Day 1
The carcasses of half-finished buildings are scattered all around, the dead husks of the 1997 Asian economic collapse. Their bare concrete and rebar bodies lay like dried up insects, thick on the ground. For some reason, the rebar sticking up all raw and naked makes me think of mosquito legs and cockroach antenna.

That's the way of it, I guess, boom or bust. Back in 1996, it was boom, baby, all boom. [...]

"I met someone wonderful," my lover tells me from the dark. She is so honest I cannot take offense. Her voice remains calm, and I suppose she feels nothing but sincere hope and love. Fredi says, "He isn't like you at all." After a moment she laughs. "I didn't mean it like that. You are wonderful, too. He's just differently wonderful." She quickly looks at me from across the bed where she sits lotus; I feel the motion behind my eyeballs rather than actually see the shift of her head. I'm sure the glance is meant as an apology. [...]

A good friend of mine is gone now. He died a couple of days ago, and I already miss him. For him, there are no last respects, at least in my lifetime. I will continue to respect him, and should I live to be 84, I hope to be as lucid and passionate as Kurt Vonnegut.

Henrick Sitton's wife Lilla died in the winter of 1978 from pneumonia and fever, a combination of diseases that left her body hot and frail and light, almost transparent, like you could almost see the organs working hard to keep her alive, like you could watch the blood pulse feebly through her veins, like you could study the bowels as they squeezed every last bit of energy from the little food she could manage to hold down. The only part of her you couldn't just about see into was her head.

The police found him dead in his apartment, hanging from a light fixture, suicide cord wrapped around his neck. There was no note, nothing to say why he did it, no one really to wonder why; that might be the reason. His face was ugly and purple with blood; I would have preferred it if he had slashed his wrists.

He was still warm when they got to him; Body let them know he was dead as soon as it happened. Funny, though, it didn't call them in time to stop him.

Oscar mounted the horse, swinging over the saddle like a green-horn. "It's been awhile," he explained with some satisfaction. "Been awhile, and it doesn't come back as easily as I'd supposed." He was unsure why he'd dismounted in the first place.