Looking into the restaurant, Ad Magic could see one of the Bahrainis clutching his throat and pretending to choke while the rest of the party laughed. Their mouths were opened wide, revealing an abundance of golden inlays. They waved to him and cheered heartily. He wondered why they were so jolly. Why couldn’t he be like that?

Out front, the bus driver was quarreling with the driver of the truck that had rear-ended the tour bus. Ad Magic turned away again and walked toward the Arabian Sea, out of the envelope of diesel exhaust into a small, pleasantly pungent pocket of gardenia, and then back into a zone of a truly ghastly odor. The tuna cannery in American Samoa had been bad, but it was nothing compared with these little pockets of smell that were all over Bombay, and what was worse was that you had to be nonchalant about it with your fellow travelers and not complain, for no one else seemed to notice it. Ad Magic was suddenly overcome by a sense of unreality—he wondered if he had been to American Samoa at all, or if it had been a dream, and, indeed, if the Bombay of the here and now was a dream.

He surveyed the long, deserted stretch of beach, and spotted a small white horse standing forlornly in the surf. As he moved closer to the horse he saw that it was old and swaybacked, covered with oozing sores, and so shrunken that its ribs protruded and its teeth seemed overly large. The horse was having a hard time staying on its feet, and Ad Magic watched it reel. There were plenty of scenes of poverty and desolation in India, but this was the most abject and miserable sight he had ever laid eyes on. Clearly, the horse was going to die—possibly within the hour. Had it been meant to die so completely alone—abandoned? It occurred to Ad Magic that it was the suffering of a horse that had finally driven Friedrich Nietzsche into an irretrievable insanity in the month of January 1889.

Good God! He had done it again. He had abandoned his seizure meds, flipped out, and somehow gotten on a plane, this time bound for India. He frantically searched his pockets for a passport. There was none. He had no wallet, either—only an enormously fat roll of American hundred-dollar bills, some loose smaller bills mixed with Indian currency, and a ball of heavy change that caused his pocket to bulge. He didn’t even know his own name; he knew only “Ad Magic,” but as he sorted out the loose cash he discovered a room key from the Taj Inter-Continental. “Suite 7” was imprinted on the tag, and Ad Magic knew that the secret to his identity would be found there, although he was in no particular hurry to return to the hotel. Somehow he felt that it would be better not to know, at least not yet.