Still, living displaces false sentiments. I had to go on with my American life, keeping Dedo out of it, busying myself with local survival, getting jobs, getting into graduate school, getting laid. Every once in a while I unleashed the power of his words upon a sensitive American woman. The first one was Cheryl, the idle wife of a Barrington lawyer, whom I met at a Bosnian benefit dinner that she was kind enough to organize. At least one Bosnian was required to benefit from her benefit dinner, so she tracked me down through a friend, an expert in disability studies with whom I had read a paper at a regional MLA conference. Cheryl was generous beyond the dinner; before she went back to Barrington, I took her to my tiny studio—a monument to the struggles of immigration, with its sagging mattress, rotting shower curtain, and insomniac drummer next door. I recited Dedo’s poems to her, pretending they were my own. She particularly liked the one about the man walking, during a lull in shelling, with his rooster on a leash, a soul fastened to a dying animal. Then I removed the permed tresses from her forehead so that I could kiss it and slowly undressed her. Cheryl writhed in my embrace, kissed me with clammy passion, hoisted her hips, and moaned with pleasure, as though the intensity of her orgasm would directly succor the Bosnian resistance. I could not help thinking, in the end, that she was fucking Dedo, for it was his words that had seduced her. But I took what was given and then rolled off into the darkness of my actual life.