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gives me a look. I’ve trampled on some social code. But she recites her digits, and I record them. Then we say good night and she walks away.
    I feel my heart beating faster than usual, as if I’ve just protected some vital Event. The GeneScan led me astray, and I let pure carnal desire, or maybe heartache, do the rest.
    As I walk toward my car I notice a man lying on one of the park benches. He’s wrapped in a filthy gray blanket; beside him is a large pile of miscellaneous possessions. I decide that I’ve already violated so many rules tonight, what’s one more?
    “Spare change, brother?” he asks. He has a thick beard and skin that doesn’t look real. There are layers there. If I could peel them all off, I wonder who I would find beneath them.
    “You sleep here? And we’re, what, across the street from your president’s house?”
    “Hell, he don’t sleep there, brother. That’s just his spectral projection. He’s floating above us in his ship, you know, pulling the strings.”
    I remove a one-hundred-dollar bill from my wallet and hand it to him.
    “Bull shit! ” he shouts, and I step back. “This ain’t real!”
    I wasn’t expecting this anger, like I’ve pulled a trick on him.
    “Maybe none of this is real,” I tell him. “But that’s legal tender, friend.”
    I wait another moment as he holds it up to the light of a streetlamp. He doesn’t thank me, and hopefully he won’t throw away the money, which I withdrew from Troy Jones’s account earlier in the week.
    I drive off to my terrible motel. Still thinking of Tasha, I check every database they’ve loaded into me. As I expect, all records of her cease at the start of the Conflagration.

2.
     
    P eople in D.C. liked to drive in the middle of the road, Leo had noticed. The narrow side streets lacked lane markers, so each car tended to glide down the center, staying clear of the parallel-parked cars on either side, seemingly confident no other traffic would dare come its way. Opposing drivers waited until the last possible moment to pull to their own sides.
    It was a warm night and Leo drove with his windows down, the city drolly exhaling in his face. He wound his way through D.C.’s bingo board of alphabetized and numbered streets until he reached the Whole Foods, whose opening here in Logan Circle, when Leo was stationed in Jakarta, had officially jump-started the gentrification process a few years back. He barely recognized the neighborhood.
    He entered the store and joined the young women in post-gym outfits—recently showered, hair pulled back, no sweat to be seen—talking on their cell phones; the mothers balancing babies on their hips and gripping their carts with their free hands; and the young men like him, some looking comfortable in their suits and some whose concert tees and tight jeans were wielded in a desperate attempt to define themselves as D.C.’s Other. Leo had been back for a while now, so culture shock was no longer an issue. But still he felt something, a sense that he did not belong here, and it never went away. What do you call that, culture trauma? Present shock?
    The grocery carts were half size to allow for some semblance of maneuverability through the cramped urban aisles. Leo tossed in vegetables whose colors and textures shone forth like they were works of art, still lifes waiting to happen. He had become something of a cook during his time in Indonesia. So far, he hadn’t been able to find any Indonesian restaurants in D.C.—the outer suburbs were spawning more ethnic restaurants than the city as real estate prices pushed the immigrants out—and since he had few plans for the upcoming weekend, he figured he could spend some quality time in his kitchen. He grabbed some natural peanut butter and extra-firm tofu for gado-gado, sifted through shallots and garlic for nasi goreng, grabbed a coconut. He realized too late he was planning a veritable feast and found himself wondering, sadly, if there was anyone at