Out on the town with my friend A, we are kidnapped by three young members of the nihilist youth league who take us to a safe house and engage us in conversation about our core beliefs. The true believer is a young man who looks like me but with longer hair. He has a little pistol. His two accomplices are his older sisters; they seem equivocal and more or less friendly. We remark that it's ironic that we are the only ones wearing all black.

An exploratory fast. In one corner, a kitten wrapped in a wet towel. In the other, the experience of love.

We show up late to the red imperial ballroom on a volcanic island where the first lecture is to be held. The first book under discussion is Laughter at Comedians, a didactic novel by a noted American realist. Everyone has a pristine Vintage paperback edition with matte cover and stylish typography. I steal a seat on the aisle; mid-lecture I am asked to move by a group of young men who say my seat is reserved for gentiles. They seat their grandmother there. One girl in our party can't read; she says she sleeps in the bathroom instead and she likes it. The three-year-old two seats to my left has the board game edition of the novel open on his lap. Later we get a walking tour of a small bamboo treehouse that has been retrofitted for fire safety by the island's closed circuit television station. The show's Australian host guides us through the necessasry steps: first we must build a water tower twenty feet above the highest bamboo room; then a thick bamboo pipe is run down and across the length of the house; whenever smoke rises an elegant leaf-based mechanism curls up to let gallons of water drip down and across the length of the pipe and irrigate the household with thick streams and drops. The woman who lives there says there are fires all the time.

On arriving in graduate school I find that my brother has been there for a year already. My thesis proposal is due immediately and I ask him if he has any ideas. He tells me that as a philsopher he has been trained to think precisely and that he has many ideas. He asks me if I have any ideas. Later, I find that my friend Sheldon Reid has been appointed Vice Provost of the University of Pittsburgh. He is still a very tall black man.