Outside of work, however, Leora had failed to take over the world, or even to try. Instead, not wanting to attract the attention of any more off-kilter individuals—such as seventy-year-old kleptomaniacs obsessed with central Asian Jews, or twenty-one-year-old born-agains with a penchant for capturing endangered species—she tried something she had never tried before: being normal, or at least ordinary, or at the bare minimum, mediocre. It wasn’t so difficult, once she put her mind to it. The lives of most people her age, she determined, could be parceled out into various predictable segments—predictability, of course, being the key factor in being ordinary. An ordinary person, she theorized, was one who could easily divide her life into groups of years so predictable that they could almost be named after different types of cheese. The cheddar cheese years, for a start, during which life is something encased in shrink-wrapped packages decorated with superheroes in brown paper bags, opened only at assigned moments of freedom, when freedom is a burden that forces you to decide where you belong—at the lunch table with the cool kids, or with the nerds? Then there are the mozzarella years, quick years when life comes delivered in a box to your door, as hot and fresh as if you had made it yourself, and you enjoy it in tremendous quantities, and dozens of others eat with you. Much later, some people enter the years of Brie or Camembert, life served in cultured slices, or brought out only for important guests. But in between come the Parmesan years: years when life comes out just a dash at a time, not a thing-in-itself but something to season the unseasoned seasons as you eat through them alone. One could argue that she was assigning too much meaning to cheese. But that’s what life felt like to Leora, as she made herself spaghetti each night in her apartment on West Ninety-second Street and Amsterdam Avenue, her little carved-out point in the coordinate plane of New York.

The big secret of the city of New York is that no matter how much they may try to hide it, white-collar New Yorkers in Manhattan are all out-of-towners. Municipal records show that only twelve people were actually born and raised in Manhattan during the last twenty-five years, and of those, nine are now studio executives in California and the remaining three are pursuing independent research in former Soviet republics. Leora lived in an apartment with two other out-of-towners named Lauren and Melanie, boring people who always answered questions with questions: “I went to SUNY Binghamton? I majored in psychology?” Their jobs were so boring that Leora couldn’t even remember what they did. She vaguely remembered Lauren telling her, tossing her voice up at the end of each sentence, “I keep track of Web sites? For our clients?” Melanie technically did something involving fund-raising, but judging by the number of forwarded e-mail jokes she sent Leora every day from her office account, it seemed unlikely that she ever did any work. Of course, Lauren and Melanie were not the only people Leora lived with on Amsterdam Avenue. During the past three years, she had traded in a roommate at a rate of at least one every nine months as various roommates—all of whom might as well have been named Lauren or Melanie—left to move in with their boyfriends. Survival rates on Amsterdam Avenue were shockingly low.