. . . our sister got caught in the flames. It seemed she liked to hide in the library and secretly read the books. Sometimes she slept there. She was woken by alarms and had to jump out of a window but she got badly burnt and cut.

I think she’s forgiven us. She’s a very forgiving person.

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Beth liked the story of Monsieur Chabert the Fire King, who had, in 1818, became known for not only eating and breathing fire but also stepping into a four-hundred-degree oven with a raw leg of mutton, then emerging at a proper time with the leg in hand perfectly cooked.

Skin of men is characteristically thicker than skin of women in all anatomic locations. It is thickest on the palms and soles and thinnest on the eyelids and postauricular region.

Even so, Beth wishes she knew how Monsieur Chabert had done it because she herself feels eminently flammable.

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Beth is my twin but we don’t look much alike. That’s my fault though, and Edward’s.

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Edward said he didn’t feel guilty about the fire. Said war had casualties. I said what war?

He ran away and tried to find one.

I had postcards from him from time to time.

In Europe in the early seventies, he said that every young conscionable citizen of the world was becoming a freedom fighter. So he went to Germany and wrote “Don’t argue—destroy” on a wall. He was smitten with the chic young Ulrike Meinhof and was hoping a bit of slogan daubing would get him some notice by “people who knew people.” Wish you were here, he said.

He went to Italy, where a Roman called Francesca took him to the universities of northern Italy where counter-right-wing feeling had distilled into organized revolutionary resistance.

Francesca claimed to be one of the founding members of the Red Brigade and showed him how to make a bomb out of soap.

He told Francesca he’d burnt down his school, and she took him to bed. He probably didn’t mention burning his sister in the process. I guess that would be a turnoff.

Edward wrote to me about fascism, the function of universities, the glorious tradition of kidnapping. He spoke about the resistance movement across Europe becoming unified through the desire to end the imperialist feudal system and through a generalized opposition to the Vietnam War. Wish you were here, he wrote.

He told me to join the Angry Brigade. I told him I’d joined an airline company. I told him to come home.

He said I shouldn’t feel guilty about the school incident but it was all right to feel sad for the victims. Or, rather, victim. I said I felt both in huge measures.

Edward told me it was excellent that I had become an air stewardess. He said that the Baader-Meinhof and the Palestinians were starting to hijack planes and he felt the movement should have someone on the inside. I said what movement? He said THE movement. He had started to talk in capitals.