Category: Memoir

I don’t like to write about myself too often, but a personal blogger can’t avoid it altogether. A few things about family here, too.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Missing notes

I was a Phebe – nothing more –
A Phebe – nothing less –
The little note that others dropt
I fitted into place –

Six-thirty. The treetops glow with the first rays of sun. A hummingbird circles a bull thistle’s purple tuft – all looks, no substance – then zooms over to the bergamot with its washed-out, scraggly heads.

Aside from the background trill of crickets and the sound of cars and trucks on the interstate highway a half-mile to the west, I’m struck by how silently the day has dawned. Early August is always a sad time of the year for me: the dusk and dawn chorus has dwindled to almost nothing. No more phoebe, wood thrush, Baltimore oriole, indigo bunting, scarlet tanager, catbird, great-crested flycatcher. Their young have fledged and learned their parent’s songs, and some have already begun the journey to their true homes in the tropics. Without such stalwarts as the cardinal, song sparrow and especially Carolina wren, the morning would arrive completely unheralded eight months out of twelve.

Already, the early goldenrod is blooming, and by the end of the week the whole field will have turned to gold. The season’s final generation of monarchs is on the wing. A dry high has settled in, bringing clear skies and autumn-cool temperatures. My niece is in heaven – she can spend almost every waking hour out-of-doors if she chooses. She spends the nights apart from her parents, sleeping up in her grandparents’ house in what had been my bedroom when I was growing up. And though she sometimes seems to wish that every adult were as facetious as her daddy and uncles are, there’s no question that her serious, naturalist-writer Nanna is still her main role model.

Yesterday morning the two of them went for a walk down Laurel Ridge, and Eva discovered a box turtle that her Nanna had walked right past without noticing. It was half-grown – only a few years old – and completely unafraid, even when Eva picked it up. After a careful examination of the eyes and plectrum, they decided it must be a female. Eva was so excited to have been the first to spot it, she ran all the way back to the house to tell her grandpa – and anyone else who would listen.

After lunch, without prompting from anyone, she sat down with a clipboard and legal pad and began to write what she proudly predicts will be her first published nature essay. We were astonished by the neatness of her hand and her fantastic spelling for a second grader. Mom reported the following conversation from earlier in the day.

Eva: “Are you famous, Nanna?”

Nanna: “Well, no, not really.”

“But do people know who you are?”

“Well, in Pennsylvania, I guess some people know who am.”

“That’s what I want! I want to write about Nature so people will know who I am!”

Yesterday afternoon my cousin Heidi stopped over with her three-year-old daughter Morgan in tow. Eva immediately took her under her wing and managed to coax her into walking much farther than she ever had before, showering her with praise for the feat. It was amusing to see these two only-children relate to each other in a big sister-little sister fashion.

As for me, I’m just happy for the company of two spontaneously affectionate and imaginative children – even when sudden storms of temper blow in from nowhere, as sometimes happens. Most of the time I am content to play Thoreau without regret for my single, childless state. But then I get a hug from a little kid and am reminded suddenly of just how much I’m missing.

The missing All, prevented Me
From missing minor Things.
If nothing larger than a World’s
Departure from a Hinge
Or sun’s Extinction, be observed
‘Twas not so large that I
Could lift my Forehead from my work
For Curiosity.

__________

Both quotes are from the R. W. Franklin edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson: nos. 1009 (first stanza) and 995 (complete).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

House and garden

My brother Mark’s family is visiting. Yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with my sister-in-law Luz about clay tile roofs. When they paid a contractor to rebuild her mother’s house in Juticalpa, Honduras, they replaced the roof tiles with tin. How come? Well, short of setting them in concrete, it seems there’s no way to fasten the tiles securely in place.

I was especially intrigued by Luz’s description of the traditional manufacturing technique: women in Honduras used to make the u-shaped tiles by bending slabs of wet clay over their thighs.”Surely they’ve graduated to using logs now?” “Well, I suppose so. But you never know.” Parts of the country remain deeply traditional, though electricity, television and internet cafes are spreading to the remotest villages.

One consequence of the loss of traditional techniques is that in the bigger towns and cities, like Juticalpa, it has become impossible to find anyone who understands the delicate art of roof tile readjustment. As I understand it, the tiles are nested together and keyed to notched roof beams in some way. All is fine and dandy until the neighborhood cats start using the roof for nuptial activities. Their constant running about is enough to vibrate individual tiles out of position.

“Can’t you just get up on a ladder and move them back into place?” “It’s not so easy. I’ve tried it. Mark’s tried it. It’s practically impossible if you don’t know what you’re doing. You should’ve seen us three years ago, during the rainy season. Every night we had to keep moving our beds around so we could sleep without getting dripped on!”

And concrete? “No, because kids, you know, throw stones. The tiles are softer than the concrete. One broken tile and you have to replace the whole thing.”

*

So after supper I am sitting here going through my e-mail when my eight year-old niece comes in and grabs me by the hand. “Uncle Dave!” “Niece Eva!” “Tell me the names of the plants in your garden!”

I let her drag me outside. “You know this one, right?”

“Tomato.”

“Yep. They’re all volunteer plants that I rescued from the compost pit. And you should know this plant, too. Here, smell a leaf.”

She takes the proffered leaf, crunches it against her nostrils, then chews on it. “Smells like limes!”

“So it’s lemonbalm, remember? We made tea out of it last spring.”

“What’s this yellow one?”

“That’s rudbeckia. I got the seeds from Pop-pop originally, over ten years ago. It just keeps re-seeding itself, year after year. Now that he’s dead, I have something to remember him by.”

And so it goes: bouncing bet, lamb’s ear, thyme, butterfly weed, bindweed, tansy, peonies. She wants to know not only the name but each plant’s reason for being there.

“This tall purple stuff is bergamot or oswego tea. It does make a nice tea, but really, I keep it for the hummingbirds.” I make her feel the square stem characteristic of the mint family, then show her catnip, with the same property.

“Is that for cats?” she asks, knowing that the only cats around here are the fully wild ones that show up from time to time.

“Yes, well, it does make cats crazy-hyper. But it has the exact opposite effect on humans. It’s an essential ingredient for sleepytime tea. I don’t plant it – it just grows wherever it wants to, and I pull out the ones that get too aggressive.”

After a while of this, she inadvertently pays me the ultimate compliment.

“Uncle Dave, this is the strangest garden I’ve ever seen! You can’t tell the good plants from the weeds!”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Afternoon of a fawn

I’ll be gone until at least Monday. Happy Decoration Day, y’all.

*

I watched an indigo bunting on
the topmost branch silhouetted
against the sky: blue
& still more blue. If I told you
all I could see was the yellow of
his bill, would you believe me?

*

In the bare crown of the elm tree
where a porcupine gnawed all winter,
a hummingbird perches with his back
to an indigo bunting. How odd to see him
sit so still so long, I think, though
his head pivots back & forth the whole
time. The bunting calls & calls.
Could this battered tree with
its foliage like a crazy woman’s skirt
hide two nests? A crow flies sideways,
silent, against the wind.

*

Putting the chili to simmer, I walked into the dining room and found a bat – some myotis, probably little brown – hanging between the storm windows. The sun shone full on its scrunched up face. I left a note on the table and went for a walk, chased down the unfamiliar whine of 17-year cicadas in the corner of the field, looped into the woods. A hen turkey took off from her nest among the ferns. Looking for the eggs, I found instead a nest in a barberry bush with three naked purple nestlings. A towhee scolded from the next bush. Jesus, I thought, what next? Then cutting back across the meadow I almost stepped on the head of a newborn fawn.

Two hours later when my eight year-old niece returns from town I lead her to the spot, tramping behind me through the thistles in her sandaled feet, too impatient to put shoes on. The fawn’s still there, curled up like a question mark. Its dark eyes blink. We are its first two humans, I tell Eva, this is the first afternoon of its life. Eva explains all about hunters, miming the crouch, the bang, her voice getting louder & louder, pointing an imaginary rifle at its heaving ribs. The wet black nostrils flare & quiver with the strangeness of our scent.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Parenthesis and antithesis

The heat and humidity, which makes the birds so happy (and the dawn chorus so full) is bad for my brain. Bear with me here, folks! At this rate, I’ll have to slink through the summer in borrowed thoughts. (Barring inspiration, I could pay more attention to the look of the site, borrow codes from sites I admire. (You can see I already took the momentous step of introducing an Image yesterday, which necessitated learning to use a free image hosting site and the photo-touchup software that’s on my machine. (For anyone who’s wondering, it’s the Egyptian glyph KA, which refers to the undying part of the soul – the “spirit” or doppelganger – which in ancient times, according to Bika Reed, was understood by analogy with an egg in the womb of BA, the overall soul-complex.)))

If the oviducts of my imagination fail to produce any original thoughts soon, the stewpot will beckon. I could turn Via Negativa into a regular potpie of pithy quotes and striking images, maybe even build up a real readership! All sorts of folks who don’t have the time or patience to struggle through my usual fare would begin stopping by for Pearls of Wisdom – presuming I could keep my more swinish tendencies at bay. (Like insulting the present readership by implication – bad bad bad!)

Today, I’m off to town (first time in three weeks!), so I’ll cut the crap right here and retrieve a pearl of sorts that you won’t read anywhere else. You may remember me writing about my niece Eva, who is eight years old and a bit precocious in the spiritual sense. I reprinted her first-ever poem, which she wrote over a year ago. The beginner’s luck didn’t last, but she did send me a poem about a month ago that was impressive in its own way. I wrote back with praise and what I hope were encouraging remarks. Here’s the poem:

Why?

Why do people kill?
Why do we have wars?
Why do we cut trees for houses?
Why did we invent the nuclear bomb?

Why? Why? Why?

Everything is a question to me.
Why does the world have so much evil,
and sadness,
and kindness?

Why is the world like it is?

–Eva Bonta, April 6, 2004

Here’s how I responded. I don’t know how much of this she understood, but I’m a firm believer in not talking down to children.

Hi Eva,

Good work! What can I say? I still ask these questions, too. A lot of people would rather avoid wrestling with tough questions like these, and prefer to settle for easy answers. Why do they do that? That’s a question that’s not so hard to answer: because people want to feel safe and secure. Who can blame them? Very few people are brave enough to face up to the basic unfairness of existence.

I like the fact that you added “kindness” at the end. That’s a mystery too: why love when it’s easier to hate?

I don’t know whether a willingness to ask big questions will make you a happier person. But it will stretch your mind and make you wiser – and a better poet. You know what they say: the brain is a muscle, it needs to be exercised. I’m glad you’re giving yours such a workout!

Dave

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Doll beings

Today I’m visiting my cousins in Gloucester township, New Jersey – part of Lenapehoking, the traditional homeland of the Lenape Indians. We’re gathering for a joint birthday celebration for Eva and her second cousin Morgan, who is four. As I sipped my morning coffee, Morgan entertained me with impromptu narratives about her play castles and her Barbie dolls – a fascination that her mother Heidi, an erstwhile tomboy, can’t quite comprehend. Heidi worries that Morgan might be learning unhealthy gender stereotypes from Barbie, but has decided she can’t forbid her from playing with the dolls altogether, since they were gifts and since her playmates are also into Barbie.

“In earlier times the Lenape Indians enjoyed their social dances. But not wishing to be distracted by their children, they placed them with a baby sitter. On one such occasion the assembled children decided to hold a dance of their own. For this purpose a boy carved a stick in the shape of a doll and carried it throughout the twelve dances. This childish event went unnoticed until the boy became inexplicably ill. A meteinu (or medicine man of great power) was consulted. He perceived that the boy had some possession and demanded special attention. After questioning, the boy acknowledged making the miniature doll that he and the others had included in their dances. The meteinu realized that this was no ordinary doll but a spirit of considerable power. . . . The meteinu advised the boy’s parents to make a better doll with which to appease the offended spirit and to continue the dances until the boy got well. He further advised them to hold an Ohtas Kentkan (Doll Dance) every year, through which the family and the whole tribe would prosper and remain in good health.

“Thereafter, such dolls were carved from a piece of wood about twelve inches long. They were given human hair and were dressed in miniature sets of Lenape clothing. It was believed that such Doll Beings possessed life and could understand what was said to them. They had the power to protect their owner’s health, and they enjoyed offerings and dances and resented ill-treatment. . . . It was believed that failure to perform [ritual] obligations would make the doll’s spirit angry and would surely cause evil to befall the owners and their relatives.”

– Herbert C. Kraft, The Lenape: Archaeology, History and Ethnography (New Jersey Historical Society, 1986).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Purlieu

The art museum’s smallest room
is filled with miniature landscapes.
We stop in front of each,
& my 8-year-old niece waits for me
to hoist her up by the armpits
for a five-second look.

***

I learn a new word from the exhibit’s title: purlieu. “A frequently visited place, an outlying district,” says Merriam-Webster’s New Collegiate. In the plural, “Confines, bounds” as well as “Neighborhood, environs.” From the French, “to go through,” it came into use in the Middle Ages, when it had a fairly specific denotation: “ME purlewe land severed from an English royal forest by perambulation.”

***

Later, she watches from
the back seat of the car as
a ten-dollar bill change hands. Giggles.
“They hold the money
as if it were fragile!”
she whispers in my ear.

***

Eva and I go for a ramble in the new snow, me with the big plastic saucer under my arm. She discovers tracking: “If you follow an animal’s tracks, you can tell where it went!” But the squirrels elude pursuit on the ground for longer than the distance between two trees. Then it’s time to re-examine our own tracks. Walking forward, craning around to see what we would see if we were tracking ourselves. We’re detectives now, she decides.

She follows tracks to where they disappear in a hole or under a log, wants to begin excavating on the spot. I remember this fascination with burrows going back to when she was four, if not earlier. “What lives here?” was one of her first intelligible questions. Now more and more this question comes accompanied by a wish: to live there too. At any given charismatic opening in the woods: “This would be a great place for a kind of a house. Well, not with walls or anything. Just to sleep in. This summer we could camp here. We can bring blankets and make tea.”

We follow a deer trail through the woods, pause to inspect weasel and mouse trails. “How far is the spruce grove?” “We’re not heading for the spruce grove. In fact, we’re going in the opposite direction.” “Are we ever going to find these deer?” “Probably not. These prints were made before last night’s additional snow.”

So it seems animal tracks can’t be trusted to take you where you want to go. The chief detective looks for something else to investigate. Thirsty, makes a discovery: the snow right here doesn’t quite taste quite the same as the snow over there. Or so she says. We thread though the laurel to the woods road and make our way to the top of the field, stopping every ten feet to sample the snow.

“Can’t you taste the difference?” “Um, no. See, you lose your sense of taste when you grow up. That’s one of the great things about being a kid.” “This one tastes like cotton candy!” “I’ve never had cotton candy. What does it taste like?” “I don’t know. I’ve never had it either.”

At the edge of the field, a new wish: to walk without leaving any footprints. “What if you just ran really, really fast?” She tries it: no luck. I reason with her. “You saw all the squirrel tracks. Squirrels weigh less than a pound! Think about it – even the mice leave tracks. The only things that don’t are the ones with wings.”

At last, the spruce grove at the top of the field: the ultimate outdoor living room. Destination of countless picnic excursions with her Nanna. With me she plays tour guide, gets exasperated at my evident familiarity with the spot. Our footprints cross paths with a pair of turkey tracks, a lone coyote. We cut back into the field just soon enough to avoid the deer carcass, which neither of us mentions. “I love the view from up here,” she says. Ridge after ridge stretching away to the east.

Time to put the saucer to use. We go to the edge of the steepest hill and my heart sinks. I grew up with sleds you could steer; with the saucer, gravity has almost the only say over where you end up. But determined to cut a good trail I sit down in the thing and lie back, trusting in my outstretched legs to keep me pointed downhill. Bump bump bump, a half-turn and I’m at the bottom looking up. I shout something cheerful, trying hard to keep the shakiness out of my voice. On the brow of the hill a small red figure jumps up and down with glee.

I would’ve been terrified at her age, but I don’t tell her that. “Now hold on tight and be careful!” “Give me a push!” A quarter of my weight, she goes airborne at each bump. At the second one her hat flies off. Spinning around, going backwards or forwards, it’s one continuous shriek all the way down. Then here she comes charging back up the hill, half-unbuttoned coat flapping, stopping to examine the places where the saucer left the ground. “Did you see me flying?”

***

Snow in March
brings marvels:
a phoebe diving for snow fleas,
the track of a chipmunk,
a turkey vulture flapping its wings.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The calculus of luck

Ungrateful keyboard! I wake myself up two hours early to write and all you can do is sit there. Your so-called keys stay locked. My brain says write, my heart says hum to yourself.

The new snow stopped falling sometime in the night and a few stars were blinking in and out of the clouds by 5:00. Every snowfall has its own properties; this one brings the trains closer and drives the gurgle of the stream farther away. As I sat out on the porch with my coffee I was admiring as I do so often the unique pitch of each eastbound locomotive whistling the crossings: Bellwood, Tipton, Grazierville, Tyrone, Plummer’s Hollow, Birmingham. Now all I can do is sit here and hum, writing about writing about nothing. Because important things have been happening too fast for me to record, unless I were to turn myself into a writing machine with no time left over to experience anything except in retrospect. So I guess I’ll have to break an unwritten rule here and resort to bullet points, so as not to forgo all mention of:

~ The courtship flights of the woodcock at dusk almost every evening for the past week – the way it can slip in and out of sight against the almost-dark clouds, the sudden transition from strange nasal peent to the rapid piccolo it makes somehow with its wings, rushing across the sky in wide arcs like a released balloon

~ The week-long Visit of the Beloved Granddaughter (my niece Eva) from Mississippi, and her 8th birthday celebration yesterday in the snow she welcomed as “a present from God – I mean from Santa!”

~ The scavenger hunt for birthday presents, and the riddles my dad and I had dreamed up for clues leading from one present to the next all over the farm

~ Some of the things collected before the snow fell: ruffed grouse feathers; jawbones from winter-killed deer; bird’s nests; a large handful of wild grape tendrils, each one an eloquent restatement of the beauty in clinging, the unique possibilities of attachment

~ My mother saying yesterday morning as the birds mobbed the strewn seeds: “I wonder if a fox sparrow will show up today?” and a fox sparrow showing up two hours later, obligingly digging his trademark holes in the snow, the song sparrows and juncos giving him a wide wake

~ The very punctual return of the eastern phoebe in the middle of the snowstorm. I was attending to e-mail yesterday afternoon when he landed on a branch of the mulberry sapling right outside the window where I type and flicked his tail up and down three times.

It’s light now and I can see what the night brought: just the barest additional skim of snow on top of yesterday’s five inches. Today, we’re off to Penn State to visit museums – always a fun thing to do in the company of a bright and inquisitive 8-year-old.

I don’t get to enjoy the company of children very often – especially children who love nature, poetry and all the other things that exercise the imagination. So naturally I’ve been enjoying the excuse to relive my childhood for a few days (who knew that tinkertoys could still be so much fun?!). Fueling my enthusiasm, too, is the marvelous, multi-authored literary experiment unfolding over at Commonbeauty, “The Archaeology of Childhood.” The entries are in the form of personal letters between participants, describing an illness or an affliction suffered during the writer’s childhood and what it meant to him or her. The results have been very moving – not a dud yet. As Tom Montag observed a couple days ago, this is an experiment that takes advantage of the unique possibilities of the blogosphere for spontaneity and immediacy.

I believe today will see the seventh and final installment of this unique experiment, so if you have the time to stop over you can read the whole series from start to finish.

****

When I began thinking about luck yesterday it was with a specific destination in mind, but I ended up somewhere else instead. I’ll start again, with the “reprint” of an essay off my other website that’s also in the spirit of the archaeology of childhood. This was written in January of last year, as the chorus of harpies calling for “shock and awe” in Baghdad was rising to a crescendo.

****

RATS IN THE WOODPILE

There were always rats in the barn when I was a kid. We kept the chicken feed in wooden bins reinforced with sheet metal but they still managed to chew through. My father said that a Norway rat could chew a hole in a lead pipe in twelve hours, and I believed him. He put out d-con rat poison, but it never got them all. We tried not to think about how it worked: slow death by dehydration.

Then when we cleaned out the shed, we found dozens of mummified rats hidden in the scrapwood pile. My brothers and I kept the most gruesome examples for a long time, bringing them out to show visitors. The mummies were completely hairless, and their tough yellow-brown hides made them seem less animal than vegetable, dried seed husks or corn stalks in winter. Except, that is, for their heads, the place where their eyes had been. “Look at this one! It’s still got all its teeth!” “Why is it grinning like that?”

The rats had excavated an extensive subway system connecting barn, shed, and compost heap. The only way to catch more than a glimpse was to sit very still in the basement of the barn for a while, for instance with a loaded .22. They were part of the natural order of things, and it never occurred to me that they could die out. But one day a few years after we stopped keeping chickens and the raccoons killed the last of our Muscovy ducks, I realized there weren’t any more rats around. Their major tunnel entrances were all grown up with weeds.

My niece Eva comes to visit at least once a year, at Christmas. Two years ago, when she was four, she and her Uncle Steve discovered a mummified duck under the hay in the barn basement. Something had eaten half its face, but otherwise it was in pretty good shape. Eva was fascinated. Every day for the rest of her visit she would beg to be taken down to the barn to see the dead duck. Nor was it a passing fancy–a year later she was still visiting it faithfully at its resting-place on the hay of the next-to-last stall.

Had I been thinking, I probably could have predicted that Eva’s first poem would include a duck–very much alive, with ducklings in tow. In my family, we’re fond of attempting such auguries about people, about the weather, about world affairs, though we never bet any money on them. For major events, like elections or impending wars, everyone will predict a different outcome.

These days, there’s fierce competition for the worst-case scenario. No one actually wants it to come true, of course–in fact, some of us cling to the notion that a bad thing can’t happen if it has been fully exposed in advance. But even if it does come to pass, someone at least can enjoy the brief frisson of its discovery. “Why is it grinning like that?”

****

This brings me to what I wanted to mention in yesterday’s post: the role of luck/grace in the birthing of any truly original poem or work of art. I don’t mean to discount the importance of practice, practice, practice. In fact, I think that Pasteur’s dictum, “Chance favors the prepared mind,” perfectly captures the relationship of preparation to inspired discovery. All I’m saying is that such discovery is utterly chancey – as my experience this morning with the mute keyboard reconfirms. And that it comes from some specific place, some spot in the in-between of earth and sky: all genius was originally of place. The word applied to the production of an artist only by the once-conventional presumption that inspiration is (as its eymology still implies) a species of possession.

I had been invited to participate in a poetry reading for State College’s First Night celebration a year ago, and as usual I brought my audience with me in the form of the extended family. Eva was then six going on seven and wanted to know what kind of tree was this “poetry” I was going to read about. She sat with me in the front row throughout the entire two-hour reading – a fairly hyper, high-energy kid who is also blessed with the ability to concentrate. A month or two later, her daddy helped her type her very first poem and I proudly e-mailed it around to all my friends. She hasn’t written anything like it since, and I have no intention of pushing her.

[untitled]
by Eva Bonta (6 going on 7 years old)

How would it be to smell
like a flower and the petals
fall off from cold wet breeze
pink and silver yellow.

The birds fly up to
their nest as hot as the
sun with their hot smooth
egg. The frog at the
pond croaked once more
as the Duck with her
Duck-lings go silently to
bed when the moon is
yellow.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Dream of the White Chamber

The M.C. or Main Complex of the World Bank in Washington includes a cafeteria with a vast selection of affordable dishes from a variety of international cuisines. Of course, not just anyone can eat there. You have to know somebody who works for the bank, and he or she has to sign you into the building. (And this was before 9/11.) I was down in D.C. visiting my friend Chris, who worked just a block away and whose girlfriend Seung was a World Bank employee, so it made sense to go there for lunch.

We carried our trays out into an atrium where a faux bistro lured us to sit in a tease of real sunlight. Actually, “atrium” may not be the right word. (I apologize for my ignorance of architecture.) The M.C. is shaped like a hollow, square column, some ten or twenty stories high: every floor opens onto the sky-lit courtyard, which is roofed in glass too thick to admit any view of the clouds.

After about 40 minutes, Seung had to hurry back to work, leaving Chris and me to linger if we wanted. Unless he has a beer in his hand, however, Chris is never one to dawdle for very long. Let’s go back to the office, man, I’ll show you around!

On our way out, I paused to admire a large obelisk made up entirely of video screens, broadcasting satellite television stations from around the globe. Not too profound, as such things go, but provocative nonetheless – like the Washington Monument turned into a Tower of Babel. When I turned around to say something to Chris, he was gone.

I usually enjoy being lost. I searched half-heartedly at first, trying to maintain a brisk enough pace so I wouldn’t stand out as an obvious interloper among all the distinguished-looking people of every nationality who crowded the hallways. No sign of Chris. (It turned out that he had been searching for me at the same time. One of us should’ve just stayed put!)

After about ten minutes of this I gave up and started looking for an exit. Oddly enough, I couldn’t find one. Which was the ground floor? Was there more than one way out? Where was all the light coming from? The janitors I queried in a stairwell merely laughed – whether from nervousness or contempt I couldn’t tell. In my panic I started opening doors at random, briefly interrupting two meetings and backing away from half a dozen soft-walled labyrinths filled with the humming of office machines. It was starting to feel not just like a bad dream but the wrong dream, someone else’s dream that I’d somehow stumbled into. When I finally guessed right and found myself facing the front door, it was all I could do to keep from breaking into a run.

And sure enough – no surprise – I did revisit the World Bank in at least one bad dream that I can remember. It’s maybe six months later. The elevator opens onto a room somewhere in the sub-basement, I step out and there’s my old friend Ben, the one who died from a heroin overdose a couple years before. His head’s shaved bare. He’s lying on a mattress with hundreds of fishhooks emplanted in his skin. I edge closer and see the maze of piano wires that stretch away from the hooks in every direction, anchored in the white concrete of walls and ceiling.

You get used to it, he says. Besides, it’s only for another two years.

It’s not the thought of the pain that frightens me but his monotonal voice. This isn’t the joyful/scornful/angry/despairing rebel I once thought I knew so well. I’m thinking, This must be some kind of stunt double or something. He won’t catch my eye for a single moment, winces every time I look at him.

Look, I’ll call the police, I tell him, but already the guards are closing in. Where are your badge numbers? I demand to see your supervisor! I protest, as someone slips the plastic cuffs around my wrists. A desperate appeal to conscience: God is watching you! I say as calmly as I can, while someone lifts my upper eyelids with a pair of tweezers, first the left then the right, and sprays a burning mist directly onto each eyeball.

There’s a high-pitched giggle that sounds almost as if it could be from Ben. He don’t need no phone call – already got a direct line to the Chief! and a hand falls on my shoulder and rests there a half-second too long.