that is a US Consular Office: a stuffy holding pen lined with video cameras, decorated with assorted tourist posters for various states of the Union interspersed with a Wild West styled "Justice for Peace - Help Us Hunt The Faces of Global Terror" posters, and the seemingly benevolent countenances of Dubya Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condi Rice, which grace one half of an end wall (at least they haven't gone down the gigantic Maoist mural path yet), gazing at the petitioners, in which he spends an entire spring morning, he receives again permission to enter Hotel America (of which Hotel California is a small part).

Yet strangely on receiving his stamped passport, he feels disembodied; he feels reluctant to cross the border, for even there, on return, he will be as he is now, a man without ground beneath his feet. He begins to feel that the sequence of hotel rooms in which he sleeps at nights are, perhaps, more appropriate places for his ilk. Such thoughts spiral outwards, and somehow mesh with the lines of a song (by honey voiced Ruthie Foster) he heard, again in transit at an airport few weeks ago:

"Take everything that you gave when things were nice, Take everything if it makes you feel alright. With the distance from what we solidified I can see things that before I tried to hide, 'cuz I am here, and you are there All alone..."