January marks the anniversary of several family catastrophes. I keep trying to laugh about it, to applaud the humor of the general bloodletting.

The impulse to laugh when things are really bad is a congenital defect—or a Darwinian asset, depending on how you look at it. My parents started it, and my three sisters and I can’t stop. For a time last January when I was very ill, my sister Betsy slept next to me, and when she woke every few hours to give me my medicine, we tried to get each other to laugh: to let late night guffaws ring hollow in our chests, relieved and loud, the body echoes of sobs. Our contest of wits had no bounds: sick beds, Emergency Rooms, stiff phone calls home. No patient went unparodied; no villain went unskewered.

But this anniversary’s impulse has been to evade anything that gives me joy. I’ll take succor, mostly via a suburban jimjilbang, but I don’t want to laugh and I want to be alone. I’m a lackluster employee, coming in late and crunching data slowly, and without a valid lunch break I’ve slipped on my midday Smithsonian museum going.

Last week I felt an urge to head to the Hirshhorn, so I slipped out of my cube mid-afternoon. Walking through the museum’s tinted revolving door, I felt awkward in the building, like an unfaithful friend. I scanned the galleries’ offerings and found that I had almost missed an entire exhibit. There were only two days left.

I hurried up to the second floor and wandered all of the exhibit’s rooms and hallways, skimming paintings, films, and installments. I came to a dark room with a bench and a black wall. A humming projector chugged from a sconce somewhere. It flashed white words on the wall:

IT HAS VARIETY

IT CAN CHANGE

SOME OF IT IS STRANGE

SOME OF IT CAN NEVER BE KNOWN

IT CAN COMPLETELY CHANGE IN AN INSTANT

IT CAN CEASE TO EXIST AT ANY TIME

Words spoke and disappeared. They were not questions; they were not answers. They were more like tones that rang to fill and stretch an unknown aural space, or a voice that sang, at once, of somewhere else and of itself.

I thought of the silent hand that reached down to write on the wall at King Belshazzar’s banquet, of the singsong foreign phrase the hand wrote, similarly strange and enchanting: it has been counted and counted, weighed and divided. Only Daniel could divine it. Only my father could explain it. As a child, I had asked him again and again to tell me that story, to make sense of the ghostly hand of God.

I found my parents’ handwriting on the wall not long after my mother was hospitalized for the same illness that sent her back to the hospital last winter. That first time, I must have been seven or eight. My parents had been fighting and fighting, and although things were quieter when she went away, the house still thrummed with all that had been said and done. Rummaging through the study closet one day while she was gone, I came to the blank sheetrock back wall and saw the words: You just don’t know when to start!

My mother had written it. My father had scribbled something back. She had replied, and he had written again. It appeared that the secret conversation had been going on for some time.

I crouched on the floor, reading and re-reading their words. The banter was nonsensical, playful, as their interaction often was. They were fighting, but they were dashing back and forth, spying out, searching for each other. I believed then, as many children do, that I could see and judge and join in everything of my parents’ lives. Reading the wall, my throat tensed in the way that it did when my father kissed my mother, when he reached out for her hands, when, in the midst of a fight, she bent her head against his chest for him to hold her. I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted that embrace.

I ran to the study and grabbed a bitten pencil off my father’s desk. I ran back to the wall and wrote, in huge letters, MENE MENE TEKEL PARSIN! I lugged Betsy, who was two years old, at most, and Julie, her twin, into the closet. I gave them the pencil and let them scrawl on the wall: lumpy circles, jabbed lines. What can a tiny child draw? Nothing, really. That, I think, was the joke’s real joy: that we thought we had anything to write on the wall, anything to add to my parents’ solitary play that mimicked and, in some ways mocked, God’s sovereign hand and all the pain that it had dealt.

Later, my sister Joni added a few drawings of her own, so that all four of us girls had snuck into the wall’s fight. Soon, our parents found our uninvited replies, and they laughed.