I used to write stories that had lakes, that had deep blue waters shelled by the sky; water mucky and full of disease; I wrote stories where people used to break down and cry unbidden, unprovoked, just because of the way a stone looked when it was wet, or the way the wind ruffled the grass; the people in those stories might jump to violence unprovoked; they wore teal windbreakers and rolled packs of cigarettes into their T-shirts; some swore up and down to God Almighty and drank slugs from tail-boy beer cans (those were the same ones who might kick a mutt unprovoked, even kill it, the sharp snap of a dog’s jaw breaking, the sound of a wooden chopstick being pried apart). I had characters who walked alone in dust-moted houses, plains pressing like gaping mouths against the windows, while they considered how to cope with abuses; furnaces popped on in basements, and there was always the sickly smell of fuel oil that saturated everything. I used to produce characters, American loners, who …