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came close to buying a dozen books, but, overwhelmed and underfinanced, left only with a useless tote bag. They stalled on the corner outside the store. “I should go back,” she said again.
    â€œI’m so hungry I could eat part of an animal,” he said.
    On a deli’s stuffy upper story they uncovered a pair of complementary facts: that at twenty-six Sara was ashamed to be living with her difficult mother in West Seneca—she usually neglected to clarify that for now she didn’t even live in Buffalo proper—and that Lucas’s Anglo American girlfriend had recently moved out of his apartment, though this didn’t mean, he insisted, that they’d broken up.
    Unable to make it back to the blog tent, Sara was constrained to pay twenty dollars to use the internet in her expensively drab hotel. Her midnight dispatch was better, and worse, than the others. She had entered the assignment with a commitment to journalistic ethics, but she figured it would be harmless just this once to invent a few quotes and coax another from Lucas (“I think in a lotof ways the left benefits from a conservative administration . . .”). All night she was sleepless with dreams of metropolitan transformations, giddy, embarrassing dreams that in some slantwise sense came true.
    June 2011

    Karyn thought of movie couples uncorking their illicit lust in elevators, against hotel walls the moment after tumbling inside the room. Preferable, she guessed, to this heavy-lidded prelude on her couch with Paul the consultant. Perhaps she hadn’t anticipated anything cinematically frenetic when she was hunching to put in her diaphragm an hour earlier, but she had at least pictured a carnality onrushing enough to frown on contraceptive pauses, and since it was their last time together, she thought it would be nice to forgo the condom. Paul was complaining now about his new multifocal eye-glasses, how much blurring there was around the edges.
    â€œMaybe progressives offend your conservative sensibilities,” she said.
    â€œI wouldn’t say conservative, ” he said, as if her joke required amendment. “I’m a classical liberal.”
    â€œWell, they look nice,” she said. The contrast between the dark tortoiseshell and his pallid complexion was too stark. “This thing in Jisr al-Shughour or however you say it—over a hundred dead, I heard.” The Arab Spring, she thought, might bridge their ideological divide.
    He murmured cryptically.
    â€œAssad the next to fall?” The next to fall. Please.
    â€œMaybe. Not sure if it’ll do much good so long as—” He broke off when a car alarm began pulsing across the street. When it stopped, he steered talk back to his elusive focal points.
    She suggested contact lenses.
    â€œI don’t believe our eyeballs were designed to take in objects.”
    She doubted he meant designed in an anti-Darwinian way, but he wasn’t always legible. “It does take a while to get used to them,” she said. “To contacts, I mean. But I was unpopular in high school, so it seemed a worthwhile sacrifice.”
    â€œUnpopular with boys?” he said, constricting her meaning. “That’s hard to imagine.”
    â€œOh God yes. Awkward. Horrible skin.” Horrible went overboard, but she wanted to fend off his idealizations. Last time he had looked at her too feverishly.
    He faced her. “You think the frames are okay, though?” The phone rang. “Jen says they’re too dark.”
    Her landline’s holdouts were mostly strangers—political fundraisers, call-center larcenists, the sandpaper-voiced man who rang once a year asking poignantly for Esther—but she welcomed the interruption. “I’ll only get it if it’s my kid.” The caller ID read GEMMA PITCHFORD . Unable to place the name, she let the call go to voice mail.
    When she returned to the couch, Paul said, “But the