My father lives all the way in Taiwan now, where he chairs the welding department at Fuxing Normal University. Taiwan seems random for a white guy named Cal Felix from Peekskill, New York, but a plush gig is a plush gig. He has a driver, a Beemer, a Taoist dietitian. He has a brutalist townhouse, infinity pool on the roof.

It was unreal, that existence. After the army, I had landed at a Pasadena hedge fund called Sempiternal Analytix. It was as weird as the war. Psychopaths in office casual, USC pennants on the wall. All the guys talked fast, used nouns as verbs, verbs as nouns. Surface the spend. Table the thrash. They loved to hear themselves produce language. And there I was with my lips that didn’t work.