By Sunday, Debra has returned to her real life. Her weekend with me had only been a brief game. I stand alone in my kitchen, drinking coffee and watching the city through my window. The wet Virginia heat is auditioning...

Two hundred thousand years of human evolution and this is what I'm doing with it - sitting in a cracked bathtub with a faded plastic tumbler of boxed wine in one hand, a damp cigarette in the other, and a...