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he’d bid on a six-ounce bottle of 2008 Yukon fireweed honey at Sotheby’s—five hundred dollars—and it ended up going for seventeen thousand Australian dollars. [Homer Simpson voice: Mmmmm . . . honey .]
    Right about then I finally twigged to the fact that my room had to be bugged and monitored for sound and picture. Lying back on my mattress, I simply said, “Warden—some food, please.”
    I immediately felt deeply sleepy. I passed out and woke up (I’m guessing) an hour later, and there on the table across the room was a plate. Hmmm .
    On it lay three small rectangular Jell-Oey slabs, pink, white and pale green. I looked at the ceiling: “Can I please get some cracked pepper on this?”
    A somewhat mechanical woman’s voice replied in cool, crisp tones: “Please eat your lunch, Zack. We have a lot of things we need to do.”
    “Who are you?”
    “ Bon appétit .”

SAMANTHA
    “ ¿Una abeja le ha picado? ”
    “ ¡Si! Yes, Simone—I mean . . . what? Sorry, I . . . what the  . . . ?”
    “ ¿Samantha, usted está fingiendo? ”
    “No, I’m not fucking with you, I’ve just been stung.”
    I’d swatted a bee off my forearm and into the central grooves of a well-established bayonet aloe. The bee was thoroughly dead . . . murdered ; I felt sick about it, and later on I’d be chided for having done some damage to the bee when I swatted it. Meanwhile, Simone, in downtown Madrid at the corner of Calle Gutenberg and Calle Poeta Esteban de Villegas, was giving me shit: “ ¡Llame a policía! ”
    “Call the po lice ? To tell them what—I killed a bee? Like I want to end up in prison.”
    “ Usted tendrá que hacer algo. ”
    “Jesus, I know I have to do some thing. But calling the authorities? I don’t know.”
    “ ¿Lastimó? ”
    “Pain? No. Not really. Pretty much like I remember it from when I was six.”
    “ Tome una fotografía de ella. ”
    “Brilliant idea.” I got down on my knees and snapped a jpeg of my bee. The phone was a new Samsung that allowed me to take a 20-meg shot with no blurring or smudginess. I sent the photo to Simone.
    “ ¡Caramba! ”
    “Caramba, indeed.”
    Here’s the thing: unknown to me, Simone was forwarding the photo to everyone on her (it turned out) globally extensive friends list, complete with explicit geocoordinates.
    “ ¡Hey! No se olvide a la fotografía de la rebanada del pan. ”
    The Earth sandwich: Right. I’d forgotten to photograph my bread slice. “Gotcha.” I photographed my slice, zapped it to Simone and told her I had to go. I hung up and sat there staring at the bee carcass.
    The wind had picked up and I was getting bloody chilly. I looked at the small red bump on my arm where the stinger had gone in. Had this really just happened? The big news the month before had been Sexy Zack with his Samoyed dog eyes being stung in Iowa—imagine having images of yourself driving a corn harvester naked being the most viral video in planetary history—fortunately for him he was hot, but still. Then they’d hidden him away, and the world hadn’t seen him since.
    But people aren’t stupid—well, actually, people are stupid—which explains wars. There’d been a slew of copycat stings, and I didn’t want people thinking I was another barmy loser looking for fifteen seconds of fame. But wait . . . I did get stung, and there hadn’t been a bee in New Zealand for six or seven years. Why was I trying to talk myself out of reporting this?
    Thing is, when something genuinely cosmic happens to you, your tendency is to believe the experience isn’t real. So there I was trying to figure out what dimension of the sting was inauthentic because interesting things don’t happen to people like me. They don’t.
    The sun came out from behind a cloud. I was suddenly sleepy. I closed my eyes and a little while later I was woken up by three biology students from Massey University in Palmy. They were photographing the dead bee in the aloe’s