leaned forward across the table and spoke to Cassandra, softly but with great urgency, his small dark hands gripping the edge of the table so hard the cloth rippled and the saltshaker leaned, waiting to fall. As Mary stood at the door she lost whatever sense of familiarity she'd developed with Cassandra. In their shared attitude of intense, secretive conversation Cassandra and Jamal looked surreal and hyperbolic, freaks from a ragged traveling circus, full of perversities and little crimes and an insane, giggling wisdom. Mary was fighting an impulse to simply turn and leave when Cassandra spotted her. Jamal saw her an instant later, and sat back in his chair so quickly he might have been a parody of apprehended guilt.
“Surprise,” Cassandra said, as Mary walked smiling to the table. “They had to close the whole kindergarten today, something lethal seems to have gotten into the pipes. It was too late to call you, so I just brought Jamal along.”
“That's great,” Mary said, though she was surprised to find herself irritated by the notion of having Jamal all through lunch. He was her grandson, what was wrong with her?
“Hi, honey,” she said to him. She bent to kiss him and he allowed himself to be kissed without indicating that he desired it in any way. He could be such a remote child, so silent and vague, although a second ago he'd seemed to have no reluctance about talking to Cassandra. Mary tried to care for him, to feel connected, and sometimes she managed it, but more often the feeling simply slipped away from her and she looked at Jamal as if he were anyone's child, balky and undemonstrative, a little dull. It might have helped, Mary thought, if he resembled her more. If he hadn't had such purplish lips, and all that woolly hair.
“We've been shooting at passersby,” Cassandra said. “So far we've bagged an even dozen.”
Mary took a chair from another table and sat down. This is a child, she admonished herself. He only wants the things all children want.
“So they closed the school, did they?” she said cheerfully to Jamal.
“They say it'll be open again tomorrow,” Cassandra said. “Every now and then disaster strikes, and you get a day off.”
“Well,” Mary said. “Isn't it nice to have a day off?”
“We thought we'd go up to Central Park after lunch,” Cassandra said. “Want to come?”
“We'll see,” Mary said. “Jamal, what.do you think you'd like for lunch?”
Jamal looked at Mary with such uncertainty, such naked absence of recognition, that she wondered, as she did periodically, if he was in fact of normal intelligence. Maybe they should take him in for tests.
“I'm having a cheeseburger,” Cassandra said, “because I'm beyond caring.”
“Cheeseburger,” jamal whispered.
“Two, then,” Cassandra said. “Mary, a salad for you?”
“I suppose,” she said.
Jamal turned to the window, pointed his finger at an elderly man passing by, and said, “Zzzip.”
“Got him,” Cassandra said. “Nice fat one.” To Mary she added, “We take no prisoners.”
“I see,” Mary said.
Jamal shifted in his seat, aimed his finger at a couple sitting at the next table, and said, “Zzzip.”
“Turn around, honey,” Cassandra said. “And put that thing away, it's rude to shoot your luncheon companions.”
Mary was surprised to see that Jamal obeyed. Suddenly his strangeness and all strangeness evaporated, and he and Cassandra could have been any ordinary parent and child, trying to get through the usual negotiations of leniency and demand, of adoration and propriety.
“Do you like playing cowboy?” Mary asked Jamal, who looked at her, once again, with an expression of utter incomprehension, as if not only her words but she herself were unprecedented, and quite possibly dangerous.
“Perfectly civil question, Jamal,” Cassandra said. “Perhaps it would be an interesting conversational gambit to tell your grand-mother about the Planet Sark.”
“I beg your pardon?” Mary said.
Jamal looked down at the tabletop as if it, too, was unutterably foreign.
“The Planet Sark is where Jamal comes from,” Cassandra said. “It's the medium-bright star just slightly to the left of Orion's belt. He isn't shooting bullets at these people, because on his planet murder isn't just forbidden, it's impossible. Sarkians can't kill any more than you or I could decide to stop breathing. It's involuntary. However, when confronted by a particularly irritating individual it is possible to zap them with a special gun that renders them invisible, and I don't mind telling you, the world is filling up fast with invisible citizens these days. They go on about their business, they go on being rude and mean and