the shapes of massive intersections in the major cities of the world. Our interests have so few overlapping places, or rather, my interests are alive within his field but unseeable from his perch. He takes the aerial view of a problem, while my lens is elemental, stuck in the soil, the undergrowth. I do not complicate his expertise, and he does not threaten my solitude. I drain the remains of the coffee Cory left in the pot and open the laptop computer that sits by his side of the bed. I also have a computer…had. Who knows? It all reminds me of camping in that whatever you bring is too much and too little. Camping! An image: my mother, her hair streaked with charred marshmallow, raving about ants. I type: Hi Mom. Here, well, we’ve made it! We’re getting settled in. Really, Cory is getting settled; I am putting it off. He likes it here. The weather is temperate… I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t name, with certainty, the season. But weather is that thing people talk about to signify their lack of cannibalistic intentions. Boxes. Cory’s things. Now that we are foreign workers or expatriates or roving lumps of meat or whatever we have been officially tabulated as, now that his role is solutions architect and mine is wife, I have become suspicious of him. I want to know what ominous inkblots bloom behind his eyes. It can’t speak well of him, for instance, that he’s ended up with me. At the bottom of the box, I find the lightly spiderwebbed face of a phone and think of the day Cory dropped it onto pavement. We had our own pavement—a long expanse of it—on which we parked, and it connected to roads, roads whose names we knew, and they connected to other roads we still knew but not as well, and on and on like that, this very phone locating us and offering guidance at each juncture until, were we to continue for days, we would eventually hit upon a checkpoint for a new country, and if we crossed it, the phone might work or not work, depending on which arrangements the ranking gods of telecommunications had made on our behalf. Here, it is a block of metal and glass with some dark accumulations of dust and skin, its innards uncoiling beneath the fractures. I press my thumb on the button, and nothing happens, but then it does. A fat smiling picture of the two of us on a hike fills the rectangle. I type the access code and paw through the choices—zap the marbles, splatter the birds. A barrage of stale notifications crosses the screen. I peek into his social media. It’s all held over from before these boxes crossed the ocean, the information posted weeks ago, and it feels like waltzing into a cabinet of cryogenically
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