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kind of stuff,’ I explained. She looked like an actress who looked like my girlfriend. Staring at her face made me tired. I’d begun to feel this way more often around her. ‘He’s only here for three days.’ Somewhere out of sight, a group of college boys hooted and yelled.
    â€˜I thought you didn’t talk to him at all.’
    â€˜He’s my father.’
    â€˜What’s he want?’
    I rolled toward her, onto my elbow. I tried to remember how much I’d told her about him. We were lying on the bed, the wind loud in the room – I remember that – and we were both tipsy. Ours could have been any two voices in the darkness. ‘It’s only three days,’ I said.
    The look on her face was strange, shut down. She considered me a long time. Then she got up and pulled on her clothes. ‘Just make sure you get your story done,’ she said.
    *
    I drank before I came here too. I drank when I was a student at university, and then when I was a lawyer – in my previous life, as they say. There was a subterranean bar in a hotel next to my work, and every night I would wander down and slump on a barstool and pretend I didn’t want the bartender to make small talk with me. He was only a bit older than me, and I came to envy his ease, his confidence that any given situation was merely temporary. I left exorbitant tips. After a while, I was treated to battered shrimps and shepherd’s pies on the house. My parents had already split by then: my father moving to Sydney, my mother into a government flat.
    That’s all I’ve ever done, traffic in words. Sometimes I still think about word counts the way a general must think about casualties. I’d been in Iowa more than a year – days passed in weeks, then months, more than a year of days – and I’d written only four and a half stories. About seventeen thousand words. When I was working at the law firm, I would have written that many words in a couple of weeks. And they would have been useful to someone.
    Deadlines came, exhausting, and I forced myself up to meet them. Then, in the great spans of time between, I fell back to my vacant screen and my slowly sludging mind. I tried everything – writing in longhand, writing in my bed, in my bathtub. As this last deadline approached, I remembered a friend claiming he’d broken his writer’s block by switching to a typewriter. You’re free to write, he told me, once you know you can’t delete what you’ve written. I bought an electric Smith Corona at an antique shop. It buzzed like a tropical aquarium when I plugged it in. It looked good on my desk. For inspiration, I read absurdly formal Victorian poetry and drank Scotch neat. How hard could it be? Things happened in this world all the time. All I had to do was record them. In the sky, two swarms of swallows converged, pulled apart, interwove again like veils drifting at crosscurrents. In line at the supermarket, a black woman leaned forward and kissed the handle of her shopping cart, her skin dark and glossy like the polished wood of a piano.
    The week prior to my father’s arrival, a friend chastised me for my persistent defeatism.
    â€˜Writer’s block?’ Under the streetlights, vapours of bourbon puffed out of his mouth. ‘How can you have writer’s block? Just write a story about Vietnam.’
    We had just come from a party following a reading by the workshop’s most recent success, a Chinese woman trying to emigrate to America who had written a book of short stories about Chinese characters in stages of migration to America. The stories were subtle and good. The gossip was that she’d been offered a substantial six-figure contract for a two-book deal. It was meant to be an unspoken rule that such things were left unspoken. Of course, it was all anyone talked about.
    â€˜It’s hot,’ a writing instructor told me at a bar. ‘Ethnic