The other employees have left for the weekend O-Bon holiday. Japanese days of the dead. Late summer is the scary joyful season. Haunted houses, dancing, and fireworks. Fear helps people chill. It isn't helping you, maybe because you're a foreigner. Gaijin .

"[L]ike everything else in their lives, it's not going to be a traditional happily-ever anything. Magic's easy. Relationships are tough."

On the fourth night of the trip, the night after Oklahoma City and the night before Flagstaff, we went to Roswell. How could we not?

Once our genes were our own, / or we were theirs,