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passed that had eventually dropped federal indictments against those who had dodged the draft so Nate had been free to leave his place of hiding, to return to America, but he hadn’t. He felt he had somehow lost the right to call himself an American. It hadn’t mattered when survival was everything. But it mattered later, when it was over. His father had simply stopped writing to him, and Nate, in quiet deference, had quietly and dutifully receded.

3.
    I T WAS MID - FEBRUARY already, in the first year of The New Existence . Joanne’s makeshift tent was still there in the living room. Norman had silently anointed her ‘The Refugee of Suburbia’.
    Norman had offered to foot the bill for a futon to end Joanne’s encampment. She had declined the offer. She preferred her improvised tent, what she called ‘the monastic aesthetic of the hardwood floor’, when the issue was that her heirloom table had not sold on Craigslist, when it was, in her words, ‘a real steal’.
    She was suffering from unreal expectations, or that was how Norman saw it. He wasn’t an economist, but he liked working with logic problems, and under the terms of The New Existence he had begun to take an active interest in the table. He saw it as part of an experiment to show how life was actually lived – the rise and dash of expectations, rational or irrational, because expectation figured in how markets worked. It had become one of his projects.
    In the case of Joanne’s table, he wanted to work out the difference between how she saw the table and how he saw it, as a pile of shit!
    He had devised a formula. The heirloom table signified as ( x ) with its value based on two factors: the table’s perceived valuation (pv) , what x was allegedly worth, and the purchase price (pp) , what someone actually paid for x .
    Denoted mathematically, in most cases pv ≠ pp . He had the table drawn on a white board with intersecting lines connected to various formulas. The table ( x ) could work out as pv ≠ pp , pv < pp , pv > pp. No transaction he denoted as pv ☹ pp .
    It was the sort of passive aggressive formulation of life that Norman thrived on.
    Joanne took it good-naturedly. She believed in the table as pv ☺ pp .
    *
    In the background, throughout the day, Norman kept a small TV playing on CSPAN in the faint belief that this was how democracy worked, and that this too was part of The New Existence – reform, self-analysis, accountability, and transparency – the great show of collective reconciliation.
    In truth, he thought it was crap, but the hearings captivated Joanne who liked the crispness of congressional and senatorial members and their staff, the polite decorum of the process. She seemed to have plenty of time to wax on life and politics, on her sense of how the world would reform under Obama, who raised great hope in her.
    Joanne was interested in the power of talk, in the power of reconciliation. She communicated all this with sincere conviction as she ran her tongue along a joint.
    Norman watched her move between the playroom and the TV room. She had a way of running her hand through her hair. She was quoting figures – the extent of the losses was astounding. Norman obligingly pretended to write it down.
    Joanne was, she told him in all sincerity, absolutely for law and order. She was interested in the process of transparency. She wondered if the Lehman Brothers would eventually testify, then made a face when Norman said nothing.
    She knew the Lehman Brothers were dead! Was Norman even listening to her?
    She wanted his opinion on whether a certain senator wore boxers or not. She liked sincerity in a man more than anything else. As she talked, she crossed her arms. She was talking and simultaneously looking between the TV, Norman and Grace playing in her room, while in the kitchen, Randolph pushed his food bowl across the floor with his nose.
    It went this way, Norman guarded in his criticism in a way he might not have been with Kenneth.