The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat.

[...] the whole shuffled pathos of a refugee existence—non- consecutive issues of Good Housekeeping, black-and-white snapshots of Enid in the 1940s, brown recipes on high-acid paper that called for wilted lettuce, the current month's telephone and gas bills, the detailed First Notice from the medical lab instructing co-payers to ignore subsequent billings for less than fifty cents, a complimentary cruise ship photo of Enid and Alfred wearing leis and sipping beverages from hollow coconuts, and the only extant copies of two of their children's birth certificates, for example.

Chip's problem was a loss of confidence. Gone were the days when he could afford to epater les bourgeois. Except for his Manhattan apartment and his handsome girlfriend, Julia Vrais, he now had almost nothing to persuade himself that he was a functioning male adult, no accomplishments to compare with those of his brother, Gary, who was a banker and a father of three, or of his sister, Denise, who at the age of thirty-two was the executive chef at a successful new high-end restaurant in Philadelphia. Chip had hoped he might have sold his screenplay by now, but he hadn't finished a draft until after midnight on Tuesday, and then he'd had to work three fourteen- hour shifts at Bragg Knuter & Speigh to raise cash to pay his August rent and reassure the owner of his apartment (Chip had a sublease) about his September and October rent, and then there was a lunch to be shopped for and an apartment to be cleaned and, finally, sometime before dawn this morning, a long-hoarded Xanax to be swallowed. Meanwhile, nearly a week had gone by without his seeing Julia or speaking to her directly. In response to the many nervous messages he'd left on her voice mail in the last forty-eight hours, asking her to meet him and his parents and Denise at his apartment at noon on Saturday and also, please, if possible, not to mention to his parents that she was married to someone else, Julia had maintained a total phone and e-mail silence from which even a more stable man than Chip might have drawn disturbing conclusions.

"He and his wife just had their fourth child. I told you, didn't I, they built that enormous house out in Paradise Valley—Al, didn't you count eight bedrooms?"

Alfred gave her a steady, unblinking look. Chip leaned on the Door Close button.

"Dad and I were at the housewarming in June," Enid said. "It was spectacular. They'd had it catered, and they had pyramids of shrimp. It was solid shrimp, in pyramids. I've never seen anything like it."

"Pyramids of shrimp," Chip said. The elevator door had finally closed.

The weather wasn't doing him any favors. He raised the shades and beach light poured into the classroom. Summerlust came wafting off the bared arms and legs of boys and girls alike.

Melissa's accusations had cut him to the quick. He'd never quite realized how seriously he'd taken his father's injunction to do work that was "useful" to society. Criticizing a sick culture, even if the criticism accomplished nothing, had always felt like useful work. But if the supposed sickness wasn't a sickness at all —if the great Materialist Order of technology and consumer appetite and medical science really was improving the lives of the formerly oppressed; if it was only straight white males like Chip who had a problem with this order—then there was no longer even the most abstract utility to his criticism. It was all, in Melissa's word, bullshit.

It was the morning of Thanksgiving. The flurries had stopped and the sun was halfway out. A gull's wings rattled and clacked. The breeze had a ruffly quality, it didn't quite seem to touch the ground. Chip sat on a freezing guardrail and smoked and took comfort in the sturdy mediocrity of American commerce, the unpretending metal and plastic roadside hardware. The thunk of a gas-pump nozzle halting when a tank was filled, the humility and promptness of its service. And a 99$ Big Gulp banner swelling with wind and sailing nowhere, its nylon ropes whipping and pinging on a galvanized standard. And the black sanserif numerals of gasoline prices, the company of so many 9s. And American sedans moving down the access road at nearly stationary speeds like thirty. And orange and yellow plastic pennants shivering overhead on guys.

Earlier in the day, while killing some hours by circling in blue ballpoint ink every uppercase M in the front section of a month-old New York Times, Chip had concluded that he was behaving like a depressed person. Now, as his telephone began to ring, it occurred to him that a depressed person ought to continue staring at the TV and ignore the ringing—ought to light another cigarette and, with no trace of emotional affect, watch another cartoon while his machine took whoever" s message.

That his impulse, instead, was to jump to his feet and answer the phone—that he could so casually betray the arduous wasting of a day—cast doubt on the authenticity of his suffering. He felt as if he lacked the ability to lose all volition and connection with reality the way depressed people did in books and movies. It seemed to him, as he silenced the TV and hurried into his kitchen, that he was failing even at the miserable task of falling properly apart.

Spread open on Chip's kitchen counter was the section of the Times in which he'd circled all the uppercase Ms. Rediscovering this artifact now, hours later, would have been like remembering a dream except that a remembered dream didn't have the power to pull a waking person back into it, whereas the sight of a heavily marked story about severe new curtailments in Medicare and Medicaid benefits induced in Chip the same feeling of unease and unrealized lust, the same longing for unconsciousness, that had sent him to the chaise to sniff and grope. He had to struggle now to remind himself that he'd already gone to the chaise, he'd already taken that route to comfort and forgetfulness.

"What about Dad, though?" she said. "Did you forget it's his birthday?"

"I lost track of time here."

"I wouldn't push you," Denise said, "except that I was the person who opened your Christmas box."

"Christmas was a bad scene, no question."

"Which package went to whom was pretty much guesswork."