“What is it like to have a child right now?” she asked her brother after everyone else had gone to sleep, as the fake flames crackled at their feet—and what was it about them that made them fake, she wondered for the hundredth time. “Oh, it’s great,” he told her. “Everything’s on fire, so you no longer have to worry about doing a good job.” His two-year-old son, when asked whether he was a boy or a girl, invariably answered that he was a gun.
