It was a magical sound: glass cracking on tile, on glass, glass landing in a soft thud on dry patches on grass, shattering glass competing with cries of stray cats in heat in the alley behind the apartment complex. Sophia sat on her faux-adobe balcony and listened, watched the silhouettes move behind Venetian blinds, the man with his hand raised, his voice lowered, whatever woman was in there that week screaming back.

This was her first apartment, a tiny, carpeted studio with a half-fridge and built-in microwave and skinny dishwasher that left sticky bits clinging to the plates. Her father had come out to Arizona to help her find a place, the August before her last year of college began. The landlord spoke only to him. The swamp cooler worked fine, he'd said – rarely a need for the expense of air conditioning - but the water was undrinkable. "We only drink stuff from bottles here," he'd said.

Stray cats milled around the apartments and the lot, tens of them, all related and interrelated, crying in the midday heat, in the steamy night. Gray ones with stripes and creamsicle-colored kitty, one with an almost houndstooth pattern of white and yellow, a black one with a heart-shaped blaze of gold. Such beautiful cats, and so indifferent.

Across from the complex was an empty lot where the cats rolled in the dirt to cool themselves, the old bungalows razed to make way for a block of Philadelphia-style brownstones, but then there were the attacks and the economy sunk and the project was stalled and now there was only the empty lot and the quiet sky. Sophia's father was stranded there. He had moved into a motel in Mesa. Found a bar he liked. Discovered the mall. All the things he'd railed against her whole life, from eating fast food to purchasing goods made in China, he now embraced. It had taken Sophia her whole life to align herself with his red-diaper baby principals, but it had taken him just once month to abandon them in favor of becoming an American.

From time to time he came by to check on her, knocking on her door, calling the phone she never answered. Sophia would steel herself against the sheetrock wall, the fabric of her batiked bedspread billowing against her back. She held her breath until he skulked away, and then she would return to her reading, the silence punctuated only by the violent bursts from across the lawn.

Sophia's balcony faced the man's. There were two rows of two-story apartments, painted desert pink, in a little block of brilliant, soddy green. A line of palm trees disrupted the view, but only slightly. Between the choppy fronds Sophia could make out the comings and goings of his apartment, all the busy life he packed into 553 square feet.

In the evenings, when she should have been studying for anthropology tests or writing letters to political prisoners or folding up her father's old neglected tie-dyes, she sat out there and watched the sad sitcom of the man's life. She watched what he watched on television: Jeopardy, usually, and sometimes The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, sometimes reruns of Friends. Sometimes C-SPAN all day long, the incessant instant replay of the act of terror – she corrected the TV's grammar.

The man refused to settle politely into any one demographic. She watched him wrap his lips around a bottle of beer, watched him love the beer and the women love him, wrap their arms around his widening belly, his back to their fronts. A little Mexican girl, a too-tall black woman, some Nordic goddess, like he was visiting every possibility, trying every flavor of woman. Sometimes she would see the same one a week or two, sometimes only once. She never saw him pull his lips back from the bottle and place them on a woman's, never saw him twist to face her, this week's girl.

This was better than television, she thought, the man's weekly brawl, better than a bar.

He looked like a cartoon character of a man: a big belly reaching out from under his tattered t-shirts, bow-legged. His hands and feet seemed stuck on at funny angles and he'd gone too long without a haircut and the hair – orange hair, orange with lighter shades of gold like a tabby cat – stuck out in staticky clumps and he was so loud, too loud, a booming laugh, a booming voice, he took up too much space and Sophia had only lived there a week when she had to admit he was The Cutest Boy in the World.

"He's disgusting," said Harmony, Sophia's former roommate from the dorms. She would stand below Sophia's balcony or call her on the phone, trying to coax her back to campus.

"No," Sophia said.

"Sophia, if you want a boy, I'll find you a boy. Come on back to the dorms. They're not all Mormons."

"No," she said.

Sophia did not want a boy. She'd had too many already.

The man did his laundry Thursday mornings. Sophia saw him when she rode her blue Schwinn cruiser past him on the way to campus, and when she glided by he would raise his hand in one hard wave.

Then one Thursday he called, "Hey. New girl."

She stopped.

"What's burning?" he asked.

"What? Nothing." She sniffed the air. "Nothing."

"I mean what's up? That's how we say what's up in Phoenix."

"No it isn't." He had dimples that dug into his cheeks, shiny teeth poking from his smile, lines around his eyes that curled like a pointer finger beckoning Sophia forward.

He said. "I'm just trying to figure out what's on fire." The he stuck out his chubby hand and said, "Maybe it's you." He laughed. He squeezed her fingers. "I'm Gerry."

It was 9 o'clock in the morning and she smelled liquor on his breath.

Gerry's next girl looked a little like Sophia, part Asian, maybe half-Japanese. She could match him beer for beer, their bottles lined up like reverse dentils along the balcony wall, and she was pretty and skinny and dressed like a twelve-year old boy and she laughed very loud, loud as Gerry, and laughter seeped out his apartment and pounded against Sophia's. She couldn't sleep.

The girl had a beautiful, high, clear voice and Sophia heard her sing in the evenings, in the shower, while Gerry watched the TV. There was no screaming. Sometimes the girl would raise her voice – it beveled through the palm trees and reached Sophia's balcony - but he responded in a low, even tone, made her calm and quiet and she led him to the bed and Sophia didn't look anymore.

The next night the girl was screaming, throwing plates and cups and bottles. An old lady called out from her apartment for Gerry to Shut The Fuck Up. The cops came, silent but with the lights flashing, Gerry with his chubby hands on the door, nodding politely, saying loud enough for the whole complex to hear, "Won't happen again."

Then the girl was gone. She just didn't want him.

"Who would?" Harmony asked.

"I don't know," Sophia said. "Someone. Me."

Harmony had turned 21 already, and graduated to the bars. She would call Sophia, late at night, and tell her about the boys she met there, a different boy each week. "Come to Throop Street," she said. "There's this tall blond guy. He's alone."

"I'm not old enough."

"I'll sneak you in. I'm friends with the bouncer now."

"No," Sophia said.

"I wish you didn't move out," she said, and Sophia could hear the alcohol swirling in Harmony's voice. "Why did you leave me all alone in the dorms?"

Sophia said, "No."

In the morning, next to the dumpster, a paper bag sat filled with crystal and porcelain shards. Sophia stared at it, at the patterns in the glass, when Gerry stood next to her.

"It's okay," he said. "They're from the Salvation Army. There's more where that came from."

He wore a gold band on his wedding finger.

"I'm divorced," he said. "I got too fat to get the ring off." He chuckled. It made his whole chest shake. "Don't worry, I didn't kill her or anything. Don't get all scared," he said. "How's the apartment?"

"Good."

"Cats not bothering you?"

"Which cats?" She looked up at him now and his back faced the morning sun, all that gold red hair shining around the silhouette of his body.

"Sometimes the street cats get up on the balcony. Mrs. Sweeny feeds them, the old lady at the end."

"Mrs. Shut the Fuck Up," said Sophia.

Gerry's red face turned a little redder. "Just don't feed them and eventually they'll go away."

"They're not bothering me," Sophia said.

"They will."

They stared across the street to the big hole in the desert and Gerry said, "God Bless the empty lot."

All day she moved through the university, along the concrete, through Brutalist buildings thinking of that smell, the beer, the pasty slice of hair stuck to his forehead and how he spoke to her.

Summer waned in Phoenix, moved into monsoon. Ineffable heat, like standing in the gust of a bus exhaust pipe in an East Coast heat wave, but stronger. The air filled with moisture but refused to rain. Airplanes returned to the sky after a long absence, and the bellowing boom of low-flying aircraft rumbled above their heads.

Sophia's father appeared in the parking lot in new khaki pants with fierce creases running through the knees, a Hawaiian shirt, Oakley sunglasses fastened to his head with straps. No more Birkenstocks, no more dashikis, the costumes that had mortified her throughout her childhood but which now she missed.

She said, "You can go home now. The planes work again."

"Oh no," he told her, leaning against the streak-free surface of his newly rented Ford: an American car. An SUV. "I'm loving it here. Who needs winter? Who needs fall? I'm going to learn to play golf," he said, beaming. "I'm going to learn to golf on a field of kelly green in the middle of the desert. Does this country never cease to amaze you?"

"What's with the patriotic crap? I thought you were a communist."

"There's a war on, honey. Support Our Troops."

"By golfing?"

Her father wiped desert dust from the windshield.

"No," he said. "By getting a hot fudge sundae and maybe doing some shopping. Keep that economy rolling. You want to come?"

Sophia shook her head. She said, "It's like quicksand, this town."

The landlord had lied about the swamp cooler. It cooled nothing, not in monsoon. Sophia stood outside on her little balcony in the evening and Gerry sat outside on his. He'd rigged a garden hose over the eaves, duct-taped a plastic cup to the end so cold water sprayed in a gentle shower. He had no women in his house.

"You want a beer?" he called over the palm trees.

"I don't know," she said.

He held up a green bottle. "It's cold."

She climbed the steps to his balcony. She didn't look in his apartment, just sat down next to him on a cloth lawn chair and he handed her the beer and it was so cold in her hands. She pressed it to her forehead and then to her chest.

"Why aren't you drinking?" he asked.

"I'm not old enough."

"How old are you?

"Twenty," she said. "Twenty-one next week."

He laughed. "That's not old enough? In what country?" He slipped the beer from her hands and pressed it to her lips and whispered, "Taste it," but she did not drink. He put the beer back in her hands. "How old do you think I am?"

"Twenty-five?"

He laughed. "Oh, no, I'm 38."

Her father was already divorced from his first wife by that age, her mother long married. Thirty-eight. Thirty-eight and still wearing a worn gold wedding ring.

"What happened to your wife?" she asked. "Am I allowed to ask you that?"

"She's over the border in Phoenix, with the banker she left me for." He drank. "We were only married a year." He looked at her face and laughed. He laughed so loud he made Sophia think she was laughing, too. He laughed loud enough for both of them. "Look," he said. "I'm as over it as I'm ever going to be."

"Okay," she said.

"Now I get what every white man wants," he said, and she looked at him. "I get to be a victim."

A slight breeze blew through the palm trees, a teasing wind that only made Sophia crave more relief from the heat. A cat jumped on the balcony, the black one with the orange bib. It sat on the railing and stared at them.

"What does it want?" Sophia asked.

"Food."

"Do you have any?"

"Memo from the management company," he said, waving a sheet of paper in front of her face. "Please do not feed the stray cats." But he put a tiny plate of chicken wings on the railing.

They watched the cat and the cat watched them, and Gerry said. "That cat has the sun on his heart."

The next evening she locked up her bicycle and went straight up to Gerry's balcony, bypassing her own empty studio. Gerry gave her a can of lemonade and drank his beer and they watched the cats and named them. "Brutus," he said. "And Cletus." The mean-looking one they named Saddam, and the one with the scraggly beard they called Osama, and there was Queenie, and Ginger and Gilligan and MaryAnn and Skipper, a whole family of identical whitish ones. They did not name the cat with the sun on its heart. Gerry turned the TV on high, the constant looped images seeping through the screen door, people leaping from the buildings, the buildings collapsing, shaky camera of people fleeing through the smoke-filled streets. It all looked like a movie from this far away.

The girls were gone from Gerry's apartment. There was only Sophia.

"He's not going to be your boyfriend," said Harmony. "I just hope you know that. He's 38. And divorced."

"Who wants a boyfriend?" Sophia asked.

Harmony said, "You do."

"Happy Birthday," Gerry said. He brought out a six-pack of PBR with a red ribbon around it. "You're legal now."

"Not until midnight."

Gerry shrugged. "Close enough."

The garden hose hissed droplets of water above their heads. It was six o'clock in the evening and it seemed the sun would never sink.

"People have it all wrong about Arizona," Gerry said. "They think it's paradise but it's really hell."

Gerry wrapped his lips around the bottle. He made love to the thing. He stared out at the evening like he was waiting for its offering, as if Sophia were not enough to satisfy him.

She thought about leaning over and whispering, I can put up with you, drunk and in your dirty clothes, I could take you on, sitting there on her almost-birthday with an untouched beer sweating between her legs.

"Get down here, girl," they heard. It was Harmony, calling up to her. "It's Saturday night."

Sophia sank back in her lounge chair. Gerry stood and looked down at all the tall, thin blond that was Harmony: the embodiment of Arizona. "Who do we have here?"

"Tell that girl to come down," she yelled.

"Why don't you climb on up?" he asked. "We've got beer."

Harmony folded her arms. "Come on, Sophia. We're going to the bar with your father. It's your birthday."

"Not for six more hours."

Harmony made a brim with her hands and stared up at them, and Gerry stood at the balcony staring down at her.

"You come down here. It's not safe up there."

Gerry started to laugh. "Me?" he asked. "It's not safe with little old me? I'm the safest man on the block for sweet innocent Sophia." He did not look at Sophia but he slipped his arm around her shoulders and said, "Little Sophia's safe with me."

Harmony stared at Gerry and he stared at her.

"She's not that innocent," Harmony said.

He smiled and she smiled back. She melted. Gerry watched her as she scooted away. Then he looked at Sophia and said, "Be a dear, would you? Go inside and fetch a few more beers."

Blue shag carpet, stained. A toolbox. A long slanted line of records. A Pink Floyd: The Wall poster. A collection of Simpson's toys dotting the top of the refrigerator, and inside the fridge, nothing but beer. The surroundings of a permanent teenager save for one beautiful narcissus flower, tall and graceful and open and white, in the center of his little round table.

They sat back on their chairs, the air wetter now, flinty, as if lightning had just struck. "Why don't you live in the dorms?" he asked Sophia. "Don't you want to be with your friends? How about that little girl who just came by? Legs?"

"Harmony."

"Isn't that a pretty name? For such a pretty girl." He finished his beer and let it roll out of his fingers and clank on the patio floor. "Why don't you want to live with your pretty friend Harmony in the dorms, with all the other pretty boys and girls your age?" He opened a new beer. "Harmony."

"She has a boyfriend already."

"What's he like?"

"It's someone different all the time."

He smiled. "Someone's jealous." He turned, resting on his side in the lounge chair with his head pressed against the plastic slats, looking at Sophia sideways. He took another beer from the cooler and he twisted off the cap and it sounded like somebody whispering to her, like God calling her over. He handed Sophia the beer and she took it.

"Drink," he said. "You want to drink."

She put it to her lips and breathed in, she breathed in the smell of her mother's morning breath, her mother on the couch with her perfume long evaporated and the white wine seeping out her pores, her little Chinese mother passed out every night.

"Why don't you drink?" he asked.

She took a big sip of bitter liquid that made her feel full and empty at the same time. "I am currently drinking," she said. "I am presently in the act of drinking."

Gerry was hovering just a few inches from her face, hot beer breath and little red lines cracking the whites of his eyes, his Rudolph nose, his lips moving next to hers.

"Harmony," he said. He looked at Sophia. He smiled the magic smile. He said, "I always wanted to have a little sister," and he raised his glass as if to toast her.

She slammed her beer down on the patio. She wanted him to yell back at her, she wanted him to grab her shoulders and shake her, like the women, she wanted him to break his bottle against the faux stucco and trace a little scar on her cheek with a shard of glass.

"That's good," he said. "Learn to break the glass. Learn to smash things." He laughed. "You're a beautiful girl," Gerry said.

"No. I'm not."

"Have it your way." And then he passed out.

Sophia floated past palm trees suffering in the heat, past artificial fields of green, through the town of Tempe, steeped in midnight. She passed a tiny protest of women draped in black, the last three radicals left in the desert. They nodded to her. They waved. She panned her head as she bicycled by them, so that everything else blurred but the women were perfectly clear. She was twenty-one years old and drunk and nothing was different.

"It's my old roommate," Harmony told her friends at the bar, the strangers, the cookie cutter Arizona Kens and Barbies Sophia had escaped two months before. "Are you over that guy or what?" she asked Sophia, handing her some strong, pink drink. "He's like an old lesbian in a middle-aged man's body."

Sophia's father was there, too, with some new lady friend of his, a plump little Mexican named Maria. They drank umbrella drinks. Her father handed Sophia a cell phone, shiny and silver and unscathed.

"Happy Birthday, honey," he said. "Give your mother a call."

Sophia drank. She drank the pink drinks and a green one, a Rheingold, a martini. She looked over the rim of her glass at her father, loving up his new south-of-the-border babe. She had never seen him drink. He had never seen her drink. She thought of Gerry at home, drinking alone. She thought of her mother back in New York, at her AA meeting, alone.

Harmony's friends eyed Sophia suspiciously. These friends drove American cars and had Republican daddies. They were like Sophia's mother. They were her enemies. One of them looked at Sophia and asked, "What are you, like, a hippie?"

"What's that?" Sophia asked, smiling too sweetly. "Someone who rejects commodity fetishism?" The girl frowned into her fru-fru drink. "What, you don't like Marx?"

"I like him," said a stocky brown-haired boy. He emerged from the shadows and shook Sophia's hand. It sent tiny sparks shooting down her arms. He told her his name. He told her his favorite theorists, Adorno and Horkheimer. He told her, you've gone and done something to me girl. He wore a thin gold chain around his neck. He had a trail of light brown freckles on his forearm.

"Make a wish," said the boy, lighting a shot glass of rum afire.

Sophia motioned for him to follow her to a corner, and there she spoke to him the line she had carefully crafted for the past two years, at the rallies and marches and meetings, at all the social gatherings for the causes she had inherited from her father: "Want to fuck?"

She left with him. She did not say goodbye to her father or to Harmony.

That was why she didn't drink.

"Sophia!" Gerry was calling next morning. Sophia had returned to her tiny studio to write the boy-from-the-bar's name in her notebook; she was up to number twenty. She was hoping to end at twenty-one, her golden birthday, the perfect number. She wished the next would be the last. "Come and help me," Gerry called to her. "Come over here a minute."

She climbed up the stairs and he was waiting there in the doorway, his holey dark green t-shirt and his funny feet and he said, "I've got a crazed cat stuck in my house. The black one with the orange glow. The one with the sun."

"How'd she get in?"

Gerry smiled, and dimples pierced his cheeks. "I've been feeding her."

"Oh, Gerry," Sophia said. "You haven't been."

He nodded.

"Where's the cat?"

"Under my bed."

He had a futon on strips of plywood on top of cinderblocks, lumpy and leaning to the left, with a blue comforter sloping off it. The comforter had holes, cotton stuffing bleeding out the cloth, and faded sheets.

Sophia peered under the bed. "Here kitty," she said, but the cat didn't budge. She said, "Get me a broom."

Gerry handed her a mangy mop and she shoved it under the bed. The cat made a horrible sound. Sophia had never heard such fear before, and the caterwauling did not stop when she removed the mop. Instead, they smelled shit and piss and Gerry started to laugh.

"We are so fucked," he said.

They worked together; they formed a team. They slid the futon off the plywood plank and dragged it to the other room. They picked up the plywood and leaned it against the wall, and there was the cat with the sun in his heart crouched in the square hole of a cinderblock. The cat was surrounded by its waste. It was panting. Its hair stood in spikes like a punk rocker.

She poked at the cat with the mop and the cat moaned but still would not move.

Gerry stopped helping. He drank beer and watched Sophia work away at the sad creature, the crying cat.

"There's nothing we can do," he said. "The thing will not move. She will not move."

Gerry slipped the mop handle from her hands and he led her to the other room, palming two beers. The swamp cooler hummed away above them but did not make them cold. He pulled her to the futon spread on the living room floor and he pressed on her shoulders to make her go down. He was smiling, an abyss of irresistible dimples. She thought how there were seventeen years between them. She thought of the time she tried to get with the Iranian refugee in the Charlotte airport on the way home to Albany her freshman year of college, and of that Mormon boy she was once convinced she loved, of the boy in high school who went out with her because he thought her mom was hot, and of the twenty boys before this man, the ones she preferred to forget and the ones whose bodies she could not recall.

She let Gerry's hands lead her into gravity, sink her down onto the worn green of his collegiate futon cover, his thick fingers and thick ankles and his big smile of a belly and his sweaty feet that smelled so bad. She wanted to be forgotten, to forget herself, to forget the world and its war, to reach down her own throat and pull out whatever was her and put it in another body, a body that was thin and white, with blond hair and blue eyes and a straight nose and eyelids with flesh enough to wrinkle: she wanted to be Harmony, an all-American girl, and apathetic.

She had wanted to make love to someone ugly, someone half ugly just like her, but now she saw her future in this man, a crystal ball gone black.

Sophia said, "What do you fight about? With the women."

"It's only them fighting, not me. I gave up fighting long ago." Gerry wrapped his arms around her, her back to his front, and he held her hand in his. "It only makes them madder when I don't fight back, you see. They take me on like a little craft project, but I take too long to dry. It's too hard to put me back together."

She was waiting, watching the two beers sweating on the floor next to them. For a long time she was waiting for his hands to find her. His body felt greasy. It felt flabby. She was floating in a moonwalk of flesh.

Then she felt him jerk and twitch, and then a soft snoring from his nose, a light breath tickling the back of her neck.

The cat still huddled in the other room, the acrid smell of his urine mixing with the damp swamp cooler air. She pressed her elbow into the rubbery flesh covering Gerry's ribs, this marshmallow man. She pressed until he snorted and twisted and awoke.

He blinked his eyes at her, braced himself as if for a fight.

She picked up the beer and drank it in one miserable gulp, the bitter lukewarm liquid missing half its bubbles. "I have to pee," she said, and she walked through the bedroom to the bathroom. The cat with the sun in its heart was asleep inside the cinder block, and she sat on the toilet and it took so long for her to go; she was all clenched up.

Gerry's dirty blue bath towel hung on a hook on the back of the door. It had bleach spots and brown stains and frayed edges and one wispy hole. She sniffed the cotton and it smelled like fresh laundry: a clean dirty towel.

She took the towel and stood before the sleeping cat, she silently asked his permission and then threw the towel over him. He did not move. He did not make a sound. She pressed her hands to the inside of the cinderblock and scooped him up, he was so skinny and still silent and she carried him like that, shrouded in towel, though the living room, stepping over Gerry's supine body and Gerry said, "What you got there, girl?" and she stepped into the glorious horrible heat on the balcony with the frozen cat in her hands. And she set him free.

Gerry jumped up. "Sophia, you're my hero," he said, and he hugged her, and she stood there and let herself be hugged. She hated Gerry the way all the women hated him, his funny poet way of talking and his fat belly and his fat hands and his wild hair and lack of hygiene. She hated the beautiful freckles on his arms and the beautiful vein on his neck and the scar cut above his left eye and his cackling laugh and how important he'd made her feel.

Her father came by that night. He had returned his SUV in favor of a rent-a-wreck, a beat-up red Toyota. He wore parts of his old outfit, socks with sandals and a hemp button-down shirt.

"Let's go over to the empty lot and break some shit," he said.

They took two six packs of empty bottles from the recycling bin and walked over the dried up grass and across the street to the big brown field. The sun was setting and an orange glow flowed around them. The cat's heart had taken over the world.

She smashed a bottle against the crumbling concrete foundation of an aborted Philadelphia brownstone and it shattered in green glass confetti and she loved the sound. She smashed a St. Pauli Girl bottle. She took that blonde bitch and smashed her. She did not love Gerry anymore. She loved the beer and the bottle in came in, she loved the glass and the sound of it cracking.

"It feels so good to be a rogue," her father said. "Doesn't it?"

The sky was darkening then, the rain was finally on its way to save them, and there were only two empty bottles left. She walked across the street to her own empty balcony and sat there, listening to stray cats laughing up the night.