“Are you sure? Wait, let me find the coin,” I said as I went hunting through various pants pockets in search of one of the very special unspendable coins that mom had given me for throwing the I Ching, which I never did, for ancient Chinese guidance. The first toss came up heads. So that plus Alice’s blessing had me feeling I should go. Yet I flipped again, then a third time. I knew a larger sample size would make the stats more accurate. Should I really go? But how do you ever know until you’ve gone? Alice was still on the phone for the fifth flipping. “You are mentally ill,” she said.

Anyway Ford, Sanch, Dan, me—that was Chambers St., and was going to be for five more weeks, until our lease ran out. Other friends lived scattered around the city in ones and twos, and this had allowed us four to provide, in the welcoming squalor of our living room, a kind of community center for the school-days diasporae. Poker was played, friends were entertained, TV got watched and color-commentated. Out of everybody we knew our immaturity was best-preserved, we dressed worst and succeeded least professionally—and at times I could get into feeling that for the old crowd to set foot on the scarred linoleum of our kitchen must be like entering this circling, slow eddy in the otherwise one-way flow of time. Outside was the streaming traffic, the money bazaar, the trash-distributing winds with their careerist velocities. And here inside Chambers St. was this cozy set of underachievers. We even had a fireplace, though it didn’t work, and housed the stereo instead. At times I gained control of the remote, and the drowned-sounding post-human electronica that was our usual aural wallpaper, making me feel like words might not apply to our condition, and freaking me out if I got stoned, was replaced by the bright fine stylings of the Grateful Dead, just as if Jerry’d never died.

At least at night the phone didn’t ring. My feeling was, the soul is startled by the telephone and never at ease in its presence. Often on a midtown street someone’s cell would ring and half a dozen people would check their pockets to see if it was them being called, and I’d glimpse a flash of panic in one or another guy’s eyes. Myself, I kind of felt like I needed my news delivered by hand—to look out the window as some courier appeared in the field, coming from a distance so my feelings had time to discover themselves. But instead people were always calling and asking me to do things, and since only pretty rarely was I really sure I wanted to, my system was to flip a coin. “Hold on let me check my . . . yeah sounds cool but hold on . . .” I would say in the Chambers St. kitchen or if someone called at work. But I didn’t have a date book and was actually consulting one of the special coins. Heads, I’d accept—whereas tails, I’d claim to have other plans. I was proud of this system. Statistically fair, it also kept my whole easy nature from forcing me to do everyone’s bidding; it ensured a certain scarcity of Dwightness on the market; it contributed the prestige of the inscrutable to my otherwise transparent persona; and above all it allowed me to find out in my own good time whether I would actually have liked to do the thing in question. By then it was invariably too late—but everyone agrees that knowledge is its own reward, and so do I.

I knew she was right. It wasn’t very unusual for me to lie awake at night feeling like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world. But knowing the clichés are clichés doesn’t help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has ever done it.

“Come on, Alice,” dad growled. “Show some spine. A diffident revolutionary is no good. I’m a commodities trader. If you don’t kill me, who will you?”

Wednesday passed in this way, then half of Thursday. Thursday at lunch I walked down to Times Square where there was a Belgian frites shop whose product I admired. Then I walked back to Pfizer wondering if flying off to meet some hardly-known person in a foreign country was really the ideal decision-making procedure. (I had booked my ticket online but still had four hours left to back out.) If it turned out that Natasha was everything I hoped and dreamed and was into, then what would she want with me? And if she wasn’t, then what would I want with her? And why even ask these age-old questions that must have had all the nutrition chewed out of them long ago? I fed the mayonnaise-limp frites into my teeth one by one, and when I returned to my cubicle I deliberately spilled a little leftover mayo into the cracks of my keyboard, just in order to make the corporate world a little more soiled and grimy, more in need of being replaced for a week by a trip, however ill-advised or well-considered, down to Ecuador.

“What uncle?” Vaneetha asked. “Which watch? Were you just now fired?”

“Um, yes. I was just now fired. From Pfizer. Wow. Pfired! So I’m pfucked!” But the p was silent so no one laughed but me. I looked at Vaneetha. “Don’t worry about my uncle. He doesn’t exist. So he’s fine.”

I chewed my toast, considering this, and between glances at Brigid looked all around the room with equal attentiveness, just so it wouldn’t seem like I was particularly fixated on her face (so sharp-boned and precise, but with a pleasant suggestion of former plumpness everywhere smudging it faintly with voluptuous life) and happily analogous body. Certainly she would make a welcome addition to any threesome.

“Is there a mosquito?” she asked. “Or what are you looking at everywhere?”

“So where do you guys live in Israel? You live in the part of Israel that’s Israel or the part that’s not so much?”

Meanwhile rest assured that I have no intention of waging class warfare against you (dad), who are just one of many rightwing voters, therefore negligible as such. Whereas you are my one and only father and thus bulk correspondingly large to me in the father dept.