She said she wanted to go to the end of the world for her birthday. January was born on the last day of August. She was convinced her parents changed her name at the last minute because it was the hottest summer of their century. It's a quarter past eight in the morning on July 31st, and we are still two thousand, six hundred, fifty-nine miles away from her end of the world. I leaned against the radiator and watched January spend an hour staring at the closet before choosing her three prettiest summer dresses. She then tucked half a dozen of her favorite socks between two thick sweaters and closed the suitcase. We left on a snowy March afternoon. Three days later, a blackout shrouded the city. It lasted twelve days and reset two million lives. During the layover, January decided to make a list of things she wanted to do. But in the end, she made a list of things she would never do again. She would never read a book under fluorescent light after eight, would never fly without compression socks, and would never go to a movie, bookstore, café, dam, apple orchard, desert, or baseball game with anyone. She finally stopped after five pages. January switched with me at a salt-worn gas station overlooking the Pacific. For the next six hours, we saw nothing but mountains, the sea, more mountains and sea, some seagulls, and then mountains and sea again, all the way until we left the tsunami zone. We checked into the only motel in town. January jumped into the pool with her favorite white socks on. I looked forward to a hot shower. The next morning, the motel manager gave us a bag of pears and two seat cushions as an apology for the cold shower. He was right about both. We finished the pears in the first two hours and spent another seven hours on the washboard roads. Our little city car almost made it. The Saab cost us five jobs and three poker nights back at the port. To fix her up, we spent ten days at the town square. I stared at the tourists with a pencil. January sat by the fountain in her thick sweater and sang a song in a language I didn't understand. Apparently, people tend to be generous on vacation. January was a devoted member of the insomnia club. The night is infinite when you can't sleep, so naturally, she took on the role of a spectator. Every night, she sat by the window in a pair of cable-knit socks and watched a stream of optimists lining up around the block, hoping for a chance to try their luck. By three o'clock, they would be spat back out, always empty-handed. We spent the night of January's birthday inside the Saab. I looked at the snowplow outside and thought about the stars and wondered if there was a place for them to go after their time was over. When I woke up, January had changed into her summer dress and put on a pair of pink two-tone socks. She smiled at me and told me she found the way to the end of the world. As it turned out, January's end of the world was only three days away, and you could get there by daily ferry. But in the end, January decided not to go to the end of the world. Brooklyn, April 25th