Free Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers

the same house. Reaching full strength, she had no interest in anyone, really, least of all him. She wanted to see things, to roam, to climb and plummet. She was attracted to the shiny, the moving, the blinking, the rustling, the fur-covered. Paul was none of those things so he held no interest.
    But something happened when she turned three, and after that Paul was known. Now when she did something, usually something dangerous, she wanted Paul—Paulie—to watch. Paulie, Paul-ee. Paul! Eee! Watch. Watch. Watch-watch-watch. Paul acted aggrieved by Ana’s demands but satisfying them was his life’s calling. He loved her. He brushed her hair. He clipped her toenails. She still wore a diaper at night and she preferred that he put it on. When Josie would wrap a towel around her after a bath, Paul would rewrap it, tighter, more carefully, patting it down just so, and Ana had come to expect this.
    Now, as they stood on the deck stained in pink fish blood, an older man was suddenly too close and was talking to them.
    “You kids like magic?” the man asked. He seemed to be leering. These lonely old men, Josie thought, with their wet lips and small eyes, their necks barely holding up their heavy heads full of their many mistakes and funerals of friends. Everything these men said sounded hideous and they didn’t even know it.
    Josie nudged Paul. “Answer the nice man.”
    “I guess,” Paul said to the mountains beyond the man.
    Now the old man was delighted. His face came alive, he dropped twenty years, forgot all the funerals. “Well, I happen to know that there’s a magic show tonight on our ship.”
    The man owned a ship? Josie asked for clarity.
    “I’m just a passenger. I’m Charlie,” he said, and extended his hand, a pink and purple tangle of bones and veins. “Haven’t you seen the
Princess
docked here? It’s hard to miss.”
    Josie came to realize that this stranger was inviting them, herself and her two kids, the three of them unknown to this man, onto the cruise ship docked at Seward, where, that evening, there would be an elaborate magic show featuring a half-dozen acts including, the old man was thrilled to convey, a magician from Luxembourg. “
Luxembourg,
” he said, “can you
imagine
?”
    “I want to go!” Ana said. Josie didn’t think it mattered much that Ana wanted to go—she had no intention of following this man onto a magic-show ship—but when Ana said those words, “I want to go!” Charlie’s face took on a glow so powerful Josie thought he might ignite. Josie didn’t want to disappoint this man and her daughter, who continued to talk about the show, what tricks a man from so far away might be capable of, but was she really about to follow this old man onto a cruise ship in Seward, Alaska, to see a Luxembourgian magic show? She couldn’t deprive them, she knew. They had only one grandparent, Luisa, who was spectacular but who was too far away, so Josie frequently succumbed to these grandparent manqués, who bought her children balloons and gave them candy at inappropriate times.
    “We’re allowed to have guests, I think,” the man said as they walked the gangplank. The kids were astounded, stepping slowly, carefully, holding the ropes on either side. But now their host, this man in his seventies or eighties, was suddenly unsure he could have friends over. So Josie stopped and her kids peered down into the black water between the dock and the gleaming white ship. Josie watched as Charlie approached some man in a uniform. A few dozen elderly passengers went around them in their windbreakers, small bags of Seward souvenirs dangling from their arms.
    “Let me talk to this man,” Charlie said, and motioned them to hang a few yards back from the door. Charlie and the man turned around a few times to inspect and gesture at Josie and her children, and finally Charlie swung around, telling them to come aboard.
    The ship was garish and loud, and crowded, full of glass and screens—the