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writers who met in a bar in the Tenderloin. When the salon started, a year earlier, there had been a lot of them, but as people found work or left the city their number shrank, until the salon became a group of bar friends like any other, who played pool and gossiped and argued about who owed whom a drink. I didn’t remember anyone named Raoul. “He works for Petopia, the pet-supply people,” Alice said. “He wants me to write copy for them.”
    “How glamorous,” I said.
    There was a beat of silence. “I just called to see if you were all right,” Alice said. “Not so you could cut me down.”
    “I’m sorry.” Beat. “Was it a good party?”
    “It wasn’t bad. There weren’t enough people and there was too much to drink.”
    “And this Raoul, he’s a nice guy?”
    “Will you be jealous if I say yes ?”
    “Not at all,” I lied. “I want you to be happy.”
    “I don’t know,” Alice said. “I feel like I’m floating. You know? It’s like I’m floating in the dark, in a sensory-deprivation tank, and nothing I see is really happening.”
    “Maybe it’s just that we’re drunk.”
    “Maybe. But,” beat, “I just feel like that’s what we’re all doing now. Like we’re all just, like, floating.”
    Beat. “Maybe we are.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I wish you were here.”
    “I’ll be back,” I said.
    “And what’s going to happen then?” Alice asked.
    “I guess we’ll find out then.”
    “I’m sorry,” Alice said. “It’s the middle of the night there, isn’t it? Make sure you drink some water before you go to bed.”
    “OK.”
    “OK.”
    “I’ll talk to you soon.”
    “OK.”
    “OK.”
    Beat. Beat.
    LOST THINGS
     
    My uncle was back early the next morning, making things move in the kitchen like an angry ghost. I groaned and wrapped the quilt around my head. He asked what had happened to me, and I said I’d been hit by a car.
    Charles laughed. “I know that car.”
    He made coffee, and when it was ready he shook my shoulder. Instant. Charles pointed at me with his mug. “So, you were just drinking by yourself, or what?”
    “I was at the Regenzeits’.”
    “Ah, our enemies,” my uncle said.
    I felt dull and sick to my stomach. I wished Charles would leave so I could go back to sleep, and in fact I didn’t know what he was doing, coming over when the sky was still green with presunrise light. Did he think that the world was full of people like him, angry men who drank bad coffee at dawn?
    “Why are they our enemies?” I asked.
    “Because they’re Turks, that’s why. The Turks are an Oriental people. They’ve hated us ever since the beginning.”
    “Turkey is a Westernized democracy. It’s even a member of NATO.”
    “Believe what you like, the history speaks for itself. Think about the Ottoman Empire.”
    “The Ottoman Empire ended just after the First World War. Anyway, Kerem and Yesim were born in America.”
    “But they remember,” Charles said, “they all remember that we won. The Americans and the Western Europeans.”
    “That’s not true, the Ottoman Empire collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy. That, and the rebellion of the so-called assimilated peoples.” I couldn’t believe I was discussing the fall of the Ottoman Empire at dawn in Thebes with a bad hangover.
    “Assimilated peoples, my ass, it was us. We won, on account of our superior military technology.”
    “You must be thinking of the Cold War, although even there—”
    “You don’t get it,” Charles interrupted. “Snowbird is their revenge.”
    “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Snowbird is a ski resort, and this is the late twentieth century. You aren’t going to convince me that Joe Regenzeit and his family have been holding a grudge ever since Mustafa Pasha’s defeat at the gates of Vienna, or, even if they did, that they would take their revenge here, in Thebes.”
    Charles growled at me that I didn’t understand a damn thing