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world’s dangers were more overtly on display. Thousands of people had died on September 11. There had been anthrax scares and false alarms and people talking on television about a jihadist underworld and an axis of evil. Just before Christmas, a terrorist had boarded a plane in Paris and tried unsuccessfully to ignite his shoe. In Pakistan a few weeks later, a Wall Street Journal reporter named Daniel Pearl set off to do an interview connected to the shoe bomber’s financing. He was kidnapped and later beheaded. When it came to danger, the totally unreal had, in the span of a few months, become entirely feasible.
    Despite it all, we were going. Our plan was to drift from Venezuela into Brazil and then to Paraguay. Sitting on the tarmac in Calgary as our plane was de-iced, I tried to push away any thoughts of death and disaster. South America was not the Middle East, I told myself. It was not America, even. We’d compressed and rolled and shoved our belongings until they were dense as bricks, making room for what we saw as necessities—extra bottles of mosquito spray and sunblock,laundry soap, antifungal spray for our shoes, plus a giant squeeze bottle of ketchup and the salt and pepper packages we’d been collecting from fast-food restaurants for months.
    When I visited my grandmother before leaving, she donated a hefty jug of antibacterial gel and some Tupperware, all of which I improbably managed to fit into my pack. By way of goodbye, she offered a cheery and quick double disapproval of my travel plans and my everyday fondness for short skirts and high heels. “I hope you know you won’t be able to go down there and wear those, you know, model clothes you like to wear,” she said as I planted a kiss on her cheek.
    From his recliner in their living room, with its old piano and Grandma Jean’s collection of ceramic purple roses, my grandfather added, “I hope you know if you get yourself into trouble, we won’t have any money to get you out.”
    I let this comment float right past.

4
A Small Truth Affirmed
    C aracas late at night looked only a little like the jungle city I’d been imagining. Our cabdriver spoke English and pointed out landmarks. Most of the buildings were shuttered for the night. I could see big palm trees, their fronds pinwheeling heavily over the broad boulevards. The city looked sedate, leafy, exotic.
    This might have been a moment to tuck myself under the crook of Jamie’s arm or kiss his palm and say something about how alive I felt, having traversed this impossible-seeming curve of the earth with him in one day, beginning in the numbing cold of Canada and ending in the drippy heat of another hemisphere. But I didn’t do any of that. It wasn’t that sort of moment. Some part of me was scared by what we’d done.
    The next morning, we woke in a three-star hotel room, which our travel agent had booked in advance and was more expensive than any other place we’d stay. I drew back the curtains and got my first glimpse of the waking city. A massive Pepsi billboard sat outside our window. There were skyscrapers in the distance and jets flying overhead. On the street several floors below, people sat in their cars, staring blankly ahead as they waited for the stoplight to turn. It was oddly, depressingly familiar. There were no donkey carts, no parrots, no panpipers or charming old women wearing ruffled blouses and lace on their heads. Only the air felt foreign—thick and a little mossy.
    I pushed open the window and peered down. On the sidewalk, severalbrown-faced men in baseball caps were selling fruit out of wooden crates: piles of oranges, peaches, papayas, and several things I didn’t recognize. “Jamie, come see this,” I said.
    Looking over my shoulder, he said, “Should we go buy some?” Jamie was always hungry.
    I was remembering what the guidebook said about fruit and vegetables, how everything had to be scrubbed and peeled. I was afraid of bacteria at that point, the same way I