Last night it rained, and I thought that was very unusual because it almost never rains, and I was thinking about something I had seen long ago—maybe a decade ago now . . . some warped, foggy, thrice-photocopied Chinese knockoff facsimile of a memory. And for once the confusion lifted, and my brain wasn’t quite so scrambled, and I almost missed what I had seen in my head. And what was it? I haven’t the slightest damn clue . . . a smeary vision of my father’s face, maybe, when he was younger. Before I could hold onto it my brain surged with a white-hot solar flare, wiping out everything in its path, and instantly I returned to my usual status as a dead-empty time-rotten creature with the emotional complexity of a rained-on duffel bag full of vampire feces.