e get off Amtrak at Davis and steal some bikes. They were sitting there, unchained, some college kids’ bicycles. Scott starts riding no-handed and crashes once; William begins singing an aria, but really it’s a passage from Schopenhauer, I don’t know which one, he’s singing it in Spanish for some reason. Dirk takes off his shirt and makes fart noises as he rides. The craziness, surely, has something to do with the whiskey we drank on the train. I kept winning at cards so I didn’t drink, but the others, well, you know the story. It doesn’t have to be told. We’re headed to Freeborn Hall for a KDVS radio special. But it occurs to me, as we maneuver though groups of students, men wearing shirts advertising their fraternities and women in skirts and others in shorts and so on and so forth (imagine a college town and the easy streets with young people walking down it, going in and out of shoe stores and record stores and bookstores and drugstores; imagine a flat college town, one that’s hot where everybody wears shorts in the summer and women wear these shirts that show off their midriffs to enticing effect, imagine the buildings and the classes and the student union and the people trying to give away credit cards and the people trying to get signatures to free political prisoners in African and Latin American and Asian and European and North American countries and imagine all the rest, the hippies sitting in a circle passing a joint and the guys on the basketball court shooting hoop and a lone woman under an oak tree reading Crime and Punishment and a couple walking toward the library and and and). We reach Freeborn Hall for our interview. But a curious thing has happened. Dirk, it appears, proving de Selby’s theory about bicycles, or at least giving it some degree of credence, can’t dismount. It appears for a moment that he has become part bicycle. This gives some degree of satisfaction. On the train, I’d been explaining de Selby’s theory that bicycle thieves often turn into the bicycle they’ve stolen. But no one had listened. (They hadn’t disagreed; merely, they hadn’t listened.) I couldn’t remember the whole theory; I only knew a part of it. However, I did remember de Selby’s strange remedy: hit the seat with your hand. Bicycles don’t like to be hit on their seat, it bugs them. Dirk hits the seat. The bicycle slowly, reluctantly let him go. You can imagine the rest.

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