If he tried hard enough, he could make sense of it all. Everything except the monkey. He was stark naked. That–he was sure—was something that happened quite regularly. The guy to his right saluting him with one arm, the other arm trying to hold his guts in place—he was sure he had seen him before in some kind of movie or something. And the guy in front of him, he was sure his name was Dennis or Donald.

“He’s clean,” Dennis or Donald said over a walkie-talkie.

The other man stopped saluting him and said, “It’s good to have you back, sir.”

There was a woman. Seemed nice. A bit too friendly and eager to please. That phony off-putting demeanor so many adopt nowadays. Heavy-set. Hair in curls like my mother wore in the 1980s. Came to see me because she wanted to patent an invention: a surfboard with wings and wheels. The Urban Surfboard™ she called it. I watched her prototype and plans as one would watch a carefully curled piece of shit on a dinner plate.

Despite my great desire, I could not have biological children. I lacked an available uterus to inseminate, so I downloaded an app. For a while, my daughter and I were happy. I would feed her lettuce when needed, as indicated by an alarm trigged by her digital algorithm. I brought her to the zoo, etc. and she was bewildered, etc. at the vast diversity of animals, etc. in this amazing world.

No one had made the connection before. But, faced with the facts, the correlation could not be ignored.

“25 Major Cities. 339 Murders. 4 weeks. 1 Common Element: Andrew.”

The front page headline of the Times on June 20, 2010 was viewed by most with an appropriate vein of skepticism. But it was the Times, so surely the facts had been checked and re-checked. And after reading the article, all of us could see that the case was air-tight. Something had gone awry with men named Andrew.

Dear Uncle Jay:

My friend Irwin went to several specialists to be treated for an intermittent buzzing sound in his ears. They treated him with everything from ear drops to anti-psychotic drugs to electro-shock therapy, but it turns out Irwin just had an influx of newly-emergent cicadas under the tree in his back yard. Now that his mind has cleared a bit, Irwin did some research and says that some species of cicadas bury themselves in the ground near tree roots for years at a time. Is that true? What do they do down there?

–B.W., Racine, Wisc.