anthropological research that had always engaged me, regardless of where I found myself, even at home, in Hopewell, New Jersey.
Then, from the corner of my eye, I noticed off to my right a figure turn into the cul-de-sac from the square, a large, dark person hunched over in a familiar way and lurching erratically from side to side as he made his way down the narrow street toward the café. It was Djinn, and instantly the same fascination and fear I’d experienced before fell across my shoulders like a heavy woolen cloak. No one else in the café seemed to notice him; everyone continued to talk, drink, and eat normally. I, however, at once put my fork down and stared at the man. He looked about the same as he had the first time—large and muscular, nearly naked, with long, matted locks and beard. But now he was covered with caked red mud, instead of dust. It was a coating rather than a skin, as if he’d been basted with it over a fire, and it made his body seem somehow more fierce than it had before, more potentially violent. He wore on his face the same strange expression of near-ecstatic clarity of feeling as before, an almost transcendent look, one we associate with the god-intoxicated.
I looked around me. Did no one else see what I saw? It seemed somehow grandiose to ask, but was I the only one here open to the meaning of this man’s expression? When he drew near, one or two people glanced up, then quickly resumed their previous activity, as if the madman were no more diverting than a stray dog wandering into the café. Everyone else simply treated him as if he weren’t there at all or, if there, as if his presence weren’t worthy of comment. This time, Djinn did not come to my table, nor did he lock eyes with me. Instead, he ignored me altogether, and, to my surprise, I found myself disappointed by it and, in a childlike way, saddened. What was wrong with me? I wondered, and simultaneously wondered how I might regain his attention. I could wave my hand, perhaps, or call out to him, notions I dropped at once, for it would have looked absurd to the others, a foreigner inviting contact with the madman, Djinn.
He passed within a few feet of my table—smelling of wet hay and overripe fruit, like a horse or other large domestic animal—but didn’t acknowledge me. Or anyone else, for that matter. He seemed on a mission, focused and directed, as he moved clumsily between the tables to the far side of the café, where suddenly he reached up and with one hand grabbed onto the support of a second-story balcony and pulled himself up to the first railing and climbed over it. Now he had everyone’s attention, no longer just mine. An odd silence came over the café, as everyone turned and stared at the madman, who was climbing up a rainspout from the second story to the third. He swung himself from the pipe out along a narrow ledge, then stood on the ledge and inched his way along it to a place from which he could reach a wrought-iron window balcony. Turning his broad back to the crowd below, in the process casually exposing his buttocks to us, he grabbed the balcony and pulled himself up to the shuttered window, turned, and faced us like a pope.
At the edge of my awareness, while the madman was climbing the side of the building, I had half-observed a bulky man with a handlebar mustache get up from his crowded table and step alone to the spot where Djinn had begun his climb. The man wore the dark blue guayabera shirt that I had learned to associate with members of the plainclothes police force, and when he slipped his right hand under his shirt, I knew that he was reaching for a gun. In a second, he had it out and aimed at Djinn, who was almost directly overhead, three stories up. Now everyone’s attention was on the policeman’s nickel-plated gun, not the man at whom it was aimed.
“All right, Djinn,” the policeman said in a harsh, but utterly relaxed voice. “Come down now. You know the rules.”
I looked for