New Year’s Eve in a Rotterdam garret, the whole block blacked out, bottle rockets rattling the casements: Mistress Mickle, villainess of the children’s game show Barnaby Grudge, off duty and far from home, ate a cold canned hot dog in the dark and pronounced it delicious. These were the last minutes of the old year. She’d come from Surrey to visit her half-brother, Jonas, whom she’d last seen in Boston just before their father had retired to Minorca. Expatriation was the family disease, hereditary: thanks to an immigrant ancestor, they all had Irish passports. The world was their oyster. An oyster was not enough to sustain anyone.

“This happen often?” she asked. “Blackouts, I mean.”

“Off-ten?” he mimicked, then he said, “Nah. I don’t know what’s going on.” His Boston accent was thick as ever, but years in England had bent her diction, and she couldn’t decide which of them should feel superior. The blackout was in its third hour. She’d hated the darkness at first, but it had gone on so long it had become essential. Let the New Year arrive unelectrified, she thought, lit only by pyrotechnics.

Rotterdam did not wait till midnight to celebrate; the enamel tabletop vibrated with the detonations of fireworks, explosion after explosion overhead. It was like life in wartime, if you knew nobody was dying, probably, and the privation would end by morning. She jumped at every salvo; she was a nervous woman. When Jonas fished out a joint she didn’t turn him down, though it had been decades. Maybe it would calm her. Last year she would have had a drink, but she didn’t drink anymore. She was forty-nine, Jonas forty-two, a shock. He had long, insufficient mousy hair he was trying to drum up into dreadlocks and a thick dark beard he’d trimmed to round perfection. Why couldn’t he take care of anything else so well? He was a fuckup. He said so himself. It was as though fucking up were his religion, and he was always looking for a more authentic experience of it: bankrupted by Scientology, busted for selling a stolen antique lamp, fired from an Alaskan cannery for filching salmon, beaten up by a drug dealer—that is, a ham-headed college kid who dealt ecstasy but took only steroids himself. For the past six months, Jonas had lived in this garret, renting the space beneath an Irishwoman’s kitchen table, with access to her stove and sink and toilet and, occasionally, herself. The Irishwoman had gone back to Kilkenny, would return tomorrow. Tonight her bed would be occupied by Mistress Mickle. The Irishwoman must never hear of this. Jonas’s pallet was still spread out under the table at which they now sat, his pillow at Mistress Mickle’s feet.

At eleven thirty the lights came back on.

“Oh good,” said Jonas.

“A shame,” said Mistress Mickle.