Summary

City Lites: An Interlude – The narrator explains to the court he has never understood the concept of a sister city. He equates some to the ending of hostilities –such as Honolulu and Hiroshima –and others to shotgun weddings, such as Atlanta and Lagos. He also finds it amusing there is a city-soulmate matching service called Sister City Global. He then reveals to the court that he used Sister City Global for Dickens, but that SCG could not find Dickens on a map. Still, they found three potential matches: Juarez, Kinshasa, and Chernobyl, though none of them want to be paired with Dickens. The narrator then reveals he chose three sister cities himself: the old 1923 Hollywood set of Thebes now buried under Nipomo Dunes on the California shore, Dollerheim, Austria (birthplace of Hitler’s maternal grandfather), and The...