His hand had fallen as she moved. His expression was perplexed, one she’d seen a hundred times on teachers’ faces when they turned from the problem under study to that of the class’s persistent incomprehension. She turned away, to her flowers, and when she straightened, felt the shift in his gaze as if she’d been inside of it and now it were being withdrawn, unpinning her will, that went to him and away and stayed all at once. He said, “I’ve frightened you.”

“Yes,” he said. “Here you are. Because you don’t believe it, do you?” She wanted not to, whatever it was, and, considering her, he seemed to be crediting her with knowing. “That there’s a findable future?” he said. “Or a world somewhere else with apparently pointless space between here and there and nothing along the way except repeated attacks on your senses. Which you’ll eventually be able to blame for making you so dull that you can’t recognize the future or the world once you’ve found it.” Now even her speech was spellbound, and she only looked at him, with the world shrinking to an understanding between them, intimate and completely foreign to her. “When, to know the world, all a man really needs is to be known,” he said. “And I know you.”

He didn’t want to sleep. If he slept and the nightmare didn’t appear, he’d have to admit as fact what so far he only suspected and could still dismiss as fancy: It wasn’t a nightmare. It never was. It was the essence of daily life, stripped of the hum and shine and glancing distraction that made it glibly livable. When a nightmare emerged, the surface was merely wearing thin, a man was less and less satisfied with going willy-nilly across it, less and less convinced that moving light was an effective evasion, that what he could evade so easily would ever have mired him anyway. Underneath was helplessness, and a whole shifting sea of women couldn’t save him from the one he was bound to find, to fall for and finally see what those women with their strange dark eyes saw in him.

“There is an ocean of dreams,” Maryse was explaining, “that our sleeping heads dip back into late at night. The tides go in and out, cleansing the shore. Who we are is whatever silhouettes against that great sea. It is deep and vast and strong, and even in the clearest moment of the brightest day something is leaking in, a permanent trickle in the plumbing. Sometimes, in some of us, things collapse, but now the moment is approaching when the wave will break to carry us all away. This will happen. Consider the signs. Learn how to float.”

“But what’s all this got to do with UFOs?” asked Beale.

“They’re the openings the dreams come through.”

Gwen stared into a field of glittering stars no larger than pinheads. “Which one?’

“The big one. Right in the middle.”

“Jupiter?”

Dash moved in for another look. “M31,” he said as though pronouncing the classified name of the ultimate weapon. “Home.”

“That miniscule point,” Trinity explained, “is an entire spiral galaxy in the constellation Andromeda.”

“Where we all came from,” said Dash.

“And where we’re all going back to,” added Maryse. “As soon as they bring us the thermium for The Object.”

There were zones, he was saying, one should flee to in the Zero Time, his voice penetrating memory, sound and cadence evoking a time before her own father departed into a private zone of his own. She looked up at the impervious masquerade of his face, strange lips forming strange words in familiar ways. She produced a vague smile of interest when he looked at her, nodded intelligently when he paused. She knew nothing about this man.

We at school knew Mr. and Mrs. Cuts come from a family that eats children. There is a red metal tree with plastic-wrapped toys in the window and a long candy counter case to lure you in. Mr. and Mrs. Cuts have no children of their own. They ate them during a hard winter and salted the rest down for sandwiches the colored boy runs out to the pulpwood crew at noon. I count colored children going in to buy some candy to see how many make it back out, but generally our mother is ready to go home before I can tell. Our credit at Cuts is short.

Here is a list of things Carol has thrown at Genius: a sneaker with a toe full of sand in it, a coffee cup with a crescent of coffee in it, a raisin box with a half a box of raisins in it, and a picture of Genius holding a young girl under red and green plastic lanterns strung beside a pool. All of the things Carol has thrown at Genius have hit him in the face. The picture of Genius holding the young girl beside the pool Carol had to throw at Genius’ face over and over because Genius was asleep. While Genius was asleep was always when Carol looked through his stuff and read his mail. When she found the picture of Genius holding the young girl she had to throw it as hard as she could on Genius’ face over and over again until Genius finally woke up.

I began as a boy, as a human-being boy, a boy with a secret at sea and sentenced to cook in Big Miss Magine’s stone-scoured pot, my long fish body laid, tail flipping, into that solid stone pot, scales ripped and skin slipping from my meat tissue-threaded in the simmer, my body floating from my long, fish-bodied bones, my bones boiled through and through down to a hot bubbly sweet steaming broth, lisping whispers of steam twisting to the ceiling, curling in your curtains, speaking to you in your sleep.

“What do I want you to do? You really want to know? I’ll tell you. Just look me in the eye and tell me one thing. Just do it. Tell me whether you and Cynthia have made love. Tell me. Go on.”

“The answer is no.”

“You swear?”

“I swear.”

“I believe you,” she said quietly, and for a moment Richard thought it was over until she turned around and screamed at him, “THEN WHY DON’T YOU MAKE LOVE WITH ME?”

He and Cynthia stumbled toward the other side of the room as the entire front end of the tractor broke through the splintered door and entered the house. As it did, the muffler, coming out above the hood, hit the top of the doorway and snapped off.

Oh, help, Caroline thought.

“HOLY SHIT,” Richard screamed.

“STOP HER,” Cynthia yelled at him.

It was an unsettling sight, to put it mildly, for Cynthia to see the front end of a 6,000-pound tractor rolling across her Oriental carpet, the very carpet she had chosen so that all the colors complemented each other and the old pine floor, the deep earth-brown and tan and the reds and yellows, and now, a green, wheezing and roaring monster with oil dripping sat on that rug.

“It’s just that I hate being alone,” Caroline said. “I hate being poor, as well, and damn it all, here I go again back where I started. I hate going backwards. It takes so much out of you to get where you want to be. One person can’t do it nowadays, you know? It’s just too hard. You’ve got to have someone else. That’s what makes me so mad about that thing he’s run off with. She doesn’t need him any more than we need another hot day this summer. You know? She just doesn’t.”

The intimate places of his father’s body were now within his reach, turned over to the touch of his fingers: his father who had never embraced him as a child. First he would touch his earlobes, to move them out of the way for the scissors, which had been taken out of the mother-of-pearl damascene box. Then he would take the nose between his thumb and forefinger, and give it a slight lift so as to shave above the upper lip. And the more the cancer gnawed away at the liver and the body grew limp, the more it opened to him, replete with its disappointments, sated with its tribulations. They would sit together in silence, the father and he, the youngest of his sons.

As the Jews’ army was making its way along the road winding up to Deir El-Kasi, Abu Shacker was looting its houses. The inhabitants of Deir El-Kasi had not waited for the convoy to arrive. They were already across the border. And Abu Shacker, who had felt their outstretched arm upon his back in the days of the Arab Rebellion, now entered the home of Mahmood El-Ibraheem, who had been the regional commander in the days of the rebellion. The gate to the courtyard was open, as if the inhabitants of the house had just stepped out for a moment to visit a neighbor. Abu Shacker entered through the gate and shut it behind him as if he were trying to preserve, if only for a moment, the vanishing past, and he stood in the courtyard, in the very spot where he had stood ten years before.

Imagine, then, a British soldier plummeting from the roof high above the third floor down into our courtyard, landing in a puddle of water from the early-December rain. The water splashes on the gas mask over the face of a boy playing by the puddle and blurs his vision. But first imagine a shot, just a single round from among the hundreds that had begun with the gray dawn, whose trajectory crisscrossed the skies of Haifa, in the warp and woof of the war between Jews and Arabs. Then imagine this one bullet hitting the soldier standing watch on the roof. He falls, and behind him the sharp spire of St. John’s Church rises toward the brightening sky. The boy, who is about seven, freezes to the spot where the thud has caught him trying to frighten a neighbor’s daughter with the gas mask he has bought from a peddler of military equipment. Now imagine the long second that passes between the thud and the scream: the silence that falls on the courtyard and is cast over the body, and then is lifted by the scream, which hangs in the air until the silence wraps itself again around the still body.

I like a crusty bread. Last spring, when the man who sold my son the satellite dish told him that the signal wasn’t coming in good because of the big old elm tree across the road by the house, that it was getting in the way of the reception, everyone—my son, my daughter-in-law, my grandsons, and then, because everyone else was, even the man—looked at me. I loved that tree. It was always there. It would always make me feel good to walk in the yard through its patterned shadow on my way into the house. But then, across the road, there was the satellite dish. I said they could chop the tree down but I wanted every bit of wood from it cut and stacked in a pile by itself. And though I hadn’t done it for years, since we’d got an electric stove and a furnace, I started back using the old wood stove, which we’d left in the kitchen mostly for looks. It’s better to cook bread in a wood stove anyway. You can tell the difference not just in the crust but also in taste.

… sometimes in the coffee and pastry shops here in Chinatown I mimic the words I hear, but very softly. If you do it, don’t get too loud, because then it sounds like an echo, and people start looking around.

Chinese, spoken, is such a pleasing language. So many tones – it’s like singing. Since I don’t know what I’m saying, I never try to use those words when it comes my turn to order. I say, “One of those, one of those, one of those, one of those, and one of those. And one of those.” All in one tone. Not so pleasing.

Simmi’s only been in New York three weeks, but the second night she was here Buck took her to a coffee place he knew, and now Simmi makes sure he takes her there every night. Maybe if there’s somewhere else they have to be, something one of them has to do, they’ll skip a night, but they couldn’t miss too many, because then it would become something they used to do. And that would make it part of the past. And what she thinks is part of the past Simmi won’t consider.