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moon and kind of contentedly smiled at Janice, saying, “It’s pretty exotic sitting with a woman under the summer moon, talking about bones and viral epidemics.”
    She closed her eyes and laughed. I think we got along spontaneously, or accidentally, or one of those qualities you think you’re identifying when really you’re just suddenly happy and you don’t know why, but you hope it doesn’t quit and get replaced with the normal emptiness and sadness of being alive one more day alone.
    For a while she talked about having visited Canyon de Chelly in Arizona and looking at the fantastic Indian ruins fastened so solidly and improbably to the canyon wall that it looked, she said, “like the wall grew a home for the Indians. And then you have to imagine, because there are no records, these primitive people without winches or cranes building these monstrous, thick networks of walled homes along the sheer edges of goddamn cliffs. And all the Indians are gone. Vanished. Inexplicably leaving behind an entire city in a canyon so that, one day, our rowdy European ancestors out conquering the continent and smugly stealing whatever the hell they wanted could come along and discover some ruins.”
    Sipping my root beer in the humid, hot dark, I looked at Janice and said, “My ancestors didn’t look for ruins. They made them.”
    She said, “What?”
    â€œI’m part German. That means I’m descended from the Vandals and Visigoths and Ostrogoths and the regular Goths.”
    â€œSo? Is that bad?” she said.
    â€œIt was back then. They walked around Europe saying, ‘Look. A nation. Let’s steal it.’ Or if they didn’t want to steal a country or it was too hard to do at the moment, they’d walk through a city and break it.
Crack. Ha, ha. There goes your civilization.
Do you know what they did one time? While wandering through Europe on a customary rampage, the Vandals sacked Rome. Some people can say of their heritage, and maybe
you
can, since you’re part Italian, that they’re descended from people who built ancient Rome. All I can say is my ancestors liked Rome so well they robbed it. Jeez.”
    Janice put her hand on my knee and said, “Don’t sack me.”
    â€œI don’t know you well enough to sack you,” I said. “I’m one of the polite Germans. I say, ‘May I sack you, please?’”
    â€œYou’re evidently thinking of an expanded, more personal meaning for sack,” she said, smiling ironically.
    â€œAt first I wasn’t, but I am now,” I said, happy and scared and astonished that in a few seconds my discussionsof the plunderings of ancient Germans had been transformed by Janice into a metaphor for sex. I didn’t know what to say. I pretended to be interested again in the people around the bonfire.
    â€œThere’s another southern custom I think I like: People roasting marshmallows on a pitchfork over the remains of a burning shed,” I said, looking over at Janice to see if this latest insidious insight of mine seemed funny and distracting to her, and if she maybe had a somewhat erotic look on her face, as if she were thinking of how we might sack each other. She was smiling, but why I couldn’t be sure.
    â€œI’m starting to get a little drunk,” she said, pouring her wine into the pine needles. “I better drive home while I still can.” And in the same instant when I was sad that she was going to leave, as if suddenly she was tired of me and I wasn’t at all the kind of man she wanted to know, she said, “Would you like to go home with me and look at my artifacts?” And she started laughing, as though I were embarrassed and she found that charming.
    I was going to say I’d been looking at her artifacts all night, but instead I just said, “Yes.”

5
    S he lived in a small basement apartment overlooking the core of the Earth,