Paul’s Fish Fry in Bennington, Vermont, is no longer
Closed For The Season Reason Freezin. The umbrellas
have opened over the picnic tables and the bees are
beginning to annoy the french fries, the thick shakes
and real malts of my past:

I am thirteen thousand miles removed, on the delta
of the Pearl River, eating a litchi. Its translucent flesh just
burst in my mouth, shreds of it glitter between my teeth.
I smile but the fruit seller is sour. In fact, he is so sour
the only man on earth he resembles is Paul. But the litchi…

Actually none of this has happened yet. I am nineteen
years old. I am riding in the boxcar of a freight train
hurtling torrid Pocatello, Idaho. In a very dangerous move
I maneuver my way back to the car behind me, an open gondola
carrying two tons of timberland eastward out of Oregon:

it is here I will lie all night, my head against the logs,
watching the stars. No one knows where I am. My mother thinks
I am asleep in my bed. My friends, having heard of a derailment
at ninety miles an hour on the eastbound freight, think I am
dead. But I’m here, hurtling across the continent with un-

believable speed. We are red-hot and we go, the steel track
with its imperceptible bounce allows us to go, our circuitous
silhouette against the great Blue Mountains and my head in a
thrill watching the stars: I am not yet at a point in  my life
where I am able to name them, but there are so many and they are

so white! I’m hurtling toward work at Paul’s, toward the litchi-
bite in Guangzhou, toward the day of my death all right, but all
I can say is I am happyhappyhappy to be here with the stars and
the logs, with my head thrown back and then pitched forward
in tears. And the litchi! it’s like swallowing a pearl.