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percent in nine months. Now, four years later, the local newspaper reported that the collapse of the market had put us back to the levels of 2001.
    For Sale signs stood in many of the front yards of the homes I was pedaling past, and I supposed that a number of them meant foreclosures. Supposedly, corporations were scooping up houses to rent to people who’d lost theirs in the crash. Here was one, I bet: sere oleanders, a citrus gone leafless and even losing its bark, several slumping cardboard boxes and a tire leaned up against the front door.
    As I got closer to the university and rode through the old and historically desirable Sam Hughes neighborhood, I spotted classic adobes—always well-kept family homes—that investors now crammed with as many student renters as possible. Boys, mostly. Former front yards held multiple pickup trucks and SUVs. Riding home recently—dark coming earlier—I’d noticed several living rooms lit up with neon signs for Corona and Dos Equis.
    During our house hunt, Will and I had looked at an adobe in this neighborhood—it had been far out of our reach. Maybe it still would have been, collapse or not, but now its arched window sported what had to be a student’s Confederate flag.
     
    That flag. One of the great and terrible features of being human is surely the way that—just trying to build a good warning system based on information about our past errors—the brain captures dreadful moments of our lives with the finest brushstrokes. So it was that a veritable Vermeer of Jeremy Fletcher’s attic apartment in Iowa City came into my head as I passed that flag—just like the flag tacked to the wall above Jeremy Fletcher’s stove.
    The flag, the crusts of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a card table that also held several spiral notebooks, some new and still sleek, others fluffed up by use (the turning of pages, the addition of pencil lead or ink). Also on the card table: the cloudy emerald-green bong of which Jeremy Fletcher and I had made use the evening that I visited the attic apartment. Across the dun, unpainted drywall ceiling over his water bed, an initially confusing, gray ghost trail of boot prints had been left by some long-gone construction worker. Red Wing, Red Wing. And here was Jeremy Fletcher’s attic bathroom: varnished car siding as shiny and brown as pretzel sticks, towels the dark green of pine needles—the towels gifts from Esmé, I knew, because I had been with her when she purchased them to replace “the regular horrors” she’d found when she first stayed over.
    And now Jeremy Fletcher himself. A fleshy man, older than most of the Workshop students in ’88, already well into his thirties. His fine hair had started to recede. Wrinkles radiated out from his rheumy blue eyes and formed a light necklace along the fold of a double chin not entirely concealed by a red sea-foam beard.
     
    On a green light, I pedaled across Campbell Avenue and continued toward the Modern Languages Building. The sun was high, the sky almost white, as if the heat of the day had baked out the color, but I shivered at the memory of Jeremy Fletcher. In his bathroom, sitting next to the base of his toilet, there had been a can of Comet cleanser, and, before heading back to Esmé’s and my apartment, I had sprinkled rills of that bleachy blue stuff on my index finger; scrubbed it into my teeth and my tongue before bending low over the tiny sink, there, and rinsing out my mouth with water that whined as it made its trip up to the attic. “Brontë!” Jeremy Fletcher had called from bed as I turned the doorknob to escape his apartment. Brontë was a joke that he had started a few days before, over the Thanksgiving dinner that he and Esmé and I had been ready to tuck into when—the most fantastic surprise, it seemed at the time—my beloved boyfriend, Will Ludlow, just flown in from Italy, had shown up at the door of Esmé’s and my place on Burlington Street.
     
    How about: I was