Van felt a familiar despair. Why was his father always like this? Why didn’t he just say whatever he meant directly? Why did he have to dig into his big, 1968-hippie head, and come up with some kind of weird, senseless, semipolitical quotation? Van’s dad was a former Rhodes scholar. He was ruinously gifted. Van’s father was literally the only human being in the world who spoke both Afghan Pashtun and African Bantu dialects. He was also the only man Van knew who carried on conversations, in real life, using semicolons that you could actually hear.