Then, without any warning, Taylor could speak Abini. June and Peter could not recall a learning period, a month when the girl communicated awkwardly with the villagers. By the time June noticed her daughter speaking the native language, the girl was spitting out long sentences at her friends, laughing with them, and joining in songs and chants, and when June’s back was turned to Taylor and her friends, she could barely distinguish her daughter’s voice from those of the other children.

When he woke up, he did not know where he was, and the red, grease-covered boys and the men chanting in Abini began to blend into a dark pattern where he could no longer make out individuals. The men started to play bamboo flutes, and the sound disappointed Peter. The flutes sounded distant and reedy, and the music had no melody, only an insistent percussive drive. He looked around the room and tried to find Makino or any of the other men he had come from Abini with, but he could not distinguish any of the people around him.

It was only when he saw [his daughter] Taylor, sitting near the door with poinsettia leaves crowning her head, that he realized he was hallucinating. Ah, he thought, I am really very sick now. And then he was aware of fainting into Makino’s arms.

She called Taylor inside and asked her to pronounce the words. Taylor stared at her mother, silent, with large eyes that seemed full of fear. For a moment June thought that she would say something, or refuse to be with her, but she stayed there, quiet, unhappy, and finally began to speak Abini so quickly the words sounded like hiccups in her mouth. June mimicked her daughter and heard how awkwardly her own voice wrapped around the language—she knew she sounded wrong and comical.

“I can’t get it right,” she said.

“Try, Mom. Try harder,” Taylor said.

“You see, Schmuel,” Aaron resumed, in the tone a very wise man might employ with a very simple child, “the fact is, women’s voices are arousing to men. Don’t you find this to be so?”

“Sure, the good ones. Is that wrong?”

“And when you’re aroused,” he went on, “what happens to your concentration? Out the window. This also is why we separate the genders in shul. Also why our women cover their hair, knees, and shoulders. Why they wear thick stockings, not thin ones. When we pray, we want to immerse ourselves in prayer, not distract ourselves with sex.”

I spoke up then for distracted people everywhere. “What’s so bad about sex?”

“I can’t write it down,” she declared.

“Here, I have a pen.”

“No, no. You don’t understand.” Her hands were bunched into fists. “It’s Shabbos.”

Suddenly this tiny obstacle—my not having a card, and her not being able to write my address down—loomed very large and formidable: a deal-breaker. This Shabbos business, I thought, was getting out of hand. All it did was throw up barricades to normal human behavior. What was so restful about that?

On the cloth sat a bottle of purple Manischewitz wine and a naked baby. The baby, his nap interrupted, looked a bit stupefied. Was this a dream? According to the Talmud (Hal continued), each of us is taught the entire Torah in utero, but in our journey down the birth canal an angel taps us on the lips—an impression we retain forever—and makes us forget it all. Thus we begin life already betrayed by education, with only a blank slate upon which to record our blunders in the world.

Not that this was the baby’s only predicament. Here, leaning over him, was an old man with a knife. And here at his feet was another old man, his alleged grandfather, prying apart his ankles. What kind of vengeful conspiracy was this?

“It’s bad to hit children.” I felt silly for saying something this obvious, so I tried hiding my inanity with more words. “When I was in higher secondary, the untouchables sat in the back of the class. The teachers couldn’t slap the untouchables because then they would be touching them. The untouchables knew this and would always be talking. Sometimes the teachers became very angry, and to shut up the untouchables they threw pieces of chalk at them. And the untouchables, because all the students sat on the floor, would race around on their hands and knees, dodging the chalk.”

When I churned my arms to show how swiftly the untouchables crawled, Asha laughed and said, “My teachers only hit with rulers.”

For a week after the first murdered man, Muslim corpses began appearing everywhere. At the edge of the town I found a young woman and a boy of about eight lying a few feet apart next to a thorn fence. Both were naked and slashed all over. One of the blows had parted the skin and meat on the boy’s shoulder and I could see white, clean bone beneath. The woman’s pubic hair woke me periodically for years, because I imagined ants feeding on her. Scattered along the side of the only road which led out of town I saw the bodies of several men and one very old woman. The corpse of the midget who ran the town’s general store showed up in the back yard of an acquaintance.

Radha slapped me, and the heel of her hand struck my nose. I tasted the iron flavor of blood. She hit me again. “Dog, Disease,” she shouted. She kept slapping and cursing. “If people knew about you, they would kill you like a mad dog. They would break your head with bricks. If I told my brothers, they would cut you to pieces with a machete. Do you know what you’ve done?” I had so much adrenaline in me that I felt no emotion. Radha’s blows did not get weaker. I said nothing and did not try to protect myself. “Your own daughter, animal. What is going to happen to her now? Have you done this many times? Have you been doing this long?”

I am a fantastic lover. I’ve got to give me that. There are only two things about me that females don’t like: the fact that I sing when I drive—admittedly, I’m not a musician—and my skiing. All the girls I know ski moguls well—really solid bump skiers—and I try to turn in the swells and lose my downhill line. I have thick hair. I’ve got a car that stinks from new leather. My skin, my body—that’s all decent. But I get ridiculed on bumps, and the way I sing gets mistaken for a joke or an imitation of someone dippy, when in fact your car is one of the few places besides the bathroom where you can sing the best songs the way they were meant to be sung. They all think my singing is terrible. Screw them. (I did.)

They say a pregnant woman looks radiant. Lynn went around for two weeks, agitated and angry and with an upset stomach, but she really did look radiant—it was like a cosmetics expert had done something to her face. Her cheeks were flushed all day, and her eyes were as bright as green candy. I can’t explain the difference. I kept catching myself staring. For those two weeks she was nauseous and pissed off. Added to that, I was still in training for my job, we were not married or engaged or anything, and Lynn really didn’t know, ha-ha, was she ready to be a mother? Maybe she wasn’t and maybe she was. Is twenty-two too young? She toyed with the idea while lolling around in the bath, conditioning her hair. Well, I knew. I’m sure. Please ask me.

I licked her ribs. She took her dress off. She had a face that held all the mysteries of Ireland. She had a single blond hair coming out of her chin I never saw before. She wore old blue cotton panties with just a slight fume of musk and salt. She let me pull them all the way down.

All right, maybe I do. Maybe I do talk first and think later. Yes, it’s true, I admit it freely. It’s because I’m from the city. Now, you can say to me, Glory B., it’s no crime to think about what you’re going to say before you say it, to figure out how it relates to the topic being discussed, or if it does at all, or if what you’re going to say has the slightest factual basis whatsoever. I’ve got that argument down cold, because listen, words are my music. When I talk, I improvise. It’s not so much what I’m saying as how it sounds. Take jazz, all right, let’s use jazz as an analogy, parallels are always good. Now, what I mean is, what—do you think every time Bird sat down to blow he had the whole musical score right in front of him? Did he have the whole thing thought out? He did not. Well, he probably did not, I’m not entirely familiar with the man’s work, but probably, most likely he improvised is what I’m saying.

One night, right after spring break, they were caught bending over a bong, boys in a girl’s room, after curfew. If boys got caught in a girl’s dorm, the girls got suspended. If girls got caught in a boy’s dorm… the girls got suspended. This, said the headmaster, was to encourage chivalry on the part of the boys. But if anybody, of any gender, race, creed, or color, got caught smoking pot, it meant immediate expulsion. Unless you were an integral part of that year’s varsity lacrosse team, which was the recipient of much alumni generosity, in the form of checks spotted with a nostalgic, manly tear or two.

I hate the word “horny,” redolent as it is of yellowed callouses and pizza-crust bunions, but there you go. Sober for eighteen months, I’d been giving up my will to God and practicing the three Ms—meetings, meditation, masturbation. But no matter the electronic reinforcement, it gets old mashing the little pink button all by your lonesome, night after night. Now here’s the dilemma I’m staring at: I Am HIV-Positive, Who Will Have Sex With Me? If I were a guy it might be different, but carrying around the eve of destruction between my creamy white thighs doesn’t exactly make me feel like a sex goddess.

I couldn’t move. The ground was tiny, an aerial map, rich in detail, and the wind tugged at my feet. What were the commands? Arch, I whispered. Arch arch arch. That was all I could remember. I stood up, gripping the side of the opening, my feet balanced on the metal bar beneath the doorway, resisting the steady rush of wind. The jumpmaster shouted again. I felt the pressure of his fingers. And then I was gone. I left the plane behind me and fell into the air.

Of all the acts in that traveling show—the snake man, the acrobats, the sword swallower, the luminous dancers—the Fire King was the one who held me fast. In his flames I saw the beauty, the power mingled with the danger. He could pour molten lead into his mouth, then spit out solid metal nuggets. He ate burning coals with a fork as if they were a pile of new potatoes. I had hung around to see if he was scarred in secret places, and I had pestered him so much, and so insistently, that when I showed up at his door one night with everything I owned, he simply waved a weary arm and took me on as an apprentice. He was a skilled old man, but he was a drunkard too, and although he never missed a show, there came a day when he inhaled accidently while chewing on a wad of burning cotton, and seared his lungs, and died.

From each stake in the ground to each new mango tree, bridging the air over the circles of poison Jamal had put down just that morning, there was a dark, quivering line. Joyce blinked, and when the illusion didn’t go away, she opened the screen to look more closely. Lines of ants were walking through the air. But it was not air, she realized, it was the fishing line Jamal had used to stake the trees, so transparent that she would not have seen it except for the ants. They were the large red ants, so dense and steady they seemed more substantial than the fishing wire itself. Joyce held herself still, as if a single motion would shatter something fragile. She hardly breathed, watching the steady progress of the ants. They were working very hard, each one excavating, than carrying away, the very heart of her trees.