Rather than a photo, Mona kept a list of her mother’s phobias in her wallet. She was afraid of the usual stuff—death, beatings, rape, Satan—but these commonplace fears were complemented by generalized anxiety over robbers, Russians, mirrors, beards, blood, ruin, vomiting, being alone, and new ideas. She was also afraid of fear, the technical term for which was phobophobia, a word Mona liked to repeat to herself, like a hip-hop lyric.  Whenever Mona longed for her, or felt like paying her a visit, she glanced at that list, and then thought of all the pills and what happened to her mother when she took too many, and the feeling usually passed.

Twenty minutes later, they were sitting on his bed and he was inserting his only clean needle—the loaded one on his nightstand—into her arm. “That syringe looks really….full,” she said, too late.

“Believe me, it’s barely anything,“ he assured her.

The next thing she knew she was lying on the floor of a stuffy attic. The air smelled like pencil shavings. A fan, some high-powered industrial thing, was on full blast, making a loud whirring noise and blowing a thousand feathers around. It was like the Blizzard of ’78. Then the fan clicked off and she watched the feathers float down, in zigzaggy fashion. They landed on her face and neck and she expected them to be cold but they were as warm as tears, and that’s when she realized she was crying and that the feathers were inside her. So was the fan. The fan was her heart. A voice was telling her to breathe. She opened her mouth and felt feathers fly out.

She didn’t photograph the contents of his drawers and closets—nothing like that—but she’d recently resumed her life’s work, which was to take pictures of herself cleaning and/or pretending to be dead, occasionally while wearing an item or two of his clothing. No big deal, she told herself, because she’d stopped snooping, stopped hunting for additional proof. This was called putting her past behind her. Moving on. And his house was hard to resist. Roomy, well lit, filled with objects that photographed well in black and white—all that wood and leather and animal fur, all those mottled vases and large, abstract prints; that tiled floor, that fireplace.

My ex answers your call like shit is sweet, says, Good to hear from you, so fake you want to reach through the receiver. Next thing, she drops the phone minus nary a pardon and leaves you on an indefinite hold soundtracked by the blare of some rap video cranked beyond good sense. Meanwhile, you carry the noisy cordless into another room, crack the blinds, and watch a pair of baseheads, both thin as antennas, push a half-wrecked sedan down the street. The baseheads, they’ve got the sedan’s doors flung open, and seethe at each other across a scrappy ragtop roof. Farther, they jog their hooptie to a slow cruise, jump in on the run, and sputter off. It’s still plenty of lightweight action on the set. The old lady dressed in a who-gives-a-what-about-the-heat getup (down coat, snow boots, thick wool scarf) tugging a shopping cart full of thrashed cans. Down a ways, boys riding wheelies for distance on dirt bikes with mismatched rims.

This is how you know we’re hella-early. The screen is dead and gray and the only human in the theater besides us is a slender (true, I got nerve calling dude slim) attendant sweeping a row a few rows up. Minus dude, this scene would’ve been prime for us (the us being me and my boys), who weekends would run CIA-like subterfuge on movie workers. We’d hop a back fence, dash through a low-trafficked exit, and trade the rest of our day for the gem of free flicks.

Maybe they’re too preoccupied to notice we don’t (or do) fit the neighborhood profile, but maybe, just maybe, they ain’t.

Scratch what I said about the pistol offering comfort. It’s an onus.

The back and forth, the back and forth, Ibullshityounot, if you snatched off the top of my head, you’d hear me pop and fizzle. 

The car veered, a tree loomed, and we were garlanded in glass, and a branch insinuated itself into Mini’s ribs and encircled her heart, and Ronnie sprang forth and broke against the tree, and in the backseat Caroline was marveling at how her brain became unmoored and seesawed forward into the jagged coastline of the front of her skull and back again, until she was no longer herself, and it was all so mortifying that we could have just died, and we did, we did die, we watched every second of it happen until we realized that we were back on the road, driving, and all of the preceding was just a little movie that Mom had played inside of our heads.

Once, Hwang awakes to find no one. He walks around the city for hours before seeing a woman in a coverall. She is pulling vines off the side of a building and stuffing them into a trash bag. I am paid millions a year for this work, she says.

Even for the future, that is a lot of money.

It turns out that everyone has been uploaded into virtual space, but a few people still have to stick around to make sure that buildings stay up and the tanks are clean and operational.

Later, everyone comes back, because it turns out that no one really likes uploaded life.

My ex-girlfriend Deena killed people for a living. She was a Euthanizer for the local health bureau. I think I must be a sick person, because I thought that was sort of hot. But this is really hard to explain. I thought that people were lucky to have someone like Deena to lead them out of life and into the nothing-whatever of being dead. If you do not believe in something like St. Peter at the gates and beautiful angels who look like the best parts of men and women both, but you want that sort of thing, then Deena is your best bet.

“This was when my dad was still living with us, but he would come to services from work, so when we went home afterward I’d have to choose who to go home with.  I don’t know if it upset my dad, but I always went home with my mom.  Mostly because she drove the Beetle, which was so much more fun. She would play these old Patti Smith cassettes, and I’d sing with her. But the best part was she’d let me put on the dome light, so it felt like we were in this little space capsule, just the two of us. That’s my favorite memory, me and my mom going home from temple Friday nights.  That car was like a lit-up igloo rolling through the dark.” 

When I heard the washing machine finish, I put our things in the dryer and went back to roaming the house.  About fifteen minutes had passed before I realized that I’d forgotten to add the fabric softener. But when I went to put it in, there was an older woman standing in the back doorway, staring at the machine.  She looked up.

It was the woman from the picture upstairs.  I could tell, although she was older.  Her face had changed.  It continued to change as I stood there.

“I’ll call the police,” she said.

I was overwhelmed by pity. This woman was an adult, she probably owned the house, but seemed so scared.  I knew I should run, but I was curious about this feeling.  It wasn’t unpleasant.  Somehow I felt okay as long as I kept her from entering the house, her house. 

The walls of the Classroom Building were cracked down to their foundations, and the rooms scattered with fallen acoustic tiles; the ceiling’s grid of aluminum beams held only fire alarms whose frayed wires wound into space. The linoleum floor tiles in the atrium were warped and uneven. And among the yellowed paperbacks and brittle hardcover books in the Teacher’s Lounge, I found that strange notebook with the teachers’ speculations about which of us might grow up to be killers.

She remembers sensing—almost smelling—that he wanted to kill her. Or that for a split second the thought was spreading itself in his mind. She remembers the terrible little theater of his eyes, which she had always thought to be blue. But looking at them in the afternoon glare, she saw that they weren’t even a little bit blue. They were grey.

They dropped their bags off and went across the street to Outback Steakhouse. Peanut ordered a baked potato with sour cream and bacon bits. Frances ordered a full steak dinner. She had always been able to eat heartily under stress and Peanut found this unattractive, too warlike.

Peanut slouched, letting her long brown hair fall over one eye. Lewd tawny light lit the exposed half of her face. “So you’re not going to talk to me?” she asked, pissed to be the first to speak.

“You aren’t saying anything either,” Frances said impassively.

“Well, I don’t know what to say to you when you act like this.”

“What, like mean?”

“More like heartless. Like a piece of statuary.” Peanut stared at Frances. “It’s like you’re autistic.”

Frances smiled like a wolf. “Do you know what that means? To be autistic?”

“Of course I do. Don’t quiz me.”

“Just tell me what you think it means.”

“It means someone who can, you know, rattle off all the prime numbers, but not, like, say hello.”

Frances chewed her steak and swallowed. “I’m like that?”

“Yeah.”

Frances was surprised by how much this hurt her feelings. She continued to eat and wanted to cry.

“You can’t just come in here.” Cindy sat on the floor next to an open magazine.

“I loved to read when I was your age,” Joan said. “But my brother was always stealing my books.” She smiled reflectively. “He didn’t even read them. He just put them on his shelf. What he wanted was my enthusiasm.”

“Mom, get out.”

“I believe this is my book.”

“It was on the shelf.”

“You can have it.” Joan set the book back down on the bed. “It’s good, isn’t it?” she said, but there came no reply. Cindy sat with her arms crossed, a homicidal song in her eyes. Still Joan was too captivated to look away. It was a marvelous view of something utterly gone: her youth.

She set the book back down on the bed and left the room, leaving the door ajar. Then Cindy slammed it.

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.

My mother supports an agency that every week or so sends her a list of the world’s political prisoners who are known to be in immediate danger of their lives. She sits over a chunky Adler typewriter and composes polite pleas to jailors and torturers and killers on behalf of their victims. “In the name of liberty, of decency, Your Excellency…”

These petitions for pity and reason, strangled as they are by formality, necessarily without anger, she types on personal stationery of pale yellow or pale tangerine or aqua—the kind got at a pharmacy. Her bursitis makes the typing difficult, and the text is unevenly imprinted, since some of the keys have more bite than others, the way she works them. All the same, her handwriting is impossible.

Sissy and I had, the year before when we still enjoyed the good graces of both our sets of partners, gone to Bermuda. Sissy was out on the beach one afternoon, asleep in a vinyl lounger, the kind with a walloping big tricolored umbrella attached. As she slept, the tide moved on her. I was watching from back in, where I had taken my towel. The sea wash was gulping at the pebbles around Sissy’s chair legs, and then at the chair legs themselves, and then the waters lifted up her nylon duffel and tipped it. Sissy was asleep, and I waded out and rescued her duffel, but I let her stay in the cold tide. I went back in-beach and watched her sleeping until she was like a person on a raft. Still she didn’t move, didn’t wake up. There was the raft and then the big straw circle of her sun hat and then the big circle made by the umbrella. “How Sissy looked, setting sail for the horizon,” I said to them.

One Sunday, they got particularly drunk, and Enoch put a cigarette burn in the cushion of Billy’s silk-covered divan. “Look, do you think that matters?” Billy said to Enoch, who was being contrite. “I’m happy to see signs of life in this place, even if they’re only your cigarette scars.” To show how little concerned he was about the ornaments in his home, Billy dropped and broke a piece of pottery, a crackle-glazed jug that his dead wife had brought from Mexico.