At a party, I met a mercenary. He had fought Communists in Afghanistan before fighting Communists in Nicaragua. He described a process invented by the Russians to strip the skin off Afghan rebels. “It was psychological warfare disguised as chemical warfare,” he said. “The Moslem believes in the ‘pure warrior,’ sanctity of the body, that sort of thing. When he saw row after row of bodies with the skin peeling off, he went mad.” The mercenary drank his champagne. “A Moslem believes the skinless soul is doomed. Gone to hell.”

My first apartment in New York had a courtyard. The friend who helped me move stuck his head out the window, into the courtyard. “The only noise you’ll hear,” he said, “is white noise. Air-conditioners. Classical music.” Later that night, we both looked out the window at the two women screaming in the apartment across the courtyard. “Your mother was a whore,” one said to the other, which was all we could make out until the silence, and then the thud as the woman who had just been hit landed on the floor.

David, a man I lived with and tried to abandon, decided that competence was a kind of genius. He gave up—and denounced—his job as a music critic in New York to take a teaching post in Los Angeles. “There is no difference between loving music and loving music well,” he said; he imagined rooms full of eager average students. We were on the phone long distance when he told me. I had left him in New York (the abandonment) to attend law school in the Middle West. I had left our life together, and now he was leaving it too. I imagined two other people, another David, another Sheila, in our apartment, oblivious and bored respectively. “Maybe I’ll come out for a visit,” I told him.

The cat was making friends. The previous day when Emmet returned home, he had found four other cats loitering near his building. He worried what would happen if the cats jumped him when he left the house. The cats understood his language, but what passed among their heads was impenetrable to him. He had observed their movements all summer and listened to their sighs and spits and sounds, but he was no closer to infiltrating any part of it as a sign.

“My whole family is locked up,” Emily said matter-of-factly, as she might say that her family had attended the same university. “I don’t mean there’s millions of us. There’s just three, aside from some cousins I don’t know. My brother is the only one who tried to make a life. He got married. It worked for a few years, but then he got tired. One night he killed his wife, her mother, and their child while they took naps on the living room floor. Then he walked into the street and sat down, hugging his axe.”

The other patients began to stampede, knocking Emmet flat against the carpet. As they scrambled over him, he shielded his head with hands. Some sidestepped his body; some planted their feet directly on his back. The procession seemed interminable, as if one of them had opened a trap door in the back of the ward, inviting every person in the city to enter and file purposefully over his body. He did not turn or look or lift his head as the shoes hammered down upon him, for fear someone would kick his face. He cowered there until the last foot made its way past his head.

Our father comes in wearing his gorilla mask and hands, swinging his arms and beating his chest. My sister puts her hands over her plate. Our father pushes her hands away, grabs at her food and pokes sauerkraut through the mouth hole in his mask. He moves around the table, swiping food from the paper plates and guzzling from the cups. Near my mother he bangs his head on the knickknack shelf and one of the snow globes falls and breaks on the floor. It’s the one with the satellite inside.

When our father comes near me, I slide down under the table, but he pulls me back up by his hairy rubber hands. I don’t say anything. He likes being the gorilla. After dinner, when he takes off the mask and hands, his face will be flushed and there will be tears in his eyes.

Two policemen come into our backyard and I wake my sister up. They ask us who lives here and we say we do. They ask us who else lives here and we say our mother and father but they aren’t home right now. Then the police ask us if we heard any gunshots in the last two or three hours and we say no. They say someone in the neighborhood reported hearing gunshots coming from our backyard and my sister says it was boys setting off fireworks. The policemen look around our yard. They ask us if our mother or father own any firearms and we look at them like what are those. One of the policemen sees the can of beer on the grass and says You girls are a little young to be drinking beer and my sister says the boys with the firecrackers left it here.

Frankie Blackmore is hiding in the bushes. He thinks I am inside counting to one hundred, but I’m outside waiting for him on the front steps. As he comes around the side of the house, the tops of the branches part and sway. I move onto the porch so he can’t see me unless he looks straight up. He keeps cutting through the bushes. First I see the top of his head, which is flat because of his summer crew cut. Then I see his hands moving down. He puts one hand behind him and leans against the bricks. Then he moves the other hand down inside his pants. I watch his face. His eyes are half closed and his mouth is a little bit open. He keeps holding himself, moving his hand around and around. He shuts his eyes. With both hands he squeezes, faster and faster until he is rising up on his toes, his head tipped back against the bricks. Then his hands stop and he lets out a cry like he is being hurt.

Shortly after Halloween, Ruthie Wittenberg, round-faced, black bangs clasped at her temples by blue plastic My Merry barrettes I coveted, the only girl in the class shorter than I, befriended me. From Ruthie I learned many things: how to fold the Land O’Lakes butter box so the Indian girl’s knees turned into boobies (Ruthie’s word; I didn’t admit to mine), the naughty version of the Bosco song. I learned why there were no Polish people in our school or in our neighborhood, though Milwaukee was full of them. They had to live, Ruthie told me, south of the Kinnickkinnick River, in basements. “Because they never wash,” Ruthie explained. They used their bathtubs for storing coal. They farted all the time from the odd food they ate: dogs, Ruthie said, among other things. I nodded. Back in Oklahoma we had Indians, pretty much the same. When I asked how you could tell if somebody was Polish, Ruthie said, “You’ll know it when you smell one.”

People have a way of wanting to know why, and even if they didn’t, it’s a thing you have to ask yourself. “Why’d you do a thing like that?” “What made you decide to do it?” Like everything you do in life is something you decide. I’m not sure why I went there  by myself, but I do know this: the why of a thing doesn’t matter once it’s done, and all the reasons in the world won’t make it right or wrong, they just make it done, and once it’s done, it is. It’s just a thing you did, whyever. Sometimes you have to put the cart before the horse on purpose, do the thing and figure out the reasons later. Or make some up. Either way, it doesn’t matter. The closest I can come to why is that I figured I was half in love with him. So I went to the place and sat on a rock and one minute I didn’t see anything and the next he was standing right in front of me.

I didn’t think. I ran into the rubble and the ashes and I grabbed the teapot. The handle seared my skin but I held on and ran toward him as he walked away. The sound my throat made was a noise like none I’d ever heard—a terrible dark language or another tongue—that wouldn’t cease until I threw the teapot at him, hard. It struck him in the back, a clank, a rattle hollow as a far-off clap of thunder. He stopped, stood still, began to turn, then caught himself and kept on walking into rain that came in short, quick gusts and then began to fall like rain, like only rain.