Despite the best efforts of a large and diverse gang of drivers united in their mindlessness, their lawlessness, their fury, and their contempt for pedestrians, Miranda and I arrived alive and uninjured at an intersection just a couple of blocks north of Sip Sak. We paused there a moment to catch our breath, wait for the next light, and entertain revenge fantasies.
    “What do you have in mind?” she asked me.
    “A small but powerful laser device capable of vaporizing even the largest and longest of limousines,” I said.
    “Ah,” she said, “then it’s technology versus biology, because I was imagining a death ray that I could shoot from my eyes, at will, just by wishing.”
    “Just like a woman,” I quipped.
    Suddenly the city’s everyday cacophony was rent by a piercing shriek. Miranda and I turned in its direction and saw that without our noticing a woman had pushed a child in a huge padded stroller to a position next to us. The child persisted in its shrieking. Miranda and I glanced at each other, then turned and started down the block, putting some distance between us and the piercing shrieks.
    We had gone only a few steps when I slowed my pace and said, almost involuntarily, “That poor child.”
    Miranda almost stumbled. “Poor child?” she asked incredulously.
    “Yes,” I said with a sigh. “I hear the anguish in his cry. For the first time, just now, here at this corner, he has felt the horror of his having been born a member of this wretched species. He’s ashamed. It’s shame that makes him cry like that. He’s crying because he finds himself a member of our supremely selfish species, the one that goes on reproducing at the expense of every other living thing on the planet, the one whose members shrug indifferently while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, who treat one another with less respect and civility every day, who shun the sublime and allow the vulgar to dominate their culture, who find a new way to disappoint me every day, a new variation on the supreme disappointment of their not having lived up to their promise, whose social discourse is dominated by the screeching of the ignorant, the superstitious, and the stupid, whose most common reciprocal bond is anger. Sophocles, I think, heard a child shriek like that long ago on the Aegean, and it put him in mind of the turbid ebb and flow of human misery and made him cry, “Why, oh, why couldn’t I have been been a worm, or slug, or any crawling thing nobler than a man?”
    “Ah, yes,” she said. “I see that you’re right. Shriek on, little man. You’ve got a right to cry.”
    We sought solace at Sip Sak, and we found it there. After no more than a few bites of my adana kebap I realized that I was, for a time, just then, a happy creature.
    “I could not possibly be more pleased,” I said to Miranda, and I meant it.