“You should go home for Christmas,” he said. We shook hands.

The meeting reminded me of a bad joke I heard in Bangkok about a Japanese mailman. The guy lived in Hiroshima, and when we dropped the bomb the heat scorched the shadow right off his skin but he survived. He pulled himself out from under his destroyed house, blistered and broken, and managed to get on his bicycle. He biked for a day straight, just to get out of the radiation. He didn’t stop until he got to Nagasaki, just in time to get nuked again. But again he survived. An Australian radio reporter met him in the hospital just after, when he was dying from a mutation in his blood but didn’t know yet. The reporter asked him how he felt. He said he felt like the luckiest man alive. Likewise.

102

It’s a tradition to piss on the statue of the university’s founding father, John Harvard, in the middle of the night. The statue is a bronze, triple life-sized, stern gentleman sitting on a chair on a pedestal in the middle of campus. Boys and girls both scramble up and urinate on him.

It never occurred to me to piss on it before I left. Too stupid. But the college handbook emphasizes the importance of community, and I’m back now. So why not? Plus, the archaeology girl, before I scared her off, told me to lighten up. This was my intention the night I went to uphold tradition.

The air was clear and very cold, like every night here, and the water in my hair from the shower froze as I walked outside. Campus was deserted, but yellow light shone from every window, backlighting students as they worked or drank.

Usually the pissing is done in groups and drunkenly, but I was not drunk and went alone. I might have called someone. Come with me and cheer for me, I would have said, the way you all do, ironically and drunkenly, for each other. But I had no one to call, really.