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ALEX: I get panic attacks over nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’ll be at work, or at home, or at school, and suddenly I’ll start shaking and I won’t be able to breathe.

          (pause)

School counselor says that it might be a chemical imbalance. Or, she says, it might have something to do with my past. I think it has something to do with my past, so if you’re my father, it’s probably your fault.

The movie is entertaining and intriguing. At four points during it I rotate my eyes to observe Rebecca. The monitor is mirrored on her glasses and behind them her eyes are very wide. Although I am a more experienced programmer, I am certain her ideas on the movie are more complex than mine.

There is a strange world

in the changing of a light bulb,

the waxing of a bookshelf

I think I could grow by,

as into a dusty dream

in which each day layers

against one just past

and molds the one to come,

content as cabbage

drudging towards harvest.

The photo showed a dog, standing on its hind legs, being helped from the door of a helicopter by a serious-looking man in a down vest. The dog seemed to stand about the same height as the man, and looked like a Malamute. The strange thing about it, besides its larger-than-average size, was the fact that it was wearing a dark-colored jacket which looked like part of an old-fashioned military uniform, and a pair of spectacles, and that it appeared to have hands instead of front paws. In one of those gloved hands it held a cane, which was pointed at an awkward angle, probably because of the way the man was holding on to that foreleg just above the elbow. The other hand gripped the side of the helicopter doorway. The expression on the animal’s face was one of terror. Its lips were slightly parted, its ears were pointing straight backward, and its eyes were wide.

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.

He had that look on his face again. She remembered it now. It was that troubled look he had six months ago when his snakes got sick. “Angelica,” she remembered him saying softly, almost in tears, “they’re dying, they won’t eat, they’re as limp as noodles, all of them.” What was he going to do? He was supposed to deliver their venom to the lab days ago. They had been calling, reminding him, demanding, threatening to go with another venom vendor. They’d tell the other labs about him, ruin his hard-earned reputation.

He was screwed without his snakes. And what’s more, he really loved them.

Angelica always wanted him to look at her that way, with that much attention and intensity that would show he loved her that much too. That he needed her around. And finally here it was.

“No more pills, Angelica. You’re going to end up killing yourself.”