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Marhaver's fascination with the plague hadn't ebbed a bit in the first month(s) of its advent. Each night he stands in his lonely cellwindow with the anticipation of a child on some monstrously deformed Christmas Eve. They demarcate the sky like fat, autonomous confetti, creating whirlwinds that possess his consciousness (,) with the ease and grandeur of a sonicboom. / And Marhaver might consider himself some kind of pervert, some kind of voyeur with a heart devastated by animosity. But this is not to be. / His curiosity is largely academic, and yet not so unpersonal he declaims responsibility. He is a geek's academic, a child's ideal professional. Marhaver remembers the old truism that what takes place twice will take place three times, and so rightly suspects that a third plague will follow sometime in the near future. But he is at a loss to guess what this thing might be. After all, Marhaver was the last American generation of his field, and he should not be held to ...

What became of Great/Grandma Mischa is anybody's guess. Most people of her time would've been defined almost exclusively by their occupations or the role they played in family.  There'd be birthreceipts, taxes collected and so forth. Mischa... We can't even be sure what her last name was.  Why, how is any of this even a question, then? Because it was Mischa who packed 8-year-old Laura's crazy wooden suitcase for her to send her to America sometime in 1918.  Laura has virtually no memory of this. Mischa stayed in the old world, like some shadow filling a stone window. Laura says, (in the sense of said) that Mischa did her best in her household-Italian to explain to the man at the train station that she could feel her life coming down around her, that she was ready 'to take a trip on the old razor highway' as it were and that this lonesome child was all she had to give back to the world if this kind stranger in his felt/leather cap would only let the child on ...