I was older than average before I felt like I was missing anything, being single. At least, I was older than the average taken over the history of humanity, older my nosy grandmother preferred. I guess these days it’s pretty normal for people to reach their late twenties or even their thirties before they hit their second adolescence, but my family made me feel like an old man at my twenty-ninth without a girlfriend hovering over my shoulder.


It’

Overseas flights like these were always on the big, two-aisle planes - and usually at waiting-list capacity - so the flight attendants worked in two crews to get to all ten seats in each row, back to front through the aircraft. Except for the few out of order, every seatback display showed the same recorded video of a smiling-but-stern, middle-aged woman in a stewardess’ skirt suit (a uniform none of the flight attendants had matched for decades), while her voice played out through the ove

26



It was at that moment that the door to my apartment

came crashing in

. The

vantage

from the dinette table provided just a narrow

view

through the kitchen doorway arch (and I had an even narrower and rather distracted view between the G

22



I decided that morning that I would volunteer to go with her to work.

Apparently,

I’m not as fractured into individualized me’s as I thought, because for the first time in weeks, several of me had the same idea.






I was the one she took, though, carefully pi

19



Even though she put out five or six books (or DVDs, or

whatever

other media

had

a good picture) on the floor, and let as many as a dozen of me into each of the little fantasy bubbleworlds she made for us, I had to wait weeks for my turn. Not ‘I’ in the communal sense, obviously – ove

16



At least a thousand of us were missing from our pre-vacation count. Admittedly, we didn’t have firm numbers before, but the genie had counted us at a glance and said it was more. Admittedly and further, a thousand of us wasn’t even quite 10% of me, but the difference when we assembled in the bedroom was obvious to my eyes, and I could see it in hers. She’d gathered all of me up onto the mattress into a tightly packed

12



The next morning was breakfast in bed– for us, not her. While she broke apart flaky croissants and dripped coffee from her fingertips for any of me who wanted a mouthful, she relaxed against a mountain of more pillows than I’d ever owned and listened to our concerns about being locked in our apartment for the whole year.






&