It was a foggy day anyway, and my cockatoo was scorched, and my bikini was moping in the ruins, so I started reading a journal some poky guy had written and dropped on my doorstep disguised in a baboon uniform. The rhythms were all crooked, and he seemed to live at the margins, outcast even by himself, snatching limps from the vast gaps and presuming to slip through checkpoints with official documents stuffed in his bloodshot eyeballs, when, in fact, the hatcheck girl’s own torpor beheld the preposterous sloth with pinched nostrils. He claims he was born with thirteen digits. Years later he pirated a schooner and sailed it over a waterfall. He was in London during the blitz. He lived on crayfish alone in a swamp for seven years. Then he procured white women for a famous eastern emperor. He was implicated in an assassination plot and has been working at a school crossing since. He feels the time has come to tell his story. I feel some old shrapnel crawling around in my head. I want fresh bandages. I want to shoot out his stoplight.