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look at textbooks, until well after ten, when my dad finally chased me out of the kitchen and told me to go check on Groucho. I gave in this time. I was tired, emotionally wiped from the day, and the incessant background noise of KTV was starting to get to me.
    My dad likes to keep the TV running in the kitchen night and day. I think he’s afraid of being caught out unprepared should another Karkadon make landfall. But between you and me, I hate the Kaiju Channel. I hate the sensational news reports and the elaborate searches for the Chupacabra and Nessie that never come to anything. But with Karkadon dead, there was no new news to report. Documentaries and reality television shows had cropped up to fill in the empty time slots, and they sucked on so many levels. You can only interview people who saw the monster firsthand so many times before it all starts to blur together, before you start going numb.
    Yet people continue to watch KTV as avidly as CNN after 9/11, afraid, much like my dad, of being hit on the blindside by disaster. But when I consider what happened to San Francisco, the extent of the damage, I wonder if any kind of advance warning would have been enough. Somehow, I doubt it. You can predict earthquakes and typhoons; you just can’t anticipate monsters.
    It started to rain while I was outside walking Groucho. Groucho is Mr. Serizawa’s Rottweiler, bought for security reasons, except he’s afraid of sirens, storms, water, bright lights, and everything that breathes oxygen. On the upside, you never have to wait very long for him to do his business, because he’s terrified of the cats that scrounge around in the alley behind the restaurant. “This is like a country-western song,” I told Groucho. “Standing in the rain, under her window, thinking about her…except I don’t know where in the city her window is.”
    “ Baroo?” Groucho said nervously. He’d heard some rats fighting over a burger wrapper in the shadows at the back of the alley. In Groucho’s defense, the rats here are huge , probably because they eat the radioactive danger dogs off the sidewalk vendor’s carts. After a while we went back inside and Groucho followed me up to my room. He sleeps with me because I keep a light on at night and he’s afraid of the dark.
    I spent a long time just lying in bed, reading through Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon and listening to the rain pinging off the roof like BBs. Generally speaking, I can usually chunk out a 400-page novel in one sitting. It’s not something I like to admit to, but neither is it something I’m willing to give up. In fact, it’s the only thing about the old Kevin that I’ve hung onto. But tonight I was seriously distracted. I found myself thinking about Aimi and school and New York. Everything and nothing in particular. How crazy the world was. How the world was this one thing before Karkadon pulled itself ashore and how it became something else afterward. Crazy stuff.
    Eventually I fell into a light sleep—the only sleep I experience anymore. And sometime in the night I had one of those long, involved dreams that leave you feeling exhausted and vaguely troubled the next morning.
    Usually I dream about Karkadon. I dream about the night it came ashore. I dream I’m trying to phone my mom about the news report on the TV. Her cellphone rings and rings, but I never get through. No one ever picks up—because my mom’s car was already at the bottom of the Bay.
    Tonight, though, I dreamed I was back in the library at my old school in San Francisco, except that Aimi was there, too. I guess we were having a study date or something because she said, “Maybe you’d like to learn more Japanese words?” and I said, “Yes.” So she started reading a book to me, but not in English. After a while I took it from her and glanced at the pages. They were covered up and down in Japanese kanji characters. I don’t know kanji, or even katakana, which is informal kanji, but somehow I could