If American politics is more religious than it has been for a long time, we are not alone. The world of Islam is undergoing a tremendous religiopolitical revival. I’m not sure I understand what’s behind it. I have the sense that the explanations we read in any paper or see on television are not accurate. September 11 caught us all off guard, and we still have not digested it.

The day I met Harry, he was drunk and desperate. We were in a bar with a group of work colleagues, and he was ranting about how a woman had mistreated him. There was something about fumbled sex on a beach, and a long train ride, and a wound to the heart. His tone was dramatic, misogynistic, and self-pitying. I thought he was the most obnoxious man I had ever met.

One night I meet a client at the ER, she grabs my arm, forces me to her, and says: “This here will heal.” She points to a broken nose, a smashed collarbone, a red eye. “But this won’t.” She thumps her hand against her chest.

I was a shy, awkward sixteen-year-old. I hated the mall, the holidays, and commercialism in general. But for some reason — the money? the challenge? the sheer stupidity of it? — I told my sister I would do it. Being Frosty became my first job ever.

I was riding in the back seat of my Aunt Belle’s Cadillac when my cousin Joanie whispered, “You want some gum?” then leaned over to me and stuck her tongue in my mouth. When she sat back, smiling, I found that she’d left her gum behind. It was gnarled and cold and foreign-tasting, I suppose because it was wet with someone else’s saliva.