In 1993, I returned to my college dorm room to find that I had left the window open. I closed the window, and went to the bathroom. When I returned from the bathroom, the window was open again. I assumed that someone was hiding in my room. There wasn’t anyone under the bed, so I opened the closet. A man named Victor who had fled to Spain 12 months previous leapt out of the closet wearing rubber boots and brandishing a frying pan.

Victor, who lived down the hall from me in 1991, chased me out the door, upstairs, down the hall, downstairs, down the hall, outside, across the street, and into another dorm before I was able to find a door that I could lock behind me. I regret that I was not able to elude him; I think I might have been devoting too large a fraction of my energy to yelling things like, “I am being pursued by a ghost!”

The last time I had seen Victor was around 5:30 am on a Saturday morning in December of 1991. He had bought a ticket to Madrid without telling anyone. At 5:30, one of our friends whom he had brought into confidence was driving him to the airport. The college didn’t figure out that he was gone for a week or so. In his room, he had laid out all of his belongings with notes saying things like, “These ping-pong paddles are for George.” He had also hung a life-size sculpture of himself, made out of stuff he found lying on the street, from his overhead light. His bureau was filled with hundreds of copies of the college alumni magazine.

Makes me feel well-adjusted.

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