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New York for another round of teaching, commitment-free relationships, and vacuous socializing. I even started doing yoga. I thought about writing a book on happiness. My newly acquired agent thought it would be a great idea. Thoughts without a thinker. Cool.

 
    In January 2008 , during a bitterly cold day when it was almost too painful to inhale the winter air, a box was delivered to my place by UPS and left in the hallway. When I got back that evening, I saw that it had been sent by Barbara at Essex. It was clearly the missing box,
Taurus
. Smaller than the others. It sat on my desk all night. A strange fear ran through me, preventing the beautifully dreamless sleep I had enjoyed since getting back from Los Angeles. I called Barbara the next morning and she said that the box had just turned up unannounced, addressed to me as before, with no letter or explanation.
    I got back from work that evening around 7:00 p.m. and began to drink freely, staring blankly at the box. I inspected it carefully, handling the box gingerly. Something shifted when I turned it on its side. I slit the wrapping tape very carefully with a Stanleyknife and opened the box. Underneath a pile of Alsatian newspapers was a circular wooden object, about a foot and a half in diameter and eight inches high. The top lifted off to reveal a tiny auditorium full of painted figures on seven elevated rows with the amphitheater divided by seven tiny gangways. It was a maquette of Giulio Camillo’s memory theater. It was exquisite. I retrieved my copy of
The Art of Memory
and began to look at the illustrations. Was this the original model that Camillo had used to persuade the king of France to become his patron?
    My landlady’s family owned an antiques business, mainly importing repro stuff from Italy. Business was bad. I showed her father the theater some days later. Any suggestion of antiquity was quickly dismissed. He disassembled the base of the theater to reveal the carpenter’s mark, the initials “D.M.” and a date, 1986—the year after Mongin had completed Michel’s memory map. The maquette was a reproduction, probably assembled in Paris from descriptions in Yates and some drawings in the Bibliothèque Nationale. I’d seen some of the latter in an obscure edition of Camillo that I had bought from Rudi Thoemmes Rare Books in Bristol.
    The theater sat on a table beside my bed for weeks. I liked to feel it close by. Oddly reassuring. That waswhen the hallucinations began. Difficult to explain. Embarrassing. I began to experience inexplicable pains in my body, something like growing pains, moving within me against my will. It made any concentration impossible. I would lie facedown on the floor and feel the pain in my body move from organ to organ. Belly pain. Kidney pain. Brain pain. Lung pain. I felt like a body bag of organs. This would go on for hours.
    Next, my visual perception seemed to be affected by all sorts of marginal encroachments. It felt like interference on an old-fashioned T.V. set. Suddenly, when walking down the street, I would see something moving or flying quickly in the far corner of my visual field. I would turn my head to look, but it was gone. Things got worse, to the point where the perceptual surface of the world began to warp and bend. It was like being in a hall of mirrors. Or in a movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story. This was accompanied with a massive increase in my tinnitus and strange auditory effects, like the sound of rain, or wind, or leaves, or distant muttering voices.
    A week later and I was hallucinating wildly on the subway, seeing doubles of myself or watching strange animals, reminiscent of grotesque carvings in Gothic cathedrals, float around the subway car. Were theyangels? Were my body and perception being invaded by some alien force? Was God punishing me? In order to reduce the massive levels of anxiety I was feeling, I began to disengage from the world. I went into the city just twice a week to