At times you could not fully expand your chest to take in breath, such was the push of the bodies on your body. And the kids in the trees throwing spiny sweet-gum monkey balls at your head. There were moments you felt you might be crushed. It had happened, in 1947. A Slovak woman and her babe in arms were crushed right here. Imagine killing somebody with your chest, a pair of hot corpses borne along by the pressing of your body and other people’s bodies—and still you came, out of this instinct to cram into the streets, because the body, despite reason, insisted on satisfying an urge that nothing in your brittle, private, homebound individual interior could satisfy.

The woman’s blood is under his fingernails. Before he left, he washed his hands in her kitchen sink, then dried them, then washed them again. He washed the water glass he’d used. He left it to dry on the dish rack and went back into the parlor, where the woman lay on the floor. He introduced himself again, it was at least the third time, and asked again what her name was, but again she didn’t respond, or even stir, half-naked there under the coffee table. He couldn’t find a nailbrush, so there is still some blood under his fingernails. He tries not to look at the blood under his fingernails. He resists the temptation to smell them.

The cigarette machine came smashing face-first to the floor. The man stood cursing it. The problem seemed to be penetrating his mind that, even if he’d succeeded in breaking the glass of the face, the cigarettes were now safely entombed under the shell of the machine unless he could lift it back up again. He collapsed onto his knees and began scratching at the sheet metal. It was piteous and difficult both to watch and not to watch, Ciccio saw he was alone with this man, in the depot.

Time moved both fast and slow, and neither speed synced up with her fears as she stood at the head of the line. The tellers looked too chipper for a Monday morning. Did they even have money on Mondays? she wondered. Shouldn’t she have come on a Friday? She couldn’t remember why she opened the stickup note, just that she did, and that her boyfriend, the first and only boy she’d ever dated, was the one who had penned it: This is a stickup. Give me all your monie.

The misspelling stopped her.

“Next in line,” a teller called.

Knowledge herself had quit school in the ninth grade but she couldn’t believe that he had misspelled money. “What kind of an idiot can’t spell money?” she told me. “How fucking stupid do you have to be? And if he’s that stupid, how stupid am I for robbing a bank for him?”

At night I used to ride the ferry back and forth, from the city to Staten Island. I’d watch the diamond lights smearing the wet window glass or stand out on the windy deck as the regulars sat crooked, drinking their pints and shouting about different kids of loss. The engine shook my legs. The water pricked my skin. I stood on the railing and let the wind sting my eyes and tickle my veins where a warm drug bubbled through, heating up like the wires of an electric blanket. I was sixteen and pregnant then, thinking that the ups and downs of the East River would kill it somehow.

That night I went home and put a grocery bag over my head. I wanted to see what the head felt like, separate from my body. I cinched the bag right around my neck and lay down without letting go of my grip. With my every breath the white plastic bag crinkled in and out, making too much noise, and the bare bulb hanging above me seemed foggy. My face turned damp. My breath smelled exactly like what I’d eaten for lunch—a bowl of instant noodles, a pickle. I tightened the grip on the bag, and eventually my breathing slowed, enough for me to sense a layer of mist licking my eyes. The plastic barely crinkled. Slowly my head began disremembering the body, sighing it off gently, until all I could feel was my now-giant skull and my own arm, still strangling the bag. It was quiet. And then too quiet.

The van’s front windows were slathered with blood, and inside, a whole brood of furry lapdogs were going wild. They leapt over the captain’s chair, running along the dash and gauges, and the dogs were soaked in blood, their fur syrup-streaked, their whiskers drooping with it. One lapdog was desperately pawing red streaks on the glass, so that the driver’s window was greasy with a thick, dirty paste.

The GTO began to go down. A surge of water washed out of the hole in all directions, an ankle-deep wave that turned the frosted ice clear black. Only as the water soaked my boots, making them seem perched atop a sheet of smoked glass, did I realize that something else had happened, that, as the black of a hot rod slipped into the abyss of the lake, my Corvette had started to baby-crawl backward toward the hole.

They handed me receipts for all my property, and then I was placed in a white room that had once been part of the vast kitchen—still visible in the floor were marks where the old industrial freezers had been bolted down. Here I was forced to watch an orientation video. Following that, I had my head and nethers shaved, and was ordered to drink a chalky liquid, then made to urinate into a paper cup. Next, I was briefly violated, and before the rubber gloves even popped off, without so much as a glass of orange juice to calm my nerves, I was dusted with a delousing powder that tasted, in my nose and mouth, bitter as vitamin C.

Panther. Painter. Puma. Cougar. Mountain lion. Whatever you want to call it, by the end of October, half a dozen more people claim they have caught a glimpse of it: a pale sliver in the distance, a flash of fur through the trees. In the woods, hunters linger in their tree stands, hoping they might be the next. In the houses, the big cat creeps nightly, making the rounds of dinner tables and dreams.

I come home the next evening to find a dark snake draped across the foot of the bed. Motionless, waiting for my next move. I freeze, thrilled to the sheer shock of it. My pulse rips with terror and delight. Fingers quivering, I switch on the light. But it is only my husband’s limp black sock, left from last night. Caught where it landed when we pulled off our clothes once words had failed us, as they always have.

The first time Jesse spoke to him, Dave was lying on the Musician’s floor, and he sat up and said, Holy shit, the Lord speaketh, and Jesse said, No, man, listen, it’s Jesse James. Last week, over an after-dinner joint, Dave told the Musician that Jesse said that his brother’s treasure was buried somewhere along the ridgeline. Can Jesse be any more specific? the Musician asked, taking a hit. No, man, Dave said, exhaling a cloud of smoke. I don’t want to bug him.

I realize then that Wichu knows. Of course he knows. He was here, at this temple, outside of the pavilion with his mother, when Khamron got drafted years ago. He was here when the wealthier boys got taken out of the line. He was here when those same boys came back an hour later, took their places at the end of the lottery line, and—when their turns came—drew black card after black card after black card. Wichu had told me all about it the night of his brother’s draft. Although I had only half listened to him at the time, the memory of his voice comes back to me now in all its anger.

“Draft Day” from SIGHTSEEING © 2005 by Rattawaut Lapcharoensap; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

I turned around. That tiny Cambodian girl had Dong pinned facedown on the railroad ties. She sat on his back while he bucked and thrashed beneath her like a rodeo horse. She yelled at him, pummeled the back of his head repeatedly with her hands. I thought about leaving him there. But then I remembered that the girl had said she was going to kill us, and I suddenly didn’t know how serious Cambodians were when they said something like that, even if the Cambodian was just a little girl. She could’ve been Khmer Rouge…

“Priscilla the Cambodian” from SIGHTSEEING © 2005 by Rattawaut Lapcharoensap; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

We’d seen better times. Papa used to win. He used to be the best cockfighter in town. The men used to say Papa could cast magic spells that sent his cocks into a bloodthirsty rage. Magic or no, I loved the way Papa would saunter into the house after a day at the cockpit: beaming, large, awesome with pride. He’d plop down a wad of cash on the dinner table and Mama would squeal with delight. He’d let me count the money; I’d lick my fingers, judiciously flip through the bills, the way I’d seen gamblers in town fondling their cash after an evening tossing dice. We weren’t wealthy but, for a little while, we could buy things. A brand-new bicycle for me. An electric stove for Mama. Orchids for the garden. The Mazda for Papa. A bigger, better television.

But that all changed the day Little Jui showed up at the cockpit.

“Cockfighter” from SIGHTSEEING © 2005 by Rattawaut Lapcharoensap; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

In 1959, Prentice Ross astounded his parents by enrolling in aviation school instead of going to Yale. Of course, being generous and humane people, Prentice’s parents didn’t have anything against pilots per se. It just happened that they had never met one, nor had they ever even thought of how a person became one. In fact, they knew not a single person who drove any machine at all (for a living, that is), so they were at a loss when they tried to imagine what their son’s future would be like.

“Well, Arthur, I should probably tell you that I do think I have a small drinking problem. I mean, I don’t think that should be held against me where the kids are concerned. But I think it’s true and I need to figure out what to do about it. I’ve done programs before. But they never seem quite right for me. We live near Switzerland, though. That’s a good thing. If there’s one thing the Swiss are good at, it’s running rehab centers. It’s like the Minnesota of Europe.”

As Arthur stood up, he felt sure that he would soon be handcuffed and led off to jail. He thought of the French’s notorious belief in occult things like handwriting analysis and imagined some sort of quasi-psychologist describing perspiration patterns and unusual eye motions that always show up when a person is lying. He was now so nervous that he wondered if he’d even be able to walk out the door. But he managed well enough, and after saying goodbye to the now-stone-faced deputy prosecutor and the diligent junior officer, he started looking forward to a large glass of the pine-needle liqueur.

There are no personal phone calls allowed. We do, however, allow for emergencies. If you must make an emergency phone call, ask your supervisor first. If you can’t find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers, who sits over there. He’ll check with Clarissa Nicks, who sits over there. If you make an emergency phone call without asking, you may be let go.

The witnesses said she dived off the bridge headfirst. They said she was walking along when she suddenly dropped her book bag and scrambled onto the guardrail, balancing on the top rail for a moment, arms over her head, then bouncing once from bended knees and disappearing over the side. It happened so fast, according to one witness. It was a perfect dive, according to another

300 Block, Galleon Court. Tall Ships Estates. Criminal trespass and public disturbance. One-armed magazine salesman kicking doors and threatening residents. Scuffle ensues. Officers sit on suspect, call for backup, ponder a cop koan: How do you cuff a one-armed man?

We will rebuild our city, yes—we will, we will build a new city in the image of our old city, a city that will withstand whatever nature sends against it, a city that will rise up into the sky, our mayor said, pointing, his arm trembling, a city raised up into the clouds, a cloud city, a city of the air currents, of the jet streams, of warm fronts and cold fronts, a city that will harness the power of the weather and put it to good use, only good, constructive use.

As the architect’s apprentice, I was obligated to sort the various slabs of sky by size, to polish them with a microfibrous cloth until their viewing surfaces were nearly transparent, and then to bevel their edges so that they might snugly fit back together.

My sister and I discovered our mother’s iron lung floating in the hallway, nudging itself along the corridor, bumping into the peeling walls like some trapped sea creature, frustrated and barnacular. The flood had spilled into our rooms overnight, snatching away the canoe and leaving us isolated in the useless, rotten house, which groaned as the waves crashed against its sides.

He tried to swerve around her but, instead, went into a slide. The reds and yellows in the road stretched out. Cottonwood leaves roared in his head. His bowels shuddered. Even before he struck the girl and hurled her into the creek bed, he felt all the familiar habits of the world begin to recede.

She stuck the crescent dish just under his ribs. It hung out of him at an odd angle, as if finding a pocket. But he felt nothing, no pain. Maybe, he’d thought absurdly, he had mimicked pain for so long in movies that he’d become immune to it.

Billy’s lips were sealed around the fat boy’s. They shared the same air. At any moment it seemed the boy’s jowly cheeks might suck Billy in. Billy breathed deeply into him once, twice, and then the fat boy opened his eyes. “Rise,” Billy said. “Rise and walk.”