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was his family's summer home. As you pull up, you see the woman who lives
in what used to be the parlor. She is sitting on a towel on the front lawn. She
never wears anything besides a turquoise robe with a pattern of a dragon on
the back and is hugely fat. Her hair is always dirty and her fingertips have
spots of old, ruby-frost nail polish. When she tells you that she used to whore
and that she was very successful at it, you learn more about men in that single
moment than everything you have ever known before. Now she's left "the
life" for her boyfriend, a guy who used to be a cook with the navy. He is tall
and thin, covered in tattoos. He looks more like a pirate than a sailor, and you
suspect from the designs on his arms that the turquoise robe she wears was a
gift from him- something he likes to see her in because it reminds him of other
places. They are a nice couple, and he enjoys making large meals. One night
in the communal kitchen, he will show you how to make shrimp scampi, but it
will turn your stomach because shrimp are very sweet when they swim.
You walk around the outside perimeter of the house and enter your
room from a door at the back, picking up a letter that has been slipped under
the door. Your room is long and narrow. It used to be a laundry room. There
is a double bed at one end and a dresser and a table at the other. The room is
like the Polish pilot's landing strip- so short but oh so wide. The first thing
you see when you enter is a small sink below several pipes that have been sev­
ered and capped off. There are three red candles on the table where you write.
Why is your handwriting slanting the wrong way; why have you gone
to the ends of the earth, when are you coming back, the letter asks. Your hand­
writing is slanting the wrong way because you met a Chinese woman at the
waterfront who sold you a jade bracelet. She buttered your hand and squeezed
it on your wrist, warning you never to gain another pound or else it would
never come off. It is a pale, foamy green, the color of the sea. You do not
know why you have gone to the ends of the earth or when you are coming
back.
Everything is turned on its ass here, they like to say. The people are
backwards. They drive on the wrong side of the road. The water runs down
the drain counter clock-wise. A bunch of celery is as long as your entire arm.
On the beach, there is a boy giving hang-gliding lessons, and he is exactly like
a boy you knew in eleventh grade, only his hair is parted on the wrong side.
You've never been able to adjust to the time change. You wake up
throughout the night, unable to stop the sensation of the day. You feel as if
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