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you—it's an emergency."
    An emergency? I phoned her cell right away. "Mom, what's up? What's wrong?"
    "Ethan, are you at work right now?"
    "Where else would I be?"
    "I'm at SuperValu. Let me call you back from a pay phone."
    The line went dead. I picked it up when it rang.
    "Mom, you said this was an emergency."
    "It is, dear. Ethan, honey, I need you to help me."
    "I just got out of the Worst Meeting Ever. What's going on?"
    "I suppose I'd better just tell you flat out."
    "Tell me what?"
    "Ethan, I killed a biker."
    "You killed a biker?"
    "Well, I didn't mean to."
    "Mom, how the hell did you manage to kill a biker?"
    "Ethan, just come home right now. I'll be there in twenty minutes."
    "Why doesn't Dad help?"
    "He's on a shoot today. He might get a speaking part." She hung up.
    . . .
    On my way out of the office, I passed a world-building team, standing in a semicircle, staring at a large German-made knife on a desktop.
    "What's up?" I asked.
    "It's the knife we're using to cut Aidan's birthday cake," a friend, Josh, replied.
    I looked more closely at the knife: it was clownishly big. "Okay, it's hard-core Itchy <& Scratchy —but so what?"
    "We're having a contest—we're trying to see if there's any way to hold a knife and walk across a room and not look psycho."
    "And?"
    "It's impossible."
    A few desks away, Bree was showing someone photos of her recent holiday visiting Korean animation sweatshops. She was bummed because she couldn't get into North Korea: too much legal juju. "It's a real blotch to have on your passport. I just wanted to know what it's like to be in a society with no technology except for three dial telephones and a TV camera they won from Fidel Castro in a game of rock paper scissors."
    Bree is right. For those of us who are too young to have visited Cold War East Germany or the USSR, North Korea remains as the sole boutique nation with a quack low-technology dictatorship. "Owning a 56K floppy disk can land you two decades of hard labour."
    I suggested North Korea should change its name to something friendlier, more accessible.
    "Like what, Ethan?"
    "How about Trish?"
    "As in Patricia?"
    "Yeah."
    "I like that. It's fresh."
    "Thanks."
    . . .
    Through a rare and cheerful accident of freeway planning, I can get from the campus to my parents' place by making two left turns and two right turns, even though they live 17.4 miles away in the gloomy evergreen cocoon of the British Properties. I find this elegant and pleasing.
    When I pulled into the driveway, nothing seemed out of place. It could easily have been 1988, right down to the 1988 Reliant K-car wagon. Inside the front door, I heard Mom call from the kitchen, "Ethan, would you like a sandwich? I have egg salad."
    I walked into the kitchen, unchanged since Ronald Reagan ruled Earth. My brother, Greg, and I once found a pile of cleaning products that predated bar-coding on a hallway shelf. "No sandwich, thanks, Mom. Am I, or am I not, here about a dead biker?"
    Mom cut her own sandwich in two. "I know for a fact that your diet is appalling. Greg tells me that all you eat is Doritos and fruit leather."
    "Mom, the biker}"
    "I was going to eat my sandwich, but okay, Mr. Impatient, follow me."
    We walked out of the kitchen and down the main hallway, past my old bedroom, over which my beer-botdes-of-the-world collection had once stood sentry—a room that now housed Mom's sewing machine, her cigarette-making machine and the machine she uses to roll up old newspapers to convert them into fire logs. Where my bong once sat now rested a balsa wood mallard duck, sitting in a basket of silk freesia.
    Farther down the hall we descended a set of stairs into the back hallway, rife with the aroma of mildewed sporting equipment, and from there, down another set of stairs that led into the basement proper. Mom reached into a basket and handed me a pair of RayBans and put a pair on herself. She said, "I'd lower the lights, but it confuses the chlorophyll cycles."
    Mom also