Space Shuttle Atlantis is perched obliquely in outer space, orbiting at thousands of miles per hour, gravity and radio its only tethers, waiting on the weather.

A creased photograph of a dreary street appeared on the luggage carousel, between suitcases.

We're back in France, the country that smells of coffee and perfume and sweat.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 6

For the next four hours we inhabited an amplified and manic world, full of rocket ships and cannonballs, chases and escapes; the personification of things and creatures into caricatures of longing and of fear. A ceaseless refrain of noise and pain sung by nemeses trapped in hopeless, eternal conflict. Cartoons taught us to identify with protagonists, sure, but they indoctrinated us into tragedy and futility too. Who among us has not rooted for the Coyote?

Medical Equipment I Have Seen

The Kowa VX-10 fundus camera.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 5

The remote control was in my sister's hands. She held it to her chest, preciously, and without hesitation I grabbed for it, trying to gain purchase on a corner of the black rectangle edged in chromed plastic, prying at her damp and dirty fingers, surprisingly tenacious, the golden retriever Alex peering at us, tongue extended; I was about to give up when it broke free and fell softly in the burgundy shag. We scrambled for it, exclaiming angry nonsense, cries of ill will and dismay: Give it! Give it! Give it! No! No! No!

It was never over until someone got hurt. Pain was the solemn and incontestable signal to progress to the next step in a program of events, the chime in the filmstrip of our lives. If no one got hurt, nothing new would ever happen. Often there were tears. Sometimes there was blood. So it was that my sister konked me on the side of the skull with the flat of the remote. It was OK. It was over now. It was time to watch TV.

She pointed the remote with an overhand dipping motion, like a magic wand. A tiny dot appeared in the middle of the emptiness, a singularity. In an instant, light and color and form and motion expanded to the edges of the screen, and words and music burst forth, too. It was 7:59 am, the penultimate. The last commercial before the show.

A boy and a girl riding skateboards; the girl complains she's "getting hot and thirsty."

They cry out into the void: "Hey Kool-Aid!"

Their savior appears at once, bursting through a wooden fence and past astonished workmen, lumbering down a hill, an enormous jug with legs and cartoony feet. He bears a real jug of purple drink in his rubbery paw. Glasses filled with ice have materialized in the children's hands. Kool-Aid Man fills them up and the kids quench themselves greedily.

"Tastes great! Our friend's cool," says the girl.

"Our friend's Kool-Aid," says the boy.

"Kool-Aid brand soft drink mix!" says the girl.

Oh yeah, Kool-Aid's here bringin' you fun
Kool-Aid's got thirst on the run
Get a big, wide, happy, ear-to-ear Kool-Aid smile!

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 4

I'd go down to the paneled rec room and take my place beside my sister on the purple beanbag chair, perched on my belly like a sniper on a rock. The television not five feet away, the twenty-six inch screen of miraculously curved gray glass in an ostentatious dark-veneer cabinet of neoclassical design, the Zenith: a magnificent totem, in apotheosis, toward which every object in its vicinity was turned. It seemed more powerful when it was off and sat brooding, mysterious. When the television was off, it was watching us.

The Acquisition - 3

My second interview was with Kevin Morris, with whom I'd had some previous contact in the context of our tiny startup's occasional projects in partnership with the enormous company. In those interactions he'd seemed remote, brusque, somewhat imperious. He'd dart in and out of e-mail threads with prickly requests and seldom reply to those of others. Now here we were in a tiny, windowless room. Kevin gazed to his left and skyward before responding to any question, and sometimes while formulating questions of his own. His right leg fidgeted like crazy. He had white hair; cold, blue eyes and the faintest trace of a lisp.

He lifted his head and, wide-eyed, seemed to scrutinize an imaginary breach in the drop-panel ceiling revealing the secret lair of a race of dark and hunching man-beasts who peered back at him with immobile, glinting eyes, computing the cost-benefit of fight versus flight; or the building's foam-sprayed steel beams, its truest inner nature either way.

"Mmmm..." he hummed, his right leg going. Then he turned to look me in the eye.

"Do you have any questions for me?" he asked, fingers poised over his keyboard.

It had to be a trick, a trap. A mindfuck. If I don't have any questions, they'll know. But what does the questioned ask his questioner?

"Sure, I said. "How did this idea come about? The acquisition."

Kevin did not move his head. The corners of his mouth curled into a vaguely lascivious smile.

"The acquisition," he said, "was my idea."

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 3

To recognize that another might impede one's progress – is that not respect? To deflect them, to wrestle them aside – that's how we acknowledge each other's existence and thus our shared humanity.

And so it was that if I met my older sister in the hallway, we'd shove each other to the wall. Automatically, almost listlessly. It was a gesture of greeting more than anything else.

I'd go downstairs and to the kitchen pantry to examine the glorious row of fortified sugary cereals occupying nearly an entire shelf: Apple Jacks, Froot Loops, Peanut Butter Crunch, Franken Berry, Trix, Cap'n Crunch, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Pebbles, Boo Berry, Honeycomb, Crunch Berries, Count Chocula and Fruity Pebbles in magnificent, cartoon fluorescence: screaming orange, purple, lime-green, lipstick pink and thousand-flushes blue. It was all so beautiful I was often at a loss for what to do. I'd try combining cereals, but the result was always somehow less than the sum of its parts. It left behind a murky pool of milk not rainbow-hued but gray-brown-blue, the color of space-age toxic waste. I'd lift the bowl to my lips and drink it dutifully, like a sacred elixir, and feel the unholy solution of vitamins and minerals and artificial flavors and colors, the red 40, the niacinamide, the pyridoxine hydrochloride, the blues 1 and 2, the sulfiting agents, the annato color, the BHT, the trisodium phosphate, the tricalcium phosphate, the yellows 5 and 6 all the rest of it penetrate each and every molecule of my being.

And yet I was not happy. It began to dawn on me that every waking hour of the day deepened my indoctrination into American dissatisfaction: to have it all and then some but to still crave more.

Notes About Home

My mother and my brother playing badminton at dusk, at the back of the backyard. My dad limping out of the car after coming home from far away. Waiting for the school bus with the girls from across the road. Hoping it would never come. The paths in the woods through breaches in old stone walls, past overgrown foundations, across the post road wide as a horse and carriage, an Atlantis buried in the leaves. There were two or three abandoned cars, rusted, skeletal. We'd sit inside them to be spooked by spirits. The brambles and blackberry bushes on the left side of the house, past the entrance to the driveway loop. Down the road the cemetery, and further still the river, the bed of pine needles on its hilly banks the color of dried blood. Pale pink winter morning embers buried in the ashes. Lying on the living room couch with an ear infection and staring out the picture window, tracing my agony through the maze of branches and sky. The garden and the compost heap. Rain pouring off the inside corner of the roof like a faucet. We never did have gutters.

The Acquisition - 2

The enormous company owned the sixth floor and the fifth floor too, possibly the seventh. We exited the elevator six, in the lobby between two wings, one keycard-protected and the other guarded by a three-seat reception console. A large flat-screen TV on the wall behind it broadcast news from the cable station the company ran in partnership with a major network, the anchor burbling as atrocities and market prices paraded mutely in the crawl.

We were instructed to sit in a waiting area beside a glass-walled cluster of enterprise servers; tall, black towers with blinking lights, sinister, mysterious. Computing God-knows-what for whatever reason. A display of what you're meant to never see.

We were greeted by Buckley Bean, a rotund and genial man in his forties. We were to have rotating interviews with him and his three colleagues, who were waiting in separate, windowless rooms, as though to turn us against each other. I hoped we'd get our story straight.

My first was Buckley. He questioned me cheerily, tapping away at his laptop. He wore braces and consequently spoke with sodden diction; each syllable seemed to emerge out of a puddle. Frothy spit accumulated at the corners of his mouth and a droopy strand ran from his upper fang to the back of his retainer, giving him the curious air of a rabid puppy, or a cherub with a venomous bite.

The interview was going well.

"OK, here's kind of a weird question," said Buckley. "It's not my idea to ask this question, we always ask a question like this."

"OK," I said. I'd heard about these questions.

"There's no real right answer. Well, there is a right answer. But we don't expect you to get it."

"OK. All right."

"I don't want you to worry about this question."

"Sure. I won't."

"It's just a question we ask. Kind of to get you thinking. To see how you think."

"Sure, sure."

"OK! So don't think this is too weird. Ready?"

"I won't. Yes."

"Keep in mind you don't have to get it right. But I'll ask you why you answered how you did."

"Got it."

"How much tea is there in China?"

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 2

My family was trained to indulge and we were utterly unashamed of our abilities. Every day was a manic and relentless parade through deep-junk Americana; harrowing, psychedelic, wonderful. I had a Batman bedspread and Aquaman pajamas; I opened my dream-distracted eyes to a poster of a mounted cowboy in a rubbly valley, mesas in the distance. He wore spurs and chaps and a red shirt with a black vest and a white hat and he brandished a pistol as he rode.

I wanted that gun more than anything.

My room was strewn with toys: G.I. Joe, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys and a Rubik's Cube. An Etch-A-Sketch, a skateboard. A real football and a fake one made of foam. A lime-green water pistol, Beretta-style. A Millenium Falcon, tilted like a pot lid, gradually shedding brittle fragments into the deep hairs of my purple shag. Belts of orange Hot Wheels track drooping from the windowsill, winding under chair and desk, some connected by dark green plastic tabs and others solitary, double dead ends in the wasteland.

On Saturday mornings I'd awake of my own volition, stumble through the debris, walk down the hall to the bathroom and brush my teeth with Aim. Because I was supposed to take aim against cavities.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 1

My father owned a sealant company. Industrial, commercial. I spent many numbing hours wandering the warehouse while he worked, memorizing the names and properties of products: Dynazip 25 one-part polyurethane sealant, moisture curing, effective on highways, reservoirs and sewage treatment facilities; the gun-grade, multi-component polys of the Merix series; Portex 400 ultra-low modulus silicon bridge sealant; the Spexxo line of custom sealants, including highly adhesive blended elastomer compounds, non-hardening synthetic rubbers such as Zoxit 90, paintable acrylic latex suitable for acoustic treatments, Lithik 1000 solvent-releasing high-solids seal for construction joints, and Evagica synthetic-rubber-and-resin compound gutter seal; Trumlo 67 (and Trumlo 67 Plus) low-mod, one-part, traffic-grade silicone sealants for highways and parking structures; CoZeel neutral-cure silicone for curtain window wall systems; FTW 500, FTW 550 and FTW 600 one-part, acetoxy silicone for sealing bathrooms, locker rooms and spas; and X-Alta no-mess poly foam to seal against the wind-driven rain: pre-compressed, self-expanding, self-imposing and self-aware.

Here we are day three of the great Swine Flu Contagion of 2009. Or is it day four? Many years from now, the historians among the few scattered tribes of traumatized human beings yet remaining on earth will debate the point when the time comes to write the official record of what will then be known simply as the Big Death.

It's a hell of a day outside today. Helicopters rattling across the hazy sky. The polyphony of roof birds and trucks in reverse. The clap and thud of wood and Sheetrock from behind the plywood walls of sites. Everything seems to be alive again.

I stood on a grassy median in a parking lot in Truckee thinking, This is California. I tried to gauge the space and time. The California air, the California dirt. This feeling is what every pioneer had felt before me. A gazed around the ring of unfamiliar stores and walked back to the van, its engine still pinging as it cooled.

My Assassin

Everyone has an assassin. Most of us never cross paths with ours is all. My assassin crept through the Great North Woods for days. All he knew was where the sun vanished and where it reappeared: over the mountains that way, from the forest over there. He countered its path through the sky with a daylong journey of his own, slashing through brush and bramble in as straight an eastward line as he could. Then the dark would come and then the cold. He never seemed closer to his goal; each new day promised nothing but night. When he awoke, the sun was there to mock him. He would eat what he could from trees and bushes. Drink from a brook. And soon set off again.

I was walking up the stairs to my apartment with a bag of wine. Hoping to avoid chance encounters with my neighbors; the requisite, awkward hellos and eye contact. I did not know that my assassin was mere days away. It was possible I might never know.

He emerged in a field and saw a highway in the distance. He followed it south, not on the shoulder where the cops would pick him up but beyond the fence, among the trees, up and down the dynamited hills. Finally he saw a rest stop: a squat, stone building with cars behind it, picnic tables, children running in the grass. He cleaned himself in the men's room as best he could and stood guard at the building's door.

"Have you heard the news?" he asked the first people to walk by, a paunchy couple in their forties with two boys in tow. No reply.

"Have you heard the good news?" he asked a slender, middle-aged woman. She walked past in disgust, chin tucked to her chest.

"Have you welcomed Jesus in your heart?" he asked a young man, who eyed him tauntingly but did not say a word.

He questioned every passerby this way, receiving nothing but mute stares, oblivious disregard or sneering nos. Finally, on the 78th try, a genial, obese man with a blond crew cut smiled back.

"You bet I've heard the good news! What's your name?"

"Uh... Jim," he croaked. He hadn't spoken a word in weeks.

"Jim! I'm Jim too! Isn't that a riot?" Jim held out his hand and shook Jim's hand.

"I guess."

Jim laughed heartily. "Hey, that's OK. You look like you could use something to eat. Can I give you a ride somewhere, buddy?"

"I need to go to New York City."

"New York City! That's a tall order. What are you doin' down there?"

"Spreadin' the word, I guess. And the deeds."

Jim nodded quickly, like he didn't specially wanna hear. "God bless you Jim. God bless you and God love you. Hey, I can take you down to Portland and then we can see if we can maybe find you a bus or something, OK?"

"Uh. That'd be great."

Jim and Jim rode together in Jim's Consolidated Christian Youth Ministries of Maine van. He ran the ministry out of Portland and had just done some evangelizing up in New Brunswick, he was saying. He was on the road a lot. Saving souls. Jim didn't much like Jim. He briefly considered killing him, but thought better of it when he thought about that ticket to the city. Jim talked and talked and talked and Jim mostly shut up and before he knew it he had a Greyhound ticket in his hand for New York City and he was standing in the bus depot on Congress Street staring at a vending machine full of pretzels, chips and candy. Jim bought a Kit Kat with the pocket money Jim had left him.

I walked down Amsterdam Avenue, fumblingly sticking my earbuds in my ear, cursing it all inside my head. It was a beautiful day, but then again it was like any other day. I had absolutely no idea that I'd soon encounter my assassin.

Jim walked the underground path from Port Authority to the Times Square station and got on the downtown 2. It was late afternoon by now, pretty empty train. He saw me sitting across the way.

"You know it's coming, dontcha?" he said.

I lifted my head warily. "Oh yeah? What's coming?"

"The end time."

"The end time for what?"

"For you, brother."

"Well, I hope not."

"Jesus doesn't give you a choice."

"That doesn't seem too Christian."

"There is a time for everything under heaven."

"So they say."

"A time to kill and a time to die."

"This is my stop," I said.

His eyes widened. "This is your stop. It's your last stop, sinner."

"I mean on the train. This is my stop on the train."

"Oh," he said. "Yeah. OK. Well..."

"Good talking to you."

"Turn your back on me, you get the evil eye."

I stood up and walked toward the door.

"Repent!" he cried.

I felt his glare between my shoulders as I stepped off the train. From the platform I looked for him through the window. He was masked by a clutch of deadpan, harried Manhattanites, newly boarded. If he was there at all. Relieved, I joined the bottleneck at the base of the stairs. Two Hispanic women labored up the steps with a stroller.

When I reached the top, my assassin was standing there waiting. I wondered whether to double back or try to run past him. Instead, I found myself standing still, open to whatever may yet come.

He lifted his right hand and made a gun with his finger.

"Pow! Pow! Pow!" he shouted, pantomiming the hammer's action with his thumb.

There was only one thing I could do. Because we live in a civilization. Because we adhere to the social contract. Because ritual actions and their requisite counteractions are at the heart of all meaningful social life.

I slapped my right hand to my heart and said, "Got me."

I left the convention at a little past noon and rode the elevators down and down. The hotel featured vast expanses of carpeted floor in various configurations: mezzanine, foyer, ballroom, auditorium. Signs on easels advertised the rooftop bar. You would not know that there were any rooms.

I emerged into Times Square, the vexing tangle of barkers, vendors and distracted tourists. I drifted out onto the island in the confluence of Broadway and Seventh, the calm eye of the storm. It was there I saw one of those things you hardly give a second thought unless you decide to. A brawny man wearing nothing but cowboy boots, a cowboy hat and skintight briefs held two slightly prepubescent girls in backwards headlocks. Their smiling faces peered out at their delighted parents from beneath his armpits. Daddy got the camera ready while mommy looked on approvingly. The cowboy widened his stance, staring south, a grim and purposeful expression on his face. The girl on his right had rested her left hand on his haunch. He took her by the wrist and lowered her open hand onto his right ass cheek with the judicious deliberation of a bomb squad technician. The girl squealed with glee as daddy snapped away. A garish, red-white-and-blue guitar dangled from the cowboy's neck and bounced lightly on his groin. On it was written "Naked Cowboy."

It's funny the things we accept, the things we do, if they seem sanctioned in some kind of way.

I drove the rental car gingerly over a glaze of wet snow. Heaters ablaze. We were on an anonymous patch of sprawl in the Pacific Northwest, heading towards a given sector of the corporate campus at the prescribed time. Coworkers in a car. We pulled in to a driveway that wound between parking lots and schoolish buildings and searched for signs indicating the alphabetical and numerical designation of our destination. We finally parked in a multistory covered garage and walked up the little hill to the main building. Purple banners hung from lamp poles celebrating our product's umbrella product, itself a minor fiefdom in the company's Platform Products and Services division.

We had a meeting with Crawford Quick, the lead Program Manager for our work group. We found him alone at the head of a conference room table, right leg fidgeting spasmodically. Crawford was a tall and powerful man, broad-shouldered, borderline gigantic. He had a Frankenstein jaw, enormous hands. Crawford came from the other side of the world.

"Sit dan, gah-eeze," he commanded. A vast spreadsheet was projected on the screen. The image must have been six or seven feet wide, yet the cells in the table were vexingly small, each containing a datapoint whose near illegibility contributed to an impression of dubious plausibility. Large sections of the sheet were painted green, yellow or red.

"Thee-iss," he explained, "is a proh-ject plen!"

We followed his cursor dutifully as he described the ins and outs. He told us he sets aside an hour every Friday morning to compile the plan into a report for his boss and ours, the elusive Alan Jones.

"Ah-ee till pay-pull, den't boh-ther mah-ee. Ah-ee tun uff the phen. Nah mah-tings. Nah nithing," he said. I could imagine Alan every Friday at about 11 am. Closing his eyes.

He showed us a PowerPoint presentation on the functions and duties of the Program Manager. One slide featured the letters "PM" inside a circle in the middle, with arrows radiating out of it to Sales Account Managers, Development Leads, Test Leads, Consulting Services and the Product Unit Manager. Crawford stirred his cursor over the P and M.

"Thee-iss," he declared, "is mah-ee."

When it was over, Crawford led us down the hall to show us something. He smiled at us over his enormous shoulder as we walked. The rhythm of drab white wall and office door was suddenly interrupted by a brass plaque and a regal entrance of dark wood: double doors inset within an elegant, decorative molding and beneath an ostentatious lintel, guarded on either side by potted trees. Crawford stopped short, seemingly afraid to break the threshold's scope.

He turned to us with a mad smile. "Thet's Jah-eeh Wah-zee's oh-fiss, gah-eeze!" he whispered.

Jay Wizey was the Chief Software Architect of the entire company. Crawford turned on his heels, satisfied, and we walked back up the hall.

Lonely in America

Atul Gawande's disturbing article about solitary confinement in the New Yorker got me thinking. Our tendency to fling prisoners into the hole is like our health care system or our gun violence or our pitiable public transportation - it's one of the many things that distinguish us from countries with which we ought to have a lot more in common. It's tempting to trace these characteristics to some innate aspect of our national identity, some dubious tendency in our nature. These conclusions are sometimes facile and reductionistic, but they often have the ring of truth: We value greed on the personal and corporate level. We distrust government. We've internalized Manifest Destiny; we view big cars, big houses and Big Macs as our due. We have rebel souls and pioneer hearts, blah blah blah. All the familiar claptrap, sure, but it's hard to dismiss when you're honest about it.

Here's what I think about solitary confinement: it's the perverse underside of American individualism. Throughout our history we've celebrated self-reliance, self-determination, and indeed selfishness. The self-made man. But just as there are self-made men there must be self-destroyed men, for America is a zero-sum game. Every winner demands a mirror loser; every gain is someone else's loss. And as we exalt the individual, so must we debase him. This is American hell: not a hot, dark pit where you toil with your fellow damned but a cold, fluorescent-lit cell where you spend eternity idle and alone.

Solitary confinement is a parody of American values, an ironic punishment. Inherent in our application of it is an unconscious rebuke of the culture that promotes it–that's why it's perverse. If solitude is such exquisite torture for someone behind bars, what is it for someone in a gilded cage? Add this to our list of selfish traits: self-destructive.

Thin, middle-aged woman on the uptown A, suitcase crowding her knees. She must've got on at JFK. Virgin tags. Shoulders slumped. Legs crossed and the top one fidgeting. She yawns. The body memory of landing unconsciously expressed.

Medical Equipment I Have Seen

The Canon RK-3 Auto Refractor Keratometer.