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such and left twisted up in the pocket of her dressing gown at the Toronto General when she died.
    Everybody’s going for a crazy swim in the rain, but you’re

a little bloated, so your bikini doesn’t fit quite right. You …
    Multiple choice, running the gamut from mellow to maniacal.
    Your boss gives you “very good” on your latest evaluation,

but you always get “exceptional.” You …
    Your record for multiple orgasms is three. You find out your

best friend’s had seven. You …
    Out of a maximum score of one hundred, under fifty was bad, but over seventy-five was even worse. Erin scored a seventy. Perfect.
“Good for you, girl. You care, but you don’t drive yourself nuts!”
Did the editors really not get the irony of this? That the true perfectionists would catch on to the quiz and nail it, know precisely how imperfect to be? Erin may have missed this point too, of course, irony never having been a strong suit of hers. Could this have been the root of all her trouble, an irony deficit, an irony anemia? Couldn’t Matt have found a way to lend her a little, to effect some kind of transfusion? If you can’t be perfect, best to be nothing—such was Erin’s approach. Couldn’t Matt have convinced her that just
doing
nothing would be good enough?
    “Gööööghœgh!”
Up ahead of Matt by a couple of rows there was a baby—an Icelandic one, or so Matt imagined—expressing his glee at having come into existence. In hopes of shushing him his mum hoisted him up so’s he could peek, bobble-headed, over the back of his seat. Matt grinned; baby grinned back, lowering dual strands of drool to the breast of his tuxedo-style bib. He blinked and burbled, a wee demented Buddha. Why do we relinquish that, Matt wondered? Wherefore all this trouble?
    After his last trip to Toronto Matt had composed a piece (which the cretinous Nagy had nixed, naturally) about the dangers of in-flight movies. In the last five years there’d been some number of incidents (fifty, was it?) caused by fritzy entertainment units on North American routes. Sparks, smoke, fire. In 1998 a Swissair jet had crashed, killing all two hundred and some odd, after its video system had gone kaflooey. Matt figured it was time to try that material again. He’d start his next review with the numbers and he’d pose the question, Is this movie worth dying for?
    Next review? Oh, right.
    Matt’s seat belt grabs him, jerks him back against his seat. They’re moving again—emergency lights have faded to a faint pulse in the darkening sky out back—and Jat’s in a big rush, all vroom and screech, a brat in a bumper car. “Jatinder, old buddy,” says Matt, “take it a little easy, wouldja?” Oops, did his inner mimic get the better of him for a moment there? Was there a pinch of Mr. Kumar, of Jatinder himself in the clip of those consonants? How to explain that this is a
good
thing, him reaching out?
    “Just be a minute,
sir.”
Too late. Nobody gets Matt anymore, how come?
    Mumbai. Matt envisions the teeming streets, he and Zane forging through the crowd with backpacks and camera bags. India, that’s where Matt’ll get into gear again. That’s where he’ll get back up to speed on the spiritual thing. The dream of a selfless self, a something sucked back up into Everything—where else would you go to puzzle over this stuff but the land of Krishna, Buddha, all those guys?
Ashram,
that’s the word. That’s where Mariko always wanted to go, was an ashram. “We could go together, Matt. Imagine leaving all this behind”—a game show–girl gesture taking in the whole of their existence—“and letting things go quiet. Just us and that silence, just you and that silence. What are you afraid of?” She really didn’t seem to know.
    But maybe with Zane. With Zane maybe he can trick himself into it, and come back to Mariko all spiritual and serene. Why not? When he and Zane have finished with the AIDS thing, got that covered, they’ll repair to