My dad knows absolutely nothing about the eighties. I have to interview him for my seventh-grade social studies class and he knows nothing. He says he can’t remember anything about the cars or the hair or the clothes or the music or anything. He says the economy sucked and that was a Republican thing but other than that nothing stands out for him. He says the most significant thing about the eighties was that was when he first met my mother and when me and my sister were both born. Those two things. That’s it. When I tell him it’s not supposed to be about personal stuff he says what else is there? I tell him I need stuff about style and fads and what was going on in the country at the time and he says none of that has anything to do with reality; that reality is an “internal affair” and all the rest of that stuff is just superficial and a lie—like the news. He says the news is all lies and the reason it’s so popular is that it sells itself as all truth and people believe it because they’d rather believe in a lie. The truth is too much for them to swallow. That’s what he says. I tell him this is just supposed to be a simple assignment thing about the decade of the eighties, not about “reality” and the “news,” but he says you can’t exclude the question of reality; that the question of reality supersedes all the other questions about hair and cars and music and things like that. Then he says he can’t even remember living through the eighties and that maybe he wasn’t even alive back then, but then he had to have been he says because he remembers meeting my mother, and me and my sister were both born back then. He repeats that. My dad’s fucking crazy. He is. I didn’t realize it for a long time but he is. My sister knows more about the eighties than my dad does and she’s only a year or so older than me. She’s in the ninth grade. She knows all kinds of things—don’t ask me how—like the way they used to wear their pants back then in this weird tapered style where they actually folded the pant leg inside their zip-up boots and the girls wore ripped up fishnet stockings and cheap white cotton gloves trying to imitate Madonna, who I guess was the bomb in music back then, or Michael Jackson, who’d just started bleaching his black skin, or Bob Seger, who I thought was only known for that dumb “Like a Rock” Chevy commercial. Then, on top of that, she knows all kinds of political stuff like Russia not being Russia anymore and the Berlin Wall coming down, and I ask her how she knows things like that and she says because she was there. “Yeah, right,” I say, and she says, “Yeah, I can prove it,” and she runs upstairs to her bedroom and comes back down with a chunk of painted concrete about the size of a cheeseburger and sets it down on the kitchen counter right in front of me and my dad. “What’s that?” I say, and she says, “That’s a piece of the Berlin Wall.”