The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…

The bartender was a fine distinguished mantis standing thin and alert and flexible with all the green grace of his species; it was very dark in there, and he never said anything, and the previous bartender (whom Mantis had killed and devoured) had never said anything, either, just pointed dryly to the cash register to indicate the amount owed for prior happiness; so nobody noticed the transition to new management; and anyhow Mantis conveyed an impression of sympathetic as opposed to apathetic acceptance and knew what was wanted and mixed very adequate drinks. The whores were nervous around him because he never pawed them or gestured for freebies like his predecessor when they gave him his share of their take (which the bugs used to buy anti-insecticide chemicals), just stared at them with his piercing bulgy eyes on either side of his green head. So the ceiling creaked and the toiled flushed and the cistern overflowed out back and life went on.

These bugs have the advantage. Not only do they outnumber us a million to one, not only do they live by alien insect creeds that attach no value to individual life, but they also retain the rectitude and purity of the underdog. And so it is that they have insidiously debauched the public mind, though we still control the larger cities. I myself have killed many bugs in my time, though of course I have never slain wantonly, only in self-defense, when no compromise could be a cure.

Well, what the hell. The situation is the same. While we have life, we have hope. While we have hope, we have courage. While we have courage, we have ingenuity. While we have ingenuity, we have flame-throwers. A state of war now exists between us and the bugs.

Even as they entered, he could feel the place envelop him like a vapor with a smell of heavy, overcooked food, privation and dust. The lady taking tickets, old and wigged, with big bosoms, conspicuously switched from Yiddish to German, putting the interlopers on notice that they had been spotted. Eyeing the overblown placard for the play, showing a giant Jew with maniacal eyes throttling some stricken Gentile, he again wondered, Why did they huddle so, these people? And all the while he kept hearing this coarse, splattery jargon, so animated, with that catarrh as though a fishbone were stuck in the throat. There was a man selling hot tea from a samovar and another vending sticky cakes and ices. And the eating—everybody eating, gnawing apples and chewing sweet crackling dumplings from greasy sheets of brown paper. And that marshy barn-warmth of people huddling. It was too close for him.

At least Russell felt he had allies and forebears. Unlike Wittgenstein, he saw himself as part of a tradition, one of a line of thinkers who had stared at various walls, wondering what remained to be done—or more likely demolished.

By persistence or brute force a wall might be assaulted, but it would not be breached by imagining it was not really so high or formidable. Still, even Wittgenstein would wonder at times if a given wall even existed—that is, if a problem was truly a philosophical problem, and not instead one of the wards of psychology or science. Russell, by contrast, was more wily. Philosophy, he would say with a wink, was traditionally a case of weighing theft—the theft of assumptions and givens—over honest toil. Wittgenstein despised this attitude. He said the problems must be squarely confronted, not sent a Trojan horse. And here Wittgenstein would see himself as both the betrayed and the betrayer, knowing, as Russell did not, that their walls were really quite different. Shameful arrogance, but true, Wittgenstein would think. Russell did not have his ear to this wall, and if he did, he could not hear it surging with the outer sea.

Looking out the window as the train crept into Vienna, Wittgenstein could see the massive city huddled under clumps of low winter clouds. A smoky bluish gray in his memory, Vienna now seemed singed at the edges like an old photograph, everything begrimed from the cheap coal they were forced to burn, when coal was available at all. In the station, with its resounding marble ceilings, the lights flickered ominously and the marble stairs echoed with wooden-soled shoes, leather, like most other commodities, being increasingly unobtainable. By the men’s room, a pudgy man with a soiled suit darted out from a vestibule. Sir, he hissed. Do you have any cocoa, spirits or other foodstuffs you might like to sell or trade? The man opened a valise crammed with cans and packages. Look. I have some lovely bacon and tinned milk. Choice tobacco? Silk for your girl?

…after dozens of visits, I stopped buying the paintings. Scenes of bright peasant life, or lovely little children in uniforms filing into school, pictures of grand bourgeois families dancing in a hall beneath towering hi-fi speakers, or of shocking voodoo ceremonies in blacks and reds with decapitated chickens flapping in blood and women writhing, panoramas of bustling, abundant markets, paintings of primeval forests, with lions, giraffes, panthers and other animals no Haitian has ever seen at home, where the wildest animal is the crocodile or the flamingo, or the tarantula. It’s hard to keep looking at those paintings, but these Haitian artists paint them over and over again, as though they can’t get this nightmare out of their system. For months, a vendor tried to sell me this one painting, of a church interior, because I made the mistake of looking at it. He started at thirty dollars, laughably high but negotiable. Still, for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to buy it, no matter how badly the stooped and stuttering art dealer wanted to get rid of it, no matter how low he would go. I had promised myself no more paintings.

People whose dead have enemies resort to all sorts of tricks to stop their deceased relation from being turned into a zombi. They build strong graves of stone; often the construction begins long before the death—the costs are high, but it’s worth it to avoid becoming a zombi. The dead man’s people throw rice into his casket, so that the deceased will have to count each grain, and because he is concentrating on the counting he will not respond to the bokor’s call to arise. They seal the corpse’s nostrils to stop his soul from escaping. But if, by some ruse, the bokor manages to trap the dead man’s soul, the game is up. The zombi rises, and thenceforth he must serve the bokor, or whoever has commissioned the zombification, as a virtual slave.

The brigades had erected barricades throughout her neighborhood to stop the Macoutes and the Army from driving through at unsnail-like top speed and spraying the houses with machine-gun fire, as they had done in other neighborhoods and in other towns. We got to one barricade, and I couldn’t go around it. Worse, I was suddenly unable, in my panic, to put the car into reverse. It was a new car. My colleagues in the backseat were screaming, “Journalis! Journalis!” at the boys at the barricade, but the boys had seen a car where there should have been no cars, and they came around the barricade with their rocks, and it was only seconds that I found reverse and got us out of there.

My colleagues were not pleased.

“Learn to drive,” said the Chicago Tribune.

We at school knew Mr. and Mrs. Cuts come from a family that eats children. There is a red metal tree with plastic-wrapped toys in the window and a long candy counter case to lure you in. Mr. and Mrs. Cuts have no children of their own. They ate them during a hard winter and salted the rest down for sandwiches the colored boy runs out to the pulpwood crew at noon. I count colored children going in to buy some candy to see how many make it back out, but generally our mother is ready to go home before I can tell. Our credit at Cuts is short.

Here is a list of things Carol has thrown at Genius: a sneaker with a toe full of sand in it, a coffee cup with a crescent of coffee in it, a raisin box with a half a box of raisins in it, and a picture of Genius holding a young girl under red and green plastic lanterns strung beside a pool. All of the things Carol has thrown at Genius have hit him in the face. The picture of Genius holding the young girl beside the pool Carol had to throw at Genius’ face over and over because Genius was asleep. While Genius was asleep was always when Carol looked through his stuff and read his mail. When she found the picture of Genius holding the young girl she had to throw it as hard as she could on Genius’ face over and over again until Genius finally woke up.

I began as a boy, as a human-being boy, a boy with a secret at sea and sentenced to cook in Big Miss Magine’s stone-scoured pot, my long fish body laid, tail flipping, into that solid stone pot, scales ripped and skin slipping from my meat tissue-threaded in the simmer, my body floating from my long, fish-bodied bones, my bones boiled through and through down to a hot bubbly sweet steaming broth, lisping whispers of steam twisting to the ceiling, curling in your curtains, speaking to you in your sleep.

At a party, I met a mercenary. He had fought Communists in Afghanistan before fighting Communists in Nicaragua. He described a process invented by the Russians to strip the skin off Afghan rebels. “It was psychological warfare disguised as chemical warfare,” he said. “The Moslem believes in the ‘pure warrior,’ sanctity of the body, that sort of thing. When he saw row after row of bodies with the skin peeling off, he went mad.” The mercenary drank his champagne. “A Moslem believes the skinless soul is doomed. Gone to hell.”

My first apartment in New York had a courtyard. The friend who helped me move stuck his head out the window, into the courtyard. “The only noise you’ll hear,” he said, “is white noise. Air-conditioners. Classical music.” Later that night, we both looked out the window at the two women screaming in the apartment across the courtyard. “Your mother was a whore,” one said to the other, which was all we could make out until the silence, and then the thud as the woman who had just been hit landed on the floor.

David, a man I lived with and tried to abandon, decided that competence was a kind of genius. He gave up—and denounced—his job as a music critic in New York to take a teaching post in Los Angeles. “There is no difference between loving music and loving music well,” he said; he imagined rooms full of eager average students. We were on the phone long distance when he told me. I had left him in New York (the abandonment) to attend law school in the Middle West. I had left our life together, and now he was leaving it too. I imagined two other people, another David, another Sheila, in our apartment, oblivious and bored respectively. “Maybe I’ll come out for a visit,” I told him.

The Banker trails behind me with his abacus

and crowd of yes-men. I hear

the gold coins rub together in his vest.

The stoplights remind me. And the scars

on my ankles and the nails in my mouth.

Once my father pointed his finger at me.

Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter.

I could have been a man like those men

on the roof, eyes narrowed at me

like diamond cutters. In surgical gowns

and crucifix tie clips, tight bands of wires

wound beneath their chests –

they remind me of me. All in sync

they cup their ears to the antenna.

Quiet. The Jew Levine is coming to collect

with his chisels and his sack of flesh.

This is the house my father tried to build.

That patch of dirt raked

in geometric plains is a Japanese garden.

Those gaps the pigeons roost in are French windows.

The step-ladder, a spiral staircase, a helix. My father hasn’t

slept in six weeks. There is a crack in the living-

room wall. There is an icy roof.

He is watching the plaster.

Certain the house will collapse.

Should I talk to him when he doesn’t talk back?

His tongue coated white.

Should I touch him? He is dirty.

By midnight I get over it. I start hammering again.

The guards stand by the fire pit, burning papers.

So many numbers, so many names.

Hammer gently, they say: we’re trying to think.

The guy next to me can’t stop coughing.

The guy next to him can’t stop singing “Glory to God

in His sacred groves.”

When is this going to stop?

The ovens stay lit all night. Everything sounds the same

when it burns, like newsprint, like the telephone book,

like name, rank, number, date of birth.

Once I start talking, what’s there to stop me?

When I run out of nails I hammer pens.

Ink stains the wood the color of my tongue.

I don’t need my pens anymore. They know it was me.

They can sign my name to anything

and they won’t be wrong.

Because there were no available roles for a woman who drove men wild and enjoyed them in bed by the dozen and gave as good as she got and didn’t want to marry and never suffered for any of it, Mae West had to become a writer before she could be a movie star. She began her literary career with a sketch for a vaudeville act in 1913, when she was twenty and her fame still rested largely on her ability to perform a well-advertised “muscle dance in a sitting position.” By the time her first successful theatrical opus, entitled Sex, got her arrested in New York, in 1927, she’d been honing her playwriting skill alongside her nonpareil shimmy and cooch for over a decade.

Hurston was at the height of her powers when, in 1937, she first fell seriously out of step with the times. She had written a love story—“Their Eyes Were Watching God”—and become a counterrevolutionary. Against the tide of racial anger, she wrote about sex and talk and work and music and life’s unpoisoned pleasures, suggesting that these things existed even for people of color, even in America; and she was judged superficial—by implication, merely feminine. In Wright’s account, her novel contained “no theme, no message, no thought.” By depicting a Southern small-town world in which blacks kept mostly to themselves, enjoyed their own rich cultural traditions, and were able to assume responsibility for their own lives, Hurston appeared a blithely reassuring supporter of the status quo.

At a Fountainhead anniversary banquet held by the Ayn Rand Institute, nearly two hundred people paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars each to listen to excerpts from Rand’s private letters, and to watch each other bid more than five thousand dollars for her blue-green metal ashtray and matching lighter (the last-minute addition of two cigarettes marked with a dollar sign, a famous Rand prop, doubtless drove up the price) and twenty-five thousand dollars for the manuscript of her last speech, made in 1981 to the National Committee for Monetary Reform, for which Rand herself had been paid in gold. Throughout the festivities, responsively conservative business executives, teachers, secretaries, lawyers, and a scattering of college students who’d been barely old enough to read at the time of Rand’s death discussed the principles of heroic individualism by which she had taught them all to live.

I had been in Ireland for six months, living mostly in Dublin, and I knew the unspoken rules of the Irish pub well enough to know that I was breaking most of them. I was a woman and I was alone. I was drinking stout instead of lager, a pint instead of a half pint. I was trying to pay for my own drink and, since there was no real lounge in this pub, I had no choice but to sit with the men. These were things a woman, traditionally, should not do, but I had a strong sense that in Ireland most rules had been created precisely that they might be broken…

Religion was as pervasive as the currency. It was everywhere. It was embedded deep in the Irish mind, and that seemed most evident in the way Irish people blessed themselves as they passed by a church; an instinctual flutter of the right hand as they studied the headlines of the newspaper they had just bought, or scolded a disobedient child, or made a conversational point to a companion. Sometimes just the fingers moved, twitching above the sternum or passing absently over the face in a barely perceptible wiping motion. Riding in a Dublin bus, I was often gripped by an eerie disorientation at the moment the bus passed by a church (a church I was never quick enough to notice), and I glimpsed, in the periphery of my vision, thirty hands flying into the air in similar fashion.

Conor was hot-faced and frowning now. Angrily he said, “Well, you son of a bitch, Mick Pat! When was the last time you had a good cleaning out? When was the last time you had a good cleaning out of your pipes, Mick Pat? You never had sex in your life, you little bastard. You’re a virgin. You are a virgin.”

Mick Pat sat still in his seat. He looked at the floor, and his heavy gray hair fell forward boyishly on his high forehead. With his smaller hand he brushed his hair back, then laid the hand gently over his mouth; but for the nicotine stains, it was the hand of an adolescent boy. “I am not,” he said. “I am not. I am not.” But he spoke unconvincingly, as though trying to persuade his own doubtful soul.

The ensuing inquiries found the girl to be a teenager, though she weighed only fifty-nine pounds and was only fifty-four inches tall. She was in much worse physical shape than at first suspected: she was incontinent, could not chew solid food and could hardly swallow, could not focus her eyes beyond twelve feet, and, according to some accounts, could not cry. She salivated constantly, spat indiscriminately. She had a ring of hard callus around her buttocks, and she had two nearly complete sets of teeth. Her hair was thin. She could not hop, skip, climb, or do anything requiring the full extension of her limbs. She showed no perception of hot or cold.

One thing that normal children learn quickly is how to form a negative sentence. They begin by saying “No have toy,” and proceed directly to the next stage, where they bury the negation within the sentence: “I not have toy.” Then they figure out how to use a supporting verb and say, “I do not have a toy,” and the prodigies contract the verb to “don’t.” Genie stayed stuck at the “No have toy” stage for almost three years, and four years after she was talking in strings she was still speaking in the abbreviated nongrammar of a telegram.

According to Rigler, “the lady running one of the foster homes was rather bizarre.” He recalled visiting the home “from time to time” and counseling Genie in her occasional outpatient visits to Childrens Hospital. “The woman was very rigid, and Genie had a powerfully strong will,” he said. “Ultimately, the collision occurred over the issue of her toilet behavior. What happened in this home was that she became constipated, and this got to the point where it was very painful. The woman tried to extract fecal matter with an ice-cream stick. There was no injury. But she was traumatized.”