“What,” says Monty, frowning at the hefty FBI agent’s remark. “You mean because I’m queer? That’s crazy.”

        “I’m only suggesting that men who choose your orientation are more vulnerable to someone like Jamal taking advantage of you,” says Wrankle.

        “What do you mean, choose my orientation, and ‘someone like Jamal’? That’s total bullshit. That kind of narrow-​minded thinking went out years ago. Sexual orientation isn’t a choice. Being a snoop, that’s a choice. Besides, I’m not vulnerable because I’m gay. I’ve been out forever.”

        Not exactly true, he admits to himself, but true enough.

        “If you say so,” says Wrankle. “I’m only suggesting you might be at risk of blackmail. Your friend’s clearly been taking advantage of you.”

        “So you claim.” And, fuck, maybe he has.

        “Okay,” says the younger agent, the good cop, Gogetsu. “I think we should change the subject, Charlie. After all, Monty’s begun cooperating with us.”

        Charlie: now I know the bad cop’s first name.

        “Sorry, Jack, you’re right.”

        And the cute one’s too.

        Jack and Charlie. Gogetsu and Wrankle. They’re like a performing duo, like Abbott and Costello or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Only these two aren’t so funny—unless you find evasion and fake friendliness amusing.

        They’re back at the houseboat, following up Monty’s call informing them he found something of Jamal’s he needs to show them. A heavy downpour is pelting down on the houseboat, a strong wind blowing the rain against the lake-​facing windows and forming angry whitecaps on the lake.

        When the two agents are seated again on Monty’s love seat, he hands over the Al-Qaeda pamphlets he uncovered in Jamal’s old suitcase and the letter he received from him, sent the day before 9/11, as everyone’s now calling the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

        “Yes, thank you for handing all this over to us,” says Wrankle. “We can tell you we suspect that this man you call Jamal, real name Zahir, is no farmer’s son, like he claimed. We think his father is a big-​time warlord.”

        “How do you know that?” Monty asks.

        “We have our sources over there,” he replies. “We’ve confirmed his identity, and that’s who he is, not some poor farmer’s son like he led you to believe.”

        “I’m not sure I believe you either. And why would you tell me this? You said you aren’t free to divulge what you know. So why now?”

        “We think you should accept that whatever this character has told you is fake,” says Wrankle. “It’s no surprise you found all this terrorist propaganda.”

        “Or that he wrote you just before the attack,” adds Gogetsu.

        “What else have you learned about him?” asks Monty.

        “Our investigations are ongoing,” Gogetsu replies, looking at the senior officer.

        “Well, I’m guessing you’re getting your information directly from him. I think you’re holding Jamal and doing God knows what to get him to talk.”

        “We don’t ever use torture, if that’s what you’re insinuating,” says Gogetsu. “It’s illegal. And besides, it’s well established that information obtained through torture isn’t reliable.”

        “Sorry, but I don’t think you’re reliable,” says Monty. “I think you’ll say anything to get me to come up with incriminating evidence. But I don’t know anything more about Jamal than what I’ve told you.”

        “We believe you now that you’re cooperating,” says Wrankle, speaking more slowly and in a lower voice.

        Monty smiles. After the FBI’s last visit, he read up on interrogation techniques and learned that speaking slower and deeper is one of the methods used to put a subject at ease so they’ll relax and more readily spill the beans. He also consulted his lawyer, who advised him to cooperate but say nothing more than the basic facts.

        “At least you realize this guy hasn’t told you the whole story,” says Wrankle. “Why else would he hide away these pamphlets? How else can you explain the letter he sent a day before the attack?”

        “You have a brother in Canada,” says Gogetsu, abruptly changing the line of questioning.

        “Yeah, so what? Is that a crime?”

        “Just checking. He fled the US to avoid the draft, right? You talk to him regularly?”

        “What are you getting at?”

        “Nothing. Nothing. Don’t worry,” says Gogetsu. “Have you spoken to him about what’s happening?”

        “I speak to my brother all the time. It’s none of your business, okay?”

        “We’re checking everything,” says Wrankle. “And we need to follow up on a few details. Like when you first met Jamal, is that when he told you he was a farmer’s son?”

        “Yes. No, well, eh. I knew it from his refugee application, which I’m sure you can easily get hold of if you haven’t already.”

        “So, how could he afford to go to fancy schools and then a foreign university?” asks Wrankle. “Have you ever thought of that?”

        “I never questioned it. He was a gifted child. Everyone recognized that. His family never had to pay for his education.”

        “You tell us,” says Wrankle. “Isn’t it more likely his family was well off?”

        “I don’t know. And I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

        “That he lied to you,” suggests Gogetsu. “How sure are you anything your Jamal said in his refugee application is the truth?”

        “About his sexuality or that his life was threatened back there?” asks Monty. “That he taught English at a high school? Or what?”

        “Anything at all he’s told you,” says Wrankle. “Are you sure, for example, that he attended the Aga Khan Foundation’s university? Did you check with him or them?”

        “No, did you?”

        “We’re checking everything about this guy, I assure you,” says Wrankle.

        “Look,” says Monty, “I’ve had enough of all your damn prying into my life. I’ve told you everything about Jamal, your Zahir. I haven’t held one thing back. So tell me what else you’ve found out. How could he possibly have taken part in the attack? He was here, in Seattle.”

        “We’re following up a number of tips we’ve received,” says Gogetsu. “Obviously your friend didn’t take part in the attack itself, or he’d be dead. But there’s been a lot of secret jihadist recruitment of gullible young guys all over the world, and plenty of fundraising.”

        “What, are you suggesting, that Jamal was involved in that?” asks Monty.

        “All we’re able to tell you at present,” says Wrankle, “is that a lot of what you believed about this person isn’t true. Maybe everything. He’s covered up his real identity. He may or may not share your, eh, sexual preference, but other than that, he isn’t who he says he is. For all you know, he has a wife and kids back home in Afghanistan waiting for his return as a hero.”

        “Right, sure. My ‘preference.’ Back to the queer stuff,” says Monty. “You guys are something else. You don’t know anything, do you?”

        “Look, we’re trying to help you,” says Gogetsu, letting out a long sigh, another technique to coax suspects and witnesses into divulging whatever they’re hiding. “I’m afraid this character has pulled a fast one on you. I sympathize with how you must feel.”

        “Yeah, right, sure,” says Monty. “You don’t know anything about how I feel.”

        “Honestly, our job is to protect Americans,” says Gogetsu. “If we could reveal more to you, we would. We only want you to be on your guard. Call us right away if he contacts you again or if you find out anything more.”

        “That’s real nice of you. I mean, tell me the truth. Are you holding him? It’s been five days since he disappeared. Are you questioning him or not?”

        “I’m sorry, we’re not at liberty to divulge that information to you,” says Wrankle.

        “In other words, yes,” blurts out Monty, his breathing quickening again.

        “We can’t say yes or no.”

        “We’re getting nowhere,” says Monty, throwing up his hands. “Forget about my boyfriend’s lying to me. I don’t believe a word you’re telling me.”

        “But we’re doing this to protect you,” says Gogetsu, trying again to ease the tension. “Our country’s been attacked. We’ve got to take extraordinary steps to protect the homeland. I’m sure you understand that.”

        “I understand you think I’m hiding something about Jamal. That’s why you keep turning up. I’m fed up with all this crap.”

Though Monty doesn’t trust anything the agents say, he’s no longer confident he knows much about Jamal either. He’s not telling the FBI that. But what they’ve insinuated has a ring of truth to it. He doesn’t have any firsthand knowledge about his lover’s former life, only what was written in his refugee file, and whatever Jamal told him after he arrived in Seattle.

        Is he actually a warlord’s son? And if so, why didn’t he tell me? Would it have changed anything between us? Would it have hurt his refugee application? Is he even genuinely gay? Nothing makes sense anymore.

        At this point he’s hesitant to confide in anyone other than his brother about what’s been happening, anxious what they’ll think about him as well as Jamal. Since the attack everyone seems on edge. People are afraid their letters are laced with anthrax powder, the latest scare. They leave all their mail on a table outside their house and wear a face mask when they open stuff. Everyone’s suspicious of anyone different, especially Muslims. None of his friends have called or asked about Jamal. You’d think since his boyfriend is from Afghanistan they’d say something. Monty no longer knows what to believe or who to trust, except for Dave.

        And how dare that damn agent make such a big deal about my being vulnerable because I’m gay?

        Back when Monty was growing up, homosexual acts were illegal, and gays were routinely persecuted. The Red Scare in the forties and fifties zeroed in on homosexuals, thousands of whom were fired from civil service jobs, mainly from the State Department, where they were deemed vulnerable to blackmail and enlistment by foreign spies. But then came the sexual revolution and Stonewall and the gay revolution.

        Monty had exaggerated his response to Wrankle’s insinuation, saying he’d been “out forever.” In fact it took him years to admit his sexual orientation to himself, let alone reveal it to family or friends. He’d ached to come out, to fulfill his desire and proclaim his identity. But he also feared he’d be ostracized, called a freak, an aberration.

        “Your sexuality puts you at risk,” the agent declared. Tempting to say that’s bullshit. But maybe I have been vulnerable—all my life.

        “My dad was a herder like most other men. We had goats, sheep, yaks, a few horses, cows, donkeys. A few, not many. My dad wasn’t considered a ‘big man.’ Big men had many animals and much more land. But he was respected for his toughness and honesty. Mom was softer, kinder, but she was cautious being an outsider. She’s Tajik, a Sunni Muslim, and intermarriage was extremely unusual. Wakhi people like my dad are Ismaili Shiites, followers of the Aga Khan.”

        Monty could listen endlessly to Jamal’s stories about growing up in the Wakhan Corridor, an isolated, sparsely populated, narrow finger of land in the far northeast corner of Afghanistan. The corridor extends out from Badakhshan Province, sandwiched between Tajikistan and Pakistan, and at its far eastern end borders China. Jonathan would listen briefly to Jamal’s accounts of his life there and then excuse himself, saying he was going to his studio to paint.

        Coincidentally, Monty knew about the Wakhan Corridor. He’d long been fascinated with an empire that ruled there, as well as ruling all of present-​day Afghanistan and much of India—the Kushan. Originally an Indo-​European nomadic confederation living in the desert oases on the northern border of ancient China, they thrived by trading jade and horses with the Chinese kingdoms. After being routed by another powerful nomadic people, they migrated down through central Asia and eventually conquered Bactria, the farthest reach of Alexander the Great’s empire. From there the Kushan grew rich controlling the silk routes. Monty tried for years to write a historical novel about their most powerful king, Kanishka, a contemporary of the Roman emperor Hadrian.

        From prehistoric times a vital link between China and central Asia, the Wakhan Corridor is a harsh, arid environment with frigid temperatures much of the year. To the south rise the towering Hindu Kush and Karakoram mountains, and to the north, the Pamir Mountains. Glaciers, deserts, high meadows, verdant riversides: the land is awesome but forbidding, the narrow valley rising from ten thousand feet in elevation in the west to over sixteen thousand in the east.

        “Besides tending the animals,” Jamal recounted, “we did some farming—wheat, barley, millet, apricot, apple trees. We barely grew enough for ourselves. There was no medicine, no government help. Many children died from tuberculosis. Three of my siblings didn’t survive past a year. And opium was everywhere. Many men were hooked on it, though luckily not my father.”

        Monty knew from Jamal’s application that he spent his childhood years in that world, working alongside his father, herding animals and eking out a bare living from the land. Later, though, Jamal had been singled out for his exceptional intelligence and attended better schools, ultimately going to university in Pakistan. Having studied English for many years, and then teaching it in Kabul, he had no trouble speaking the language fluently.

        I wonder now if it was all a ruse? His whole life story. Everything he claimed in his refugee application. Everything he told us after he arrived and moved in with us. Then all the flirting while I was still with Jonathan. And later, becoming lovers. All a cover so I’d shelter him while he raised money or recruited or whatever it was he was doing for some nightmarish cabal. If that’s what he was doing. How gullible I was.

        “What did you live in?” Monty asked. “A yurt, I guess it’s called?”

        “No, Kyrgyz people live in yurts higher up in the mountains. They’re seminomadic. We lived in a simple one-​room house. The walls were made of stone and mud. We used manure as a kind of cement. There were rough wooden pillars inside, poplar and juniper. They held up wooden beams covered with layers of willow, grass, and more manure to keep out the water. The floor was dirt, but we had some old worn-​out rugs. On one side there was a long wood stove for heating. It was very smoky inside. Imagine eight of us crowded into one smoky room, my mother making bread in a tandoor oven. It was so cold outside. It could drop to twenty-​five degrees below zero in midwinter, minus fifteen in Fahrenheit. Our skin was always terribly dry, our faces red and inflamed. Rosacea, you call it. To keep warm we drank tea with yak milk, butter, and salt. I miss that taste a lot; you’d probably hate it.”

        “No, I’d like to try it,” Monty said. “What kind of diet did you have? I’d love it if you’d make the foods you grew up with.”

        “Hmm, not so sure you would like it. No chili or spices. We usually ate a fried stew of vegetables and herbs and, when we had any, chicken and goat meat. And of course my mom’s flatbread.”

        “What did you do for essential things you couldn’t grow or make yourselves?”

        “We depended on traveling merchants for a lot of basic staples, especially salt, flour, rice, onions, soap, rubber boots,” Jamal went on to tell Monty. “Later we also bought generators from them. They would enter the corridor each spring, driving over the one nearly impassable road that ran through the corridor along rocky precipices and through deserts. Their trucks would get stuck all the time in ice and snow even though it was spring. Sometimes they had to light a fire under their tanks to defrost the fuel. Can you imagine that? Occasionally a truck would fall over a cliff into a ravine. Some years the trucks couldn’t get through at all, and we’d run out of basics. Life got really hard then. We often went hungry. No Melmac dishes for us. We were happy having any food to eat.”

        Maybe I revealed too much of my own story to Jamal, like about my mom’s Melmac dishes and growing up middle class in Los Angeles. Our lives couldn’t have been more different.

        “Did you pay these merchants in money?” Monty asked.

        “Almost never. It was all barter. We would exchange animals, sometimes cheese, for their goods. It was fun to watch all the bargaining. It was like a game, fierce but friendly in the end. The merchants would pick up the animals on their way heading back from the east end of the corridor, near the border with China. The same guys would come year after year, until they got too old. But even then they’d hire a young driver.”

        “Were there any wild animals there?”

        “Yes, of course. It wasn’t like the fantasy movieland wild animals you thought a man kept around the corner from you. In the Wakhan there were lots of wolves. We’d see them, but they kept their distance, except for a few tamer ones. But the snow leopards and big sheep with long, spiraling horns—they’re called Marco Polo sheep in the west—we only spotted them occasionally.”

        “Wow. Yeah. We sure had different childhoods. It must have been very hard for you.”

        “It was the only life I knew. Nothing you could do about it. But I was happy. I had a happy childhood. I was the second oldest. And I was loved by my parents, though I was terribly precocious. Other children were satisfied to live the same life as their parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents. But I was curious about everything. I wanted to understand why mountains exist, where the clouds come from, why there’s so much desert, and how humans ended up ruling the earth.

        “In the summer I would go with my dad when he took our animals to higher pasture in the mountains. It could take as long as ten or twenty days to get there and back, depending on where the better meadows were that year. We’d ride donkeys or yaks. Yaks are great: they’re like jeeps—they can travel up steep rocky mountainsides and cross icy rivers. But we’d be freezing and totally exhausted by the time we arrived at our destination. And you’d have to be careful in case of avalanches or landslides. Kyrgyz people would be up there too. Wakhi people like us, on my father’s side, and Kyrgyz got along okay. I loved it up in the mountains, so isolated. I’d often wander out by myself for hours at a time. I would talk to the mountains.”

        “What? Actually talk to mountains?” Monty asked, his eyes popping open.

        “Yes, they were my friends. I looked up at the high peaks and the clouds, and we spoke the same language. The animals, too. They talk. And when we returned home, I would renew my friendship with the river and the trees. Trees are especially talkative. Mountains talk very slowly. You have to be very patient with them. That may all sound crazy, Monty, but it was really true for me.”

        “What did you talk about, like with the mountains?”

        “Oh, what they could see from such heights. And what they thought witnessing millions of years unfold, hundreds of millions. They would tell me how the land kept changing. Floods, new rivers and valleys. New vegetation. New animal species, right up to us humans—the johnny-​come-latelies. (I love using these funny English expressions.) The mountains and tress, they think humans are crazy. Less so about people like us living on the land, but city people especially. The mountains can see all the great cities of the world, and they told me about them—Paris, London, New York, Moscow, Beijing. You must think I’m nuts. But it’s the truth.”

        “Do you think other children talked to mountains and trees like you did?”

        “I don’t know. I doubt it. I was independent compared to other boys, and certainly girls. More than independent, I was a little wild. Very wild. Once my parents sent me away for a year to live with my mother’s Tajik family in another village after my dad found me masturbating two teenage boys. He hit me hard, I remember. That was the only time he hit me like that. I think I was eight or nine.”

        “So you knew you were gay from such an early age?”

        “I never thought of it that way. It felt natural, playing with other boys like that. Just like talking to the mountains and trees.”

        Doesn’t seem plausible that he had so readily accepted his sexuality in that culture. Probably another lie—a lie that he’s homosexual at all. Though he sure convinced me. I’m still convinced. It’s even conceivable he was recruited, if he was, for the very reason that he is gay, or bi. Maybe they, whoever they are, thought it could prove useful. Clearly it did. And all that stuff about talking to mountains … come on.

“I saw your homeland once from the China side,” Monty told Jamal two years later, after they became lovers.

        “I remember you mentioned that to me before, after I first arrived here.”

        “It was when I traveled there in ninety-​five—did I tell you that too?—and I asked my driver to take a detour right up to the border where China touches the Wakhan Corridor.”

        Monty fancied the coincidence hinted at something preordained in their meeting, as if they were two quantum-​entangled particles running on parallel tracks, light-​years apart. It was an absurd thought, he knew. Sure, I’d met Jonathan after three serendipitous encounters. But he and I hitched up—the words I used—literally overnight. But with Jamal, I developed a deep rapport during the two years before we consummated our relationship. And we had strong chemistry from the time he arrived.

        “Don’t you remember? I waved at you from over the border in China,” Monty added. Silly besotted me.

        “Hah. You told me that too. But I was teaching in Kabul by then,” Jamal retorted. “No way you could have waved at me. Maybe at some other handsome Afghan boy.”

        “Now you’re teasing me. But seriously, I wanted to get a feel for the land there firsthand. Of course I didn’t cross the border and go into Afghanistan, but the land on the China side is virtually identical. I wanted to see all this because of my interest in the nomadic people who formed an empire there.”

        “You’re talking about the Kushan again, right?” Jamal said.

        “Yes, them. Maybe you’re related to their great emperor Kanishka,” Monty said in jest.

        “Of course I am,” Jamal replied in the same tone. “In fact I am Kanishka. I’m immortal. You know I converted to Buddhism and endorsed its practice in my empire. And I sent Indian monks to China to introduce Mahayana Buddhism there. And of course my mentor was Ashvaghosha. You know him, right? He wrote the first biography of Buddha and was the twelfth in the direct line from Buddha’s disciple Mahakasyapa to Bodhidharma, who brought your Zen to China.”

        “Okay, okay. I give up,” Monty said, covering his face. “I guess you know everything.”

        “Well, I know the history of my country backwards and forwards. The Wakhan was home to one of the five Kushan clans. The Kushan controlled the silk route, many routes actually, and much more than silk was traded. Like lapis lazuli from Badakhshan, my home province, the world’s only source of that blue stone. Marco Polo passed through the Wakhan to get to China, if you believe his book. Centuries later, the Wakhan Corridor was set as the boundary between Russian Turkmenistan and British India, in their so-called Great Game, when they competed for control of central Asia. I’ve learned about world history too.”

        His mind was like a library; it took my breath away. Hard to believe he’d picked up all this being groomed by his handlers. I mean how could he know so much detail about the history of Buddhism, more than I did, in fact? I was dazzled by his worldliness given his origin. I shared more with him intellectually than I ever did with Jonathan all those years. Jamal took an interest in my academic work. We’d discuss American history for hours. We watched science programs on PBS and talked about physics, biology, the environment. I introduced him to Western classical music. Even before we were a couple, he asked me to teach him Zen meditation, and we practiced together. He was grounded like a shepherd boy and yet sophisticated and urbane. It made me fall deeper in love with him. And, admittedly, the sex was phenomenal. Better than I’d ever experienced with anyone. More intimate. Playful. Passionate.

        “I’d be curious to know more about your time in Kabul, after the Taliban took over,” Monty asked. “It must have been terrifying. Especially considering what they did to your boyfriend.”

        “I really don’t want to talk about that, Monty. I’d prefer you don’t ask about it.”

        “Okay, sorry.”

        But it wasn’t okay, I know now. He was hiding something. But what exactly? Maybe something to do with the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. Oh, Jamal, who are you really?

        “I don’t want to go,” says Dave, still in bed, yawning.

        “Come on, it’ll be fun,” implores his mother, poking her head into her son’s room.

        “Yeah, right,” moans Dave, covering his face with his pillow.

        “Let him stay,” says Leo, not too thrilled himself about driving far into the San Fernando Valley on the weekend. He’d much rather be outdoors, under the hot sun, playing tennis. “But concentrate on your homework,” he adds. “And I don’t want you hanging around Stew’s place.”

        “Yeah, fine. Whatever you say,” says Dave, intending to head right over to his friend’s apartment as soon as his family drives away.

        Leo’s determined to leave early enough to beat the traffic, and Sarah wants to get to the discount store for their annual Melmac sale before they run low on stock.

        Melmac: the dishware made from melamine resin—a polymer of melamine (a trimer of cyanamide with a triazine skeleton, combined with formaldehyde). Tasty, yes? And so easy to wash, stack, and store—and to drop without shattering into a thousand life-​threatening ceramic shards. You can use Melmac for anything, and Sarah and Leo do, consuming countless cups of watery percolated coffee at every meal, heedless of how the steaming hot liquid interacts with its synthetic vessel. Why bother washing and chipping expensive china when you can use Melmac for your weekly schedule of dry Swiss steak, leathery overcooked liver, juicy double-​baked brisket, and Kraft macaroni and cheese? Plus potatoes, boiled or baked—“Dinner isn’t dinner without potatoes,” Leo insists, accustomed still to his mother’s plain cooking.

        The San Fernando Valley, where they’re headed early Saturday morning, itself resembles a kind of synthetic Melmac cosmos, the pseudo-​urban world of Los Angeles spreading rapidly like an invasive species over the mountains and up and down the coast. Large ranch-​style homes with expansive water-​hungry fertilizer-​consuming lawns and other foreign plants fill this flat, endless, formerly dry chaparral plain, a plastic malignancy grafted onto the amorphous conurbation of Greater, and lesser, LA.

        But to get to the Valley you must first cross though the Santa Monica Mountains, and that’s fun. Unlike LA’s boring grid streets, with their endless rows of single-​story homes, the canyon passageways twist and turn and rise and fall, following the natural landscape and offering glimpses of woodsy shacks and pricey secluded bohemian-​looking estates owned by otherwise unconventional left-​leaning celebrities. Packing into Leo’s meticulously washed white Mercury sedan, you head into your choice of Coldwater Canyon, Laurel Canyon, Benedict Canyon, Beverly Glen, or Sepulveda Pass, each of which winds its way through the mountains.

        It’s around one of those bends that Leo abruptly lowers his speed, seeing flashing lights ahead. “Monty, duck down right now,” Sarah cries out. “Cover your eyes. And don’t look out the window.”

        A sure signal for Monty to raise his head just enough to see the smoking remains of a crash and the leg of a lady protruding from under the wheel of one of the cars, the rest of her body lying in an expanding pool of blood. It’s not the first crash he’s witnessed, three decades before seatbelts become mandatory in California. But it’s the first time he’s seen an actual dead human being. Maybe the car’s going to explode, he thinks, smelling gasoline fumes and smoldering rubber.

        “Is she dead?” he asks, both terrified and aroused.

        More thrilling yet than the calamities along the winding passes are the conflagrations that periodically devour the mountainsides themselves. Caused by lightning, faulty power lines, or people accidentally or intentionally setting light to the parched terrain, the fires spread rapidly through the canyons, mutating into monumental infernos. Watching safely from afar, sitting on the lawn of his West LA home, Monty watches in awe when sections of the Santa Monica Mountains perennially go up in flames, consuming the homes of the rich. Of course, wildfires also wreck poor people’s lives. And years later, Monty will feel empathy for all suffering—that of the rich as well—and not just human suffering. Nevertheless, catastrophes of all sorts confirm that, despite Homo sapiens’ conceit we’ve conquered the final zenith of evolution, nature ultimately wins. We all die—especially Monty. He knows he’s doomed, and it terrifies him.

        “Let’s go,” says Leo, beckoning his family once again into his pristine Merc, this time to join hundreds of other families driving into the hills to gawk at the sight of mansions burned out during the most recent disaster. Who needs Karl Marx butting in when homemade firestorms level the playing field?

        By the time Monty flees LA and its smog and heat to attend a notoriously libertine, though academically prestigious, private college in Portland, where he hopes he’ll get a superior education—and lots of sex—most people will have abandoned driving through the picturesque canyon roads to get to the Valley. They’ll be loading instead onto the new Interstate 405. Slashing its way sensibly and efficiently north through the mountains, the San Diego Freeway, as it’s called, is a breeze—except it isn’t. Within days of opening and forever afterward, the 405 will be packed with more cars and more traffic jams than any other single highway in all of America.

        But who cares? Monty lives in a pretend world where everything including nothing is here for the taking. Los Angeles itself is a fake city transformed from a conquistador slave mission into an urban sprawl conjured up by railroad and water barons who exploited the northern half of the state’s resources to irrigate the land and incite waves of property speculation. Freeway construction took off after World War II, ultimately crisscrossing the entire LA basin, allowing you to drive everywhere, and nowhere.

        And why not? Gas is practically free. Until it isn’t. Until not only does the price of fuel jump, but Monty and everyone else wakes up five or six decades later to realize, lo and behold, me personally, I’ve poisoned the earth’s atmosphere and melted the polar ice caps.

In the meantime, life is scary enough as it is for this eight-​year-old—like walking by himself to elementary school, taking care that he doesn’t get attacked on the way by wild animals when he turns the corner of his own street and descends Preuss Road, the steepest hill in his little world.

        From the crest of the hill, he can look east toward central Los Angeles. Here Preuss Road has a few larger homes that seem like mansions to Monty and more American, some displaying the flag every day. Christian, Monty guesses. These houses must be Christian. Christians fly American flags every day. Jews like my family live in Spanish-​style houses and only fly the flag on July Fourth, and only so no one will think they’re communists.

        The homes on his street are smaller and virtually identical in style. In one of several standard layouts, thousands of pastiche Spanish colonial homes were built in LA in the 1930s and ’40s, mostly to accommodate employees of the burgeoning defense industry. Seventy years later these modest homes will be highly esteemed for their decorative details—genuine terra-​cotta roof tiles, cool patios, leaded stained glass windows, and wrought iron gates. Landscaped with native plants, modernized with air-​conditioning and faux-​marble kitchens, fitted out with solar panels on their flat roofs, they’ll cost a hundred times what Leo and Sarah paid in 1950.

        Midway down Preuss Hill, heading toward his school, there’s a mysterious house on a double lot, hidden behind tall, stinky-​smelling bushes. An old man lives there and, it’s rumored, keeps animals for the movies—dogs and cats, giant snakes and lizards, monkeys, perhaps tigers and lions too. Monty’s never seen any of these animals, but he walks by carefully to avoid disturbing them. In West Los Angeles, you never know when you’ll come face-to-face with a wild beast. Or Nazis or Richard Nixon or Joe McCarthy.

        Or a movie star, for practically right next door is Hollywood. Monty understands Hollywood. Hollywood is the girl in his third-​grade class selected to be a guest on Art Linkletter’s televised kids’ show. The whole class watches her on a puny TV set mounted on a flimsy metal stand at the front of the room. Later she appears in commercials and has a role in a movie, a Western.

        “I want to be an actor,” Monty tells his parents, pleading to be sent to acting school. He yearns to be in the movies, to be famous, worshipped, immortal, with his own everlasting gold star on Hollywood Boulevard.

        A few years earlier he began demonstrating his thespian prowess at the meetings his parents hosted of the one organization they still dared to belong to, the Red Scare having frightened them into quitting the rest. Members of this secular Jewish association were uniformly “liberals,” his parents’ code word for left-​wing Democrats, socialists, and disenchanted ex-communists. Although Leo and Sarah are devoutly nonreligious and committed to racial, religious, and all sorts of other equality, they associate exclusively with other Jews. Liberal Jews.

        But there was no politics in this organization. Families would merely gather for picnics with games and barbecues, all very American. When the club’s executive committee met in Monty’s living room, every few minutes he would parade through the room dressed in a different costume. Astride a broom and wearing a witch’s hat left over from Halloween. Draped in a dusty serape, wearing a Mexican hat and shaking maracas purchased during a cut-​rate vacation in Baja California. Or brandishing a toy rubber sword and wrapped in a bedspread as a cape, a precursor to Zorro, the righteous upper-​class communist who fights the rich and liberates the poor. More characters would appear until his father led him back to his room and ordered him to stay put. He would sit and mope on the floor, playing with his set of toy plastic American soldiers battling Tinkertoy spools, their center holes armed with pick-up sticks. The soldiers always lost: a virtuous fledgling liberal was Monty.

        Over the next three years he glumly plots escaping from his bedroom into stardom, becoming infinitely more famous than his classmate, and meanwhile saving the world from starvation, disease, and Richard Nixon. Nix on Nixon reads the presidential bumper sticker on his parents’ best friend’s car, a rusty Model T Ford—like the American communist, a vanishing relic from a bygone era.

        “Okay, okay,” Sarah says, giving in to her son’s daily plea. “You can try out that acting school where your cousin went.”

        “Waste of money,” says Leo, frowning.

        “Yippee,” cries Monty, jumping up and down.

        “But remember,” his mother says, “artists starve.”

        “Yeah, you should be a lawyer instead,” says his father. “You can convince us of anything.”

One thing he hasn’t managed to convince his parents to do is to give him a weekly allowance like all his classmates receive. Unless he hoards his milk money, he has no spare change, and for months he’s been jealously eyeing other children who stop after school at a corner store and buy Abba-​Zabas, Sugar Babies, Bazooka gum, Oh Henry! bars, and Tootsie Rolls. On his way home one rainy Friday, wearing his yellow raincoat and buckled galoshes, Monty grabs a tiny syrup-​filled wax bottle from the store counter and hides it in his pants pocket.

        As he’s about to head out the door, the owner, a tall, thin bald man wearing a white apron, steps in front of him, raises a fist above his head, and bellows, “Give me that candy! If I ever catch you stealing again, I’ll kill you.”

        Two cents they cost: life is cheap in LA. Terrified, Monty hands over the miniature wax bottle and runs out.

        The next morning, anxious the man will kill him on sight, he crawls into his parents’ bed and, whimpering, tells them what happened. When they ask if he’s ever stolen anything else, he tearfully leads them outside to the trash can, where he digs down and pulls out five toy cars he’d carefully hidden in crumpled newspaper. He pilfered the cars from a neighborhood toy-​and-photography studio where his parents have taken him and his brother every year for family portraits.

        “Why did you do this?” his father asks, for once not angry but sensitive to his son’s crisis.

        “Because I want a dog,” Monty answers straightaway.

        Has he been longing for a dog? The thought’s crossed his mind for sure, but it’s not something he’s craving. Not like candies or theater school or Cubby the Mouseketeer. A dog is merely the quickest excuse he can think of to account for his life of crime. And come to think of it, having a dog might make life perfect. I could be happy all the time, like Jeff, he thinks, picturing the cute blond owner of the golden collie Lassie in the popular TV series of the same name. Monty even looks like a Jewish version of the towheaded Jeff.

        The next weekend his parents take him to the nearest pound, where he immediately selects a skittish black-​and-tan mongrel with rancid breath. He names her Josephine, a dog he’ll soon enough ignore, leaving her to his father to care for. Decades later he’ll have nightmares that while his parents are away on vacation, he’s left Josephine outside for days and forgotten to add water to her bowl.

        As for the pilfered cars, his parents don’t embarrass Monty by insisting he return them to the toy shop. Instead they’re stored high in a closet and later given away as gifts. A family of Zorros sharing ill-​begotten booty.

        Besides his life as a serial thief, Monty is also a serial killer. Each spring—a seasonal change only barely detectable in Los Angeles, with a slight uptick in temperature—bright pink buds appear on the begonia plants his mother hangs in pots from the archway over the front patio. Lovingly he pops open all the buds he can reach. They make such a marvelous sound. Pop pop pop. It’s a wonder any survive.

        And now that he can reach the lower branches of the jacaranda tree growing in the narrow curbside band of lawn in front of his house, he can strip away its violet-​colored blossoms. The flowers come off in one delightfully orgasmic zip as he pulls his thumb and forefinger down each stem. Zip zip zip. The lawn is covered with a sea of slaughtered bright purplish-​blue blossoms.

        What marvelous power Monty has over nature—forget about those fires. Later in life, a practicing Buddhist, he’ll go out of his way to avoid accidentally bruising a flower or harming the tiniest insect. But today he’s free to exercise his ferociously male killer instinct, doing his part in what turns into humanity’s unwitting mass species extinction.

        Ants are a favorite target. On the paved driveway of his home, they’re declared enemy number one. J. Edgar Hoover, at the height of his power as FBI director, fails to dispatch anywhere near as many evildoers. Barely ten years old, Monty inflicts a holocaust on ants, his abiding fear of death never once arousing mercy for other forms of life. Not yet, anyway.

        Particularly enticing is attacking the ants when they form a long line to harvest something like a dead caterpillar. Slap slap slap: he dispatches hundreds and thousands of ants with the bottom of his rubber flip-​flops. The ones his parents bought for him at the Akron store that recently opened not far from his home, introducing Angelenos to all sorts of cheap, colorful imports from Mexico, Korea, Japan, and other impoverished countries.

        In the fifties, a decade after its humiliating defeat, Japan remains vanquished and destitute, unlike America at the height of its power: optimistic, economically burgeoning, blindly ignorant of the outside world. Yet to be significantly challenged by the Soviet Union or communist China, America faces only one grave menace: Tetramorium, better known as pavement ants.

        These and other Formicidae threaten the entire Monty household. Sarah is vigilant for the slightest sign of them indoors. Particularly vulnerable is the vented kitchen cabinet where bananas and other ripening fruit are stored. “Leo, get the poison. They’re everywhere,” she cries out in panic after spotting two or three scout ants.

        Small bottles of sickly-​sweet-smelling goop are opened and set up here and there throughout the kitchen, while Monty handles extermination duties outside. A family of liberals transformed into homicidal maniacs.

After he’s attended the private drama school for two years, Monty’s parents convince him to shift to less costly classes at the local Jewish community center. At first his good looks get him leading roles. One time he plays Judah Maccabee, the hero of the Hanukkah celebration. When it comes time for his character to light the menorah, Monty shouts his lines so melodramatically that the younger children representing the candles all break up in giggles. By the time he’s twelve years old, he admits to himself how grossly he overacts and abandons his hope of stardom. But “acting” continues to hang over him like a brand identity.

        “You’re just acting,” says Leo when Monty declares his intention to run away to socialist Sweden. “Stop acting,” his mother exclaims when he says he’ll die if she doesn’t buy him a scooter like other neighborhood boys have. “They’re too dangerous.” And years later, when he returns from his freshman year in college and announces he’s gay, “You’re just acting,” his father will declare.

        Monty’s begun thinking the same thing himself, that he’s pretending all the time. That he’s a total fake. Pretending to be interested in girls like the other boys in his grade school constantly proclaim, going along with their vulgar taunts, meanwhile hoping no one notices that he’s furtively eyeing the bulges in other boys’ crotches. Bulges that have grown more prominent and alluring with each advancing grade level, cupped neatly by stiff blue Levi’s jeans, with their rolled-up cuffs.

        He realizes he isn’t supposed to be ogling boys’ crotches. That’s what’s called queer or faggot and what you get beat up for, for being a sissy, a target of loathing and ridicule. He should be staring instead at girls’ nascent boobs, titties, bangers, bazookas. That’s what all the boys incessantly talk about, boasting of what they would do to these titties or those titties, inventing stories that they’d made it with so-and-so, that they’d had her, whatever that means.

        Monty first catches a glimpse of pubescent breasts, so unlike the sagging wrinkled lumps he’d once inadvertently seen when his grandma was dressing in her mothball-​and-rosewater-​smelling bedroom and forgot to close the door. He’s standing in the bleachers where his sixth-​grade class has assembled for their graduation photo. Among the tallest boys, he’s placed in the middle of the top row. From here he can peer down the blouse of the girl standing below him. Her first-​bloom breasts are round and firm. He’s supposed to be titillated by these titties and to long to fondle them … and tell all the other boys about his made-up conquests. But he doesn’t feel the urge at all. He wants the Mouseketeer Cubby and Cubby’s thing, or some other Cubby’s thing. Or Jay, the boy who’d once nuzzled up close to him on the kindergarten steps.

        By chance, later that day he’s standing right next to that same Jay. In the years since kindergarten, Monty had often spotted him in the playground—tougher, rakish now for a twelve-​year-old—but they’d never become friends. The two have been assigned to load up stacks of newspaper onto a flatbed truck for an end-of-year drive to collect funds for a new piano in the auditorium honoring the school’s retiring principal.

        Grasping the scratchy sisal string the bundles are tied with, Monty has a momentary fantasy he’s touching the rough fabric of Jay’s faded blue jeans, along the inside of his thigh. The thought sends a chill through his body, like when his mother used to tickle his feet after cutting his toenails. Taking a sidelong glance at Jay, he’s startled to see a large protrusion in the boy’s crotch. Jay catches him looking and smiles. “Down, boy,” he says, talking to his erect penis as if it were a person and he could coax it to settle back down.

        Turning to face Monty, he says, “Wanna touch it?” Still the same Jay.

        Monty blushes, shocked by the boy’s brazenness. Yes, I want to, he’d like to answer. I’m dying to touch it.

        But he’s too scared to say a word, looking this way and that, checking that no one’s watching them, embarrassed by his own arising erection. What if he’s fooling me and tells everyone I’m a faggot? Why does he even have a hard-on? Monty wonders, not realizing he himself is the attraction, that Jay is as aroused by him as he is by Jay, whose erection at that moment is Monty’s whole universe. And yes, he wants it. Desperately.

        “Huh, what do you mean?” Monty manages to squeak out.

        “Nothing,” says Jay, sniggering. “Just kidding around.”

        Or not.

        Later that day, standing in the large, tiled stall in the bathroom next to his bedroom, taking his habitual thirty-​five-minute-​long shower, hot water running over his face and chest, down his back, along the crack of his ass and through the hairs newly sprouting around his genitals, he’s passionately trying to masturbate, thinking about Jay’s erection while rubbing his own.

        This growing passion, this new obsession—something besides fearing death, besides showing off how smart he is or craving to be a movie star—is gradually taking shape in Monty’s consciousness. Shadowy and amorphous at first, rising from the source of his being, as intrinsic as his having grayish-​blue eyes and blond hair, it calls to him with an instinct he still has no name for. Within the year he’ll have a name for it and furtively look up the word homosexual in every science and reference book he can get his hands on at his local library branch, careful that no one sees him. Careful that no one will think that, like his deformed Aunt Beatrice, he’s a freak.

        “Yes, I just got it. It was mailed Monday, the day before the attack,” says Monty, using a different pay phone from the last time he called his brother. “It took three days to get here. I guess mail delivery is slowed down.”

        “It’s probably that anthrax scare. So what did Jamal’s letter say?”

        “Here, I’ll read it to you. ‘Monty, my heart, I have to leave for a while. Don’t be alarmed. But if I don’t return, something may have happened. I’m sorry, I can’t say more. Take care of yourself. Be careful. I love you. Jamal.’”

        “Holy Moses. Like, what might happen to him?” asks Dave.

        “He doesn’t say. Not even a hint.”

        “But are you sure it’s from him?”

        “It’s got to be. It’s his handwriting.”

        “Where was it sent from?”

        “It’s postmarked on the tenth from somewhere in downtown Seattle.”

        “Sent the day before the attack. That doesn’t sound good at all.”

        “No, it sure as hell doesn’t,” says Monty. “So what should I do about it? This is fucked up. He must have known something big was coming. Jesus Christ. What should I do?”

        “What do you think you should do?”

        “I hate it, but I think I have to hand the damn letter over to the FBI, and all the Al-Qaeda pamphlets I found in Jamal’s suitcase. I phoned them and they’re coming tomorrow. If I don’t show them this stuff, I’ll get into deeper shit myself.”

        “I’m afraid you’re right. You don’t have a choice,” says Dave.

        “But this is going to incriminate Jamal even more, isn’t it?”

        “Probably. I realize it’s painful to picture him as a terrorist, Monty. But the letter is suspicious. You have to hand it over, along with the pamphlets.”

        “That’s what I think too. But I needed to hear it from you.”

        “Listen, I have my theories about what’s behind all this,” says Dave.

        “About Jamal?”

        “No, not about Jamal exactly. I mean the attack, what led up to it, what’s going on in Afghanistan and the Middle East. I’m writing an article about it, that it all has to do with oil and other fossil fuels.”

        “Come on, it can’t be that simple,” says Monty.

        “Oh, it’s not simple at all. It’s byzantine. And it’s all been unfolding in the years since World War Two. Fossil fuel consumption, petrochemicals, plastics, pesticides—their consumption has grown exponentially exactly during our lifetime. Yours and mine. And along with it America’s meddling in the Middle East. Look at what happened when the Egyptians closed the Suez Canal in fifty-​six. Britain and France invaded. But then the US intervened, and the Europeans withdrew. And so the US gets the upper hand for the future.”

        “But what does that have to do with oil?”

        “Over ten percent of the world’s oil production passed through the canal.”

        “Yeah, okay … and …”

        “And before that, in fifty-​three, the US covertly overthrew the elected government of Iran after its leader, Mosaddegh, nationalized the oil industry. Then the US installed the shah to do their bidding. And then his brutal regime was overthrown by the Iranian Revolution. All you have to do, Monty, is ask yourself who’s interests are being served. The coal, petroleum, and petrochemical corporations have a stranglehold over America, along with related industries like automobile manufacturers, armaments, fertilizer, plastics.”

        “Okay, I understand all this, but I don’t see what it has to do with Afghanistan, let alone Jamal,” says Monty. “You’re not making any sense.”

        “Hold your horses. It’s all related. And a lot of it centers on Saudi Arabia and the oil emirates. Everything America has done rotates around controlling the Middle East and its oil, namely the Arabian Peninsula. And secondly to defeat the Soviet Union. Which fell apart soon after the US-backed mujahideen triumphed in Afghanistan and Russia retreated. Except that the US stupidly left the scene in complete chaos, and the Taliban took over. Meanwhile Al-Qaeda was determined to attack the US so they could in turn dislodge Arab governments and set up a giant caliphate. Fifteen of the nineteen attackers were from Saudi Arabia. The Taliban may or may not have been involved, but for sure they allowed Al-Qaeda to settle in Afghanistan after they were expelled from Sudan.”

        “Are you sure this isn’t all conspiracy paranoia?” asks Monty. “I mean, I wouldn’t put anything past America or Saudi Arabia and the oil company giants. But do you think everything is so interlinked?”

        “Of course everything is interlinked. You never take me seriously, Monty. Don’t you realize from your Buddhist practice that everything is related? Codependent origination, it’s called, right? Everything arises concurrently. Everything causes everything else. Samsara, endless cycling and suffering.”

        “Hah,” says Monty. “I guess you’ve been reading up on Buddhism so you can poke fun at me. But you’re right, conspiracies aren’t always conscious. It’s all interwoven. So do you think your article will get published? You’re a freelance journalist, after all; you can say whatever you want.”

        “Yeah, if we truly lived in a free country,” says Dave. “So far none of my usual outlets here or in the States want to touch this story. Everyone only feels pity now for the US. Let’s put all else aside, as if America’s issues are infinitely more important than the rest of the world’s. I don’t mean to belittle at all what happened in New York. It was horrific. But to cite one example, virtually the same number of people were killed outright in India, in Bhopal in eighty-​four, when Union Carbide’s chemical plant exploded. And half a million more people suffered lifetime injuries. So did India attack America in retaliation? I’m sure the US will bomb Kabul, and who knows where else in the Middle East. Iraq maybe—get rid of Saddam Hussein once and for all and unleash some other horror.”

        “Come on. Aren’t you exaggerating a bit, Dave? America didn’t purposely attack India.”

        “No, but suffering is suffering. And sins of omission cause as much suffering as sins of commission.”

        “I agree, but I’m not clear what you’re driving at.”

        “Look, all the world’s attention, including the media, is directed at whatever happens to be the immediate scandal or tragedy of the moment. But meanwhile we’re ignoring the real existential threat—global warming. Hardly anyone talks about it, and no one’s doing a thing about it, but I’ve been following the science. And guess what? It’s all because of fossil fuels. It’s coal and oil and gas all coming back to haunt us. Did you know that Carter’s chief science adviser predicted exactly this back in seventy-​seven or seventy-​eight? And I’m sure the oil companies have realized for decades what’s happening, but they’ve suppressed it: that from the start of the Industrial Revolution, and exponentially since World War Two, greenhouse gases have been accumulating in the atmosphere. And no one’s doing a damn thing about it. In fact, the reverse, like when Bush agreed with the Senate to repudiate the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gases. When? March 2001, barely six months before the attack. No one wants to face up to what’s happening to our world. Everyone’s buried their heads in the sand. Species dying off. The oceans polluted with plastic, the soil with fertilizers.”

        “Okay. I agree it’s all about petrochemicals,” says Monty. “And my generation, we’re all to blame. It’s all happened exactly in our lifetime. But don’t you think you’re getting carried away? And what does this have to do with Jamal? It can’t all be about oil.”

        “You’re in denial like everyone else, Monty. Have you seen any of this so-called reality-TV crap? The people on it are crazy. It’s all fake—the opposite of reality. And it’s perverting everyone’s perception of where this world is heading. Wake up, Monty.”

        “Okay, okay. You’re right.”

        “Thank you,” says Dave.

        “But listen, talking about petrochemicals and plastics, it reminds me …”

        “Yes, what?”

        “I wanted to tell you I came across some of Mom’s faded Melmac plastic dishware. I still have lots of it. I thought about throwing it out because I have no space here on the houseboat. But I feel kind of nostalgic about it. Do you want some of it?”

        “There you go again, Monty, changing the subject. And no, I don’t remember Melmac at all or much about other stuff. You’re the one who’s nostalgic about that sort of thing.”

        “Thanks a lot,” says Monty. “Okay. I’m guilty, I agree. My whole generation. We’ve lived off fossil fuels, including good old Melmac. But I don’t see what it has to do with Jamal’s disappearance.”

        “I’m not sure either. But the pamphlets and his letter are damning. I had a positive feeling about Jamal from the first time I met him. But I guess people can hide their true identity. If he has, well, his handlers did a damn good job training him in subterfuge. Maybe he’s been secretly helping the terrorists or raising money. Crazy, but it’s conceivable. Whatever the truth is, you better hand over the evidence to the FBI. Let me know what happens. And remember, if you need to get away for any reason, you can always come up here. Secretly if you have to. I could pick you up somewhere along the border.”

        “Right,” says Monty. “Come and pick me up in your gas-​guzzling SUV. Hypocrite.”

        “Very funny, Monty. Hah hah. But seriously, I’m here for you. Love you.”

        “Love you too—even though you drive an SUV and don’t care about Mom’s old Melmac.”

        The family brought their politics with them to America. After settling in Ohio, Leo’s father got a job at a steel mill, a setting ripe for organizing unions and proselytizing converts to Marxism. “I remember going to the mill to help my dad distribute leaflets,” recalls Leo. “To get around I had to jump over rivulets of red-​hot molten metal running along the factory floor. The air there was burning hot—like hell.”

        Caught and fired at several mills, Leo’s father eventually set up a cubbyhole-​size shoe repair shop. But he spent much of his time attending secret meetings, standing outside workplace exits handing out flyers, and organizing strikes. A few years after Beatrice was born, their father died from peritonitis contracted during an appendectomy, rumors circulating that the surgery had been purposely botched.

        “Dad was rarely home,” says Leo, “except when he was hosting famous leftists passing through town. When he did come home, like for dinner, he had an awful temper. He’d often explode with rage, striking me or Mom.” Evidently social justice was easier to preach standing atop a soapbox than sitting around the table with one’s family.

        The paternal anger streak passed down from father to son, Monty’s father and brother both having anger issues. Only Monty seems immune, cultivating from an early age other ways to express his emotions, and more devious and effective means to get his way.

        Monty and his brother are polar opposites—Monty the towhead, Dave with curly chestnut-​colored hair and the gaunt look of a morose rock star, which he longs to be. Dave avoids being seen with his younger brother when their time in elementary school overlaps. The five years’ difference sets up a barrier neither will breach until years later. That and their discordant personalities: Monty always appearing cheerful and the brightest in his class; Dave struggling to pass from one grade level to the next, brooding about the latest afront to his independence, often locking himself in his bedroom for hours.

        “No, you can’t sleep over at Stew’s,” says Sarah, disapproving of Dave’s best friend’s single mother, a divorcée being an outlier in the Jewish community. Dodgier yet, she lives in a shabby wood-​frame apartment building in otherwise middle-​class West LA.

        “No, we can’t afford to get you a drum set,” says Sarah, staving off Dave’s desire to join Stew’s high school rock band.

        Then there’s Leo’s precious 1950 white Mercury sedan. “No, I’m not letting you use my Merc until I’m convinced you drive safely,” declares his father after Dave gets his license.

        “Damn it,” screams Dave. “What do I have to do to prove every damn thing to you. You never trust me. I’ll kill you the next time we wrestle.”

        “Go ahead and try,” says Leo, snickering.

        Father and son spread out a blanket in the backyard between the fig tree and the lemon tree and go at it, sweating profusely, inches away from busting their heads open against the tree trunks. Monty watches from his bedroom window, trembling at the violence but also mesmerized, curious to see if either one gets hurt, if blood will flow. He’d never challenge his dad to a match, not in a million years. I’m not that stupid, he thinks to himself.

        Just when Dave figures he has his father in a tight hold, Leo plants his left foot on the ground, twists his torso, and bridges his body, flipping his son onto his back and pinning down his shoulders, Dave flailing hopelessly. Monty’s happy to see his brother lose, but he’d like to see him beat their father at least once, beat him bad so Monty could make fun of him.

        “Hah,” shouts Leo in triumph when father and son stand back up. “You’re getting stronger, but not strong enough to beat your old man.”

        Leo had done well in amateur wrestling at college, representing his team at meets all over Ohio. It doesn’t occur to him that his victories humiliate his older son, further alienating and embittering him. “I hate you,” shouts Dave, turning red and glaring at his father. He runs inside to his room and slams the door shut.

        Leo takes out his own angst on his wife, like when she pesters him to fix one thing or another around the house. “The kitchen drawers are all stuck,” she tells her husband one Sunday while they’re dressing.

        “So why don’t you rub the edges with a candle?” he suggests.

        “I don’t know how to do it,” she answers.

        “It’s so simple,” he says, his voice rising. “Anyone can do it.”

        “But you know how to do it. Can’t you take care of it before you go out for tennis?”

        “I’m late already,” he shouts.

        “But I need to work in the kitchen this morning.”

        “Stop nudniking me,” says Leo between clenched teeth.

        “But—”

        “I’ve had enough,” cries Leo, slapping his wife and stomping off.

        Monty heard his father’s anger and is furtively watching from the side of his parents’ open door. As soon as his father leaves the house, he runs in and lies down next to Sarah on the king-​size bed. He wraps his arm around her in a comforting embrace, and they cry together. He’s lain there with her before and breathes in the familiar scent of her rosewater cologne, the same brand as his grandmother’s lotion. He can smell, too, the residue of his father’s nervous sweat. It disgusts him.

        “Why did Dad hit you?” Monty says between his sobs.

        “I don’t know,” she answers.

        “I hate him,” he cries, slamming the pillow with his fists.

        “Don’t say that, Monty,” she says, cuddling up to him.

        But he stops speaking to his father for weeks, until Sarah tells him, “You should talk to him. You’re hurting his feelings.”

        “I don’t care,” says Monty, tearing up. It’s exactly what he wants to do, hurt his father. Hurt him bad in the only way he can, with words or, better yet, with no words.

        Eventually he gives in, and he and his father resume their habitual frosty relationship, Leo uneasy with his younger son’s sensitive, vaguely girlish nature. Monty grows up dodging physical challenges altogether, trusting in his brain and sharp tongue to get him through life, deflecting threats to his spirit or body.

        Not like Dave, who’s right up there on the roof of their house, helping his dad replace a layer of tar paper. The two of them look down at Monty, coaxing him, more like teasing him, into climbing up the ladder.

        “Come on up,” Leo says, adding grudgingly, “I’ll help you.”

        Monty painstakingly climbs up, step by step, pausing to wipe away his tears.

        “Don’t be such a damn sissy,” says Dave.

        Monty teeters over the top ledge and, struggling to keep his balance, carefully stands up, glowing with accomplishment, as if he’s ascended Mount Baldy, the highest peak in the nearby San Gabriel Mountains, where LA families go to see fresh fallen snow. From the roof of his house Monty looks out at a view infinitely greater than he’s ever seen from home before. Despite the haze, he can see much of the LA basin and the pale outlines of the successive mountain ranges to the north and east. The world feels far grander from higher up. He’d like to get away from his bullying brother, from his parents, too, and go over those mountains. Get away from LA, with its glaring summer heat; from death, from ladders, from everything that frightens him.

        Climbing down from the roof proves even more formidable, until Leo goes first and supports his younger son as he warily makes his way down step by step. “What a wimp,” says Dave from above.

        One time when the two are playing catch in the driveway and Monty keeps dropping the softball, Dave, exasperated, throws one extra hard, and it hits his brother in the crotch. Hearing Monty wailing, Leo runs out of the house, slamming the door.

        “Goddamn it,” he shouts at Dave. “Be more careful. And why don’t you make a greater effort?” he adds, turning to Monty.

        “He’s such a klutz,” Dave says.

        “Shut up,” Leo shouts. “And stop whimpering, Monty,” he adds, looking askance at his younger son, stumped how he can toughen him up to face a world infinitely more cruel than his brother’s taunts.

        Monty and his family are making a rare visit to one of his father’s cousins, who lives in Pasadena, a right-​wing bastion. His wife is Orthodox—another strike against the family in the eyes of the rest of their relatives. She wants to keep a distance, too, fearing that association with her husband’s relatives, all fervent left-​wingers, would endanger his career in the military.

        Nothing’s wrong with her! thinks Monty, turning red with anger hearing the younger boy’s remark. He’d like to smack him across the face and scream She’s not a freak!

        “It’s just your cousin Beatrice,” says the boy’s mother, who’s come up from behind and taken hold of his hand. “She’s just short. That’s all.”

        That’s a lie, Monty nearly blurts out. He doesn’t like the mother much either. He’d like to smack her too. Beatrice isn’t a just anything, he’d like to shout. And she’s not a freak!

        But for the first time he comprehends how truly grotesque she is. It’s inescapable—her monstrosity. The realization strikes at the heart of his sensibility, at his whole ground of reality, at everything he’s taken for granted. But how dare his cousin make such a horrible remark? Beatrice is different, but she’s Beatrice. This is how a Beatrice is meant to be. This Beatrice is a normal Beatrice. The perfect Beatrice.

        To compensate for the difference in length between her legs, Monty’s father cobbled together a detachable lift for her left shoe. But it’s awkward and heavy. A structural engineer and later a teacher, Leo loves to tinker in his garage, overbuilding everything. Like the gate in the driveway alongside Monty’s house, made of odd planks of salvaged wood bolted together with bulky metal braces like some medieval stockade. A victim of dire poverty in his childhood, Leo wants things to last forever and be perfect. No way can Beatrice be perfect, no matter how zealously he tries to make things right.

        His care for his misshapen sister, ten years his junior, is infused with a sense of injustice. “How could life have dealt her such a blow?” he says. “Things aren’t meant to be that way.”

        He’s a true believer, believing in the godlike perfectibility of mankind and society while ignoring the imperfectibility of both. How could the world, the ideal world of Marx and Lenin, the new God and his Son, create an aberration like Beatrice, with all her deformities and suffering? Or create a sociopath like Stalin, whose paranoid cruelties Monty’s father won’t acknowledge till the late eighties, when the whole Soviet myth begins to fall apart, not long before Leo’s own demise. “How could it have been so bad?” he’ll ask, his eyes moist. “It was supposed to be perfect.” Like Beatrice should have been.

        Leo will also confess to Monty years later, long after Beatrice has died, that he’s sure he caused her deformities. “When my mother was pregnant with Beatrice, I jumped out once to surprise her when she stepped down from the side door of our house. I guess the shock caused Mom to fall. So I never believed Beatrice’s condition was genetic.”

        Leo, Leo. All this remorse, all this groundless guilt pent up for decades, all the misplaced idealism, all the faith in human virtue and progress—shattered.

Aunt Beatrice lives around the corner from Monty’s elementary school in a tiny apartment, more like a converted garage, in a low-​rent single-​story courtyard complex. After Sarah picks him up from school, they often stop by to drop off leftovers from their previous night’s dinner. When he’s allowed to walk to and from school on his own, he continues to visit his aunt, if only to say hello and give her a quick kiss on her sweaty cheek. He’s accustomed to her odd body and clammy smell, a fusion of defective sweat glands and the stale smoke that hangs heavy around her from the unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes she chain-​smokes.

        Pall Mall, literally a pall, a cloud, of smoke, like other brands with their four thousand or so chemicals—arsenic, benzene, cadmium, lead, styrene. Carcinogenic particles Monty soaks up when visiting his aunt, along with all the hundreds of commercials for soaps and toys and candies he absorbs from TV between the minutes of Looney Tunes, Three Stooges, and Our Gang comedies, which, though made decades earlier, don’t yet seem dated. Life hasn’t changed that radically in America, and it won’t until later, in the sixties, when everything will seem to go topsy-​turvy—including Beatrice, who will have her first mastectomy around the same time US authorities admit smoking causes cancer.

        Monty’s aunt barely gets by on meager government disability benefits and the trivial earnings she makes printing mailers and announcements for a couple of businesses on a chunky mimeograph machine she keeps in her bedroom. Rarely used for sleeping, her bed is a portrait of her life, covered with family photos, boxes of postcards from friends and family traveling around the country, a collection of assorted buttons, costume jewelry, ashtrays of various sizes and colors, an extra set of crutches, and rolls of multicolored yarn she uses to crochet small bags and infants’ bonnets for the auctions that benefit the handicapped association she belongs to, euphemistically named “Indoor Sports.” All this long before the Paralympics, sidewalk ramps, and better job opportunities begin to give dignity to the disabled.

        Supported by a cushion under her chest, Beatrice spends most of her time on a sofa in the crowded living room, reclining on her stomach and looking up at a television that’s turned on nonstop. It’s here she usually sleeps or dozes off. The curvature of her spine makes sitting upright or lying on her back unbearable. After she was born, doctors advised her parents to strap her to a board to straighten out her spine, and she spent hours every day undergoing this useless torture.

        Monty helps her with the mimeographed announcements. He’s not allowed to touch the machine, but his aunt patiently instructs him how to gauge folding the eight-​and-a-half-by-eleven-​inch printed announcements into even thirds, and how to stuff the number 10 envelopes and correctly place the stamps and address labels.

        “You see this line of words?” she asks.

        “Yes, Aunt Beatrice,” answers Monty, his eyes beaming.

        “Okay, take the bottom of the sheet and fold it up to this line of type. Make sure the sides of the paper touch evenly. Press down on the fold like this, out from the center, and then fold down the top part so it touches to the bottom.”

        Monty carefully copies her instructions. “How’s this?” he asks, as if executing the most complicated task an eight-​year-old was ever asked to do.

        A sense of superiority bordering on arrogance is taking root early in his life, shielding him from his underlying fears. Already, back in kindergarten, he made sure he stood out over others, literally. He was the tallest in his class until a lanky immigrant from Norway arrived midterm on a stormy day. Right away Monty cornered the boy in the cloakroom and pushed him against the wall after the other children had hung up their yellow rain gear and gone to their scrunchy little seat-​and-desk combos.

        “I’m the tallest,” Monty said to the shocked newcomer, glaring at him and shoving him roughly against the wall. “And don’t forget it.”

        Now in third grade, his hand always comes up first when his teacher asks a question. “Call me. Call me,” he cries out, squirming in his seat whether he knows the answer or not, coming up with something smart to say. Smart-​ass, he’ll later be called by those who resent or fear his dominance.

        “Perfect,” his aunt says, inspecting his first stuffed envelope. “Let’s get ourselves each a Drumstick.”

        Despite her scanty earnings, Beatrice is always giving things away to her siblings’ children. Years later, when Monty’s at college in Oregon, she’ll send him a check for fifty dollars every month, a fair sum in those days, especially for her.

        Beatrice hands Monty two dimes when they hear the ice cream truck approaching, with its indelible jingle dee dee dong dong DEE dee dee deedy, dong dong DEE dee dee deedy … Drumsticks got their name when the wife of one of the brothers who invented the treat observed that they looked like chicken legs. Monty and his aunt adore them, oblivious to their synthetic taste or that ice cream is typically thickened with lard. Who cares or even knows about organic, vegan, or gluten-​free in midcentury America?

        First you carefully peel off the top part of the Drumstick’s paper wrapping and take a bite out of the crisp nut-​encrusted paper-​thin milk-​chocolate coating, revealing the vanilla ice cream underneath. Then you lick away at the top, with more bites of the chocolate crust, hopelessly taking care that the ice cream doesn’t melt over the side of the cone and drip down your chin, onto your shirt, and all over your hands. When you finish the top, you remove the remaining wrapping and stick your tongue down as far as you can into the sweet honeycomb cone and bite away at it until you get the very last iota of cream and sugary brown wafer.

        “You must be the fastest eater on earth,” says Monty when Beatrice finishes the whole cone before he’s halfway through the top of his.

        “I can’t stop myself,” she says.

        “How’d you learn to eat so fast?”

        “I don’t know. It’s how I eat.”

        “I wish I could eat that fast.”

        “Don’t. It’s a bad habit.”

        Wolfing down food is one of Beatrice’s few pleasures in life. Twenty-​three years later, after she’s died in county hospital during a second mastectomy at age fifty-​eight, Monty will wonder whether she ever managed to gratify herself in other ways. Sex with someone? Unlikely. Surely not those kinds of “indoor sports,” echoing her handicapped organization’s name. But intimate questions, particularly how she feels about herself and her condition, questions he’s too shy and too young to ask, he’ll regret never having explored with her. He’ll imagine he could have eased her sense of self. Made her feel whole and content. But she appeared to have done just fine without his probing do-gooder Zen intentions.

        While eating their Drumsticks and later finishing the mailers, Monty and Beatrice continue to watch daytime TV shows he otherwise wouldn’t be permitted to see at home, like Roller Derby and wrestling, with their combative cast of bizarre characters. And Search for Tomorrow, the perennial number one soap opera with its never-​ending soft-​core serial intrigues. “Soap operas” so named because they’re sponsored or owned outright by the major soap manufacturers.

        Their favorite program, though, is Queen for a Day. Its host, Jack Bailey, a mustachioed former world’s fair barker with slicked-​back hair, respectfully but firmly extracts the woeful life stories from the day’s contesting housewives: dire health problems, financial crises, emotional tribulations, widowhood with five young children, a child with cancer or Down syndrome. Bailey asks each plain-​looking woman in turn what things she most needs, like a hearing aid, a washing machine, or circus tickets to fulfill a dying child’s last wish. Quick cutaways show women in the audience dabbing away their tears. At the end the audience applauds for each contestant in turn, and the one who registers loudest on the applause meter is draped with a robe, crowned queen for a day, and handed a large bouquet of roses.

        An assortment of prizes is showcased by scantily clad buxom beauty queen types, the contrast to the homely contestants speaking for itself. The gifts always seem to include the very items the winning housewife singled out—which must have been identified in advance, along with the day’s winner. Nothing in TV land, after all, is for real. Maybe the day’s queen would get a washing machine (a miraculous labor-​saving invention Monty’s mother has yet to get herself), family passes to Disneyland (only recently opened), a year’s supply of Coca-​Cola, a set of china dishes and silverware for twelve—as if any of these women can afford to give fancy dinner parties.

        “Aunt Beatrice, you should enter,” implores Monty, his head quivering with anticipation.

        He’d like that, like to boast that his aunt is a queen, her oversize head crowned with rhinestones and artificial rubies, the fake ermine-​lined red robe dragging behind her short body as she limps across the stage, victorious.

        “Nah, I wouldn’t want to be up there on TV,” she says.

        “You’d win for sure.”

        But it’s others’ miseries and misfortunes she feels pity for, not her own. And not merely pity but a profound empathy that, combined with a knack for listening, draws people to seek her ear and counsel. Often, on entering the apartment, Monty finds a visiting neighbor complaining to Beatrice about her lazy husband, troubled children, greedy landlord, or mounting debts. Friends and acquaintances from all over regularly phone her for advice. Nothing shocks or surprises her—including Monty’s sexuality when, years later, he introduces her to Jonathan. Her worldliness is more remarkable considering that, since she, her mother, and her older sister arrived from Ohio during the Depression to join Leo in California after he secured a job monitoring boilers at a potash mine near Death Valley, she’s never traveled outside Los Angeles, except for a bus tour once to Baja California organized by her handicapped association.

        With no more view on the outside world than her TV screen and her friends’ accounts of their miseries, Beatrice has an uncanny ability to read people’s thoughts and emotions. Her nephew is amazed how accurately she can foretell each new plot twist in the endless soap opera, or which virile lady skater is about to push another one over the side, or who will be crowned queen this day. It’s as if for her these casts of characters portray the whole panoply of human nature.

        “Yes, who’s calling?”

        “Monty. Jamal’s partner. Or Zahir, if you want to call him that.”

        “Ah, it’s you,” says Wrankle gruffly. “What’s on your mind?”

        “I need to show you something of Jamal’s I found in his old suitcase.”

        “What is it?”

        “I’d prefer you come and see it. I don’t want to talk about it over the phone.”

        “Okay, we’ll be over tomorrow afternoon. What time do you get back from school?”

        “I’m usually home by four.”

        “We’ll come to the houseboat then.”

        Monty had arrived moments before for his first day in kindergarten after walking a half mile with his mother from home, a long walk by LA standards. Here everyone except the poor takes their car just to go around the block.

        But Sarah hasn’t learned to drive yet because she’s afraid. And because Leo is short tempered when he tries to teach her. “No, don’t step on the brake. Step on the clutch. No, don’t slow down out of the curve. Watch out for that car!” Driving will have to wait a few more years until she gives in and takes private lessons.

        Sarah leaves Monty sitting on the terra-​cotta steps leading to the front door of the Spanish colonial revival school building. She’s a touch dismayed, though she wouldn’t admit it, that her beautiful towheaded boy isn’t hiding in the folds of her red skirt and bawling like the other children being dropped off by their mothers for their first day of school.

        Monty’s thrilled to be on his own. And he’s even more thrilled by the olive-​complexioned boy sitting next to him. The tingling feel of Jay’s fleecy cotton flannel shirt brushing against his bare wrist gives him the goose bumps. He can feel the boy’s radiating body heat and smell his shirt’s freshly laundered soapy scent of Oxydol. The boy’s probably Sephardic, though Monty doesn’t have a clue what that is, nor for that matter Ashkenazi, which clearly he himself is, with his platinum hair and grayish-​blue hazel eyes, possibly the genetic remnants of a pogrom attacker raping a female somewhere back in his genetic lineage.

        The only blond in his extended family, except for an adopted second cousin, Monty is often teased by his brother. “You were adopted like Sammy,” Dave tells him so often Monty comes to suspect it’s true. He has doubts even after Sarah shows him a photo of herself hugely pregnant with him, sitting on a log in the snow up at Big Bear Lake. How can he be sure it’s him and not Dave?

        “How big is your thing?” the boy asks him.

        Thing? What thing? Does he mean my weenie?

        Monty’s embarrassed, but he wishes they could take theirs out and compare. He’d love to see Jay’s penis. Maybe touch it, like he’s been touching his own at night before going to sleep, holding on to it like he used to hold on to his treasured blue blanket, his “bubank,” while sucking his thumb.

        “I like you,” the brown-​haired boy says, snuggling up closer.

        Monty can smell his fresh boy smell. The smell of the first day of school before anyone rolls on the grass and picks up things they shouldn’t. There’s another scent, too: something exotic, unfamiliar, and tempting—a kind of soap, maybe—creamy, warm, and a touch spicy.

        Monty likes the boy, but he’s too shy to say anything. And he never gets to see Jay’s “thing” nor that of any other boys, not until he gets into junior high school and tries to hide his wandering gaze in the gym’s dressing room and communal showers.

Two years later Monty develops a crush on Cubby, one of the vaguely seductive boy Mouseketeers starring in The Mickey Mouse Club, Walt Disney’s premier TV series. I bet Cubby’s right here in Los Angeles, thinks Monty. Somewhere close by.

        Growing up in LA, you feel an intimate connection to the newly unfolding televised reality. Did anything exist before me and television? Monty knows instinctively that time and space, life itself, arose concurrently with his own existence, and it will come to an end with his death—not that he wants to think about that. Death isn’t something you learn about from watching The Howdy Doody Show, Roy Rogers, or any of the other fantasy versions of reality produced for children.

        Soaking these shows up hour after hour, you might think nothing is real, merely an illusion like television or the movies, most of which are filmed or processed in nearby Hollywood, or in the opposite direction, in the more prosaic-​sounding Culver City. Monty grows up amid the artificial world LA epitomizes, where life is a two-​dimensional screen sitting in your living room, and your whole mind is glued to it like a sticky Band-​Aid on a sore thumb.

        Naturally, then, he feels as if Cubby the Mouseketeer is part of his own private world, like he could reach out and touch him, touch him anywhere he wants. Like he could have reached out and touched Jay, the boy who sat next to him on the kindergarten steps. Except he didn’t.

        For now Monty is limited to his mother’s touch, and he relishes it. He loves lying on his back on the living room sofa, his feet resting on Sarah’s lap while she meticulously cuts his toenails with a curved scissors, careful not to pierce his delicate skin.

        “Please tickle my feet,” he begs after she finishes. Tickling the bottom of his feet has become a routine, and she, too, enjoys every opportunity, while she has it, for intimacy with her little boy.

        “Okay, but just this once,” she answers, realizing full well she’ll indulge his desires for as long as she lives. “But how can you stand it?” she asks as he lies still while she glides the backs of her fingernails over his skin.

        He’s trained himself not to flinch or pull his feet away, savoring the chill the tickling sends up his legs and through his body. And his mother is compliant, as if giving pleasure to her son were her sole function in life. Which is exactly how he sees it, content with the pampering.

        Years later, when Monty turns aloof toward his parents, flaunting his gay otherness and pompous sophistication, Sarah will long for the lost intimacy, looking up at her son with her sad dark almond-​shaped eyes, silently seeking tenderness that no longer comes. Only after her death will Monty feel remorse for having spurned her unconditional love. It will hurt to realize he could have reached out and held her quietly, soothing her anxieties in the face of a cruel world.

        Throughout his youth his mother suffers ailments of one kind or another—sacroiliac pain, an autoimmune disorder that leaves painful purple blotches on her legs, a chronic sore throat. “What now?” asks Leo, having long ago dismissed her habitual complaints. “Why don’t you work out more, like me?” She’d enrolled in several exercise programs but gave up; similarly with diets, always trying to lose excess weight.

        Though Monty is more sensitive, his detachment differs little from that of his stoic father, whose unsentimental outlook on life permeates the household. Monty never once sees his parents kiss or embrace. Whatever physical intimacy transpires between them happens in their bedroom, behind a closed door, neither seen nor heard, nor imagined. No moaning, no sounds of play or pleasure. Sex is unspoken, the subject itself a dirty word.

        “Don’t you think it’s time he learns the facts of life?” Monty overhears his mother say to his father one day during the summer break between kindergarten and first grade.

        Facts of life? he wonders. What are they?

        “No one ever explained it to me,” replies Leo. “What am I supposed to do, have a talk with him or something? Like today, right this moment?”

        “Well, you could get him a book to read and look it over with him.”

        “I don’t have time. You do it. I promised the guys I’d meet them for tennis.”

        Sarah goes out herself and finds a rudimentary book at a nearby dime store, about “the birds and the bees.”

        “Here, Monty, this is something for you to look at,” she says, handing him the book. “You can ask your father if you have any questions.”

        Okay, thinks Monty after he’s looked over the pages and read the simplified text several times. So when they grow up, boys make these itty-​bitty tiny fish called sperm, and girls make these gigantic circles called eggs that fill up the whole page of the book. I guess they’re like chicken eggs, with a hard shell, but round and huge. And the daddy’s sperm mixes with the mommy’s egg to make a baby. Which is kind of weird. But how does the sperm find its way? He imagines the tiny fish traveling in a line, like a line of ants, traveling across the bed sheet from one parent to the other. They must have eyes so they know where to go, and sharp teeth so they can break through the egg’s shell.

        A year later, given a more advanced book, he reads that when a man and a woman love each other—only then, mind you—the daddy’s sperm get inside the mommy when he puts his penis into her vagina. Okay, I know what a penis is. A weenie. But what’s a vagina? Some kind of hole Mommy has where her penis should be? More like a slit than a hole.

        He saw one once when his family went to visit cousins in the Valley who’d recently had a baby girl, and she was lying naked on a table before having her diaper put on. Did the slit go this way or that way? He tries to remember, picturing the opening in his mind.

        So did Daddy put his penis into Mommy’s hole like that to make me? Monty squirms, imagining the act. Ick. I wouldn’t ever want to do that. What if it got stuck? And who knows what’s inside that hole? It’s probably smelly. At least penises you can see. You can touch them. Boys touching each other, that’s natural. But people with different stuff? Yuck.

        That’s too creepy to imagine at seven years of age, let alone that holes can also be touched and explored, or that some people might find penises yucky and smelly. And besides, the book his mom gives him doesn’t show actual intercourse, not between human penises and vaginas. Only between birds and insects. They must have incredibly tiny penises, he figures, so I guess they can fit inside okay. I wish I could ask Dave about all this stuff; he probably knows it all. But he won’t have anything to do with me. He always walks away if I get near him at school. I hate him. I’m glad he’s moving to junior high next year.

        Maybe I could ask Aunt Beatrice about this birds-​and-bees stuff.

        Though his aunt rarely leaves her tiny two-​and-a-half-​room apartment, crowded with knickknacks and reeking of stale sweat and cigarette smoke, Beatrice seems to understand everything and everybody, like a sage of antiquity. It’s she, not his parents, he seeks for answers and solace.

        Beatrice: Latin for “she who brings joy”—the heroine of Dante’s fourteenth-​century Italian classic Divine Comedy, who guides the author to heaven out of hell. And the name of Monty’s beloved hunchbacked dwarf aunt, with her lumpy obese body, oversize head, bulging eyes, sparse kinky red-​and-gray hair, and left leg three and a half inches shorter than the other.

        “I’m in a phone booth,” Monty tells his brother.

        “Why aren’t you calling from the houseboat? Doesn’t it cost a lot more to call Canada from a pay phone?”

        “I think my home phone’s bugged.”

        “What? What the hell is going on?”

        “Jamal disappeared early the morning of the attack. Or the day before. I’m not sure,” Monty stammers, out of breath. “And I haven’t heard from him since. The FBI have come twice to ask about him. I’m totally freaked out.”

        “Wait a moment. Asking about Jamal? The FBI? About what?”

        “They won’t tell me exactly, but they must think he was involved in the plot one way or another. I’m sure that’s what it’s about.”

        “What plot? You mean, what happened in New York and Washington? But that’s crazy,” says Dave. “That doesn’t sound like Jamal at all. What evidence do they have?”

        “I don’t know. They won’t tell me anything. Maybe they’re holding him. But I suspect they’ve probably bugged my place. I can’t be sure. I know it sounds paranoid, but it wouldn’t surprise me. They seem to know so much about me.”

        “Like what?” asks Dave.

        “Like that I mentor students in Zen at Seattle State. Everything about my past. Trivial details, like our original family name. That I traveled to China during my sabbatical. Shit, they even know where I went there, like when I went right up to the border with Afghanistan, as if that could possibly have something to do with the attack, or with Jamal. I mean, how in the hell could they have discovered that? What, do they have spy satellites that can follow people? I know this sounds crazy, but how do they discover all this?”

        “Calm down. Take a deep breath,” says Dave. “Maybe you wrote about it in an email or something. I’m certain they can monitor that. And I’m sure the intelligence services are all going crazy ’cause they fucked up and failed to nab those guys ahead of time. I read they were already on their radar. Can you believe it? So now they’re trying to cover their asses, going overboard probing every possible angle, going after anyone remotely suspicious.”

        “You’re lucky you’re in Canada. It’s not a police state.”

        “Not yet, anyway, but that could change. Ever since I fled here to escape the draft, I’ve thought sooner or later the US will invade Canada, probably for water.”

        “It wouldn’t surprise me. Nothing would surprise me,” says Monty.

        “But do you really think Jamal could be involved in terrorism?”

        “No, but …”

        “But what?”

        “Well, the agents wanted to search Jamal’s stuff, and I wouldn’t let them since they didn’t have a warrant. I said I’d search around and tell them if I found anything suspicious.”

        “Well, did you?” asks Dave.

        “I’m afraid so,” answers Monty, his voice cracking. “That’s why I’m calling you. I don’t know what to do about it. I looked everywhere and didn’t find anything. But then I remembered he still has the suitcase he brought with him when he first arrived here. There’re some Afghan clothes in it. But underneath I found a pile of Al-Qaeda propaganda, full of crazy accusations about the West, calling on people to join in jihad. The worst passages are highlighted in yellow marker.”

        “You didn’t tell the FBI about what you found? That’s risky, Monty.”

        “I’m afraid to tell them. It would seriously incriminate Jamal. But if I don’t tell them, it’ll incriminate me—withholding evidence. Jesus, I don’t know what to do. What do you think I should do?”

        “Well, you’ve got to be careful, Monty. It could be bad if you don’t show them what you found, especially if it turns out Jamal is entangled in some kind of conspiracy, as crazy as that sounds. I mean, those pamphlets are suspicious, don’t you think? Highlighted in yellow like that?”

        “Well, maybe. But I don’t understand what it’s evidence of. Maybe there’s an innocent explanation for him having this shit. I still can’t believe he’s guilty of anything. But I don’t know what to believe anymore. I’m so terrified of losing him. They could deport him or worse.” Monty begins to cry. “There are rumors they’re sending suspects to secret prison camps in other countries where they can be tortured. But of course if he’s guilty, then …”

        “Okay. Calm down, Monty. Listen, apparently all the attackers were Arabs,” says Dave. “Sure, Al-Qaeda is based in Afghanistan, and they must have operatives there and maybe here, too, who could be Afghanis. I know it hurts to even suspect a tiny bit that Jamal might somehow be involved. I don’t believe it—no way. But you’ve got to be on your guard and protect yourself first and foremost.”

        “Yeah, you’re right. And I think we’re heading to some kind of martial law. Like a police state. I never thought I would see that here. Mom and Dad sure did, but I didn’t, not exactly.”

        “You were too young to remember what it was like when the whole Red Scare started, and they began firing people just because they once belonged to some organization, or wouldn’t sign a loyalty oath, or were gay and supposedly subject to blackmail. I think you were only five when Dad lost his job the first time. It was like a police state then. People were afraid to subscribe to liberal magazines. Dad stopped all his subscriptions. And then he got called by that state committee investigating alleged communists.”

        “But he didn’t ever belong to the party, did he?”

        “I don’t think so. But some distant cousin did, and so Dad was under investigation because he worked in the defense industry.”

        “Did he testify?”

        “No, he refused. That’s why he got fired. He sent them a letter declaring emphatically that their demands were against the Bill of Rights, that he refused to cooperate. I have a copy of it somewhere.”

        “I’d love to see it some time. Dad was a real radical,” says Monty. “Speaking of which, do you still have your bushy beard? That and your monster head of Afro hair make you look like a terrorist. I don’t think they’ll let you back into the States anytime soon.”

        “Very funny. What, are you jealous of me having hair?”

        “No, bald is beautiful,” says Monty. “And far easier to care for. No wasting shampoo.”

        “So you can shower fast and put on your expensive Italian clothes?”

        “That’s just another style, Dave, like you and your sweatpants and plaid shirts. I think you’re the one, not Jamal, who looks like a fanatic.”

        “I am,” says Dave, chuckling. “That’s what people here all think when they read my columns. And thank you, by the way, for sending me that Loden-​green wool coat from Filson’s. I love wearing it. It keeps me really warm.”

        “Glad you like it. Suits you like the gun-​toting sportsman you are.”

        “Haha again,” says Dave. “Anyway, what’s happening down there, all the paranoia, reminds me of the fifties. The same shit all over again. Except nowadays it’s Muslims instead of Reds.”

        “Right, there’s always someone to persecute.”

        “So what are you going to do about what you found?” asks Dave.

        “I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll wait a day and decide. Or I’ll call the FBI later today.”

        “Be careful. You can always hide out here.”

        “Thanks, bro,” says Monty. “How are Dorothy and the boys?”

        “They’re not boys anymore. Gerald quit his job and set up as a freelance designer. And Mark is working on his graduate thesis. I’m not confident he’ll ever finish.”

        “Give him a chance,” says Monty. “What about Dorothy?”

        “She’s still loving her work heading up the food bank.”

        “She’s lucky to have a career she cares about.”

        “For sure,” says Dave. “Say, do you remember our second or third cousins who lived in Pasadena?”

        “The right-​wing family? Yeah, I remember them. I haven’t heard a word about them for ages. I didn’t like the youngest boy at all. I remember one time, I must have been around five, he was three, and I just about slapped him when he made some remark about Beatrice, about her being a freak. But he was just a little boy.”

        “Well, that little boy is grown up, a real sweetheart, I heard … and he’s a she.”

        “You’re kidding,” says Monty. “When did she come out as trans?”

        “Long ago. I only heard about it from some relatives who are still in touch with that part of our family. They said she was sixteen or seventeen when she told her parents.”

        “They must have freaked out, considering how ultrareligious they were.”

        “Yes, apparently they threw her out. She lived on the streets with a bunch of kids like her—various sexualities. She got hooked on drugs for a while. Came close to dying from an overdose. But eventually got her life together and became a successful party organizer. That’s what I heard, anyway.”

        “So, out of curiosity, Dave, how would you feel if one of your sons announced he was transitioning?”

        “Yeah, I thought about that after I heard about our cousin. I guess at first I would be shocked, particularly if there’d been no sign or even a hint before of gender ambiguity. I’d worry a lot about his—I mean, her—safety, though I guess it’s a lot better for trans people up here in Vancouver than most places in the US. But the main thing is, I would love her every bit as much as a daughter as I did when she was a son. You have to accept your child as they are. I love mine unconditionally.”

        “Naturally, I’ve read up about trans things, not that I’ve ever felt that way myself.”

        “Oh? I remember when you did drag at Jonathan’s fiftieth.”

        “That was different,” says Monty. “Yeah, I loved doing that, a few other times too. But for me it was a performance. No, there are definitely people who realize inside themselves, often from a young age, that they’re in the wrong body. Sooner or later they have to come to terms with it. It’s physiological; it’s not fake or made up to join some trend or other. There have always been and always will be people whose gender is fluid or different from the sexual apparatus they had when they were born. It’s a fact. There have always been trans people, everywhere, only these days it’s more out in the open. People who deny this fact, who make fun of trans people—or worse, beat them up or kill them, even—they’re living in denial about reality. It’s mainly men who are often insecure in their own sexuality, so making fun or abusing someone different is a way of covering up their own doubts. Believe me, I’ve encountered that ever since I came out as gay.”

        “I always forget how tough that must’ve been for you.”

        “Not exactly. I was lucky I never felt guilty about it. Yes, frustrated by how to live as the person I knew I was.”

        “I’m glad you’re you,” says Dave.

        “Thank you. You too.”

        “But this thing about bullies compensating for their own insecurities, it’s exactly the same with dictators—bullies gone big and berserk. I don’t care whether it’s communist tyrants, fascists, cult leaders, religious fanatics fanning hysteria or xenophobia—most of them are the same. All those despots who grabbed power when the Soviet Union collapsed, each snatching a former so-called republic. Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Assad in Syria. Petty dictators in Latin America and Asia. They’re all former schoolyard bullies whose narcissism and thirst for imposing their will on others masks some childhood trauma or other abuse they suffered as children, like their father always putting them down, belittling them. Dangerous on the street, like thugs, but watch out if they seize control over a whole country. Watch out.”

        “At least that won’t happen here or in Canada.”

        “That’s naive, Monty. Of course it can happen here. Isn’t that what Mom and Dad always warned us? Just like Hitler took control with barely a third of the vote, just over fifteen percent of the whole of Germany’s population, manipulating his way into the executive and exploiting the country’s democracy to destroy it—virtually overnight.”

        “Jesus Christ.”

        “Jesus Christ? Even your Buddha can’t help you if that happens here.”

        “Okay, I’m freaked out enough as it is, Dave.”

        “Sorry, didn’t mean to alarm you. I get carried away. Listen, stay safe and keep in touch. And call me as soon as you hear anything about Jamal. Love you.”

        “Love you too,” says Monty. “Oh, and by the way, about when Dad was fired from his job during the Red Scare … I do remember lots of things from when I was five.”

        Monty has to give the bureau credit for evidently having tapped into his susceptibility to attractive younger guys, if that’s what they’ve done, substituting the new agent for the sinister lady from yesterday, the one with the pointy black shoes.

        They’ve probably learned every damn thing about me, he figures as he leads the two agents once again to his love seat. All my secrets. Stuff I’ve never told anyone else. Anything they can use as leverage against me. Oh shit, I hope they don’t know that.

        That being the fact he’d had sex with a few of the students he mentored in Zen meditation at the university. He’s been serving there as a chaplain of sorts, separate from his teaching American studies. It was about the worst transgression he could commit as a chaplain. If it got out, he’d be censured for sure, more likely fired outright for such a grave ethical breach.

        He’d convinced himself he was helping these guys. Helping them get over their sexual hang-​ups, their fear of being gay and singled out. He liberated them in a way he wished he’d been when he was at college, opening up to sensuality, to this moment, to things just as they are. That is Zen, after all. Sex provided a kind of key to break through. Zen’s physical, not mental, he would tell his students. That’s what he told himself, too, downplaying that he took advantage of the power imbalance, that the guys were beddably cute, and that he was horny all the time, surrounded by so many tantalizing young men. Had he seduced them, or was it the other way around? It’s so easy to fool yourself.

        But that wasn’t the worst of it. There was more—with a Brazilian exchange student who, after they had sex once, tried to keep up the intimacy. But Monty pulled back, telling him it wasn’t appropriate for a spiritual mentor. So why had he come on to the young man in the first place?

        And then something gruesome happened. If the FBI knows that, shit, I don’t want to think about it.

        Of course, what happened might have had nothing to do with him, so he told himself. He kept going over in his mind all the interactions between the two of them, not only the sex, trying to figure out if he’d said or done anything else that might have exacerbated the situation. Whatever the circumstances were, Monty escaped suspicion the following semester after the Brazilian’s roommates found him dead, hanging nude in the morning from a beam above a toilet stall in their dorm bathroom, his tongue dangling loose and, as happens occasionally with hangings, his penis erect, semen dripping from the tip.

        Monty never told his then-​partner Jonathan or anyone else about his connection to the student. Presumably no one knew. It was horrible enough to admit to himself that he was as culpable as any of the countless other spiritual leaders who turned out to be moral hypocrites taking advantage of vulnerable, pliant followers. And with Buddhism of all things, the practice of compassion. What sort of compassion had Monty manifested?

        He tried to put it all behind him, but the guilt hung over him like a heavy blanket you keep trying to kick off on a sultry night. He vowed he wouldn’t let it happen again, having sex with students. But it had only stopped for good when he and Jamal got together. Unlike Jonathan, Jamal wouldn’t put up with Monty’s infidelity. And besides, Monty no longer craved intimacy with anyone else.

“We need to ask you more about this friend of yours who you call Jamal,” says the heavyset agent, Wrankle, his tone more businesslike, as if Monty will have convinced himself it’s time to make a deal. And maybe it is.

        “Has he contacted you?” asks Wrankle.

        “No,” says Monty. “And I don’t know where he is. So why are you here again? And why don’t you let me know ahead of time when you’re coming? I’d like my lawyer to be present.”

        “Don’t worry, it’s nothing to do with you,” says the younger agent—Gogetsu, according to his ID. “We’re not investigating you. Here, look, we brought you a latte from the café across the bridge. No sugar, right?”

        How do they know these things? he wonders. Like that he prefers lattes, unsweetened and unflavored, and specifically from Torrefazione in Fremont. Yes, investigators will resort to bullying if they must, but they understand that if you’re relaxed, you’re more likely to recall past events. Too much anxiety and your brain gets jostled. You’ll clam up. Better for agents to appear friendly, with a hint of threat, while slyly cross-​examining the hell out you.

        “So you said that Zahir, or Jamal if you want to use that name, stayed up after you went to bed last Monday, the night before the attack, right?” asks Wrankle.

        “Yes.”

        “But your neighbors report that they saw him leave your houseboat at around four in the afternoon,” says Wrankle. “And they didn’t see him return.”

        “What, did you interrogate them too?”

        “We’re confirming the facts, Montgomery. Just the facts.”

        “Well, I don’t know what they saw, but I’m telling you what I remember.”

        “Could your memory be off?” asks Gogetsu. “I mean, everyone’s in kind of a shock after what happened.”

        “Look, I know my busybody neighbors watch every single thing that goes on. Okay, yes, I remember now that Jamal did go out earlier. But he returned.”

        “Are you sure?” asks Wrankle. “Why didn’t you mention that yesterday?”

        “I am sure. And I don’t know why I didn’t think of it yesterday.”

        “Okay, if you say so. Do you know where he went?” asks Wrankle.

        “When?”

        “The first time, around four.”

        “I’m not sure. Maybe to get a newspaper. What difference does it make?”

        “Does he often go out for newspapers?” asks Gogetsu, looking up from his notes.

        “I don’t monitor him. He’s my lover, not my servant.”

        “But are you sure he came back?” asks Gogetsu. “Maybe you didn’t monitor that either.”

        “What are you getting at? That I’m covering for him or something? That’s ridiculous.”

        “Okay, okay,” says Wrankle. “But you knew his real name is Zahir. Right?”

        Monty hesitates and looks away. “So?” he says, shifting in his chair.

        “So, hiding that from us before, when we came the first time, is sort of like complicity. Telling the FBI something you know isn’t true is potentially a grave …”

        “But we can overlook that, can’t we?” says the younger man, smiling sideways toward Monty. “I’m sure you must feel betrayed that this man faked his identity, that he fooled you, after you were so compassionate, taking him in as a refugee and then trusting him. So tell us what you know about him. We’re all ears.”

        And Monty will talk, now that he’s been caught covering up for his lover, conveniently forgetting that Jamal had left earlier in the day on the tenth and hadn’t returned, and evading the fact also that he knew his real name. He inadvertently discovered it one morning early in their relationship. He’d been preparing Jamal’s favorite breakfast—waffles with maple syrup, though he didn’t much care for waffles himself—when he saw Jamal’s weathered leather wallet lying on the dining room table. Without thinking, he opened it up. Tucked behind Jamal’s Washington State driver’s license, he found another ID with his picture but with the name Zahir typed above the Arabic script.

        When Jamal came downstairs from their attic bedroom and refilled Monty’s cup with coffee before pouring his own, Monty flicked the ID down on the table and asked, “Who the hell’s Zahir?”

        “Oh, I’m so sorry, I should have explained before,” said his lover, with the slightest lilting intonation and sharpness to his r’s.

        Having mastered English, Jamal has virtually perfect grammar and syntax. When speaking informally or relaxed with friends, there’s a hint remaining of a rolled r, more like a tap at the front of the upper palate, with less of the stress here and there typical of English. When he gets excited, his speech becomes a touch more melodic; if angered, rare though that is, his voice drops lower, harsh and guttural.

        “When I was a boy, my friends used to tease me all the time because everyone thought I was so handsome. They’d follow me around, chanting ‘Zahir, Zahir is jamal. Zahir is jamal.’ Jamal means beautiful, but you know that already. And so, my nickname stuck, and everyone including my family began calling me Jamal. Back there legally I’m Zahir, but I use Jamal these days. I hope that’s not a problem,” he adds, lowering his head sheepishly and smiling in that endearing manner that melted Monty’s temper every time he got riled.

        “That’s such a sweet story,” said Monty, giving Jamal a hug.

        No, Jamal’s explanation for his name change didn’t seem to be a problem—not then. In fact Monty found it amusing that he’d fallen big time for someone whose name, his real name anyway, didn’t start with the letter J. There’d been Jonathan. And Jin Li, his Chinese friend. And way back, a boy named Jay. How alluring that letter J, with its dreamy opening sound, the tongue barely caressing the upper palate as the lips touch together lightly as if forming a kiss. Kissing Jamal.

        But now that he thinks about it, Jamal’s explanation for his alias seems flimsy. I must be awfully gullible to have believed it for a second. And why didn’t the name Zahir show up in his refugee application? And why the hell didn’t he tell me about this before? What was he hiding? And what else is there I don’t know about Jamal, a.k.a. Zahir?

        Whatever it is the FBI knows about him, the agents aren’t revealing, not to Monty. Not yet.

        “How long exactly have you been acquainted with this Zahir or Jamal?” asks Gogetsu.

        “A little over four years,” Monty replies, “since he first arrived here as a refugee. Don’t you know that from your own sources?”

        “Yes,” says Wrankle, “but we thought you might have known him earlier.”

        “That’s impossible,” says Monty. “What are you insinuating?”

        “Just checking,” says the younger agent. “And how long have you two been a …”

        “A couple? Can’t say it, can you. Hah. Two years already, since I split up with my ex.”

        “And does he belong to any organizations you know of?” asks Wrankle.

        “I don’t think so, not that I know of. Eh … except …”

        “Except what?” says Wrankle.

        “Well, he does meet with a group of other Afghan refugees. Kind of a men’s group.”

        “Oh,” says Gogetsu, glancing toward Wrankle, as if they’d already discovered that too. “And how often do they meet?”

        “Every month, that is until …”

        “Until what?” presses Wrankle.

        “Eh, well, recently they’ve been meeting more often.”

        “How often?” asks Wrankle.

        “Oh, I guess every week or so. Maybe every few days.”

        “That’s interesting,” says Gogetsu. “And have you ever met any of these other refugees, or has your friend told you their names or what they discuss in this group, or cell, or whatever it is?”

        “No, I haven’t. And no, he hasn’t. He explained to me that what they say stays within the group. That’s how these men’s groups work, isn’t it?”

        “You tell us,” says Wrankle.

        After questioning Monty further about how he and Jamal/Zahir met, what he knows about his friend’s past, about his work, whether he belongs to any other groups, who his other friends and acquaintances are, and so on, they take their leave, saying they’ll be back.

        “And remember this time to look over your friend’s things,” says the senior agent, still avoiding the word lover or partner. “We don’t want to be forced to get a search warrant. We’re counting on your cooperation.”

        “Okay,” says Monty, avoiding Wrankle’s eyes.

        When he sees the agents out, Monty notices his neighbors spying again through their venetian blinds, shutting them as soon as he looks their way.

Monty had in fact already gone through Jamal’s possessions, searching through his desk, all around his closet, and inside his drawers of their shared dresser. Nothing unusual. Then he remembered Jamal still had the worn leather suitcase he’d originally traveled with after his refugee application was approved. It was stored with other luggage in a crawl space next to their bedroom.

        Inside the case Monty found some traditional Afghan clothes Jamal had brought with him, including a chapan, a long-​sleeved coat he’d sometimes worn at university in Karachi, with flamboyant red and gold stripes and a bright chartreuse lining. Monty was about to close the suitcase back up when he felt something hard under the chapan.

        “Holy fuck,” he cried aloud after uncovering a stack of Al-Qaeda pamphlets full of extremist propaganda. They were written side by side in Arabic and English, published, Monty guessed, to enlist foreign converts to jihad. Or something else equally insidious. The most inflammatory passages were highlighted with a yellow marker, the kind students use. “DEATH to America! DEATH to Israel! Avenge the TRUE FAITH! Victory for the RIGHTEOUS!”

        Monty felt as if he’d been kicked in the groin or stabbed in his chest. He grabbed his chest and held on tight, fearing for a moment he was having a heart attack or a stroke.

        Fuck, do I know Jamal at all? he thought when he recovered his senses. Maybe the FBI have valid grounds for investigating him. Could he have been using me all this time as a cover for what he’s been up to? Oh come on, it’s not possible. I love the guy. I believed everything he ever told me. Was it all a sham? Have I been duped?

        He brought one of the pamphlets to his nose and nearly gagged. Sour foreign spices mixed with feces—cumin, turmeric, camel dung? Maybe dried rotten apricots. And cheap, acrid-​smelling paper.

        Drifting off for a moment, he recalled Jamal’s smell, so sui generis—a subtle, enigmatic scent of sandalwood from the soap and shaving lotion he used. Monty would lick Jamal’s neck where the scent was more intense and compelling, before continuing all over his body, craving every iota of him, finding all Jamal’s erogenous spots. And Jamal would reciprocate. Sometimes while they were making love, Monty would fantasize Jamal eating him up, eating him up entirely. And he wanted it. He wanted to be consumed by Jamal. He gave himself to Jamal as he’d never given himself to anyone in his whole life, not only in sex but emotionally, intellectually. Between them there was no barrier.

        “I’ve told you every secret about me,” Monty had confided to Jamal once after they’d made love. “Things I never dared tell anyone else. There isn’t anything I’d hide from you.” Though he’d never even hinted about his having seduced students, let alone the Brazilian boy’s death.

        “It’s the same for me,” said Jamal, his luminescent green-​blue wolf’s eyes peering into Monty’s soul.

        Damn, I believed him. I believed everything. I still want to believe everything.

        Monty recalled the time he and Jamal almost made love, when they were camping at the coast, when Monty was still with Jonathan. He pictured vividly the moment they finally had sex, when Jamal abruptly stopped giving him a blow job and started lightly tickling his feet, as if, magically, he sensed this was the most intense physical pleasure Monty experienced as a child—when his mother would tickle his feet after clipping his toenails. How does Jamal know this trick? What, is he—some kind of psychic? Or demon? Yeah, a demon I could fall for. And did.

        It was as if he and Jamal, though distinct selves with dissimilar personalities, were fused into one being—not only in the act of sex. Monty was amazed they could talk about it so freely—a touchy subject he and Jonathan had rarely broached. But he and Jamal shared their thoughts about life, culture, politics, emotions, everything—or so Monty thought—including his lifelong fear of death.

        “You’re not the only one,” Jamal once said to him, reaching out to hold his hand. “Except for fanatics who trust they’ll go to heaven, I think everyone fears death.”

        Despite Monty’s shock at discovering the pamphlets, he wasn’t ready yet to reveal to the agents what he’d found in the suitcase. His faith in Jamal was beginning to wilt, but he couldn’t trust the FBI either, not for a second. What if Jamal were innocent? In fact, what if the FBI got into the houseboat while Monty was away and planted the evidence in the suitcase to incriminate Jamal? It was possible. Anything was possible.

        How did they figure out I knew Jamal’s real name? Did they spy on me? Is the houseboat bugged? Did they already have information about Jamal? And about me? And how could they be looking for him so soon after the attack? Was he on some kind of watch list? And why was he meeting so much more often with that men’s group before the attack? Something doesn’t add up. I wonder if the FBI are holding him already and interrogating him—or worse. I’ve got to be careful. It’s not just his life that’s at stake.

        I’ve got to talk to someone about all this. Someone I can trust.

        Four foot ten, tightly corseted, Monty’s grandmother is a law unto herself, compact, self-​assured, toughened from a fraught childhood. Barely sixteen years old, she left her homeland and emigrated to America, in part, like everyone else, searching for a better life, but also because she despised her father’s second wife. The woman’s Jewish Orthodoxy riled Golde’s secular, socialist disposition. She thought the woman superstitious and mean.

        Arriving for processing on Ellis Island in New York in 1905, Golde was accompanied by her sister and two family friends, Shmuel and his brother, whom the girls soon married. Two brothers, two sisters, complicated kinship ties making for loads of double cousins. All four came from a tiny shtetl close to the border between Galicia and Bukovina, both then part of the Austro-​Hungarian Empire.

        Golde worked as a seamstress in New York and might well have perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, as did a hundred and forty-​six other female garment workers, had she not secured a job a few weeks earlier sewing for a wealthy German Jewish family on Long Island. Germans were the elite among the Jewish population, having arrived in the prior century. The Galitzianers, like Golde and Shmuel, and the Litvaks (Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Polish Jews), like Monty’s paternal family, argued among themselves over who had higher status. Unlike German Jews, many of whom held professional positions in the Old Country, the eastern European Jews, with few exceptions, had farmed or worked in the few trades they were permitted to practice. The Galitzianers often fared better. Golde’s father, a mason, specialized in gravestones—a position of far higher status, she would point out to Monty’s father, than that of the horse traders and leather tanners in his family.

        Golde and Shmuel, a tinsmith, moved to Detroit when he secured a job at Henry Ford’s first factory there. But he had a weak heart and had to quit in less than a year, a few weeks before Sarah was born. A son soon followed. Golde was helping to support the family by sewing aprons, handkerchiefs, and other casual items, which led to their opening a dry goods store and rising to middle-​class status. When business collapsed early in the Depression, they sold their entire stock and moved to Los Angeles, where they bought a four-​unit apartment building and later a second.

        Now five, Monty often accompanies his grandmother to a nearby park and watches her as she marches briskly in front of the other immigrant grandmothers, glued to their wooden benches, gossiping like birds pecking for every last crumb. Golde paces back and forth, her back rigidly straight, chin held high, modeling conceit for her darling blond goyishe-​looking grandson’s budding ego.

        “You see, I am much strongker than them,” she tells Monty after sitting down. “I know how to take care on myself. They just kvetch.”

        Her speech, heavily accented by a fusion of the eastern European languages she spoke in her shopkeeping days, is peppered with Yiddish words. Prone to boasting, she would hold up her chest and declare to her daughter-in-law, Monty’s aunt, “You see, I am much older, but I have much better buzem than you.” And to Monty’s father, “How come I am so much older, but my hair’s not groy like yours?”

        When it came to her own children, her son had been favored, as was then customary, and was sent to college. Sarah had to stay home and work in the downstairs shop, forgoing an offer to study piano at the Detroit music conservatory. She’d shown promise and continued to teach a few friends but gradually gave up playing. For decades she kept her baby grand piano like an albatross around her neck. It was one of many inexpensive models of the era, branded with the names of classical composers. Monty and his brother before him both learn to play on the Brahms Bach that dominates one end of their living room, next to the bay window, with its one stained glass panel of fruit, looking through a tinted lens onto the rest of the world.

Two years after his two grandparents’ deaths, Monty’s own fears play out as repeating nightmares featuring a king chasing him along the edge of his bedroom ceiling, threatening to chop off his head with an axe. Terrified, he screams himself awake. When his parents rush into his room, he finds no comfort in their soothing words.

        What is life if I’m going to die, and if all my family are going to die too? I must live forever. I will! And my mother and father must join me, and my brother, and my Aunt Beatrice. But their parents must also live forever, or they won’t be happy. And their parents’ parents and so on, back into the boy’s primordial roots, back to Europe, back to the Fertile Crescent of his ancestral origin. Only in this way can he and his loved ones guarantee happiness. The world will be bursting with Monty and his kin. But we must, we must all live forever. And I will save everyone!

        Death also looms large not only in a little boy’s thoughts and nightmares but in the nightly news. In the early fifties, footage of the Nazi death camps is broadcast on television for the first time, revealing mounds of purloined eyeglasses, lampshades made of human skin, extracted gold fillings, shaved hair, and emaciated corpses mangled together like rubbery squid but with human faces, trapped in nets and slung out in piles on rough cement—mouths gaping in death’s last throes; penises and breasts once adored and caressed, or lonely and abandoned, flaccid, hanging lifeless. Youngsters, Monty’s age, too, who once played games and laughed and cried. These squid all led happy, sad, rich, poor, satisfied, hungry, human lives, their histories methodically exterminated.

        Monty’s family are latecomers to the new mass medium. Their first TV, small even for the era, with rounded corners, is housed in an American-​colonial-​style maple cabinet. It’s a mystery why his socialist-​sympathizing mother loves American-​colonial-​style furnishings, and why his communist-​sympathizing father indulges her taste. But here they are: colonial bookcases with curlicue corners, a coffee table with turned legs, matching end tables with lamps Leo fashioned out of abandoned antique coffee grinders, a captain’s chair, and a brass colonial floor lamp. On the wall are Currier and Ives prints showing iconic scenes of snowy New England that make no sense to a boy growing up in Southern California. Leo makes frames himself to hold the free art prints he gets from Chevron.

        “They take better care of your car,” he declares, aping the Chevron jingle and driving extra miles to avoid loading up on gasoline from a Texaco, Richfield, or Union 76 gas station. “Never buy gas from them. They’re Republican companies,” he tells his credulous younger son, as if Chevron were left wing and benevolent.

        Maybe Chevron is so powerful, imagines Monty, it can keep death away. Maybe so, for life is good in America seven years after the end of World War II, unless you happen to be Black or Hispanic. But Black and Hispanic people don’t live on the leafy west side of Los Angeles where Monty’s growing up. Where gas is only twenty-​seven cents a gallon. And where Rosemary Clooney can be heard breezily crooning “Come On-a My House” on his family’s cream-​colored Bakelite RCA radio sitting on the kitchen counter.

        Though Monty’s been told his ancestors came from some unfathomable other place, he knows that everything on earth, not merely he himself, materialized right after the war. Like everything on earth is centered in Los Angeles at the corner of Sawyer Street and Robertson Boulevard in a modest three-​bedroom, single-​story tract house. Everything begins right here. And tonight it features scenes from the Holocaust.

        “He shouldn’t watch this,” Sarah implores as Monty stares at the ghastly images on the TV screen, horrified and spellbound. “He’s only a child.”

        “No, let him,” Leo replies sternly. “He should see how evil the world is. It could happen here.”

        “Yes, you’re right,” says Sarah. “It could.”

        Monty is convinced not only that it could but that it will happen here—any day. And I must be on guard at every moment with my magic flying cape and my army of boys behind me. We must all be ready at any instant to fly in and defend Jews and Black people and the starving Chinese and all the other poor people. Life is full of so many threats. Death, is it really inevitable? Why aren’t I dead yet? he asks himself in the shapeless abstract way of a little boy about to explore more of the world than the corner of Sawyer and Robertson.

        Monty doesn’t realize that six thousand miles away, far from his own microcosm, young men who have no magic cape are dying right this moment, killing each other off by the tens of thousands in the hills and valleys of Korea while old men survey maps and make threatening speeches. These doddering warmongers honed their skills in the recent world war. One of them wants to use the ultimate new bomb only America so far possesses in large numbers. But Monty knows nothing of this. Or that the devilish Joe McCarthy will soon cause his father to lose his job and withdraw into valleys of his own frightened soul. Or that Richard Nixon, the evilest man on earth according to his parents and their friends, was recently elected to lead America in company with the chief of those same old doddering generals.

        Today Monty knows only one thing: it’s his first day of kindergarten at Shenandoah Street Elementary School—the most exciting day of his life.

        The fat, balding pickle salesman in his early sixties shifts in his chair and snickers uncomfortably at the boy’s question. “Such a cute little boychick,” he says, patting the three-​year-old’s platinum blond hair. But the boy pulls away.

        “Come here,” Leo tells Monty sharply. “Sit by me.”

        Monty ignores his father’s command and wanders around the room. He feels offended. It was a genuine question. He wants to know why this old man isn’t dead yet, like his Grandpa Shmuel. And besides, he resents the pickle man for occupying the ancient wooden rocking chair where until a few days ago his grandpa would sit and sing Yiddish nursery rhymes while Monty stood on his feet and held his hands, the two rocking together in time to the simple rhythms.

        It’s a typical summer day in Los Angeles, 1950, hot and sultry, the Santa Monica Mountains barely visible as a pallid grayish outline two miles to the north. Heavy smog leaves a dry, bitter taste in the back of the mouth, tears burning in the eyes, and a muted acrid smell, like charred crust stuck inside a toaster. Not until a decade later will state officials first dare to propose measures regulating toxic automobile emissions.

        Cars here reign supreme, the top of the food chain lorded over by grotesquely long Cadillac sedans with glossy two-​tone bodies—black and violet, green and white, black and red—and with fins that will evolve increasingly pointed year by year, as if purposely designed to kill off pedestrians and any lesser vehicles encroaching on their space. Monty sees the Caddies lined up at Blum’s ice cream parlor in Beverly Hills.

        “Too fancy for us,” Sarah proclaims, putting off her son’s plea to stop for one of those ice cream sundaes that ooze over the top of the tulip-​shaped glass, sending chocolate syrup, nuts, and artificially colored candied fruit dripping down the side, turning into mush the fancy paper doily under the glass. Doilies like the larger versions of which rest over the top of his grandma’s sofa, preventing the oily residue of her guests’ heads from further soiling the worn-​out nubbly purple upholstery.

        Monty and his parents are visiting his grandmother Golde, the reigning Cadillac in her own eyes of a small circle of elderly eastern European Jewish immigrants who gather daily and gossip at the local park. She lives in a two-​story complex she owns, a half block south of Beverly Hills. Monty is old enough to sense that life over that border—indistinguishable at first but for a sign—is utterly perfect, like Blum’s sundaes, but too young to understand that not all people in his grandmother’s age bracket abruptly drop dead from a heart attack, like his Grandpa Shmuel just did.

        “Why aren’t you dead yet?” Monty asks the pickle man’s thin, sallow wife, and then each elder in turn until his father lightly cuffs him on the side of his head and pulls him away.

        A tall man with rugged good looks and eastern European roots, Leo is muscular, lean, and tanned from decades of tennis and daily sunbaths, as he calls them. He’s cautious with his son. Once when Monty was a toddler and wouldn’t stop crying, Leo shook him so harshly it caused a cracking sound from the boy’s spine, like a Ritz cracker snapping in two. Shocked, in the future, Leo checked himself from striking out at his younger son.

        The elders gathered in Golde’s living room, heavily scented with the rosewater ointment she lavishes on her body, are here to offer their condolences. They smile at the boy’s question, smiling in a way that conceals their discomfort and embarrassment. Why indeed aren’t we all dead? they might well ask themselves. What string of chance circumstances led us, like Shmuel and Golde, to get out of eastern Europe and emigrate to the New World in the years before and after 1900, missing out on the fate of countless relatives destined forty-​some years later to be shot and dumped like discarded garbage into large open pits, or be gassed and incinerated?

        In truth we could each ask ourselves, Why aren’t I dead yet? Between life and death, between the here and the not-​here, with all the possible accidents, diseases, and organ breakdowns, there’s only a micron-​thin “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” divide. And like the shy girl wearing the tiny swimsuit in the “bubblegum pop” hit featuring that lyric refrain, we’re afraid to reveal our true selves in our skimpy costume called life.

        If we stopped for an instant and peered down deep inside the Me, down into the black night of our being, down into our cells, and deeper yet, down into our subnuclear core, what is there there but emptiness? Somehow, through natural selection—or miraculously by the will of some god we concoct—the collectivity of our neural cells creates an illusion that all these microbits of stuff and primarily empty space coalesce and constitute a singular, indivisible permanent Me. An “I am,” as the seventeenth-​century French philosopher René Descartes put it: Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.

        It’s a mere conception, a conceit, the ultimate human vanity. But the ego serves a purpose. Evolutionary forces that made hominids increasingly self-​conscious produced an individual and collective identity that enabled us to develop the minds, tools, and schemes to fight off predators with sharp horns, long teeth, and massive bodies. And to fear death to the point of denial. All these same evolutionary forces have come together to produce a Me called Monty, who at three years old first begins to fear the end of Me.

        The foreboding first surfaced three days before the scene in Golde’s apartment when Monty ran to answer the family telephone where it sat on the yellow-​tiled kitchen counter next to the breakfast nook in the cookie-​cutter Spanish colonial revival tract home where he’s growing up.

        “Hehwoe,” he said proudly into the heavy black Bakelite receiver, thrilled to answer any telephone call. “Whooz dis?”

        “Grandpa Shmuel has the figs,” his grandmother shouted from the other end.

        Sarah grabbed the phone from her son, and seconds later she slumped onto the faded blue-​and-yellow linoleum floor, sobbing hysterically and howling, “Leo, Leo, Leo.”

        Whenever Sarah panics, she cries out for her husband: during LA’s sporadic earthquakes, each time Red-​baiting Joe McCarthy appears on TV, during the polio outbreak when Monty’s brother, Dave, five years older, is away at camp. Sarah’s nearly a foot shorter than Leo and petite like her mother, clearly Jewish, with an added touch of exotic Asiatic features. She’s feisty if challenged by authority, but when faced with affliction, real or imagined, turns nervous and apprehensive. She finds in her husband not only comfort but confidence that she is actually alive. Her marriage provides a core meaning, a sense of identity, an unconscious pretense of immortality.

        Except that everything out there is a threat. Only recently subdued and barely so, Nazis may return at any time, she’ll tell Monty, and this time on American soil, led by Joe McCarthy, white racist mobs, and capitalist plutocrats.

        Heaven knows what Grandma Golde actually said on the other end of the phone. Certainly not “figs.” Probably some Yiddish expression for “dropped dead.” And while Monty didn’t understand the words, his mother’s hysterical reaction left him with an undying message of horror and annihilation.

        A few months later he absorbs a similar stamp on his heart from his father’s stoic yet palpably distraught reaction to his own mother’s death. “Don’t bother your dad,” Sarah tells Monty after he’s pestered his father to help him fix a broken toy. “He’s not feeling so good. Better to leave him alone.”

        A quick temper and a stone face can shake a child’s fragile sense of security no less than hysteria. And though too young to grasp the biological meaning of mortality, Monty absorbs its absolute finality. Thoughts of death begin to penetrate his mental amniotic sac, the layer of consciousness that nurtures and cushions his certainty. The protective buffer against truth and the dangerous outside world has burst a leak. Life doesn’t seem so safe anymore. Menace lurks in every dark corner of his home, behind the clothes in his closet, under the coffee table in the living room, in the two desks where Mommy and Daddy hide away their secret things. What I see, what I feel, everything I am, in death there is no more. No more Me.

        But perhaps in Beverly Hills there is no death. Barely a half block away from his grandma’s apartment, where towering palm trees gradually begin to dominate the landscape, everything one cherishes in life, including Blum’s ice cream sundaes, seems perfect and everlasting.

        It’s nearly evening, but Monty’s still wearing his gray pajamas and black silk bathrobe. A cloud briefly blocks out the sun, darkening the entry porch facing the rear of the small moorage, where a fetid smell hovers over the stagnant water. Two crows squawk brazenly as they chase each other back from who knows where and settle in a nearby tree.

        “We’d like to ask you a few questions,” says the man, tall as Monty but chunky, with hips like a pickup truck with oversize fender flares. In his midthirties, twenty or so years younger than Monty, he’s sporting a glossy black suit, a cropped butch blond haircut, and a grin on his face like a con artist about to cheat you out of your life savings.

        Monty and Jamal, his Afghan boyfriend, bought the houseboat two years after they’d hooked up as a couple. Jamal was more confident about the move, and Monty trusted his judgment. They both loved its cozy cabin-​like character, with its aged oak floors. They grayed down the clapboard exterior, painted the door and window trims a sexy shade of cabernet red, and modernized the pocket-​size galley kitchen where guests entered, from the back of the houseboat, its front facing the water. Monty was surprised to find that he liked the confined space, so compressed compared to the house he’d long shared with his ex. It made him feel like he and Jamal were cuddling all the time—lightly brushing up against one another in passing, squeezing into the bathroom at the same time, snuggling up on the two-​person love seat while watching movies or listening to music.

        “We need to have a little chat with you,” says the heavyset man at the door, as if he and Monty are old friends.

        “But who are you?” Monty repeats, squinting as the sun reappears.

        “Who are you?” counters the short anorexic-​looking middle-​aged woman with a tightly braided bun of salt-​and-pepper hair that looks like it could snap loose any moment and strike out at you like a whip.

        “It’s best you let us in,” she says, relaxing an iota. “We’re from the FBI.”

        Hmm, I should have guessed, thinks Monty, his antennae switching to full alert. A scholar of American history, he’s well versed in his country’s checkered inquisitorial record.

        He closely inspects the black ID wallets the agents hold up, noticing behind them that his neighbors are spying on the goings-on through the discreetly parted blades of their shuttered venetian blinds. Kirby, the husband, a shaggy tinkerer with a pack rat shack of his own at the top of the embankment overlooking the shared moorage on Lake Union, devised a motion detector to alert him and his chummy wife, Hillary, whenever someone walks down the stairs onto the common dock. Ever since Monty moved into the adjacent houseboat, they’ve been a bit too friendly with him and Jamal. Snoopy neighbors are fine in the unlikely event robbers are breaking into your place; not so great when the Feds show up.

        “I’m sorry, what’s this all about?” Monty asks.

        “We’ll explain,” Wrankle, the male agent, replies, eyeing Monty directly.

        “Do you have a search warrant?”

        “No, but we can get one,” Smitt, the female agent, answers, taking a step toward Monty with her pointy black shoes.

        “Maybe I should call my lawyer first,” says Monty.

        “Of course, that’s your right,” says Wrankle. “But it’s better you just comply. Resisting at this point might affect your situation. All we need is some information.”

        What situation? What’s this all about? But in the evening after the terrorist attack, he figures it can only be about one thing.

        “Okay, I guess you can come in, but I don’t have much time.”

        “It won’t take long,” says the woman, forcing a smile. “And we can always come back if we have more questions.”

        Questions about what exactly? Monty wonders as he leads the two agents through the narrow kitchen to the living room, too meager to accommodate a full sofa. Gesturing to them to sit on his love seat, he takes the chair.

        “Does a Zahir Gulbalbalp … carkill live here?” Agent Wrankle asks Monty, grossly mispronouncing his lover’s family name. “About the same age as me.”

        “No,” answers Monty after hesitating a beat too many.

        “Are you sure?” asks Wrankle, tilting his head. “We have information he does.”

        “There’s no one here by that name,” Monty shoots back, this time too fast.

        “I see. So, what about this person?” Wrankle asks, pulling out a color photo of Jamal from his inside breast pocket and passing it to Monty across the rattan-​and-glass coffee table. “Does he live here?”

        Monty looks at the print for a few moments. Dusky face. Strong cheekbones. Long wavy black hair. Neatly trimmed seven-​day beard. Sensuous lips inviting lingering kisses. And those arresting translucent green-​blue eyes, like a wolf’s eyes, half-​tame, half-​daemonic, peering straight into your heart. Jamal—“beauty” in Arabic.

        “Yes, this man lives here … with me,” Monty replies, deliberately stressing the nature of their relationship. “But his name isn’t Zahir,” he adds, glancing sideways.

        “Well, whatever you think his name is, where is he now?” Agent Smitt asks, as if Monty must be hiding Jamal in his pajama pocket.

        “I don’t know,” he answers.

        “What do you mean you don’t know?” she presses, insinuating again that Monty must be concealing his lover.

        “I don’t know. That’s what I mean. I don’t know. And what do you want with him anyway?”

        “That, you don’t need to know,” she answers back with a slight smirk on her skintight face.

Before the agents showed up at his door, he’d been glued to his mini Sony TV, watching the news all day, like most everyone else in Seattle and the rest of the world. Earlier that morning, unaware of what was unfolding on the East Coast, he was topping up a bowl of granola with yogurt and dried sour cherries, more miffed than worried that Jamal hadn’t left a note explaining why he wasn’t home.

        Unexpectedly Monty got a text message from Jin Li, a young Chinese man he’d had a fling with some years before. The fellow returned home after six months studying English at a private Seattle college, but they’d kept in touch and connected again when Monty visited him during a brief trip to China.

        Terrbull what’s happen. R U watching? the message read.

        Monty flicked on the TV in time to see the World Trade Center’s South Tower collapse, floor after floor sandwiching down onto the next as if in slow motion, the humongous edifice nothing but a stack of flimsy pancakes, with zillions of crumbs thrust out in an expanding cumulus of poison and fear.

        Monty’s jaw dropped, granola and yogurt dripping down his bearded chin, a mix of gray and red now that his blondness had long faded away, along with his once-​proud blond mane, thinned over time and now shaved off entirely.

        “Holy shit,” he exclaimed aloud.

        Thirty minutes later the North Tower fell. And all day since, CNN has kept replaying footage of the carnage: the two jets crashing into the skyscrapers like arrows penetrating human flesh, the dark, distant blips vainly hurling themselves from the top floor to certain death a hundred and ten stories down, until the buildings themselves cave in, erasing every trace of life. Ghastly images repeated again and again on every TV channel, implanting in the collective American consciousness an indelible posttraumatic stress disorder.

        Monty had first seen the Twin Towers thirty-​some years earlier, a few months after his college graduation. It was during a week’s stopover in New York, on his first trip anywhere beyond the West Coast. He and Jonathan, the man he’d end up spending over a quarter century with, were visiting the city before boarding a ship to Europe.

        Jonathan, five years older, had been to New York before, but Monty insisted they take in all the famous sites, including the Empire State Building. They reached the observation deck shortly before closing time. Standing at the edge, Monty gazed through the canyons of parallel streets with their hundreds of tall lit-up buildings, down toward the World Trade Center. Still under construction and partially sheathed, the towers stood out in the murky twilight like two giant unearthly ghosts.

        And ghosts they now are, along with twenty-​seven hundred or so of their occupants and the emergency crews who got stuck trying to rescue them. All dead in a giant heap of noxious fumes, smoke, and paranoia engulfing Lower Manhattan and the whole of America. The hijacked jets couldn’t have been more shrewdly aimed, the resulting cataclysm igniting mayhem and xenophobia around the world, like evils released from Pandora’s box.

“So let’s get this straight,” says Agent Smitt, pulling out a notebook from her black purse and snapping it shut again. “Surname Chubatov, Chubatovsky before your grandfather shortened it. Correct?”

        “Yes.” How the hell do they know about my grandfather?

        “First name Montgomery. That is your full name, correct?”

        “Yes.”

        He’d been named after the broodingly handsome actor Montgomery Clift. It amuses him to think that if his parents had had the slightest suspicion that Clift was a closeted homosexual, surely they would have named him after someone safer and more manly, someone like Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, or John Wayne. But John or Gregory would have been too Christian sounding, certainly not Jewish enough, though his family were anything but religious. Yes, Gary. Gary would have been a more prudent choice.

        “You’re what, a hundred eighty pounds, six, six one, fifty-​three years old?” says Smitt.

        “Fifty-​four. Twenty years older than my boyfriend. What else?”

        “Grew up in Los Angeles. Went to that, shall we say, left-​wing college in Portland, and then here at UW for graduate school. And you’re a full professor in American studies at Seattle State University,” she continues, as if they’ve uncovered dark, incriminating secrets. “And you lead some kind of Buddhist thing there, correct?”

        “Yup. Zen.”

        “And you’ve lived in this houseboat for about two years, since you split up with, eh, what’s his name?” she asks the other agent.

        “Jonathan Weaver,” answers Wrankle.

        “Yeah, so what? Our relationship ended. No big deal,” says Monty, wincing. Breaking up after so many years had been a very big deal.

        “Let’s see.” Smitt pauses while reading her notes. “You got out of the draft, judged psychologically unfit for military service in Vietnam, right?”

        “Look, that was decades ago. Why the hell are you bringing all this up?”

        “We need to be sure we’ve got the right person,” says the man, smiling.

        “The right person for what? You’re not investigating me, are you? It’s Jamal you want to know about, isn’t it?” Monty asks, realizing they’ve cornered him into pointing the finger at his lover. As if Jamal were guilty. Guilty of what? Collaboration in the attack? Ridiculous.

        “We like to have all our facts straight,” says Smitt. “And don’t worry, we can always offer you immunity in case he’s compromised you in any way. Just tell us what you know.”

        Immunity? From what?

        “So when was the last time you saw your friend?” asks Wrankle.

        “Partner. Yesterday.”

        “Day or evening?” the man continues.

        “In the evening before I went to bed.”

        “He stayed up?” asks Smitt.

        “Yes.”

        “Do you remember him coming to bed later?” Wrankle asks.

        “Yes, I guess so.”

        “Guess so or know so?” the woman sharply interjects.

        “Eh, I’m not sure.”

        “Okay,” says Wrankle. “So yesterday, how did he seem to you?”

        “What do you mean?”

        “Did he act normal?” asks Smitt. “Was there anything unusual in his behavior?”

        “I don’t think so. He seemed normal. Why are you asking these questions? I really should have my lawyer here.”

        “It’s okay. No worries. We’re only checking up on details,” says Wrankle. “So, what did Zahir say to you the last time you talked?”

        “I … I don’t remember. Maybe something about what time he was teaching his first class today. And it’s Jamal, not Zahir.”

        “Yeah, okay,” says Wrankle. “But was it unusual for him to tell you what time he’d be teaching? Don’t you know his schedule?”

        “No, no, no. There was nothing unusual at all in anything he did or said.”

        “What was he wearing when you last saw him?” asks Smitt.

        “I don’t know. His usual clothes.”

        “What sort of clothes? New, old, expensive, plain?” asks Wrankle.

        “He usually dresses casually, but he’s well dressed. Nothing shabby, if that’s what you mean.”

        In fact Jamal always dressed aesthetically, taking even more care than Monty in selecting his clothes each morning, choosing subtle contrasting shades of gray, black, tan, and maybe a scarf for a dash of color. The two of them often shop together downtown or along Broadway, in the “gay ghetto.” Or buy each other surprises, like a slinky silk shirt for Jamal or yet another Borsalino hat for Monty. Monty rarely bought clothes for Jonathan. But he’s smartened up in his new relationship. And besides, he and Jamal know each other’s taste in clothing right down to their jockey shorts.

        “I see. But you don’t remember what he wore when he left the houseboat?” asks Wrankle.

        “I told you, I didn’t see him when he left.”

        “Okay, fine,” says the woman. “But back to you. You traveled in China not that long ago, correct? Went to the far west there, right up to the border with Afghanistan, yes?”

        “How the hell do you know that? And what relevance is it, for that matter? It was way before I ever imagined someone from Afghanistan named Jamal.”

        “Speaking of which,” says the woman, “we’d like to take a look at his room.”

        “Our room,” corrects Monty.

        “Right, whatever. We’d like to go through his things.”

        “Sorry, you said you don’t have a search warrant. How about I go over his stuff and let you know if I find something suspicious?”

        “That’s not good enough. But, okay, maybe for the moment. And don’t let us down,” says Wrankle as he and the woman rise to make their exit. “Here’s my card. Call me right away if anything turns up.”

        Monty sees them out, and as he’s about to close the Dutch door, the two crows fly back across the porch. His hands trembling, he shuts the door firmly and flicks the security lock, watching warily through the door’s upper window as the two agents head back along the dock and up the stairs, until they disappear at the top of the embankment above the moorage.

        Barely half a day after the attack, the dust literally not yet settled, and already two agents of the instantly ensuing police state have planted themselves firmly on Monty’s love seat, insinuating not so subtly that his boyfriend was involved in the plot and that he himself might be complicit.

        He returns to the living room, opens the double doors to his deck to air out the space, and sits down on his black leather lounge chair, gazing out at the lake. He tries to breathe in and out slowly and deeply through his nose, like he learned long ago to do in meditation. A fresh breeze blows in from over the water. Boats and barges, some dwarfish, others gigantic, sail by on their way to and from the Fremont Bridge nearby, sending out ripples and occasionally waves that rock the houseboat for minutes, gradually dying down until the lake is once again placid for a brief interlude.

        Why the hell am I so shaken up? I’m trembling like a wimp. I thought I’d gotten over all these sorts of emotional reactions. What have I been practicing Zen for all these years if I get thrown off kilter so damn easily?

        Jamal couldn’t have been involved. It’s impossible. I’m sure they’re just fishing. But why are they questioning me as if he’s guilty and I’m complicit? What am I missing? I thought I finally found the true love of my life. Jesus Christ, I feel horribly vulnerable all over again.

        Maybe I’d been better off sticking with Jonathan after all, despite all our issues. At least I knew more about him, about his life, his family. He’s approaching sixty but still slim and charming, and doing something with his life. (There I go again, judging him.)

        And what do I really know about Jamal? Maybe I should never have come out of the closet in the first place. I would’ve been safer all my life if I’d kept up the act and played straight. Yeah, and I was a great actor. A great fake.

        Damn. I’m falling into the FBI’s trap, doubting everything. Doubting myself. Doubting Jamal. I don’t care what they say, I refuse to think he’s guilty. It’s insane. How the hell did I wind up getting into this whole fucking mess?

        A continent away from the devastation in New York, ensconced in his cozy houseboat with its meticulously curated collection of Native American art, with all the lovingly nurtured azalea, dahlia, and begonia plants on his deck, he’d thought he was safe.

        But then he’s never really thought he was safe. Death’s been hovering over his shoulder all his life, ready to take him out any second.