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empty their mailbox. Had he bumped her ass in jest, or simply to mean Will you hurry? They had two names on their mailbox. Soon they’d have just one.
    I was reading Montaigne’s Apologie de Raimond Sebond that afternoon, and was sitting in a relatively quiet corner of Café Algiers drinking an iced coffee that was to last me at least two and a half hours. Nursing a drink is one thing. But watching your ice cubes melt and turn the watered-down brew into clear soup and still pretend that your glass is half full was like trying to preserve the polar icecaps with a paper fan.
    Then I heard him. He was sitting at a table not far from mine, speaking French. Correction: he wasn’t speaking. He didn’t speak; instead, he rapid-fired machine-gun style, in bursts and sputters. Rat-tat-tat , he took down civilization, Western and Eastern, no difference, he hated them both. Cranky, jittery, crazed, strafing his way from one subject to the next—it didn’t matter which—he’d mow it down. Rat-tat-tat , like shattered glass spun in a blender. Rat-tat-tat , like a jackhammer, like a chainsaw, like a power drill, every syllable spiked with venom, vengeance, and vitriol.
    I had no idea who he was, what exactly he was talking about, or why he kept raising his voice, but in this underground café on a quiet midsummer Sunday afternoon, his was the only voice you heard.
    Oui, oui, oui — rat-tat-tat . Bien sûr, bien sûr — rat-tat, rat-tat . Et pourquoi pas? — rat-tat-tat-tat? Long sentences, spoken with spitfire accuracy, while all around him sat cigarettes, napkins, matches, a cheap lighter, home keys, car keys, leftover change from his previous coffee before he’d decided to order a second and then a third—debris strewn helter-skelter about his table like the spat-out bullet shells of his hysterical prattle. Rat-tat-tat , down with capitalists, communists, liberals and conservatives, Old World, New World, the League of Nations, the Arab League, the League of Women Voters, the Catholic League, the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, down with them all! Whites, blacks, men, women, Jews, gays, lesbians, rich, poor, cats, dogs—a flint storm of curses as unmistakably North African French as the cicadas on sleepy Mediterranean afternoons when they drown out every other sound with the raspy musketry of their hindquarters.
    At that moment he was fulminating against white Americans, les amerloques , as he called them. Americans loved all things jumbo and ersatz, he was saying. As long as it was artificial and double the value if you bought five times the size you’d ever need, no white American homemaker could resist. Their continental breakfasts are jumbo-ersatz, their extra-long cigarettes are jumbo-ersatz, their huge steak dinners with whopping all-you-can-eat salads are jumbo-ersatz, their refilled mugs of all-you-can-drink coffee, their faux-mint mouthwash with triple-pack toothpaste and extra toothbrushes thrown in for the value, their cars, their malls, their universities, even their monster television sets and spectacular big-screen epics, all, all of it, jumbo-ersatz. American women with breast implants, nose jobs, and perennially tanned figures—jumbo-ersatz. American women with smaller breasts, contact lenses, mouth spray, hair spray, nose spray, foot spray, scent spray, vaginal spray—no less ersatz than their oversized sisters. American women who were just happy to have found a man to talk to in a crowded café on a midsummer afternoon in Cambridge, Mass. would sooner or later turn out to be jumbo-ersatz all the same. Their lank, freckled toddlers fed on sapless, bland-ersatz, white-ersatz bread and swaddled in ready-to-wear, over-the-counter, prefab, preshrunk, one-size-fits-all, poly-reinforced clothes couldn’t be more bland-ersatz than their big, tall, fast-food lumbering football giant daddies with outsized shoes, penis enlargers, and sculpted, washboard, eight-pack abs who personify the essence of all that