I lived in a town called Altadena in California. It was north of a town called Pasadena. Altadena means "higher dena," as in Pasadena. I do not know what Pasadena means. Apparently no one does. There are many things that no one knows, which is comforting, up to a point. At the time of this writing, I do not know whether I will live much longer, and you don't know what I"m talking about. I was led to this point by a simple note, marks on an odd scrap of paper, words that could have meant nothing, that I could have allowed to mean absolutely nothing. But that's not really possible, is it?

"If I was flirting, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. I didn't realize I was."

"Okay."

Her "okay" was so flat, so distant, so blaming, that it actually did make me angry, and so I said nothing else. Instead I fought the urge to say something mean under my breath,not that I could have come up with anything, and stared through the open window until I believed I was asleep.

Igor finished his coffee and nodded toward a young woman walking past.

"What?"

"Don't tell me you didn't see her."

"You know you can count on me to come visit you on every third Sunday," I said. [...]

The worst feeling in the world is knowing your child is afraid, not startled or apprehensive as when about to take a test or ride a roller coaster but paralyzed by that icy cold in the pit of her stomach, confused because she suddenly believes her parents cannot make it all okay. [...] there might have been nothing wrong at all and certainly I was afraid, but the look of fear in Sarah's eyes sent that same ice lance through my center, lodged it in my spine, and stayed there, unmelting, unmoving. My daughter was my reason for waking each day, and I wanted to kill myself for having in some fashion already resigned myself to losing some part of her. [...]

[...] The students were apparently demanding many resignations because the president and his administrator were insensitive to the needs of students of color. It sounded like my college days twenty-five years earlier, when we were asking for essentially the same things. I was sadly as apolitical then as I was at this moment. I dealt with fossils. I crawled through caves and measured the bones of birds long dead. [...]

[...] Signs seasons abounded in Los Angeles and around, more subtle than the abundant death of leaves that so many seemed so in love with. The blooming of flowers and trees, the appearance of various birds. In the spring, the phainopepla appeared, the males showing off their white-patched wings. Purple finches in the fall. Santa Ana winds blowing hot through October. Rains in the winter. The sun there was bright, often too bright, somehow too close, and it was so that day, hammering on me as I drove.

[...] I had fallen in love with her. I remembered the moment it happened. Sarah was three months old, and though I was happy, however scared to be a parent, my love for my daughter until that day had felt abstract, amorphous, distant. I was wiping her sour spittle from my shirt when I looked at her rather expressionless little face and I fell. Deeply. Completely. Unforgivably. Now here I was on this arid mountain, in these woods, trailing in her wake. If a bear or lion came from the brush, I would kill it with my hands to protect her. My only job in life was to keep this little animal alive, and I could not do it. Behind her there on that path, I did not consider that I wanted to be a good father, wanted to be a loving father, only that I wanted to continue being a father.

When I was seven, I watched my father get crushed by the weight of a failed tenure bid. I of course didn't understand what was going on at the time, but I remembered a change in his posture, how he went from saying, I thought proudly, that he was a professor at the University of Chicago to uttering, almost under his breath, that he was an adjunct professor at Roosevelt. I didn't know until years later how he had struggled to piece together a life for us, that the unfinished book on Ralph Ellison that had been a passion, that lost him tenure, was now an unfinished book that meant nothing good to him. He took other jobs on occasion, among them driving a taxi, and fell hopelessly into himself. When I was just fourteen, I was the one who found him in the basement with only most of his head intact. [...]

I thought of how we take for granted that the space of the world and the time in which that space exists and in which our immediate experience is located are really the only space and time that matter. Yet somehow I believed, like all others, that moments are causally connected, tied together and moving influence in only one direction.

"The first two floors are a whorehouse."

"Thank you, but I'm good."

"On the third floor is the cartel, their offices."

"Like a drug cartel?"

"Exactly, a drug cartel." He put a cigarette in his mouth but he did not light it. "That's what we deal with down here. The cartel has offices. You have a war on drugs, and we get shot. It is a mess. In Ciudad Juarez women are hunted. It didn't used to be like this. Maybe one day, it will not be like this again."

"I'm sorry."

Deocampo shrugged. "Go home. You cannot save anybody. I cannot save anybody. Go home to your family."