If and when Global Aid sends me back to Africa, I will help continue the worm-eradication program, and as the Witnesses delight Susan with tales of a Heaven on Earth I’m thinking of the heat and the bugs in the equatorial zone, and the muddy water that the villagers take from rivers—they pour it in jugs and let the sediment settle for an hour and then dip from the top, where it looks sort of clean; it’s hard to get through to them that Cyclops crustacea may be floating about invisibly and one swallow could get you seven worms, a swallow you took three years ago. You can talk to the villagers until you’re blue in the face and they’ll drink it anyhow. So you have to poison the Cyclops without over-poisoning the water. I mean, it can be done, but, given the way things work over there, you have to do everything yourself if you want it done right, which is why I hate the idea of going back: you have to come on like a one-man band.

On the other hand, Brother Bogue and the other brothers in the home office of Global Aid don’t trust me; they don’t like it when I come into the office irrepressibly happy, like Maurice Chevalier in his tuxedo and straw hat—“Jambo jambo, bwana, jambo bonjour!”—and give everyone one of those African soft handshakes, and then maybe do a little turn at seventy-eight revolutions per minute: “Oh, oui oui, it’s delightful for me, walking my baby back home!” or “Hey, ain’t it great, after staying out late? Zangk heffen for leetle gorls.” Etc. They hate it when I’m high and they hate it when I’m low, and they hate it most if I’m feeling crazy/paranoid and come in and say, “You won’t believe what happened to me now!” To face those humorless brothers every day and stay forever in a job as a medical administrator, to wear a suit and tie and drive I-5 morning and night, to climb under the house and tape those pipes with insulation—you get in the crawl space and the dryer-hose vent is busted and there’s lint up the ass, a time bomb for spontaneous combustion, funny the house hasn’t blown already (and furthermore, no wonder the house is dusty), and, hey, what, carpenter ants, too? When I think of all that: Fair America, I bid you adieu!