The inner lives of creatures great and small, extinct or currently living or mythical. As a boy, I’d often wondered: what was it like to be any one of them? Later I came across mention of Thomas Nagel, his writing about that very thing, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” His answer: really it’d be impossible for any of us to know. If I’d read his answer when I was younger, I would’ve bowed to his superior judgment and not spent so many afternoons in my imagination, donning consciousnesses exotic to my own. In the pre-Internet of childhood on snowy days I’d pull volumes from the complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica from our living room shelf, sit next to a heat register on the floor, blanket over my shoulders, and read entries on animals I’d never known existed until I turned the page. Full color photographs of mandrills and budgerigars and triatomine bugs, aka “kissing bugs”, carriers of Chagas disease. What was Chagas disease? This would send me to the volume for all entries beginning with the letter C. There I’d discover a horrible fate suffered by South Americans unlucky enough to be kissed by the bug. Muscles of the heart slowly harden, a living mummification of heartbeat. This would be enough source material to project me into a visualization of my own heart struggling against a slow, painful calcification. Having fantasized my way through that specific demise, I’d return to the question of the bug, its innocence of its own lethality. Was it aware it evolved this kind of weaponry? Did it intend to kill, or did poison move through it as a byproduct of its meager size and desire to protect itself? For five long minutes I’d study a full color photograph of a specimen then enter it via amateur soul-possession. Opening eyes again, a tropical rainforest around me, human footsteps approaching. Then would work my way toward feeling what fear might feel like as a beetle.
*
The plasticity of consciousness. What neuroscientists and psychologists call Theory of Mind. Always disliked the label, how aridly cerebral it was, no color or movement to it. For a certain kind of kid, new to consciousness, unaware of what it is or how it should be used, curiosity can drive all sorts of naive playfulness. Show them a medieval artist’s rendering of a manticore or a electron microscope photograph of a tardigrade and they’ll dream their way into the mindscapes of newfound interesting monsters. Leaping from species to species, they'll travel through humanness and far beyond it. When they come back to their regular selves, sitting crosslegged on a living room carpet, will they be identical to who they’d been only minutes before? To anyone entering the room, they’ll look like the kid they’ve always been, blanket around their shoulders. But the kid’s feel for themselves and the room might not be unchanged, might have gained an extra dimension or two, subtly.
*
Researchers at the National Institute of Health recently finalized the first ever complete mapping of the brain of Drosophilia melanogaster, the common fruit fly. A 3D digital model of the brain looks like a pinata, colorful with dots of green and pink and blue and red. Some 140,000 neurons collaborate to create the intricate effects of a fruit fly thinking. By studying patterns of linkage between each, researchers might gain a more detailed understanding of the species, their memory, learning, motor control, courtship habits, flight navigation and decision-making. All the better to more clearly mark the boundary that can’t be crossed, humanhood to fly-hood. I remember running across a few when young; reaching for a banana or apple in the fruit bowl, little flies would scatter. The fruit had sat uneaten for too long and the flies had found them. They were more delicate, gentler in their movements than the houseflies that could be found banging against windowpanes. To my eye they appeared an eighth the size of most flies, easily mistaken for gnats or midges. Since the fruit had spoiled, I would cross my forearms on the counter, rest my chin to watch them going about their business, fizzing like bubbles across the surface of a freshly poured glass of ginger ale. With my brain’s 86 billion neurons and several trillion connections between, I would enter one fly then another by way of steady gazing. Closing my eyes a brief second, I’d open them again with my whole visual system revolutionized, the fruit below having undergone a massive rescaling. Banana no longer discernibly a banana, but a fragrant expanse of brown and yellow. Through a split in its outer peel, I'd gain entry to the mushy inner flesh. The whole trance would last about a minute but would feel like days. A hybrid self leaning against the kitchen counter with chin resting on folded arms, half-Homo-Sapien, half-melanogaster.
*
During those early years of unselfing, I was most drawn to animals that could change shape or color. There were ponds less than a mile from where I woke each morning, and often I’d walk over to the ponds after breakfast to watch tadpoles move like shadow-commas in the shallows. When freshly hatched, small as they were, they were nearly impossible to catch in my cupped hands. But as they fattened themselves on algae and whatever else they ate and grew, I could lay hands underwater a while and wait patiently until they swam within reach. A quick snatch of hands and I’d have one trapped wriggling. These, one of the older neighborhood kids told me, would soon become frogs. I imagine at first I didn’t believe them. Not long after I probably asked my mother, who would confirm to my amazement or confusion, yes, that’s right. Those groups of eggs you find clinging to underwater grasses eventually hatch and become tadpoles. The tadpoles then eat and eat and sprout legs and turn into frogs. Maybe she’d have gone so far as to tell the story of my own prehistory as an embryo and a fetus. Early in the stages of maturation, she could have told me, I would have had a tail. Somewhere in the stages of early development, the tail withdrew into my body and became a coccyx, a tail bone. Reach back, feel it (Reaching with pointer and middle finger, would rub where spine ended and buttocks began). Before I'd become a mind, I’d somewhat resembled a tadpole. This wouldn’t be how she would have phrased it, but would have been how I’d heard and imagined it. Later pulling the F volume of our encyclopedia off its shelf, I’d study illustrated diagrams of stages of metamorphosis and search there for some hidden resemblance to myself. No, my fingers weren't webbed. My eyes weren’t fixed either side of my head. But still, frogs had eyes, fingers. They have four limbs and a head. They jump and so could I. Once they had been mere a fraction of their adult size and had eaten and eaten and grown larger. Near dusk along the edges of a pond, they would sit among their kind croaking and moaning and signaling their whereabouts with short, bright bleeps that to my ear sounded curious or resigned. After some careful listening and trial and error, I might even imitate their calls. The croaking, the moaning, the bleeping. Imitation, I thought, was maybe a precursor to becoming, no matter how briefly, an amphibian-human hybrid. Things don’t work that way, of course, but it was fun to think it.
*
Last week I came across a news article announcing something maybe uninteresting to most but for the curious few cause for amazement. The first case of a shapeshifting vertebrate had been discovered. A species of South American rainfrog, Pristimantis mutabilis. Adult males are smaller than females, but both grow no larger than a few millimeters, about the size of a pebble. In their normal resting state, the frogs have a skin texture that’s spiky but when frightened a dramatic change overcomes them—the skin smooths over in a matter of seconds. It’s believed this is their attempt to blend in more convincingly with their surroundings. Look at that, I thought, without a boy’s imagination to guide it even an obscure species of frog can transform itself. Plasticity may begin in the mind but doesn’t end there.
*
Creatures that can change their own shape at will. Why couldn’t people do the same? They couldn’t so they had to make do with disguises or operations. As far as outward appearances go. But what about inwardly? That was different, I was told. Introspectively human beings have more flexibility. Who put the idea in my head? Sonocia did. And who was she? The first true acquaintance I’d met among my type, someone capable of “imaginal self-transformation”, a shapeshifter. I met her in my late teens, when I moved to the city of Everywhere (city’s true name changed here to protect its anonymity). This was long after my family had moved north and the encyclopedias were boxed and stored in an attic, later to be donated to Goodwill. Graduating high school, I enrolled in college and moved alone to Everywhere. There were few ponds or fields there but plenty of trees. On the way to and from my small apartment I walked beneath them and, passing through their shades, carried some of them with me. A troubled time inwardly, though my body thought otherwise, easy to heal as it was, healthy. One afternoon while sitting on a bench watching geese travel south across the sky, a tall middle-aged lady took a seat next to me. A friendly smile. Noting where my eyes traveled, following geese across sky, she told me she had stopped to do the same. It’d rained the past week with few breaks, chilly and medieval. Watching geese was a privilege, given how crappy the weather had been. Lucky it was dry enough to sit a short while and say goodbye to them. Later I’d learn this was a common move among shapeshifters in search of an understudy. Observe the activities of certain contemplative types. Wait for the right moment to sit nearby, venture an introduction. Small talk first, then direct the small talk to more serious fare. Begin suggesting a little whimsical thought experiment—those geese waddling across the empty softball field over there, how different were the inner lives of each from the others? See how their new acquaintance responds to that. With strong interest, good news. Could be a possible candidate. With half-hearted interest, will need to see. With confusion, a misread in their initial impression. With none at all, like most people, indifferent and not worth convincing. For two hours that afternoon I first met her, Sonocia didn’t tell me outright she was skilled in the arts of changing species, only suggested it. Pointing at the nearest goose on the lawn, instead she asked, What do you think this creature here thinks of us? A question straight from childhood, one I had asked many times before without needing certainty of an answer. And here was a grown adult teacher (for that’s what she did for a living, she told me) sitting on a bench next to me, asking it.
*
It wasn’t so unusual, she assured me, there was a long tradition to support it. Polymorphism had a long history; leave it to a species such as ours to rebel against the curse of being allowed only one body across a lifespan. Being a teacher, she was somewhat an amateur scholar. She cited obscure antiquated sources when describing the craft. Had I heard of the poet Boio? An early Greek who collected myths about the human propensity for transformation. Humans into fish. Humans into birds. Wrote a whole long poem about the latter, the Ornithogonia. Ovid later came along and pilfered it as source material for The Metamorphoses. Once there had been a time when this kind of thing was common, people assuming the forms of their fellow animals. Humanness was less fixed back then. Somewhere along the way they lost interest in interspecies travel, settled into a provincial anthropocentrism. Other than a few rare exceptions such as herself, there they’d remained for several centuries. Though perhaps unevenly, more in the West than the East, more in the northern hemispheres than in the southern. Could be why, she speculated, birds fly south when things turns cold. I could have been forgiven for assuming she was a teacher of English or History, but she was quick to check the assumption. No, she was a biologist. Just as the mentally unwell are often attracted to applied psychology, she’d been drawn to the formal study of flora and fauna. Anyways, she said, we have Ovid to thank for Shakespeare, and Boio to thank for Ovid, and countless nameless early Hellensitic poets to thank for the Ornithogonia. When he wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare was perched on all their shoulders. From the old play between species, he’d created a fun bit of comedy. Have you read it? she asked. I had. Remember the prank Puck played on poor Bottom? For sport, changed his head into a donkey’s. Sonocia had a photographic memory when it came to passages describing interspecies transformation, willed or otherwise. To initiate me into the craft she was about to teach me, she quoted Puck on the matter:
I’ll follow you; I’ll lead you about a round,
Through bog, through bush, through brake, through briar;
Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound,
A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire;
And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.
Did I want to know what that was like, she asked. I did. Then meet with her once a week over the next year, and pay attention.
*
Sonocia lived alone in a house gifted to her by the widow of a colleague. The day she moved in, two trucks were parked along the street, movers carrying the deceased’s belongings out of the house forever. At his request, those final years his widow had not lived with him. He was impatient with people, bitter to be dying from cancer. That was not how he wanted to be remembered. This was half a lifetime ago, when Sonocia had been young and eager to build a life beyond herself. The old bitter colleague had taken a liking to her because he could sense she was odd. The eccentrics of the world often keep clear of each other on principle, but not in his case. One day early in her first year of teaching, he invited her for tea at his house. His wife would be present also, he clarified, anticipating wariness. Mostly out of curiosity about what an old man’s house might look like, she accepted. It was only a few miles away from her apartment and a beautiful fall day so she walked. A careworn series of tree-lined streets in a neighborhood that began off a main thoroughfare then ended near an abandoned factory. Once they made shoes there, her colleague informed her, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the factory and its abandonment. The house was poorly lit except by windows. He led her through a living room in which very little living appeared to happen, to a homely kitchen. There he poured, her choice among many options, camomile tea. He made a point of drinking the same tea she did. On a back patio his wife waited, already sipping her own choice. To this day Sonocia still remembers: it was Red Zinger. What was in that, she asked. Oh, some dried weeds made to taste like raspberry, the lady told her. Hers was a manner of face that gathered kindness towards it from all directions. Calm. Subtle. Attentive. Together they sat and watched the afternoon pass and talked of things that inspired their interest. Her colleague, old already but not quite old enough yet for death, confessed he was sick of his own field of mastery, mathematics, but had harbored a love of comparative anatomy since childhood. A curiosity about natural forms, about the many paths plants and animals take to reach their final shape, had never left him. This Sonocia took as an explanation for what she’d noticed upon her brief tour of the house—why so many paintings and framed sketches of birds and fish and mammals hung on the walls. He’d drawn and painted each, he admitted when she asked. They were beautiful, very skillfully rendered, she said, and meant it. Had he used photographs as source material? No, his wife answered for him, with an obscure turn of pride in her tone. Each was painted from memory, some single specimen of a species he’d seen at one time, many from long long ago, from childhood. Amazing, Sonocia said, what she wouldn’t give to have that detailed of a memory. In his reply, the old man showed his oddness: It’s hard to forget who—and what—you once were. At the time she didn’t quite catch his meaning but smiled and nodded anyway.
*
This was her own coming-of-age story, she said, how she met her own mentor. I’d found her by simply sitting on a park bench to watch birds, she’d found hers by accepting an invitation for tea. If through steady effort and a willingness to learn, I proved my worthiness as a student, I might acquire through her everything the old man had given her to teach. In the old man’s opinion, their case was a matter of even exchange. She was the trained professional and he was merely an artist. He could show her the step-by-step processes through which a person might, through visualization and other mental mobilizations, assume the shape of another species, but he couldn’t reliably draw upon the necessary vocabulary while doing so. By training she understood the morphologies and developmental pathways and anatomies of any species he might imitate; he was hoping he might learn more about the craft, by teaching her. No, she told me, it’s not like you think. Shapeshifting isn’t about changing one’s molecular structure, reversing the work of evolution to revise it in other, more interesting directions. The laws of nature are fixed, immutable. It’d be delusional to believe otherwise. What Paul, the old man, her instructor in the art of self-transformation emphasized was the unchangeability of appearances—the person sitting in a chair, eyes closed. Look on them and notice nothing unusual. Outwardly they’re unremarkable, even a bit boring. But inwardly they were achieving the impossible, undergoing a kind of willed but patient mutation, picturing themselves as if seen from outside themselves. Their head bows, legs lengthen, arms retract into their shoulders. Painstakingly and gradually they imagine their way towards a smallness and slenderness, until they accomplish a final shape on the floor. A coral snake curled into itself, tongue flicking to smell the air. Along its length bands of crimson and black and yellow. For a while they might move along the ground hunting for prey or bask on the warmth of sunlit rock. Long as eyes are closed and mind is imagining, they can remain a snake. But to return themselves to human form safely they had to take time to visualize step-by-step their conjugation from snake-hood. To jump back to their original form by opening eyes suddenly, mentally still a snake, could result in confusion, dizziness, lethargy. Interrupt that second half of the transformation process, a shapeshifter would be left depleted, unable to summon the energy for another interspecies expedition. This down period, the old man told Sonocia, could last as long as a year. Never be in a rush, it wasn’t worth it.
*
I’m flipping now through the log I kept back then, on Sonocia’s advice. When she’d first set about learning the craft, she told me, she’d done the same. The old man had required it. Little black pocket-sized notebook in which to make working notes. Relevant info, sketches of certain target species, taxonomic names, habitat and bodily dimensions. I flip to the middle and find a truism: animals’ structural and functional characteristics result from their interaction with their environment. There are notes about mirror neurons, morphometrics, holotypes. Notes about various -isms: phototropism, gravitotropism, thigmatropism. Flip a couple pages backwards from there and find mention of a lecture delivered by a certain Harold Wager. Using the epidermic cells from the leaves of various species of plants as lenses, he’d taken photographs of people and landscapes of the English countryside. Quote: “…at least from the point of view of simple optics…the phenomenon of vision in plants was perfectly plausible.” I vaguely remember Sonocia mentioning this, one afternoon as we sat in lawn chairs in her back yard, me trying to recast myself as an elm tree behind closed eyes. I was having difficulty working myself into a size larger than my body allowed. She identified the flaw in my approach: I couldn’t clear my mind from picturing the elm tree standing just a few feet from us. Cross-referencing myself against an actual specific presence, I was having trouble shedding my own mortal scale. As a result, I kept viewing myself from its perspective, a tiny figure sitting in a chair next to her own tiny figure on the lawn. Scratch that, she advised. Try another species. A Japanese maple, a baobab. Working myself internally towards the latter, I achieved baobab-hood within half an hour. For an hour at least thereafter I enjoyed the light and the breeze within myself, then, having learned what I came to learn, slowly worked my way back to my original form, opening eyes next to Sonocia. The elm, she said, look at it now. Does it feel the same as before or does it feel different?
*
Opening my old work log at random again, I find extensive notes on a plant I’d never known existed, until during one training session Sonocia described it. Boquila trifoliolata, a liana vine found in the rain forests of Argentina and Chile. This was a special case, she said. The patron species for all shapeshifters. It was sui generis, unique among plants, the only species of its genus. While describing it she took the pen from my hand, interrupting my note-taking, to dash off a sketch of what the vine looked like in its resting state. Three unremarkable ellipsoid leaves, rounded along their edges. Nothing particularly memorable. This ordinariness, she explained, was its first disguise. Set Boquila growing anywhere near other species of plant and soon enough it’ll shed its original identity and begin to imitate. Growing to blend and tangle among the branches and leaves of other plants, slowly, subtly its own leaves will change size, shape, even color, until it achieves a workable imitation of its neighbors. This is amazing enough, but should its vines be untangled and directed elsewhere, to the branches and leaves of a completely different species, it would soon shed its previously assumed identity and fashion a newer, more appropriate one. Somehow it gathered relevant information about surrounding plants, to model these successive self-reinventions. Some speculated its leaves possessed a capacity for vision, others noted that perhaps the information-gathering occurred underground, at the root level, genetic specifics absorbed at the thinnest, finest apices, to guide Boquila’s transformations. It has a compulsion for replication, Sonocia said, brimming with admiration, much as we do. If it had no natural predators, would it have had any reason to contrive this skill? A relevant question to ask ourselves might be: is this also the reason we’re drawn to change ourselves? Or is it simply an aberration of the imagination? We can do it simply because we’re curious. What’s worth noting is that even the Boquila’s art’s imperfect. Even its masterpieces of imitation are at best approximate. When it comes to mimicking serrated-edged leaves, for example, it strains, tries its hardest, but can never quite execute a version that passes. Point is, there are limits. A shapeshifter that has no feel for its own particular limits will often leave itself exposed, unconvincing as natural company among other species around it.
*
What happened to Paul, I asked her, the old man? One day at the end of her training, after accomplishing full imaginal metamorphosis into a blue heron, after coming back into herself, a grown human woman sitting on a cane-backed chair in a kitchen, the old man informed her that she had fully absorbed what he had to teach and thereafter was free to practice her art without guidance, alone. Long ago, back when he was learning and had acquired a strong handle on the craft, he told her, his own teacher had told him the same. So here was her turn, him releasing her from tutelage. A frivolous art, totally useless, except for how it can subtly expand the feeling-life of the practitioner. She made a half-hearted attempt to resist, ask for more time, a few more lessons, but raising a hand the old man stopped her. She was ready, he assured her, she was skilled enough to weather any failures on her own. To honor the tradition, what he’d passed along to her, it would be best if she didn’t come by the house again. Like herons, shapeshifters aren’t flock animals; they travel solo. With one exception, though, so pay attention. There’ll come a time when she’ll begin to feel the need to take on a young one, nurture them. To take under her wing a beginner to the art, who felt the pull to venture beyond their species but lacked the know-how. Sad as you might be, that I’m releasing you now, know that when that time comes an you take on a student of your own, you’re honoring me by finding me in another form, then handing me back to the tradition. While Sonocia described her own release-day, I began to sense in what direction she was taking me. So when she sat back, finished with her story, I knew what she would say next. That while the past year’s work had been difficult and profitable, it had brought us to this. Her telling me I was ready to be sent on my way, and though it might be sad to hear, I should be glad for it, because one day I’d have a chance of finding her again as a different person, and could hand along to them everything she’d taught me.
*
Sufficed to say, that time hasn’t yet come. I’m not entirely sure it will. Not long after she released me and discouraged further contact, I graduated with a degree in Nothing and moved from Everywhere, to Chicago. Chicago was truly somewhere, I thought, a habitat ideal for gaining a lived familiarity with other species. A large urban ecosystem, I believed, was almost inherently metaphysical. Instead of flying like many a bird I’d already imagined, I packed a car with my few belongings and drove. My brother William would be riding with me, having decided a move to Chicago would improve his prospects also. He’d lived in Austin, Texas the past few years only to discover he was not in fact a Texan. No matter how hard he tried, it wouldn’t work. So we rented the first floor of a brownstone in Logan Square, on a block we later learned was territory of the Latin Kings. Drug deals day and night on the corner outside our living room window. William landed work at a non-profit which made good on the designation, earning him very little money. I handed along my name to a temp agency, which dealt me out like candy to a series of short-term employers. Answering phones for an insurance agency. Filing paperwork for an internet start-up. Running documents to the Cook County courthouse for a law firm. Within a few months of moving, I found myself far from the tutorials I enjoyed in Sonocia’s company, unbothered most afternoons on a park bench. Take a bench in Humboldt Park and within minutes you could be guaranteed someone with questionable intentions would approach, to buy or sell something illegal. Quickly I learned the green spaces around the city were not what could be called natural, but only appeared so, to trick unwitting creatures from seeking asylum there. Ducks, sparrows. Once I even spied a poor opossum waddle along in broad daylight, injured and dazed. Somehow a lengthy stick had been stabbed into its hindquarters. As it crawled along the stick bobbed back and forth like an antenna. Out of fellow feeling for the poor animal, thought I would close eyes and assume its form, then work to devise strategies to remove the stick. Useless, I learned. What I became in my own mind was unconnected with the creature crossing the lawn before me, kids following along behind it, throwing empty styrofoam cups and wadded-up burger wrappers at it. In this habitat cruelty was frequently apparent, unlike most others, where it was undemonstrative, subtle, noticeable only to those who were in the habit of looking for it. This was a far cry from Everywhere, where I’d learned my craft. But here, I thought, was a place where I could really perfect it.
*
Pigeons, rats, cockroaches. Those were the most dominant urban species, no surprises there. Anyone who had never set foot in Chicago could predict that vermin trinity. But there was also the mynnah bird a neighbor kept in a cage on their rear porch, the chickens another neighbor let roam free through the alleys, pecking at trash and used needles. To share a city with such creatures, best to think like them. My earliest transformations in the apartment were conducted behind a closed bedroom door, since William was unaware of my secret tendency towards plurality; I knew him well enough to know he’d be skeptical. Doubtless he’d dismiss it as, at best, daydreaming that’d aged past its natural expiration date, me being a grown man, or at worst, an impossible ambition turned inward to curdle as delusion. Sonocia had already warned me about discussing the craft with just anyone. Do that, people would begin watching you from the corner of their eyes, as if you were a threat-in-the-making. Present normal. Remain hidden. This foundational principle of the shapeshifter’s art had been honed over long centuries of suspicion and persecution. Once, she said, shapeshifters expressed themselves out in the open, changing their appearances outwardly for all to witness and admire. In some cultures they were venerated, in others regarded with fearfulness but respect. But as time advanced, shedding centuries as it went, the cultures died off or changed into climates less welcoming to their kind. People still feared them but somewhere along the way the old respectfulness left them. So began the dark ages of their persecution, common people hunting down changelings in their midst to imprison, dissect, burn at the stake. Seeing it was no longer safe to freely express themselves externally, the few shapeshifters left evolved their art as a skill to be practiced introspectively. Inside their heads, they thought, they would be safe, hidden. The people would be less threatened by what they couldn’t see. This, Sonocia told me, sadness when she said it, grieving our many forebears, this was why discretion was essential. Traditionally it was a matter of survival. So when among unsympathetic company, close a door and practice the craft in private. William loved me, of course, being my brother. But being he was an elder brother, was duty-bound to correct any waywardness on my part through teasing and hazing. If he caught me changing shape, I could imagine the response. “What’re you doing?” “Imagining what it’d be like to transform, step-by-step, from a human to a pigeon?” “What for?” “To rescale the dimensions of first person feeling.” “Christ, what a flake. How much weed you been smoking lately?”
*
Nowadays I have an evening habit, after work and after a bite to eat, I’ll take long looping walks around the neighborhood, particularly every other Thursday. Every two weeks my neighbors will have set bright orange recycling bins to the curb, so as I pass I’ll peruse what they’re getting rid of, bottles and folded-up cereal boxes and the occasional stack of old magazines. In my days I’ve assumed the shape of many a scavenger, so maybe I’ve retained the instinct: dig through the junk, take home what looks interesting or useful. This was a habit I only took up after leaving Chicago, because neighborhoods there were already overrun with legions of trash-diggers and alley-skulkers. When I arrived here, a much quieter, greener place, I noticed sidewalks were empty most evenings and the recycling bins were unbothered. So I took up again this modest discipline of aimless walking. One evening a few years ago I made my most significant find, dozens of very old back issues of National Geographic, stacked in two full bins. As I write this, years later, the magazines are stacked on the floor beneath the desk, next to my right foot. In one issue dated from the mid-90s, I believe, I came upon a brief article about a man in his nineties, a retired carpenter living in Israel. He had been born in Poland but had left before the German occupation. If I remember correctly, during the war most of his family had died. Surviving all that, he eventually made his way to Israel, where he took up work as a tradesperson. Accompanying the article were photographs of a very old man standing in a workshop he’d built behind his small home, lined along its benches several large dollhouse-like constructions. Synagogues, this article explained. In his retirement the old man had set out to reconstruct from memory and in miniature each of the eighteen wooden synagogues in Poland that had been burned during the occupation. I found it hard to believe that level of detail could be recalled from memory alone, surely he’d cross-referenced photographs to guide his making. But no, that’s what the article told me, so I had to honor the man by believing it. Why mention this? As way of an explanation for why, during those early days in Chicago, I tired of assuming the shapes of species within sight and reach, rat, pigeon, cockroach. A spontaneous return to old associations soon came over me, and I felt impelled to chase them where they led me, into quieter turns of nostalgia. The birds and insects and reptiles and mammals that populated my rural childhood. Absorbed into mind, and mind grown to branch out in every direction as memory, they remained alive in that one place, inside me. So I turned to these as models for what else I might become, eyes closed while riding the El to work, or standing under the heated lamps of a kiosk, at California Stop, shoulder to shoulder almost with strangers equally shivering.
*
