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probably sixty, and his breath hung so heavily in the cabin you could actually feel it on you.
    On his lap was a big black bag. I tried German. I tried Spanish. I tried English. Those were all the languages I knew and still I couldn’t convey to him that he needed to give up his bag to be stowed before we could back away from the gate. But the passenger’s German was even more indecipherable than my own, and the only English word he knew was “you.” Somehow, though, I understood there was something inside the bag he needed with him right then, so through charades I convinced him he could take out the things he needed, and we could store the rest in the bin above him, and that way we could get going. So I watched him rifle through the bag’s contents and retrieve one item: it was an eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photograph.
    He thrust the picture at me, smiling and shouting the only English word he knew. “You,” he roared. “You, you, you.”
    I took the picture and looked at it. It showed a slim, handsome young man in a cavalier pose, looking up as if he were caught in the act of laughing at an off-color joke. It looked like a publicity still from the fifties, except his hair was a little too long and lustrous. Maybe he was a young king.
    “You,” the passenger said again, indicating the photograph. I told him I didn’t understand what he wanted. He took the picture out of my hands, pointed to it and then to himself. “You, you, you,” he said again, and then he laughed. For the first time I really looked at the passenger’s face, his cauliflower-shaped face, and suddenly I understood. The picture was of himself when he was young. He had gotten his pronouns mixed up, and when he said “you” he thought he was referring to himself.
    The man’s eyes looked back at me and sparkled like dark stars through crinkled sockets. He pointed to the picture. He pointed to me. He pointed to himself.
    “You,” he said, his finger aiming proudly at his chest.
    “Me,” I corrected him softly.
    Me, I thought to myself. Then I took his baggage and secured it properly.

Perfectly Fine
    K EIGER CAN’T DRIVE WITH me behind the wheel without losing a few years off his life, he says, and Grant and Lary agree, which really pisses me off. I am a perfectly fine driver. I mean, between the four of us, I am not the one who dropped the dishwasher in the middle of the freeway. I’m not naming names, mind you, or even admitting that anything actually happened, but I will tell you that the guilty party has a smile that belongs on a big voodoo doll and the dishwasher was mine.
    Not that I ever saw it. I just got a call one morning from evil voodoo mouth man, who was at that moment perusing a bunch of expensive appliances from the fire sale of a failed dot.com enterprise. “Seriously, it’s never even been used,” he said of the dishwasher. “Not that you’d ever use it, either. I’ve seen your kitchen. That did it, of course.
    “You retard, I would so use it, and not just to store bags of cat litter like you do in yours.” I swear, I do not even know why Lary (oops, I said his name) cares about kitchen appliances. To hear him go on that day you’d think he cooks a turkey supper every Sunday, when in fact the only thing he has to eat in his house is half a bag of pistachios and half a dozen chocolate Easter eggs. It used to be a full bag and a full dozen, but goddam, a girl has got to eat when she’s pretending to care for his cat while he’s away, doesn’t she?
    So here Lary was getting me all excited about a new dishwasher when I already had one that worked perfectly fine. It was scarred and leaked a little bit, but it did it’s job and I was fine with that. It just wasn’t shiny and plated in nickel or whatever the new one promised. In fact, it was so beat up from the former owner of the house that I figured he must have had parties in which he invited homeless people to come over and hit it with their shopping