I was standing outside this cocktail bar, see, on the Nile, when along came this chick with whom I had passed the morning in the poolhall: We found we shared a deep interest in thaumaturgy as she stroked the 8-ball into the side pocket. Fuzzy Wuzzy, for that was her name. Probability was her strong suit. She was a gold mine on the skids, and I yearned to wangle a weekend with her. I bluffed, “The farther you get away from me the suddener you’ll be back.” Rotten and lazy, I carried a gun. I began shrugging toward her, closer, until she turned to ice. “Since when did you escape from mud,” she said, and I considered my predicament, I took time for reflection. “Fuzzy Wuzzy,” I said, “you learned the dark arts through a prolonged sojourn among myriads of bats nesting in abandoned mines, I know that. Still, as Nietzsche says, ‘Man has regarded his natural propensities with an evil eye for too long.’ It is not that I wish you to visit depravities upon me, I would perish first! One of the big Pharaohs once told me in a dream that one day I would be very thin and sit in a soft armchair. I would be reading a letter, written in Chinese calligraphy, in pencil, scribbled hastily, and its central motif would be the mat the author was sitting on and the writing pencil with which his hand and arm, torso and brain and a lifetime of witnessing, were struggling. I know there are contradictions in all that I say. Fuzzy, whence is the unseen vindicated? Esteemed cocktail bar, the Pharaohs have edged your needs into retreat.”