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footage of one crash after another. Screeching brakes. Metal crunching. Screams.
    W.’s becoming hysterical.—‘Why don’t they tell us anything?’, he cries. ‘Are we cattle?’
    I sit him on the floor and tell him Hindu stories to calm him down. I tell him how Ganesha came to have the head of an elephant, and Daksha the head of a goat. I tell him of the sage who temporarily substituted a horse’s head for his own, knowing that the secret wisdom he was about to gain would shatter it into a million pieces. (‘That’s what would happento you if you ever had an idea’, W. says.) And I tell him how Dadhyanc’s head was lopped off for revealing the secret of the sacrifice to human beings.
    ‘Hinduism is a bloody religion’, W. says.

 
    On the bus. W. opens his man bag to show me what he’s brought to read on our trip to Memphis. Rosenzweig, of course. You need a volume of Rosenzweig with you at all times, W. says. Polyani’s The Great Transformation . And Whitman’s Leaves of Grass , which dreams of what America might have been, W. says.
    We must read if we want to live, W. says. We may have forgotten how to live, but they—the authors of the books in his man bag—have not.
    And what have I brought?—‘Maimon’s autobiography. Oh yes, very good. Scholem’s memoir of Benjamin. Very impressive’. But he knows I won’t open my books, W. says. He knows I’ve got a National Enquirer concealed somewhere on my person.
    W. doesn’t believe I actually read books.—‘They’re like totems to you’, he says. ‘They contain what you lack. You surround yourself with them, but you don’t understand them’.
    My office is filled with books, that’s the paradox, W. says. I get a childlike excitement from them, from the fact of them, with their heady titles and colourful spines.
    Of course, the real reader has no need to surround himself with books, W. says. The real reader lends them to others, without a thought of them being returned. What need has he for a library of books? He prefers to be alone with only the most essential works, like Beckett with his Dante, in his room at the old folks’ home. Beckett with his Dante, and cricket on the TV.

 
    Memphis, unexpectedly, is cold . The taxi driver tells us that the weather doesn’t know what it’s doing. We go to Gap to buy warm clothes. To Gap! In Memphis ! Imagine! The last place we wanted to go!
    Gap ’s impossibly cheap. How can clothes be so cheap? In what mess of exploitation have we been caught? But we’re cold, we have to compromise.
    I buy a hoodie, W. a cardigan. We examine ourselves in the full length mirror. We look preppy , we decide, without knowing what this word means. We look like preppies .
    It’s still cold outside. What are we going to do? We rent a pool table. Preppies play pool, we decide.
    We’re being followed, W. observes, and it’s true. The same rough-looking guys we saw earlier are slumped in leather chairs in the pool hall.
    They hate preppies and want to rid the world of them, W. says. Which is fine, because he thinks he hates preppies and wants to rid the world of them. They’re going to beat us to death, and he’ll welcome it. But we outlast our would-be assailants, who tire of watching us playing bad pool and drinking.
    The word barbeque doesn’t mean the same thing over here, says W. over dinner. Nor does the word ribs . He’s right. What have we been served? Vast oval plates of red-cooked meat. French fries in great piles. It’s frightening. I must be in heaven with my enormous greed, W. says. My life has peaked at this point, hasn’t it? I’ve finally found a country where I don’t feel perpetually starved to death.
    W. has always liked chubby men, he says. We recall the fat singers we admire, who drink wine out of bottles on stage. Fat, angry men. Is he angry because he’s fat?, I ask of the singer in Modest Mouse.—‘No, he was angry and then he got fat’, W. says. Do you think he minds being fat?, I