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surprises. They’re never who you think they are.” I began to imagine that all men were in costume, that somewhere down each of their backs was a zipper. Then it occurred to me that someday I would be a man, also, and I wondered about the zipper thing.
    My mother and I each had our routines. She taught high school, took long hikes in the state parks near our house, read mystery novels, and sometimes disappeared with explanations as thin as, “I just need a few days,” or “I’m going to visit a friend.”
    “Which friend?” I would ask.
    “That’s right,” she would say.
    I ate ice cream in front of the TV, did my homework well enough, and sneaked out at night with my father’s rifle to shoot streetlights. Within half a year, I had blacked out whole neighborhoods and begun blacking them out again after they had been repaired.
    Nothing was more beautiful to me than the blue-white explosion of a streetlight seen through crosshairs. The sound of it—the pop that was almost a roar, then silence, then glass rain—came only after each fragment and shard had sailed off or twisted glittering in the air like mist.
    John Laine was exceptional in that he was the first man to last over three months. Even that day at the lake didn’t faze him. There was no telling how long he’d stay.
    Though I was only thirteen, John taught me to drive his pickup—the Silver Bullet, he called it—and let me speed through the back roads all over Sonoma County. If we passed another cop, we just waved. I remember vineyards in late September at a hundred miles per hour, the way their matted purple, red, and green whirled by like patches of seaweed on an overgrown ocean. John, whose voice was always calm, even as the tires were slipping beneath us like bars of soap, said I was a natural. He said I might even make a good officer one day.
    John had dark sideburns he could wiggle up and down. He had descended from a tree, he told us when we asked where he was from. And before that? I asked. He pinched my nose with his rough fingers and told me to go to bed. I was sitting on thecouch with him and my mother. She grinned at me and jerked her thumb toward my bedroom.
    When my mother finally broke up with John, on that same couch as I hovered in the kitchen, peeking through the louvered doors, John said, “Okay,” and kept holding her hand. Without a fight, my mother wasn’t sure what to do. My father had wronged her in concrete ways that could be yelled about. With my father, there had been the possibility of righteousness. But with John, for both of us, there was only the ache of knowing how much we had wanted him to stay.
    After John came Emmet. This was during January, when my mother was dreaming of Legoland and personal fame. With Emmet’s help, she dragged our dining table into the living room, added its extra leaves until it was at full length, and commanded us to be quiet. She had written to Motorland Magazine, asking whether they might be interested in an article on the trip we had taken to Denmark’s Legoland, and against all expectation, they had responded positively. Every evening she sat before her notes and 35-mm slides while Emmet and I sat obediently on the living room couch, Emmet reading Louis L’Amour Westerns and I doing my homework.
    Emmet was a man who kept telling us who he was. And who he was kept changing. One week he had grown up in Sandpoint, Idaho; the next week it was Red Bluff, California. Shrugging his shoulders, he’d claim his memory was improving, that was all. And if you caught him in his sleep, as I once did, his claims were even wilder.
    “Mittenwald,” he sighed, pushing his head farther into the corner. I had found him in the back of our hallway closet at 4:30a.m., curled around the vacuum cleaner, our old drapes under his head. “I have to; I’m from Mittenwald. Small town just north of here. Lots of fires.” He had mistaken the closet for my mother’s bedroom, I was sure. I could sympathize.