It worked. And it wasn’t just as a reporter that Leora excelled, as might easily have been the case. No, Leora had also mastered the feature story, the human interest story, the sort of story that parents clipped out of magazines and mailed to their grown children. She had an eye for detail, could paint the perfect gut-wrenching image, knew just where to place a heart-stopping quote. She was praised for her work, even receiving the occasional letter to the editor drooling over her “moving” stories, her “sensitivity.” It was easy, being a barbarian. You could take over the whole world if you wanted to.

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.