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the siege of Barcelona, yet subsequently captured eleven enemy British ships.
    We are not Franklin Roosevelt, who overcame crippling polio to become president, or Stephen Hawking, whose mind would not be shackled by the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that claimed his body. We are not Helen Keller, or Randy Fucking Pausch. We aren’t even Cher, with dyslexia.
    The rest of us, when our bodies are broken, break along with it. And these heroic exceptions with their incredible ability to rise above the most awful circumstances imaginable just make us look bad.

 
    MORNING
    Mornings are the worst. The disorientation of unfamiliar surroundings since the hospital—then ITCH, and now the attic—is compounded by hours of sleep during which the pain meds wear off, and the stinging realization, before I even open my eyes, that my arm is gone. Mornings are made worse by the dream interrupted in which, regardless of whether I am being chased by dogs, losing teeth, flying, drowning, or having sex with a woman I never met, I am always whole.
    I start the day with a V 2 boost (Vicodin and Valium), and Dad and I are in the car on the way to breakfast before the wooziness overtakes me. I’m not thrilled to be up and out in the world, especially a world as small as this one. It’s still the place where I grew up; the only unfamiliar thing here is me, the temporary blemish of an angry pimple.
    The din on the radio recedes behind the shimmering tinnitus that recurs at irregular intervals like visits from the neighbor’s cat. But then a woman’s voice cuts through the ringing—it’s sweet, sultry, smart, and belongs to the station’s science reporter. Her name is Sunny Lee and her show, ninety-second interstitials of fun science fact, is called The Sunny Side :
    Think your shiny new car’s GPS is sophisticated? Well, it’s got nothing on this tiny traveler: the ant! Foraging ants travel distances up to seven hundred feet from their nests—which may not seem like much to you and me, but that’s one giant leap for ant-kind. So how do they find their way back to the colony? The same way a mom finds her teenage boy’s gym clothes: scent trails! Ants leave a distinctive odor allowing them to find their way back, even in the dark.
    But what if the ant in question is, say, all stuffed up with a head cold? Ants are also visually inclined, and some navigate using a combination of physical landmarks and the position of the sun, while others can detect Earth’s magnetic field. And some even measure distance with an internal pedometer that actually counts their steps! Amazing! And all this time you thought they were just … clairvoy-ANT. This is Sunny Lee, for The Sunny Side.
    Over the coming days and weeks Sunny Lee will tell me things I never knew, about the speed of falling raindrops, the peripheral vision of hammerhead sharks, the torque of a spun pizza. By the time we pull up to the Four Corners Diner, I’m in love with her.
    Although located at an unusual intersection of five corners, the Four Corners seems to have been named in deliberate denial of the unusual in favor of the mundane. Sometime after my departure from Paris, this became Dad’s ritualistic breakfast place. For someone who expresses incredulity at the concept of “eating out” (“Why would I pay someone to cook me a steak? I can cook my own steak. And seven dollars for a beer—you can buy the whole six-pack for that.”), Dad has embraced breakfast here with an enthusiasm usually reserved for a child hearing the jingling approach of an ice-cream truck. I could go ahead and point out that eggs cost about a dime apiece or that for the price of three or four cups of coffee he could buy himself an entire one-pound can, but he would disregard both like my missing limb. What Dad enjoyed about breakfast out was the camaraderie, the sheer comfort of the familiar.
    All of which flee upon our arrival