At some point during the lecture Sándor would get up, point a finger at Professor Teleki and accuse him of lying – and Teleki would gasp and sputter and grow red in the face and the audience would love it. But it wasn’t an act, and Teleki had approached Sándor many times – either personally or through his agent – to ask what his problem was. He even offered him money, which Sándor accepted, only to break his promise and show up at the lectures again – to the point where audiences started expecting him, as if Teleki’s presence was secondary, playing the straight man to this hectoring, vindictive blind guy who was the star of the show.

The employees could tell that the company was floundering and that some of them would lose their jobs soon. For a whole morning Tian Chu stayed in his cubicle, processing invoices without a break. Even at lunchtime he avoided chatting with others at length, because the topic of layoffs unnerved him. He had worked here for only two years and might be among the first to go. Fortunately, he was already a US citizen and wouldn’t be ashamed of collecting unemployment benefits, which the INS regards as something like discredit against one who applies for a green card or citizenship.

Around mid-afternoon, as he was typing, his cellphone chimed. Startled, he pulled it out of his pants pocket.

At first they thought the white things in the trees were plastic bags. You saw that back in Brooklyn all the time: scraps of sheeny litter caught in the branches of sidewalk ginkgos and sycamores. But out here in the middle of the French countryside it was a shock.

Today, my brothers, Mohammed and Rubel, are going to foreign. Mohammed is going to Africa and he wears a very handsome uniform.

(Our mother has died.)

Rubel wears an orange jumpsuit.

On the river island where we live, the water has turned to salt. The fish have disappeared, and only the shrimps are left. Mohammed has a lucky forehead, so he is going to foreign, and Rubel, whose forehead is unlucky, is also going to foreign, because he wants to be like Mohammed, and not take money from Mohammed, and marry his girl Komola.

Two days ago, at approximately 3.45 Thursday morning, a truck driver named Gregorio Rabassa misjudged the clearance beneath the pedestrian overpass on the thirty-second block of Avenida Cahuide. His truck, packed with washing machines and destined for a warehouse not far from there, hit the bottom of the bridge, shearing the top off his trailer and bringing part of the overpass down on to the avenue below. The back of the trailer opened on impact, spilling the appliances into the street. Fortunately, at the time of the accident there were no other cars on that stretch of road, and Mr Rabassa was not seriously injured. Emergency crews arrived within the hour, flooding Cahuide with light, and set about clearing the road of debris. Scraps of metal, pieces of concrete, the exploded insides of a few washing machines, all of it was loaded and carted away. Except for the ruined bridge, little evidence remained of the accident by the morning rush, and many people who lived nearby didn’t even hear what had happened while they slept.

On Bainbridge Island, across the Puget Sound from Seattle, there are two modes of living: downtown and inland. The downtown way of life centres near the ferry that brings tourists and residents over from the mainland. Here you’ll find a lively strip of art galleries, bookstores, boutiques and restaurants, and in the summer you can sit outside at the pub and look on the sailboats anchored in the marina while eating the fresh fish of the Pacific Northwest. Wing Point Country Club is nearby, as is a complex of high-end condos and culs-de-sac of quaint clapboard houses. Lucinda Wagner lived in one such house with her husband Paul. They had commissioned a man-made pond in the backyard where wild frogs pounded out throaty calls during the mating season so loudly it sometimes woke her from a dead sleep. But this was to be expected on an island that offered in high contrast a second way of life.

Something’s out there. Something has shown up in the woods of Highland City. Dave Hardy was the first to see it, the first weekend of bow season, up in his grandfather’s tree stand on the hill behind Wal-Mart. Afterwards he bushwhacked hell-bent down to the parking lot and, gasping for breath, tried to tell the story to anyone who would listen. The story changed with the telling, and after a while Dave Hardy himself didn’t know what to believe: See that old pine tree over there? It was close to me as that tree. As close as that blue Honda over there. As close as you to me.

I met my aunt Melanie in the summer of 1974, an August of high bright days, so dry that my father had to oil our front lane to keep the dust down. I was fifteen, midway through high school and deadened by its sameness. I could scarcely remember what had preceded it, or begin to imagine what might follow.