Once, after visiting a New York City firehouse, she asked me why the firemen were so small. That stumped me—they were all pretty big, and one was truly a giant. “They’re not small, they’re big,” I answered. Xana thought about that for a moment. “Not compared to the buildings they go into,” she said. Xana had somehow summarized our relationship with a vast universe that doesn’t seem to care or even notice if we die.
