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sees my alarm.
    “What the hell is this?” I ask.
    “We made copies,” she says.
    I turned on the TV. The State of the Union, a rebroadcast on cable. I pushed my ear into the pillow. The president had burst into the hall and everyone was so
happy
. They all seemed so genuinely mirthful, all of them. What is the president whispering to them? Most of the people just stand and clap, but some get the president whispering to them, something really great. These people, in their suits and ties, the women all wearing their bright, solid-color outfits, like a loosely distributed bunch of giant fruits and vegetables. Green and red peppers and apples and blueberries, everyone smiling such difficult smiles, not easy smiles, but smiles full of resentment and fear—
    I corrected myself. I had no right to judge these people I’ve never met nor ever will, presuming that their smiles are forced or bitter, when there was every possibility in the world that these were happy and good people, that the senator from North Dakota for example was wholly normal and content, was someone who loved those close to him and did what he could to aid those he represented. It was entirely possible that the distinguished senator from Oklahoma was stung every time a poll indicated the public’slack of trust and admiration for those they elected. Maybe he was hurt. Maybe when results like that were conveyed to him he shook and vomited and went to his window for air and called his mother, who still lived in his childhood home and was widowed and who soothed him by using both his first and last names, and whispered them together, over and over and over and over—
    Oh Jim
    Oh James
    Oh James honey
    Oh Jimmy my dearest one
    Oh Jimmy Inhofe
    Jimmy, Jimmy my son
    Oh Jimmy Inhofe
    Jim-Jim
    Jimmy Inhofe Jimmy Inhofe
    —and this would work for the senator, though neither of them would know exactly why.
    It was dark and the phone was ringing; the pillowcase beneath my mouth was soaked.
    “You awake?”
    I’d slept for two hours. It felt like minutes.
    Hand came in and we ordered pizza and watched
Kingpin
on cable. The guilt was monumental. We were wasting the time allotted. We had had hours and we slept. We could have been doing something. This week was about using minutes and hours like these, taking them and holding them, polishing them, throwing them as far as we could, but at our first opportunity—all these hours free and full of infinite choice—we’d done nothing. We could have hitchhiked somewhere. We could have knocked on doors—even in this hotel—and met or groped new people. But no, nothing. We’d bought the Senegal tickets but now were waitingfor pizza in an O’Hare Best Western—we wanted to be able to tell people about every hour this week, that every hour we had done something not-or-seldom-before done (at least by people like us) but instead we were watching the angry hustler guys put Woody’s hand in the bowling-ball retriever machine.
    “If you think about it,” Hand said, tearing a slice from its crust, “the original schedule had us getting into Dakar at 1 in the morning, too late to do anything anyway. Now we get in at 9 A.M. or something. Same difference, except we sleep on the plane.”
    He was right. He was a titan. We were again golden.
    And in an hour the phone rang again; the shuttles were coming. We jogged down to the lobby. In the lobby, what seemed to be a hundred Senegalese dignitaries milled and lined up. There were a few women among them, a pair our age, their skin so smooth and unblemished it seemed fake or too tautly stretched. I was caught staring at the full round hips of a woman in red, the color of new blood in direct sunlight.
    I nudged Hand. He rolled his eyes.
    He knew I liked women of heft and generous curve, 5′11″ and up, as tall or taller than me—I’m maybe 6′1″—and with exuberant, exaggerated lines. It was a preference I’d developed in the past few years, after dating Charlotte, who remade