When I got home, Victor was standing in the kitchen knee-deep in shopping bags. He’d bought more food than we normally eat in a month, and was trying to find room for it all in our tiny kitchen. When he saw me standing in the door, he put down a jar of peanut butter he was trying to wedge between some soup cans, waded across the sea of plastic bags, and hugged me hard. Normally when I come home Victor peeks out from behind some book about minstrels and barely raises an eyebrow. It’s not that he isn’t glad to see me; he just likes to greet me in his own time. It’s as if there are two Victors, and between the intellectual Victor engaged in an ongoing critique of the suppression of conflict and the Victor who rubs my toes when I’m cold there is a powerful force field, and each day, like a superhero morphing back into his normal life, Victor must cross back through it to get me.

“Hi,” I said into the flannel of his shirt.

“I was worried,” said Victor. “I tried to call you at the museum to come home early.”

“Why? Was there more news? Why didn’t you call my cell phone?”

I’d had the phone since a month after 9/11; my father had insisted. But he and my mother were the only ones who called me on it. Victor did not yet believe in being reached.

“No. They’re giving instructions on how to seal the windows with duct tape, but they’re not saying why. I went to the supermarket.”

We both looked around the kitchen at the bags of apricots and pears, the cheese wrapped in butcher paper, the loaves of bread, the chocolate bars and pints of ice cream, the cold cuts and condiments, the plastic tubs of dips and spreads.

“I can see.”

“The store was being emptied. I grabbed what I could,” Victor said. “I’m going to make you dinner,” he said, nipping my ear between his lips.

Victor is a talented cook, and in the ten minutes it took me to change into my sweatpants and curl up on the sofa in front of the TV, the apartment was already filled with the smell of something good simmering on the stove. I watched as the news channel flashed images of ransacked shelves at the supermarkets and lines snaking out onto the street outside the distribution centers, and then the picture cut to a little girl with blond curls and a nose crusted with snot trying to work a gas mask down over her face. When I looked up from the TV screen I caught a reflection of myself in the window, tucked under a blanket like a child before a hurricane, and I realized that I was full of happy anticipation. Outside the world was cold and dark, but inside the rooms were lit with the yellow glow of lamps, and, waiting for Victor to call me for dinner, I felt the rush of pleasure that I used to seek in the made-up games of my childhood, where all things were eclipsed by the singular goal of survival.