"You're going to get a lot of nice wedding presents," she says. "I don't want to spoil any surprises, but you'll get two coffee makers. You should probably keep them both. You might break one."

"What else?" says the man.

"You want to know if you'll have kids, right? Yeah, you'll have kids, a couple of them. Smart kids. Smart grandkids too. Redheads. Do you garden?"

The man and woman look at each other. They shrug.

"Well, I see a garden," the fortune-teller says. "Yes, a garden, definitely. You'll grow roses. Roses and tomatoes. Moses supposes his toeses are roses. But Moses supposes erroneously. Do you know that song? Squashes. Is that right?"

"Cole Porter. Squash," the man says. "Squash is the plural of squash."

"Okay," the fortune-teller says. "Squash, plural not singular, and tomatoes and roses. That's when you get older. What else do you want to know?"

"We get old together?" the woman says.

"Well, looks like," the fortune-teller says, "um, it looks good to me. Yeah. You get old together. White hair and everything. You grow things in the garden, your grandkids come over, you have friends, they come over too. It's a party every night." She turns the boot over and studies the heel. "Huh."

"What?" the woman says.

"How you met. That's sweet. Look here." The fortune-teller points to the worn-down tread. "It was a blind date. See what I mean about luck?"

"You can see that in her shoe?" the man says.

"Yeah," the fortune-teller says. "Plain as anything. Just like the garden and the grandkids. Blind date, first kiss, hunh! The next date, she invited you over for dinner. She washed the sheets first. Do you want me to go on?"

"Where will we live?" the woman says. "Do we fight about money? Does he still snore when he gets old? His sense of humor – does he still tell the same dumb jokes?"

"Look," the fortune-teller says, "You'll have a good life. You don't want all the details, do you? Go home, make wedding plans, get married. You should probably get married inside. I think it might rain. I'm not good at weather. You'll be happy, I promise. I'm good at the happy stuff. It's what I see best. You want to know about snoring, or breast cancer, or mortgages, go see the woman next door who reads tea leaves."

She says, "You'll get old together. You'll be comfortable together. I promise. Trust me. I can see you, then, the two of you, you'll be sitting in your garden. There's dirt under your fingernails. You're drinking lemonade. I can't tell if it's homemade or not, but it's perfect. Not too sweet. You're remembering I told you this. Remember I told you this. How lucky you were, to find each other! You'll be comfortable together, like an old pair of shoes."

MOST OF MY FRIENDS ARE TWO-THIRDS WATER

"Okay, Joe. As I was saying, our Martian women are gonna be blond, because, see, just because."

– RAY BRADBURY, "The Concrete Mixer"

A few years ago, Jack dropped the C from his name and became Jak. He called me up at breakfast one morning to tell me this. He said he was frying bacon for breakfast and that all his roommates were away. He said that he was walking around stark naked. He could have been telling the truth, I don't know. I could hear something spitting and hissing in the background that could have been bacon, or maybe it was just static on the line.

Jak keeps a journal in which he records the dreams he has about making love to his ex-girlfriend Nikki, who looks like Sandy Duncan. Nikki is now married to someone else. In the most recent dream, Jak says, Nikki had a wooden leg. Sandy Duncan has a glass eye in real life. Jak calls me up to tell me this dream.

He calls to say that he is in love with the woman who does the Braun coffee-maker commercial, the one with the short blond hair, like Nikki, and eyes that are dreamy and a little too far apart. He can't tell from the commercial if she has a wooden leg, but he watches TV every night, in the hopes of seeing her again.

If I were blond, I could fall in love with Jak.

Jak calls me with the first line of a story. Most of my friends are two-thirds water, he says, and I say that this doesn't surprise me. He says, no, that this is the first line. There's a Philip K. Dick novel, I tell him, that has a first line like that, but not exactly and I can't remember the name of the novel. I am listening to him while I clean out my father's refrigerator. The name of the Philip K. Dick novel is Confessions of a Crap Artist, I tell Jak. What novel, he says.

He says that he followed a woman home from the subway, accidentally. He says that he was sitting across from her on the Number 1 uptown and he smiled at her. This is a bad thing to do in New York when there isn't anyone else in the subway car, traveling uptown past 116th Street, when it's one o'clock in the morning, even when you're Asian and not much taller than she is, even when she made eye contact first, which is what Jak says she did. Anyway he smiled and she looked away. She got off at the next stop, 125th, and so did he. 125th is his stop. She looked back and when she saw him, her face changed and she began to walk faster.

Was she blond, I ask, casually. I don't remember, Jak says. They came up onto Broadway, Jak just a little behind her, and then she looked back at him and crossed over to the east side. He stayed on the west side so she wouldn't think he was following her. She walked fast. He dawdled. She was about a block ahead when he saw her cross at La Salle, towards him, towards Claremont and Riverside, where Jak lives on the fifth floor of a rundown brownstone. I used to live in this building before I left school. Now I live in my father's garage. The woman on Broadway looked back and saw that Jak was still following her. She walked faster. He says he walked even more slowly.

By the time he came to the corner market on Riverside, the one that stays open all night long, he couldn't see her. So he bought a pint of ice cream and some toilet paper. She was in front of him at the counter, paying for a carton of skim milk and a box of dish detergent. When she saw him, he thought she was going to say something to the cashier but instead she picked up her change and hurried out of the store.

Jak says that the lights on Claremont are always a little dim and fizzy, and sounds are muffled, as if the street is under water. In the summer, the air is heavier and darker at night, like water on your skin. I say that I remember that. He says that up ahead of him, the woman was flickering under the street light like a light bulb. What do you mean, like a light bulb? I ask. I can hear him shrug over the phone. She flickered, he says. I mean like a light bulb. He says that she would turn back to look at him, and then look away again. Her face was pale. It flickered.

By this point, he says, he wasn't embarrassed. He wasn't worried anymore. He felt almost as if they knew each other. It might have been a game they were playing. He says that he wasn't surprised when she stopped in front of his building and let herself in. She slammed the security door behind her and stood for a moment, glaring at him through the glass. She looked exactly the way Nikki looked, he says, when Nikki was still going out with him, when she was angry at him for being late or for misunderstanding something. The woman behind the glass pressed her lips together and glared at Jak.

He says when he took his key out of his pocket, she turned and ran up the stairs. She went up the first flight of stairs and then he couldn't see her anymore. He went inside and took the elevator up to the fifth floor. On the fifth floor, when he was getting out, he says that the woman who looked like Nikki was slamming shut the door of the apartment directly across from his apartment. He heard the chain slide across the latch.