Perception

She scribbles in a leather-bound journal, and I like to think I know just what she’s trying to say.

She’s young—perhaps not yet eighteen—and blonde, and what’s probably a great body is covered with baggy clothes. Kind of punky, oversized black pants. Chains. T-shirt advertising a band nobody ever heard of. Thick-framed nerd glasses with lenses than distort her eyes. Ugly-pretty. Like, if this were a sit-com, everyone would make fun of her as an outcast. And then, in the last scene, she’d get a makeover and everyone would mistake her for a super-model. The snooty guy would suddenly fall in love with her, but she would go for the cute but dorky guy who’d always had a crush.

I bet she’s writing about angst. How much she hates the plebians sharing this train car, how no one understands her, how she can’t wait to get away from her family. She’s dreaming of college. She’s ready to ditch her lame high school crowd and meet some mature adults.

Or else, she’s writing poetry. Overwrought poetry full of images of pain. The journal’s leather binding is dyed a rich purple. Her favorite aunt—the only one who understands her—probably gave it to her last Christmas. She eschews the commercialism of the holiday, but she loved this one gift.

I wish I could tell her that everything will be all right, that she will get a little older and life will get a lot better. I imagine we have a lot in common. When the train stops, people start shuffling around. I end up a little closer to her, but she has her back to me. The train starts up again.

She snaps the journal shut and reaches into her pocket. It’s her cell phone. “Yeah, I’m on my way,” she says in a voice far more mature than the one I imagined for her. “Had some great ideas for the website. No, no, I wrote it all down. What? No, I’ll tell you when I get there. God, I hate public transportation. This crazy old dyke was leering at me the whole ride.” She laughs at something I can’t hear. “Yeah, I don’t think so. Anyway, she’s gone now. See you in five.”

The phone goes back in her pocket and she opens the journal again. It’s not poetry. It's computer code. She’s a programmer. The train lurches and she steps back into me. She isn’t the type to apologize for that. It’s a crowded train, after all. But she does turn to see what she’s hit, and the moment my eyes catch hers, before I can say something clever about the human condition, she turns away, squeezes between two men to get closer to the door.

I realize that I am the crazy old dyke, although I am completely sane, and only twenty-eight, and only experimented with girls a couple of times in college. She gets off at the next stop. A guy my age tries to stare me down as I watch her depart. He’s starting to lose his hair, but he thinks he’s hiding that fact with a baseball cap. Probably, he played varsity football in high school, but wasn’t good enough for a college scholarship. Probably he went to his dad’s alma mater, joined the same fraternity, knocked a girl up, paid for her abortion. Now he works in a cubicle. Drinks beer afterward with the guys from his office. Lives for Monday night football.

He smiles at me. I turn away.

The Awful Woman Next Door

There’s an awful woman next door. She doesn’t live there; I think she’s visiting her grandmother, a kindly but slightly demented old lady who insists on feeding a herd of feral cats, which we have neutered, one by one, when we can get charity funding to do so. But this awful woman, she has the voice of a fishwife. She’s always shrieking at someone to do something.

There’s a man she shouts at, and a little girl, and a dog. You can always tell when she’s leaving her grandmother’s. Her voice, piercing, harsh, and loud, jars you out of whatever peace your evening might have had to offer. Usually she’s screeching for someone or something to get in the car.

If she yells at the man, he responds in a voice too low to hear. If she yells at the girl, the girl cries, but she can’t match her mother’s volume. If she yells at the dog, it goes on and on. The dog, gifted with a simple intelligence that tells him to run from that deadening noise, sets off all the other dogs in the neighborhood, but never gives away his position by barking himself.

I feel sorriest for the girl. The man committed to his path by choice, and the dog, at least, gets a nice run out of it, and a moment of the freedom. The girl lacks the agency to choose or to run, but must suffer her mother’s shrill imperatives with nothing but a tiny version of that voice with which to retaliate. Still, it’s disconcerting. There’s a clear view of their driveway from our front door. The woman isn’t physically abusing the girl, at least not in our sight. It just sounds like she is.

Eventually, she stuffs the man, the girl, and the dog into the car and drives off, leaving echoes of angry and canine wails in her wake.

Pierced

Her little sister possessed something that she lacked. The girl couldn’t say, quite, what that thing was, but obviously, her sister was more acceptable. Her sister didn’t mind wearing dresses. Her sister didn’t prefer playing with boys.

Her sister did the things their parents expected her to do.

The girl didn’t do certain things because she didn’t like them. She hated how dresses looked, she hated how they felt compared to jeans, and more to the point, she hated being told to act like a lady. Wearing dresses meant you weren’t to run, jump, shout, fidget, or climb trees. Why would anyone choose to wear a dress, given the attendant restrictions? The little girl accepted the limitation of being a girl; that didn’t mean she must become a lady. It didn’t indicate any compulsory girliness. She was a case in point. If she had been meant to be a certain way—for instance, feminine—wouldn’t she just naturally feel, behave, embrace that label? And not being feminine, didn’t that mean that she wasn’t all the other things they thought she should be, and shouldn’t try to fake it?

Why would they force her to pretend to be something she so clearly wasn’t? They told her lying was wrong, and then they told her to lie to them.

When her sister came home from first grade insisting that she needed pierced ears, the girl wasn’t surprised. Of course her sister would want pierced ears. They were ladylike.

Her little sister got her ears pierced and proclaimed herself pleased with the results. Their parents asked the girl several times if she didn’t want her ears pierced too. The girl was emphatic that she didn’t. It didn’t even have anything to do with not feeling like a girl. Primarily, she despised needles in any form. So she really couldn’t see the point of having instruments of torture applied to her head in order to become more of something she wasn’t in the first place.

Her little sister had her pierced ears for a few months, long enough that she could take out the gold piercing earrings and wear whatever kind of earrings that she wanted. Their parents kept asking the girl if she didn’t really want pierced ears. The girl kept telling her parents she really didn’t want pierced ears. She didn’t care for jewelry, and she didn’t need one more thing to clean. She was, overall, scared of the process. She was not interested in suffering for beauty.

Her parents decided she would get her ears pierced.

She resisted, argued, complained, screamed. She tried logic and she tried volume. They took her to the mall anyway. She fought them all the way to the booth where they pierced ears. She cried.

Her parents said, “Don’t be a baby.” They compared her, unfavorably, to her little sister. They said even a first-grader could do it; there was nothing for her to fear. The girl repeated her objections: she didn’t want pierced ears, she didn’t like needles. Her parents reiterated their argument: she was a big girl and she needed to act like one.

They pierced her ears.

Coda: When the girl got to be a teenager, she horrified her parents by adding six more piercings, five on the left ear and one on the right, using the post of the piercing earring that had inflicted the original insult. She spaced them out over a period of years, snickering to herself as their horror mounted with each new hole.

Aftercare

It happened on October 17, across the street from a haunted house, which meant I couldn’t enjoy Halloween anymore. I had screamed and screamed myself hoarse, and later, the police said they had even heard me screaming, but it was October 17, across the street from a haunted house. Screams filled the air.

Then again, I’m still here, so maybe that means I’m lucky?

Bad enough to give up horror movies, the superior thrill of autumn leaves skittering down the street in a gust of wind, the wearing of short skirts. The real tragedy, though, is giving up that youthful sense of invulnerability, the security that comes from knowing terror is something that happens to other people. Terror happened to me.

That was all more than a decade ago, and I can finally watch scary movies again: a Korean ghost tale, an adaptation of an HP Lovecraft story, some stupid modern slasher flick where gore replaces suspense and character development. Took a while to get over it, but I did. Because, seriously, what’s scary is reality. You want to scare me? Give me a Holocaust memoir. Or how about that scene in the Will Smith movie where he’s newly homeless and he and his kid are sleeping in a public bathroom? Or how about the news?

It was a mistake when I stopped loving Halloween because a crazy man did a crazy thing to me. Halloween is the antidote.

Deadly Sins

The day after his thirty-ninth birthday, Louis decided to give up vice, cold turkey. How long could a man go on tempting fate? His youth had ended; mortality loomed. His bad habits were many, his indulgences excessive: a pack of cigarettes a day, an eighth of marijuana a week. Liquor was his particular weakness. It made him boisterous and funny, popular with his coworkers and women he met in bars, which resulted in frequent promiscuous sexual encounters, despite the potbelly he wore as a result of his love for fried food, sweets, and that most lethal combination of the two, doughnuts.

He would die, soon, and with agony, at this rate. It snuck up on you and—bam!—you were forty. But he wasn’t forty yet. If he could wipe the slate clean, perhaps he could elude the specter of death for a while longer.

Cigarettes were out completely, as was the weed, and the occasional hit of X or bag of mushrooms. Hard liquor was out, and he would limit himself to a single glass of wine or beer a day. Fornication was out. He would not sleep with any woman until he had dated her exclusively for at least a month, and then he would wear a condom every time. He would become a health nut, and join a gym.

For two solid weeks, he remained faithful to his new regime. Mornings, he experienced a clear-headed lack of regret he had not known since before college. Seven pounds dropped from his waist and breathing came easier. With the time and energy he used to spend in bars pursuing women, he cleaned and painted the house, repaired windows and refinished woodwork, even changed the oil and sparkplugs on the car. He felt great; he would live forever.

On the fifteenth day, Jim from accounting persuaded him to take a single hit off a joint. Louis thought, one toke won’t hurt. Just on the weekends. The next weekend he smoked two joints, one each day, and went to Dunkin’ Donuts after the second time.

After a month, his exercise schedule became sporadic. He still worked out, sometimes. Sometimes he had a second drink with the guys from the office. At the same time, he discovered a bakery that specialized in vegan cakes, and enrolled in a healthy vegetarian cooking class at the recreation center. There, he met Joann, a willowy blonde who whispered to him that she still, sometimes, ate red meat. With great restraint, he managed to wait ten entire days before seducing her.

Waiting was a good idea, he thought. Things with Joann heated up. He abandoned his resolutions, sort of. He ate whatever junk food he wanted, and smoked and drank whatever anyone offered him, but only when she wasn’t around. After they got married and had a baby, he didn’t indulge around his daughter, either. Louis became a secret vector of vice. He sinned only on the occasional Sunday afternoon, or when Joann took the baby to her mother’s. He made the most of the occasions, and threw the evidence in other people’s trash.

Louis lived thirty more years. At sixty-nine, he was diagnosed with cancer, terminal. Hereditary. Genetic, the doctor said. “There’s nothing you could have done differently,” the doctor assured as Louis numbered his weak resolve and his many transgressions. “It was in your DNA.”

Townhouse

When I first met Ty, he lived in a little row of townhouses, the first in a block of four, not far from the university. He shared the place with an alcoholic old English teacher who went around quoting Shakespeare as if he didn’t expect anyone else to understand, and smelling of piss. Everyone else in the building was a kid, early twenties max.

Ty and I took to each other like an electric cord to a wall socket. I liked his fit, and he seemed to like the way I made him feel. He got to sample all kinds of new sensations and found them agreeable. He liked my world.

His world didn’t suit me too much. The English teacher stank, and the kids in the other units threw loud parties. Plus, one night, we heard gunshots over the noise of his computer speakers. Ty and the English teacher prowled around the parking lot, but they didn’t see anything. They even called the cops, who poked around too, but they didn’t see anything either.

But then later this girl came around looking for her boyfriend. She was in tears, Ty said. She was sure something bad happened to him. And sure enough, when Ty and the English teacher went around the fence, they found a dead guy in the alley. So they were up all night with the police after all. I had already gone home, before the cops turned up the first time.

That night Ty found out from the guy in the second unit, right next to his, that we could buy weed cheap from the guy in the fourth unit, all the way at the end. It was a sweet connection, for a while. But then unit-two guy, Chad, said that unit-four guy was tweaking, and he wasn’t going to deal with him anymore. He was a disaster waiting for his fifteen minutes, Chad said, and he was going to end up dead, or in jail, or both. He didn’t want to get anywhere near unit-four guy anymore. “I think that meth-head might have shot that dude in the alley,” he said. “The dude was trying to rob him, I bet.” From the outside, you'd never guess what a skeevy place those townhouses were.

After that, Ty was persuaded to move into my place. He’s a tough guy, but he’s not bullet-proof. And anyway, I hated those townhouses.

And sure enough, a couple weeks later, we saw it on the news. Eight police cruisers outside the place, two dead bodies. “Couldn't be Chad, could it?” Ty worried, and texted him.

Chad called right back. “It wasn’t us,” he said. “It was meth-head and his girlfriend.”

“You’re gonna move out now, right?” Ty asked him.

“Hey, maybe it’s gonna be safe around here, now that he’s gone.”

He invited us to a party on Friday, but we ended up not going. We were kind of too old for that sort of thing.

For the Soul

I rough-cut the onions, because I am tired, and hurried, and I don’t eat onions anyway. It’s easier to eat around big pieces. Rough-cut it all. Carrots, celery, garlic. Lots of garlic. A small red pepper, withered in the back of the fridge. Throw the lot into a big pot of water. Plenty of salt. Dill, basil, and parsley from the garden. Add a splash of olive oil; it gives vegetable soup a little meatiness, the mouth-feel of chicken soup. Chicken soup is better for you, really, but I don’t eat meat.

A bowl of broth is all I can manage. My appetite doesn’t run to so much as a Saltine. I sleep.

When I wake up, the sun is low in the west. My head doesn’t pound quite so much, but the ringing of the phone jars it anyway. “Hello?”

“Oh, god, baby, I’m so sick.” His voice drips with pathos. “I can’t breathe. I can’t move.”

Something creaks within me. “You want some soup?”

“That’s sounds great. You have some?”

A half hour later, I’m in his kitchen, short of breath, fumbling with the stove. He leans against the door, his dark hair plastered to his face with sweat.

“Too bad it’s not chicken soup,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say. “I’d make you chicken soup if I had some chicken.”

“I have some chicken.” He pulls a takeaway carton from the fridge. It’s tandoori chicken, bright pink. Why not? I cut it up, add it to the pot. “You are so good to me, baby,” he says.

Even though I don’t eat meat, I have to check, to make sure the soup is OK, and damn him if it isn’t a thousand times better this way.

Saturation

We had this crazy storm last week. They must have been all out of buckets because it was coming down in kegs, and everywhere I went people were swimming through puddles on the ground, although the air was just about wet enough to float in. “Monsoon season,” they said, laughing. The wind blew a thick cloud out of the fountain, so the plaza was twice as wet as anywhere else. Everyone’s umbrella was getting blown inside out at one certain point, like a wind corridor, just like in the Loop. When I got there, the rain penetrated my jacket, my clothes and my skin, but I just turned to one side and my umbrella was blown the right way out again.

Dissonance

I took Psych I and Psych II, which is where I learned about cognitive dissonance, reconciling ideas which are opposite in your mind, but I thought of sensory dissonance myself. It’s when the way something looks or sounds or feels doesn’t match up to what’s really inside it. Like, take for instance, the Pink Floyd song, “Comfortably Numb.” Maybe you hear it on someone’s Dad’s car radio and it seems like a kind of nice song, like a song about relief after pain. But then you actually watch The Wall and you realize it’s not like that at all; it’s just the beginning of the worst freak out for this guy, and things are only going to degenerate for him.

Or like Jenny Snowden, whose acquaintance I also made in Psych I and Psych II. On the outside you never saw a more beautiful creature, her eyes so big and soft, and the way those fuzzy pink sweaters cupped her breasts and the dark opiate of her perfume it’s a wonder I learned anything at all next to that girl. You wanted to believe everything she said, that she never met anyone like you, that it was a safe time of the month, that two people could have a little fun without worrying about the consequences. But then you find out none of that is true, and that’s only the beginning of the deceit and the meanness, and things are only going to degenerate from there.

And now her dad’s got me by the balls and it’s a question of doing the honorable thing or hiding on an island somewhere. I look at her and it’s like these two giant rocks colliding in my brain, her captivating beauty and her castrating bitchiness. Or two even bigger rocks: the knowledge that I’ve chosen to stick around like a stupid puppy dog simpering at its master’s feet, and the knowledge that I’ve chosen the path where dreams die.

Hello, Dolly

Dolly leaned into the thin shadow under the eaves, but the red brick burned her back. The kindergarten playground had big canvas shade structures, but the upper grades had to tough it out under the desert sun with only a couple mesquite trees for shelter.

In her book, Tessa Singer was embracing her fairy heritage to vanquish the Troll of Baby’s Lake, but light reflecting off the white pages needled Dolly’s eyes. She held the book over her head, between her face and the sun. Kaya Green bumped her on purpose and Tessa Singer, fairy princess, fell into the hot dust at her feet.

Dolly rescued Tessa and went inside.

Sometimes you could sit in the lunchroom but it smelled like fish sticks and all you could hear was screaming. After a long, thoughtful drink, she noticed that the hall was empty and decided to be invisible. She walked right past the lunchroom door without the monitors seeing her, and into the courtyard, where there would be peace and quiet and shade.

The courtyard was still too hot. The benches were metal—stupid idea—but she could see into the library, where Mrs. Ketchum was rolling carts around. She tried the door and walked into another world. Mrs. Ketchum had to wear a sweater, that’s how cold the library was.

“Hello, Dolly,” Mrs. Ketchum sang. Adults always thought that was funny, but Dolly forgave Mrs. Ketchum. She did the best story time.

“It’s really, really hot out there,” Dolly said, except she knew it came out, “Ith wewee, wewee hot out thaya,” even though she’d had to go to the speech therapist twice a week since first grade.

Mrs. Ketchum’s eyes sparkled. “And what did you want in here?”

“Just to sit out of the sun and read my book.”

The librarian smiled wider, but her eyes fell in a sad, sorry way. “Go ahead,” she said. Then she went back to rolling her carts around, putting books here and there.

Dolly tried to get back to Tessa Singer and her epic battle with the troll, but they felt very far away now, even though she had almost smelled the sulfur on the troll’s breath in silent reading that morning. Mrs. Ketchum looked happy with her books. Her hair was just the yellow color that a fairy would have.

“Can I help you?” Dolly asked.

“Maybe so. I have to put books on the tables for the kinders to choose from. They’re not allowed to take them off the shelves yet. What books did you like in kindergarten?”

Dolly set Tessa Singer on the edge of the table and walked along the stacks. “Curious George,” she said. “And the one about the dragon who likes vegetables. And that book with the unicorn and the lake.”

“Good, good, good,” said Mrs. Ketchum. She knew where everything was and could just pull a book off the shelf the way you would pick your own backpack out of a pile. “How about Little Critter? Did you like those?”

When they had made all the hard cover books stand up on the tables with the paperbacks in between, Dolly said, “What else can I do?”

“Do you know Dewey Decimal System?”

“No.”

Mrs. Ketchum tried, but Dolly only understood about half of it. They put some books in order. “That’s OK,” Mrs. Ketchum said. “It takes practice. But once you learn, you’ll be able to find any book, any time. Until college. Then you’ll have to learn a new system. Was that the bell?”

It was.

“Come around again sometime and I’ll show you more.”

Dolly grabbed her book and ran back to class.

“Where were you?” Mrs. Vance demanded.

“In the library, helping Mrs. Ketchum.” Forty-six eyes burned her like the sun. She pressed Tessa Singer to her chest like a shield, but then remembered what Kaya Green had said about fifth graders who read books about fairies, and she held the book behind her back instead.

“You know you’re not allowed to wander the building during recess, Dolly.” She paused long enough for Dolly to get to her seat, then tapped the desk. “You were three minutes late. You owe me three minutes of recess tomorrow. And I don’t want you bothering Mrs. Ketchum again.”

Technophobia

David turns the flat black plastic over in his hands, wondering why he stays.

“Davey, are you even listening?” Lance is still sitting across from him, cables snaking from his hands. David hates being called Davey, and he’s afraid he’ll turn to stone if he looks straight on, although Lance is no Medusa. Lance is the most beautiful man he ever met, with blond hair past his ass, and cool blue eyes set in a cherubic pale face.

“It’s a monitor,” David parrots. “I slide the iPod into the dock to watch videos. I plug it into the USB port to recharge it.”

“With this cable, right. But you use this cable if you want to just plug it into a wall socket. And this one goes into your car’s cigarette lighter.”

Why would I be watching videos in the car, David wonders, but he accepts the cables, sets them to the side of his plate, dares to look into Lance’s face. He does not turn to stone. Lance squeezes his hand.

“With all the traveling you’re doing lately, Davey baby, I figured it would be easier than trying to watch on a tiny screen. Do you like it?”

David nods, squeezes Lance’s hand back, blows a kiss for good measure. Lance gave him the iPod, and the laptop, and the cell phone, and he uses them, because when your lover gives you an expensive gift, you can’t let it gather dust in the closet like you do with the ice skates your mom gave you when you turned eighteen, or the waffle iron from your aunt. He uses them, but he doesn’t like them. They are alien rocks, chunks of silicon that betray and befuddle him. Lance never asked him what he did in airports before. David used to enjoy the people watching, the invisible anonymity of airports. It used to be that everyone watched everyone in airports, while pretending to read books. Now everyone is wrapped up in cords and cables, alone in their worlds of music and movies and wifi.

He programs numbers into his cell phone, but speed dial always calls the wrong person. He stores music on his iPod, but when he hits shuffle, it only plays Lance’s techno music. Despite Lance’s best efforts, David fries his hard drive an average of once every nine months. But Lance keeps trying.

Now, Lance smiles his angelic, cupid’s bow smile, brushes the satin hair back from his face, stirs his coffee. David’s cell phone buzzes in his pocket—Lance helped him set it to vibrate—but he’s put on some weight this year, and by the time he drags it out, whoever it is has hung up without leaving a message.

“Who is it?” Lance asks. David shrugs, and Lance reaches, impatient for the device. “Unknown name, unknown number,” he says once he has it, and hands it back again.

David leaves the phone on the table. It’s too embarrassing, trying to get it back into his pocket while sitting down. “You know the theory of resistentialism?” he asks.

“Tell me.” Lance’s blue eyes sparkle, as if he’s actually interested.

“It’s the belief that machines are aware, and they’re hostile to their owners. It’s why copiers always break down when you’re in a hurry. And it’s why everything I touch malfunctions.”

Lance laughs, grabs David’s hand again and kisses his fingertips. David lifts his head, so Lance won’t see his double chin. “That again,” Lance says, laughs. “You’re crazy, Davey baby. Look, machines are machines. They do what we tell them to do. You just have to speak their language.” When he drops David’s hands, he nods at the pile of cables and technology on the table, then glances down at his iPhone, starts tapping on the screen with one hand.

Without looking, he reaches his other hand out for his coffee. David admires the muscles in his forearm, the white skin and golden hair, the manicured fingernails. Lance always smells good, like a baby straight out of the bath, and his clothes don’t wrinkle, no matter how he sits. And Lance never sweats, either, or if he does, it smells like talcum powder.

Lance sputters into his mug, but even that is graceful, like blowing bubbles. “It’s cold,” he mutters, but his mutters are the warm-up scales of an opera singer. His eyes intent on the screen of his phone, he opens the microwave on the counter beside him.

David can’t take his eyes off him, the graceful arc of his arm as it whisks the coffee from the table to the microwave. Light glints off the metal spoon still resting inside the mug. David says nothing as Lance shuts the microwave door, hits the start button without ever looking up from his phone.

Oleander Fence

Serle liked to joke about the boy scouts who cut their weenie-roasting switches from the wrong tree, and died. “Where’s your god now?” he would say to Terry, laughing. Her husband was not a cruel man, but rather a wonderful man with a cruel sense of humor.

They seemed artificial to her, at least here in the desert, those towering, leafy predators, dissembling with profuse flowers in red, pink, and white. She watched the workers, her upper lip trembling, as Mr. Next-Door directed the ballet of flora.

“Nothing personal,” Mr. Next-Door called across the property line. “Good fences make good neighbors, right? I figure you could use the privacy as much as we can.” And up it went, a barrier of poison leaves and lying blossoms. And you could still see through anyway. Mr. Next-Door was a retired man, in his seventies, who puttered in the garden in his boxer shorts, exposing things Terry did not want to see. Terry wouldn’t even get the mail in flannel pajamas with a belted robe on top.

The oleander fence inspired Serle to take on his own home improvement project. He built a koi pond. To Terry, the little orange koi seemed as artificial as the oleander, and they started dying right away. Serle netted them out and threw them into the alley, one by one. Why did the fish cross the road, Terry thought. When they’d all crossed over, he drained the pond, threw the lining into the alley, and declared the resulting hole a fire pit. “The smoke will keep the mosquitoes away, so we can sit outside at night,” he promised. He roasted hot dogs in it, and taught himself to barbecue over the open fire, steak and fish. Terry didn’t eat red meat.

“I roasted you a marshmallow,” Serle said, holding out a whippy stick with a brown confection melting off the end.

“Are you trying to kill me?” Terry asked, afraid. Serle just laughed.

Changing Planes

When you have to change planes at 2 a.m. in Montreal, there’s a shop where you can buy Néstle’s Crunch bars and cans of Coca-Cola with the labels all in French. You want to buy Néstle’s Crunch bars and cans of Coca-Cola, but you can’t because they cost Canadian dollars, and all you have are Israeli shekels, British pounds, Dutch guilders, and also American dollars. You can’t get Canadian dollars, because it’s 2 a.m. and all the currency exchanges are closed. You don’t want Canadian dollars; you want to get back to the States. You want your eight years of junior high-high school-college French to hold a lens up to the signs so your eyes can untangle the words you ought to understand, the words that tell you how to find your airplane. You want to see the long lines at border control in O’hare and realize that there is no line before the booth marked “U.S. Passports Only.” You want to see a regular American guy look at you only once before stamping your passport and saying, “Welcome home.” You don’t want to cry with relief when he says this, but you will.

Juice

Imagine Mars was about to collide with the Earth. That’s what it looked like, I swear, coming up over the horizon. One night when I was walking back from shul with my father, I saw something so big it should have crushed us, so red you could take a bite and juice would drip down your chin.

The moon was so close I could have touched it, if my parents let me climb on the roof.