Early in the morning, when I don’t want to get up, I project myself; or imagine that I do. I picture myself as a set of eyes with no body, flying eyes or a spirit or a disembodied brain or a ghost that hums and hovers and drifts here and there like a hummingbird over every wall and yard and through the streets of this beat-up old city, the only city I know.
I can launch off the lip of the Mountain, the rock face a hundred metres high that separates the new city from the old – launch so convincingly that, although I’m lying there in bed, I get a rush of vertigo as I fly, flicking leaves from the tops of the trees that anchor the crumbling soil of the cliffs. Then I skip off the roof of a freight car lumbering along the railroad line that follows the foot of the escarpment, and fly up Sherm
