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thoroughness—Anna squinting gravely at the art, Andrew squinting gravely at Anna. He couldn’t understand any of the art. He was too old for all of this; everything challenging was for the young. He sat down on a bench in the middle of the room. He could see the bobbing of Anna’s scapula through her T-shirt when she adjusted her purse; running had made her wiry in a feral cat kind of way. What, he wondered, would this moment come to mean to Anna? Maybe it would become merely one episode in her crazy sister’s crazy life—something to talk about in bars, on dates, or to tell Lily’s wide-eyed, ruddy-haired children one day (“Your mother,” she might say, “was
wild
”). Maybe this hour at the modern art museum would be merely one of the narrative’s many surreal asterisks, something decorative that did not appear in every single telling. Or maybe, Andrew thought, this moment would become something else. Maybe Anna would remember it as the very last second that they were still trying topretend that their whole lives hadn’t gone fully to shit. Maybe she would talk about it in therapy one day—recalling how they’d gone through the sad little self-conscious motions of enjoying the city, as though they were on fucking vacation, and how this was the
exact
kind of pathological WASP repression that had motored them all through everything, always. Which story were they in right now? Andrew was not sure he wanted to know.
    On the taxi ride back to the hotel, Andrew and Anna gazed out separate windows and did not speak. Every few blocks, they passed graffiti in support of Cristina Fernández—newly beloved in the wake of her husband’s death, newly forgiven for raising the taxes on soybeans—and Andrew experienced a minor stab of satisfaction. Encountering something in the world that confirmed what he’d learned of it always gave him a nice solid sense of existing in an actual universe—a reassuring feeling, and one that had been slipping away from him, faster and faster, in recent years. Even before Lily’s arrest, Andrew had felt untethered—like his life had come undone in big sloppy pieces, and nothing had held together long enough to really count. Sometimes it seemed to Andrew that the meaning of his existence had been like a rare gas in a bottle he’d mistakenly uncorked—it was still out there somewhere, presumably, but was now so diffuse as to be undetectable.
    Andrew had not slept with anyone since Maureen. He rarely put it in a sentence like that, but there it was. Of course, there had been chances—graduate students: ambitious and/or working out father issues and/or bored and drunk—but he had never taken any of them. The closest call had been an ABD named Karen, who had sleek hair and a creamy avian face and glasses that offset her unruffled beauty in a way that made her look like a porn star playing a librarian—there was no way, there was just
no way
, that those things actually had corrective lenses in them. Her area was Central Asian republics, and she’d spent an entire summer in Almaty trying to quiz Kazakhs on their feelings, their actual feelings, about Nursultan Nazarbayev. And there’dbeen one night when she and Andrew had had too much wine and too much high-spirited talk about whether the revolution in Egypt was best compared to the Eastern bloc countries in 1989 or to Iran in 1979 or to Iran in 2009, which had gotten them onto the CIA’s overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953, and this had led them into dark cynical snorting about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan in the ’80s, and then the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud two days before September 11th, and then they’d gotten onto rogue intelligence services generally, and conspiracy theories they’d never articulate in the classroom—he spoke of the ISI and Benazir Bhutto, she spoke of the FSB and Lech Kaczyński’s death in that weird plane crash, which, Andrew had to admit, was admirably, almost sexily, audacious. And maybe