Dec 24

In later years, he was never able to explain how it happened. It had all seemed terribly logical at the time, one thing leading to another in series, and after Cairo, it was simply inevitable that he’d be scaling a cliff with a pear, a voodoo doll, and of course, the goldfish. (Always the goldfish. The goldfish was the crux of the matter, after all, even if he hadn’t known it at the time.) But when he tried to explain this to other people, it began to sound increasingly crazy, until finally he gave up completely. After that, whenever anybody asked, he said he’d been in a cult, but was feeling much better now, and that seemed to satisfy everybody and didn’t lead to nearly as many awkward questions.