My main fear, as I scurried across the icy street in high-heeled boots, was that the busdriver was an asshole. My next greatest fear was that the light would turn green.

If the light turned green, the bus would easily make it to the stop before I could. If the busdriver were an asshole, he would see me now, scurrying across the icy street in high-heeled boots, and he would not open his doors or even pause. He would blaze on down Avon Street as if that bus stop did not exist at all, and I would have to walk to the next stop to wait for a different bus, and even if that bus were on time, which would be the biggest freaking miracle in the universe, I would be at least a half hour late to the party, but more likely forty-five minutes, and if I were forty-five minutes late to the party my good friend who I hadn’t seen in ages would think I didn’t care enough about her or her cooking to just show up on time: after all these years, to just leave my apartment forty-five minutes earlier, couldn’t I handle that?

The light turned green. I began to book it, hopeless, as my bus whirled through the intersection — and came to a squealing stop right next to me in the middle of the road. “Hey there!” a man smiled from the front seat. “You want on?”

Until this day, there had been three certain facts in my life: death, taxes, and buses do not stop for you if you are not at a stop, and they will only let you off at stops, because I don’t know, that’s like a law or something.

“Get on!” the busdriver waved jovially. “I hate to see you running on the ice like that, you could hurt yourself.”

I stepped on hesitantly and then swiped my Charlie Card. The bus was completely empty: bright blue plastic chairs buzzed in the fluorescent light, roadsalt patches making neat little placemats in front of each one, white shadows and scuffs from former feet. “Some weather outside, isn’t it?” he grinned at me. “Isn’t this just crazy? My wife just called, she wanted to know if she could turn the heat up.”

What parallel universe have I stepped into? I wondered. Maybe I’m dead. Maybe this is a last hallucination. The bus just hit me, and I am unconscious on the road.

It began shortly after we moved in. We would be sitting in the living room, when he would begin to pound.

Bam bam bam bam bam bam!

At first we had thought the display of anger correlated understandably with the cats — fat on beef with gravy, chasing each other madly around the apartment like two drunk buffalos. Pipsqueak could tumble off a bookshelf, or Jack would initiate a surprise-attack from behind the laundry basket, and two seconds later we’d hear it — bam bam bam bam! Bam bam bam! We guiltily locked the kitties into our bedroom, and made a note to apologize to him later, talk to him about it some time. I wrote him a letter, and we just kept editing it, never actually slipping it beneath his door.

But then it began happening when we were reading in bed, the cats asleep at our feet. It could be three in the morning, six in the evening, noon. Noon! Weekdays, weekends: our floor would shake, the frames would rattle on the walls. Jurvis would be out of town for a couple of days and in the wee hours of the morning I would hide, locked away with the cats as he threw thunderbolts of rage from below. The door quivered — I would clutch the sheets and freeze, plan an escape route out the window.

“That dude is a dick,” I said.

“The cats were sleeping!” Jurvis would cry. “Was he pounding just now because the steam heater was rattling? We don’t even control the heat!”

“Total, super dick,” I said.

Jurvis talked to our super, who said that this guy had already complained to him about us. The super had told this guy that he should just come talk to us about it. But that was a long time ago. “He’s still pounding?” the super asked.

During my first election as a voter, I thought voting was enough.

I was proud of myself for little things: finding a notary, having a pen on hand, mailing my absentee ballot in on time. These things involved advance planning: phone calls, journeys across campus, freaking acquisition of stamps. Scrawling my signature on the back felt like I personally had just planted a small forest, ensuring hundreds of future generations a world of clean air and plentiful shade. “There!” I declared. “I have done my civic duty. Clearly this country is not going to be completely stupid, so we should be all set.”

Huddled in the campus center of our small liberal arts college, we watched in horror as the results came in.

Outside the Obama offices in New Hampshire

When I was in junior high, I was terrified of the telephone. I would practice conversations out loud to myself before dialing any numbers. I drew web diagrams, with “hello” circled at the top and their potential responses branching out below, with written-out and rehearsed replies branching from these. “How’s it going?” they might ask. “Oh, I’m fine,” I wrote. “Oh, I’m fine,” I said aloud, at least three times.

In short, I was insane: but you could also say that I was cognizant of my weaknesses. And at least back then, I was making an effort to work around them.

We were lounging on the deck in our bathing suits, drinking shandies and dipping our feet into the lake, when the fellow who’d disappeared hallucinating into the woods returned to the cabin.

“Hey dude. How’s your trip going?”
“Pretty . . . good, I guess.”
“How long do you think you’ve been gone?”
“I don’t know . . . like, an hour?”

We tittered delightedly, taking joy in our superior knowledge of reality: the only thing to do when you’re tipsy on lemonade-diluted Magic Hats and your friend has been rediscovering God or whatever. “Dude you’ve been wandering around for like three hours.”

“Oh. Well, okay then.” He shrugged us off, letting his backpack shuffle down his shoulder and down to the deck floor. He stared for a moment into the water and then began rummaging through his things, looking pretty with it. We’d almost given up on him entirely as a source of entertainment, and had returned to our former conversation — until he yelped.