K------ sends a text warning me of the Dean of Students’ true motivation, which is, she’s sure, to pinpoint the location of his globe, to trick me into inviting him up under the pretext that he is not feeling well or that he has some sort of important business matter to discuss with me. And then to drug me perhaps, to ransack my place afterwards in search of the globe he must know now for certain that I stole from him on my last visit to his office. Don’t trust him, she writes, run quickly in the other direction when he is distracted for a moment. My opportunity comes when a loud explosion sends a sewer grate skyward two streets over. One can’t help but turn and look in the direction of any loud noise and the Dean of Students is obviously no exception to most rules, especially one as universal as this. Before I know it, I have found a side entrance to what turns out to be a premier eating establishment known for its elaborate seafood concoctions and its wait staff versed in at least seven different languages. I know the place by reputation but have never considered myself the sort to frequent any establishment with a name of more than four syllables and so my discomfiture at finding myself standing square in the middle of it, or at least in the middle of that portion of it where the food preparation takes place, where the lobsters are, for instance, dropped squirming into vats of boiling water and the leeks are minced up finely by hand, is enormous and has, I realize, the potential to become debilitating if not for the fact that the explosion outside has rendered me virtually invisible due to everyone on the premises – guests, staff, and self-important members of management alike -- rushing for the wide, blue-tinted windows so as to have a look for themselves at what might have caused this explosion. Now is not the time to start singing, I know this instinctively; I should sneak unseen out the front entrance and into the street where I can blend in again with the crowds come downtown so as to avoid wasting away anonymously in the fields and the forests that proliferate a mere half day’s journey by rail from here. But I can’t help myself. Sometimes the throat insists on a reality the head had no hand in creating and when this occurs, you might as well pull up a chair and listen, might as well admit sound is a more effective vehicle for the transmission of that which the soul wishes to share with anything that lies outside itself than is any other medium. This includes the spoken language the soul has created for itself, has synthesized out of nothing, so as to be able to make its wishes known, to break down the very barrier the soul has -- let’s face it -- been defined by throughout its long and checkered history. The barrier that allows one to refer to it as a soul in the first place rather than something else, like an appendix or pocket.