I wish I were really in those rooms right now, one of those rooms instead of this one. This whole hotel smells like laundry. No, like a smell sprayed from a can. That time Ali and I were in line at the pharmacy and saw, on a storage shelf over the cashier’s shoulder, a cardboard box labeled “Farts in a Can” and “Made in China”—because they sell a lot of gag gifts in that place. Me of course thinking instantly about all the waste, the environmental cost of shipping consumerist crap from China, the Texas-sized trash heap in the middle of the Pacific, and how my daughter’s generation will never know the sense of well-being my own took for granted, the limitless security we felt but never realized we were feeling. Silently thinking all that but actually saying to her, to be funny, to keep it upbeat: Those farts came all the way from China.

But Ali, serious-faced: Who made them?

Some factory.

No, who made them?

Oh, who made them. Beats me!

Then a fidgety sort of silence, until out in the car she started rattling them off, old people and young, rich and poor, tall and short, one by one, all the different people she’d imagined in China who had taken time out of their busy days to fart into those cans in our pharmacy. That was only a couple of years ago. She’s still little. Still mine. Actually, this room doesn’t smell so bad. It doesn’t smell like much of anything.