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invade your allies,” Janice said.
    â€œWhen I asked if we were civilized,” Annie said, “I didn’t mean is the United States civilized. I meant are
we
civilized, here? A man drives a Japanese car into my nineteenth-century tobacco shed because he’s drunk. And do we settle anything, make the world better? No. We rip the shed apart, pour gas on it, and have an explosion and fire in my driveway.”
    Janice leaned her head in front of me to look at Annie and say, “At least we had the guy arrested for destroying your property, so we could set it on fire.”
    I liked her even more. A deep sense of irony in a woman was as important as breasts and a vagina. Again I’d thought of something I couldn’t tell her. I realized you usually can’t talk about sex, even if you’re not having it.
    The fire was burning pretty violently, then, with yellowish orange flames whipping against each other, rising about six feet or higher and shooting unpredictable bursts of embers up into the dark, like thousands of tiny red stars escaping into the night. People were sweating. It was already eighty-seven degrees that night, and the bonfire got it up to maybe a hundred and thirty degrees, we guessed, within six feet of the fire.
    â€œThis is my favorite southern tradition: Sweating,” I said.
    â€œThat’s not a southern tradition,” Annie said.
    â€œI guess it’s just a southern misfortune, then.”
    â€œShut up.”
    â€œFuck
it’s hot,” Thomas said.
    â€œI always wished the TV weatherman would say that one day,” I said.
    â€œI think we should move away from the fire,” Annie said. We all got up, backed away, and started walking to the patio to get something cold to drink. Janice asked me what I’d thought of doing, now that I’d been fired from the paper.I told her I might write a southern novel called
As I Lay Sweating.
She said, as she playfully rubbed some sweat from my forehead with her finger, that I couldn’t write a southern novel because I wasn’t a southerner.
    â€œI know. Maybe I’ll write a German novel,” I said as we walked up this big hill behind Annie’s house, just sort of spontaneously deciding to go up on the hill together, with neither of us saying why, like we didn’t know.
    â€œBut you’re not really German, either,” she said.
    â€œNo. I’m not really anything. I guess that makes me American.”
    The light from the bonfire was bright enough for me to see her smiling at me, and I was happy, even though I scarcely knew her and, as far as I knew, this might be the only time I’d ever see her. The world put people together as randomly as it guaranteed that nothing would work and your hopes were stupid. But I kept liking her, in case it would work.
    She carried with her a glass of some blush wine or something, and I had a new bottle of IBC Root Beer. Near the top of the hill was a little spot next to the trail that was cleared and padded with thousands of dry pine needles where we sat together and stared down at those idiots, our peers, who apparently had found a pitchfork and were using it to roast hot dogs over the bonfire.
    â€œLook at them,” Janice said. “It looks like a cookout in hell.”
    â€œI’ve never seen a cookout in hell, but maybe you’re right,” I said, watching this tall guy with glasses hold the pitchfork close to the edge of the fire with little dark things impaled on the prongs. We assumed they were hot dogs. Naturally this led to a discussion of theology.
    â€œDo you get to eat hot dogs in hell?” Janice asked.
    â€œThe Bible doesn’t say. It’s badly underwritten.”
    â€œDo you believe in hell?”
    â€œNo. I think eternal damnation is too long.”
    â€œToo long? How long should damnation be?”
    â€œMaybe a month. I think being in a lake of fire for thirty days is long enough.”
    She