling their physics now collapse - a man who had grown up marveling at yoking electrons into order , only temporarily , ever , only momentarily making use of their capriciousness to spring a word to souls across the ether - to bring a song , a sermon , a bit of news , a warning - yoking invisible angels utilized slightly to dance on glowing orange filaments of vacuum tubes , each with a message and their own joy of being - all the joys of his life left the old man at once - the wife his one and only love succumbing to a cancer that left her a dried dish-rag shell of herself , then disappearing from the shell , hammering his own powerlessness into him at every turn and then leaving him abruptly alone , a daughter who for no good reason blamed him and another who wanted to stand by him but , finally , could n't ( not spitefully but from the deeper unconscious drive to live and be herself and escape the toxicity of an atmosphere of decay ) - it had been five long years with blaise and his father alone , his father increasingly withdrawn to that dry paint-peeling house and his electronics shack out back - alone alone , straining at headphones and listening for signals from everything that had abandoned him - straining for a whisper of reassurance , for one last will and testament from the airy angels who had danced with him so graciously before when he was young , waiting on a whisper from god that he still loved him - no whisper came .