And romanticize. But lest you confuse me with some love-swacked swain in an Elizabethan madrigal mooning after a buxom shepherdess, let me scrawl a compensatory note. If I were lured to Coproliabad by Valerie, it is equally true that I was driven here by greed or its euphemism, enlightened self-interest. Dr. Joseph Grady, that cunning gray eminence of UGH, had fanned the flames of my insolvency with tales of untold wealth. It was he who had discovered that riches were waiting to be snared in this unpromising, scorched chicken of a place, and from the most unlikely source. It was the secret formula of the shit bricks he was after, to isolate that mysterious elixir which would transmute dross into gold for the two of us by supplying an eager, overpopulated world with an endless, inexpensive supply of the most workable building material ever stumbled upon by man. The multinational consortium, Ultra Global Husbandry, would, through its subsidiary, Resource Analysis and Technology, finance the launch of our magic upon a receptive world. And launched we were. For a brief and splendid moment we soared across the financial heavens, Grady a comet and I his tail, his instrument and ambassador.

Only to come to this. I hardly need a reminder of my plight but there it is: the caretakers of the tower are reporting for work, like groundskeepers of the college green tidying up for class-day japes. They manicure, pluck, and sharpen the pickets to receive my ventilated body. What a vulgar way to die.

When my jailers graciously complied with my strange—to them—request for a ballpoint pen and a clutch of legal pads brought from home, it was, I told them, to keep me from going mad. This may be true, if I could only limit my meanderings to the soothing fellowship of the past, thereby obliterating the perilous present. But how can I write of the past without evoking my father’s disappearance, which defeats my very reason for writing? It tends naggingly to remind me of my own impending departure.