She lights a candle for the Russians trapped in their submarine (they were communicating by banging a metal door with their tools, they didn’t have much oxygen left, and the sea was freezing). She’s like that. She prays for Russians she doesn’t know, who won’t be saved. I hate spots. I huffed too much glue in high school and one night I understood that the spots on my arms were spiders embedded in my skin. I tried to cut them out with a knife. My father kicked me in the face and saved me. He also broke my jaw. They wired it shut and I spent weeks drinking soup through a straw. Quitting glue isn’t easy. You wake up and your fingernails are full of plaster dust from scratching the walls all night. “Only pain makes you feel better,” my father told me. It’s true. His kick put me on a new path. I didn’t go back to school, where the teacher had told us, “Study, boys, or you’ll end up being journalists.” I wanted to sink down into journalism. Instead, I rose up on a scaffold as a window cleaner.
