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getting clearer, circling and homing in, until he was close enough to touch it.

As always, the preamble is the unnerving part. You’re not sure if you got ripped off, but OK, now the guys in the motorboat are whistling for you from just offshore. Right away they’re shouting: Don’ go near da blade! Step in quick, put on a lifejacket, put it on quick. Now! Don’ sit dere! Sit dere! When they passed us off to the parasailing boat the experience took on the air of a rescue operation. Turn around! Turn around and sit on da boat! Put this on and sit down dere, you first! There seemed to be an undue amount of process and gear. Why can’t we just be tied to the thing and spirited into the air? But then suddenly we were looking down at the shadow of our parachute on the turquoise waves. And suddenly it was over, too.

Lying on the upside-down, translucent floatie in the pool, I saw the multilingual safety instructions on the front backwards. Every language made even more foreign than it is. Turkish, Arabic, Portuguese, God knows what. We really are all the same. Just trying to get our kids entertained for a few hours on vacation. We’re all ignoring the same warnings.

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“I still call him regularly and check up on him. You can't just cast aside family members because they seem uninterested in you

The rasta in the West 4th Street station is playing a drum now, not a guitar. A single snare, strapped over his shoulders and resting on his belly. He plays it softly, near the edge. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. No accents, no rhythm. Just quiet, mindless beats forever. The equivalent of the single, droning chord he used to strum. I wondered what was going on in his head. Did he just want to make a gesture toward music, without caring about it, so he’d be perceived as more than just a panhandler? Or is this what music is to him? Does he think he’s playing? Then I got to thinking about the phenomenon of New York City characters. Did he invent himself? Did he find an open space to occupy? Is he the rasta with the drum, or the Rasta With the Drum? Formerly the Rasta With the Guitar? Do people talk about him? Is someone else writing about him right now? Is he somebody?

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no matter how much the people who elected them insist that it must be so.

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Bill was very happy. He had made a lot of money on his last book, and was going to make a lot more.

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“I'll call you later,” I said and idly looked up hotel prices in Central London

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In the apartment next door, the woman looked at a television set and spoke into a tape recorder.

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He smiled and gave Robinson a friendly nod.

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Two American presidents, several heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency,

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doctors will be giving the drug to real patients who are diagnosed with ‘flu-like symptoms’