It's time to take my elderly boss for a walk. We set out down a muddy path through a winter forest. Soon we are trailed by a pair of brothers who listen in on our conversation. The boss grows a foot taller and a decade younger, and now has a thick mop of curly hair; he has turned into something of an aging Tony Kushner. He refers to a theory that says that it is wrong for nuclear weapons to be legal in big countries and banned in smaller countries; not only wrong, but therefore dangerous. Trying to keep up, I suggest that the same argument could be made for contraception. We push onward. Feeling that we are excluding the brothers, when the boss brings up free trade agreements, I observe that the elder brother has traveled to Central America. No one hears.

In the war of civilizations, my stubborn friend wants to organize a meeting where people can air their grievances. He sets up ten plastic cups on a card table in an abandoned classroom and waits, expecting no one to come. An hour later the room is packed with people asking each other the questions. And without meaning to, I ask a question that gives away the identity of another friend's mother, a square-jawed woman with short hair, who must now go into hiding with her twin sister.

As my lover attempts to engage me in conversation at 4am, I groan without waking, "I Am A Human Being Who Needs to Sleep."

I am hovering along a rocky coastlike with a friend, occasionally touching down on the stones with bare feet. We are searching for the cottage where my family will converge for the holidays. When I arrive I see an empty desk and a rotary telephone. An uncle calls to verify that the next five Saturdays will be considered Sabbaths by the God of the Israelites. I reply that, despite the fact that one is Christmas eve day and the other is New Year's Eve days, I believe they will be observed.

I check into a fading hotel with my aging boss and his middle-aged secretary. We are on deadline for the biweekly Atlas of the World. As he rips through another two-page spread of Central Asia, I go down to the hotel lobby to clean up. I gather a pile of large full-color proofs with suction cups on the back—from the phone booth, the urinal, the check-in desk, and from the stairwell—as a number of families with small children arrive. In the elevator, the secretary asks my boss whether we should mention the films of Robert Frost. He replies that Frost hated film. "Is that in Frost?" she asks meekly.

A gravelly hillside where my Dad is teaching myself and my brother the fine art of BMX. We discover that you can ride from that side over to this side, avoiding the piles of unpacked dirt and the little potholes here and there. Or you can ride from this side over to that side, pushing hard up the hill and making sure not to pop a tire. Dad suggests a little trip across the ravine which has some PVC pipe stretched over it. And I call it like it is: a ballbreaker.

In my hometown there is an eclipse. While it's dark I am the only one who wonders whether the boy with tight lips and fierce eyes has been doing harm. Light returns and I glance down at the four children, each with a tiny hole in the temple that begins to ooze. And as wave of panic spreads through the town square, I am the only one who locks eyes with the tight-lipped boy. His hair is wavy blond and his eyes are fierce.

That night I feel hunted; I am sure that he will come to silence me. I can't tell my friends for fear of endangering them, so I stop going outside. As time passes the feeling is more of being haunted, and eventually all that is left is the guilt I feel for not exposing the murderer. It becomes so general that I wonder whether that might not have been me.

When I am grown there is another eclipse. The man with tight lips pierces the temple of an infant child in his mother's arms. This time the Father sees what has gone wrong and, out of mercy and desperation, draws a revolver and puts the mother and child out of suffering. And immediately the tight-lipped man with fierce eyes has executed the Father.

We park near the train track and wait for the drive-in movie to be projected by our eyes onto the freight cars as they rumble past.