That November, the earth opened and we fell through the cracks, picking up speed. It wasn’t one big hole but endless small ones, like gas coming up through the tundra, or like our house in the Valley with its network of hidden fissures that opened up one day twenty years after the earthquake. Broken clocks floated by. They were melted but no longer missing. I am a communist again, like lots of kids. As I write this, children across the country are marching out of their schools together because the location of safety has moved outside. The rich are planning missions to the stars.

“Let him come,” I said to my friend. “If we refuse to speak of him, we give him the power of our childhood phantasms. The enemy has revealed himself. Now we can fight.”

“You are a white girl in the park on acid,” he said. “On the border, they are building camps.”

I put my foot out sharply and stopped spinning. One looks at one’s friends and neighbors and wonders who will turn. One turns to oneself.

I do not know if we can organize from a place this disorganized. But I want to believe.