Be Secret and Exult

The fourth story in the Comeback series: is it ever really possible to save oneself?

"Belonging, here, was measured in apocalypses."

“'I have been waiting a very long time for you,' she said. 'Hours.'”

A true story about the complicated, painful experience of helping, and being helped.

"What's it say about bears in the contract?"

The third story in the Comeback series, in which transit worker Alvin Alterman wrestles with some of the inconveniences associated with the end of civilization.

The definition of insanity, they say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That may be so—but it is also, I would suggest, the definition of love.

A true story about three arrivals in New York City, and everything that followed.

The second story in the Comeback series.

"When you’re young, you trust your parents to know everything, including the names of the dangers in the world, like traffic and pneumonia. Then you get older, like me, and you see how much they haven’t told you. And the question is whether they think they’re protecting you by not telling you these things, or whether they just can’t see what’s really out there in the world."

The story of a family struggling to adapt amid an ecological anti-catastrophe, an apocalypse of abundance.

"I can almost guarantee you that this will not go wrong."

A true story about answering a ringing pay phone on a lonely San Francisco night, and what it means to be secret and exult.