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narrows as I near the crow’s nest, making the climb feel increasingly treacherous. Finally I pull myself over into the small wooden tub that hugs the mast—only to find it’s not small at all. Like the crew’s quarterdeck, it may look small from the outside, but once inside, the circular space appears to be a hundred feet in diameter. There are members of the crew reclining in velvet chairs, sipping neon-bright martinis with faraway eyes, and listening to a live band that plays smooth jazz.
    “Party of one? Right this way,” says a hostess, and she leads me to my own velvet chair, which looks out at moonlight shimmering on water.
    “Are you a jumper?” asks a pale man sitting in the next chair, drinking something blue and possibly radioactive. “Or are you just here to watch?”
    “I’m here to clear my head.”
    “Have one of these,” he says, pointing to his radioactive drink. “Until you find your own cocktail you can share mine. Everyone here must find their cocktail or you’ll be whipped soundly and sent off to bed. That’s how all nursery rhymes end here. Even the ones that don’t rhyme.”
    I look around at the dozen or so people enjoying themselves in vaguely psychedelic stupors. “I don’t understand how this can all fit in the crow’s nest.”
    “Elasticity is a fundamental principle of perception,” my companion says. “But as rubber bands break when left too long in the sun, I suspect that the crow’s nest will, in time, realize we’ve abused its fine elastic nature and it will break, too, shrinking back down to its appropriate size. At that time, anyone caught inside will be crushed; their blood, bones, and various insides squeezed through the knotholes of the wood like so much Play-Doh.” Then he raises his glass. “I’d pay to see that!”
    A few yards away, a crewman in a blue jumpsuit climbs to the lip of the crow’s nest, spreads his arms wide, and leaps toward certain death. I stand, and look over the edge, but he’s vanished. All those gathered applaud politely, and the band begins to play “Orange-Colored Sky,” although the twilight sky is bruise-purple.
    “Why is everyone just sitting here?” I shout. “Didn’t you all see what just happened?”
    My drinking companion shrugs. “Jumpers do what jumpers do. It’s our job to applaud their pluck and celebrate their lives.” He casually glances over the side. “It’s so far down you never see them splat, though.” Then he gulps the rest of his drink. “I’d pay to see that!”

18. Mystery Ashtray
    There is no one at school who wishes me harm.
    I tell myself this each morning after checking the news for Chinese earthquakes. I tell myself as I hurry between classes. I tell myself on the occasions that I pass the kid who wants to kill me, and yet doesn’t seem to know I exist.
    “You’re overreacting,” my father had said. Which might be true—but that implies there was something to actually react to. In better moments I want to beat the crap out of myself for being so stupid as to think the kid had it in for me. So what does it say about me if beating the crap out of myself is one of my better moments?
    “You need to be more centered,” my mother would say. She’s all into meditation and raw vegan food, I suppose as a way to cope with how much she hates cleaning meat out of people’s teeth for a living.
    Centering, however, is easier said than done. This I learned from a ceramics class I once took. The teacher made throwing a pot look easy, but the thing is, it takes lots of precision and skill. You slam the ball of clay down in the absolute center of the potterywheel, and with steady hands you push your thumb into the middle of it, spreading it wider a fraction of an inch at a time. But every single time I tried to do it, I only got so far before my pot warped out of balance, and every attempt to fix it just made it worse, until the lip shredded, the sides collapsed, and I was left with what the teacher