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apologize for these lapses—a year here, a year there? History isn’t linear, after all. It runs in shallows and narrows and bayous and bays. (And treacherous undertows and hidden whirlpools.) And even a memoir is a kind of history.
    But I suppose it depends on the audience I’m writing for, and that’s still unclear in my mind. Who am I addressing? My own generation, so many of whom have died or are now dying? Our heirs, who may not have experienced these events but who can at least recite them from schoolbooks? Or some more distant generation of men and women who may have been allowed, God willing and impossible as it seems, to forget a little of what passed in this century?
    In other words, how much should I explain, and how thoroughly?
    But it’s a moot question.
    Really, there are only two of us here.
    Me. And you. Whoever you are.
    Nearly five years passed between my visit to the mall with Kaitlin and the day Arnie Kunderson called me out of a batch-sort test to his office—which was, perhaps, the next significant turning point in my life, if you believe in linear causality and the civilized deference of the future to the past. But taste those years, first: imagine them, if you don’t remember them.
    Five summers—warm ones, when the news (between Kuin events) was dominated by the ongoing depletion of the Oglalla Aquifer. New Mexico and Texas had virtually lost the ability to irrigate their dry lands. The Oglalla Aquifer, a body of underground water as large as Lake Huron and a relic of the last ice age, remained essential to agriculture in Nebraska, parts of Wyoming and Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma—and it continued to decline, sucked up from increasing depths by ruthlessly efficient centrifugal pumps. The news feeds featured the farm exodus in repetitive, blunt images: families in battered cargo trucks stalled on the interstates, their sullen children with web toys plugging their ears and masking their eyes. Men and women standing on labor lines in Los Angeles or Detroit, the dark underside of our blossoming economy. Because most of us had work, we allowed ourselves the luxury of pity.
    Five winters. Our winters were dry and cold, those years. The well-to-do wore thermally adaptive clothes for the first time, which left the tonier shopping districts looking as if they had been invaded by aliens in polyester jogging suits and respirators, while the rest of us beetled down the street in bulging parkas or stuck as close as possible to the skywalks. Domestic robots (self-guided vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers bright enough not to maim local children) became commonplace; the Sony dogwalker was withdrawn from the market after a well-publicized accident involving a malfunctioning streetlight and a brace of Shi Tzus. In those years, even the elderly stopped calling their entertainment panels “TV sets.” Lux Ebone announced her retirement, twice. Cletus King defeated incumbent Marylin Leahy, giving the White House to the Federal Party, though Democrats continued to control Congress.
    Catchphrases of the day, now all but forgotten: “Now give me
mine
.” “Brutal but nice!” “Like daylight in a drawer.”
    Names and places we imagined were important: Doctor Dan Lesser, the Wheeling Courthouse, Beckett and Goldstein, Kwame Finto.
    Events: the second wave of lunar landings; the Zairian pandemic; the European currency crisis; and the storming of the Hague.
    And Kuin, of course, like a swelling drumbeat.
    Pyongyang, then Ho Chi Minh City; eventually Macao, Sapporo, the Kanto Plain, Yichang…
    And all the early Kuin mania and fascination, the ten thousand websources with their peculiar and contradictory theories, the endless simmering of the crackpot press, the symposia and the committee reports, the think tanks and the congressional inquiries. The young man in Los Angeles who had his name legally changed to “Kuin,” and all his subsequent imitators.
    Kuin, whoever or whatever he might be, had already caused the