So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.

Do you have it with you?

I bent down to unzip my backpack. When I’d pulled it out and handed it to her the officer began turning the pages of my second passport slowly, by the edges, like you handle a postcard whose ink isn’t yet dry.

When do you use this?

Very rarely.

But under what circumstances?

Whenever I enter or leave Iraq.

And does that give you an advantage?

What sort of an advantage?

You tell me.

If you had two passports, I said evenly, wouldn’t you use your British one whenever entering or leaving the UK?

Of course, she said. That’s the law. But I don’t know what the law is in Iraq, now do I?

I didn’t mean to, but I smiled. And faintly, she flinched. Then, still holding my second passport—which is to say the only passport I had left—she nodded slowly, comprehendingly, tapped it lightly once on her knee, and stood up and walked away.

In the night, she awoke three times. The first time, he was lying on his back, while beyond him the skyline was still glittering and the top of the Empire State Building was floodlit in red and gold.

The second time, he was on his side, facing away from her. Alice’s head hurt, so she got up and went to the bathroom to look for an aspirin. Someone had turned the Empire State Building off.

The third time she woke up, he had his arms around her from behind and was holding on to her tightly.

The fourth time, it was morning. Their faces were close, almost touching, and his eyes were already open, staring into hers.

“This,” he said grimly, “was a very bad idea.”

In the unrealistic days of their marriage there was a question whether she would read what he wrote. He was a beginner and she is a tougher critic than she meant to be. It was touchy, her embarrassment, his resentment. Now in his letter he said, damn! but this book is good. How much he had learned about life and craft. He wanted to show her, let her read and see, judge for herself. She was the best critic he ever had, he said. She could help him too, for in spite of its merits he was afraid the novel lacked something. She would know, she could tell him. Take your time, he said, scribble a few words, whatever pops into your head. Signed, “Your old Edward still remembering.”

She remembers giving him advice on how to write. How audacious that now seems. She said, you need to stop writing about yourself, nobody cares how fine your feelings are. He replied, Nobody ever writes about anything but himself. She said, You need to know literature, you need to write with literature and the world in mind. For years she was afraid she had killed something in him, and she hoped his turning to insurance meant he didn’t mind. But this book looks like a different kind of answer. She wonders how much contempt or irony lies behind his choice of subject, and she hopes he is sincere.

Despite his fine outer manner, she soon discovered he had suffered a crippling injury: his heart was broken. He had been engaged to a girl named Maria, who had jilted him and married somebody else. Jilted: a good old-fashioned word. He did not seem heartbroken. He seemed vigorous and enthusiastic about the future. But heartbroken was a secret state, which she could share. It occurred to her she was heartbroken too, on account of Jake, who was retaliating for her career choice by a program of worldwide travel and picking up girls. She and Edward could be heartbroken together. It gave them something to talk about, and it protected them from each other, like brother and sister: no need to worry about hearts since their hearts were broken.

…after dozens of visits, I stopped buying the paintings. Scenes of bright peasant life, or lovely little children in uniforms filing into school, pictures of grand bourgeois families dancing in a hall beneath towering hi-fi speakers, or of shocking voodoo ceremonies in blacks and reds with decapitated chickens flapping in blood and women writhing, panoramas of bustling, abundant markets, paintings of primeval forests, with lions, giraffes, panthers and other animals no Haitian has ever seen at home, where the wildest animal is the crocodile or the flamingo, or the tarantula. It’s hard to keep looking at those paintings, but these Haitian artists paint them over and over again, as though they can’t get this nightmare out of their system. For months, a vendor tried to sell me this one painting, of a church interior, because I made the mistake of looking at it. He started at thirty dollars, laughably high but negotiable. Still, for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to buy it, no matter how badly the stooped and stuttering art dealer wanted to get rid of it, no matter how low he would go. I had promised myself no more paintings.

People whose dead have enemies resort to all sorts of tricks to stop their deceased relation from being turned into a zombi. They build strong graves of stone; often the construction begins long before the death—the costs are high, but it’s worth it to avoid becoming a zombi. The dead man’s people throw rice into his casket, so that the deceased will have to count each grain, and because he is concentrating on the counting he will not respond to the bokor’s call to arise. They seal the corpse’s nostrils to stop his soul from escaping. But if, by some ruse, the bokor manages to trap the dead man’s soul, the game is up. The zombi rises, and thenceforth he must serve the bokor, or whoever has commissioned the zombification, as a virtual slave.

The brigades had erected barricades throughout her neighborhood to stop the Macoutes and the Army from driving through at unsnail-like top speed and spraying the houses with machine-gun fire, as they had done in other neighborhoods and in other towns. We got to one barricade, and I couldn’t go around it. Worse, I was suddenly unable, in my panic, to put the car into reverse. It was a new car. My colleagues in the backseat were screaming, “Journalis! Journalis!” at the boys at the barricade, but the boys had seen a car where there should have been no cars, and they came around the barricade with their rocks, and it was only seconds that I found reverse and got us out of there.

My colleagues were not pleased.

“Learn to drive,” said the Chicago Tribune.

When in 1679 a London woman swung at Tyburn for bestiality, her canine partner in crime suffered the same punishment on the same grounds. King James I ordered a bear that had killed a child to be baited to death, and rural shepherds frequently hanged dogs caught worrying their flocks. The Merchant of Venice included a reference to “a wolf, hanged for human slaughter” sufficiently cursory to suggest that Shakespeare’s audience recognized animals as appropriate participants in formal judicial proceedings.

The ultimate measure of the tiger’s unregeneracy was its fondness for human flesh. Many tigers living in the populated parts of India and Ceylon routinely preyed on domestic animals and occasionally became man-eaters. Some turned to human prey because they were too sick or old to catch faster and less dangerous quarries. Most, however, were thought to be “cattle-lifting tigers” who had once “summoned up courage to attack the herdsmen,” and thereby added a tasty new item to their diet.

The most natural way for most visitors to interact with the animals was to feed them, an act which symbolized both proprietorship and domination. Most zoos encouraged this activity. The first elephants in the collection of the London Zoo were reported to “have a keen relish for buns and biscuits, which are vended on the spot for their benefit and the gratification of visitors.” Their successors shared the same tastes. When the celebrated Jumbo was about to depart for the United States, his admirers expressed their regret with farewell gifts including fruit, cake, oysters, and a variety of alcoholic beverages.

I had been in Ireland for six months, living mostly in Dublin, and I knew the unspoken rules of the Irish pub well enough to know that I was breaking most of them. I was a woman and I was alone. I was drinking stout instead of lager, a pint instead of a half pint. I was trying to pay for my own drink and, since there was no real lounge in this pub, I had no choice but to sit with the men. These were things a woman, traditionally, should not do, but I had a strong sense that in Ireland most rules had been created precisely that they might be broken…

Religion was as pervasive as the currency. It was everywhere. It was embedded deep in the Irish mind, and that seemed most evident in the way Irish people blessed themselves as they passed by a church; an instinctual flutter of the right hand as they studied the headlines of the newspaper they had just bought, or scolded a disobedient child, or made a conversational point to a companion. Sometimes just the fingers moved, twitching above the sternum or passing absently over the face in a barely perceptible wiping motion. Riding in a Dublin bus, I was often gripped by an eerie disorientation at the moment the bus passed by a church (a church I was never quick enough to notice), and I glimpsed, in the periphery of my vision, thirty hands flying into the air in similar fashion.

Conor was hot-faced and frowning now. Angrily he said, “Well, you son of a bitch, Mick Pat! When was the last time you had a good cleaning out? When was the last time you had a good cleaning out of your pipes, Mick Pat? You never had sex in your life, you little bastard. You’re a virgin. You are a virgin.”

Mick Pat sat still in his seat. He looked at the floor, and his heavy gray hair fell forward boyishly on his high forehead. With his smaller hand he brushed his hair back, then laid the hand gently over his mouth; but for the nicotine stains, it was the hand of an adolescent boy. “I am not,” he said. “I am not. I am not.” But he spoke unconvincingly, as though trying to persuade his own doubtful soul.