New York City dawn streets. Making my way from downtown back to my hotel in the 50s. Yes, I can feel the key in my pocket. A market where a number of people are emptying garbage bags. A truck is unloading the bags. Someone has found a gun. What a fool to turn it in, I think. Up on the top floor of a high building I can see down a narrow air shaft, pipes and iron ladders five hundred feet down. Why walk? I jump off an iron balcony and swim through the air uptown.

Meet two naked angels about sixteen. They say it's their first solo flight. The city spread out underneath us about a thousand feet down, in beautiful pastel shades... all quite idyllic.

I acquire some liquid nourishment in a silver trough. It is creamy and custardy and it tastes delicious... I absorb some by a sort of osmosis. (Reminds me of a recent dream in Tangier cafe and various old friends turn up. Old friends like Slim whom I don't remember seeing before, but who are nonetheless familiar.)

The proprietor brings out a bar like a gold ingot, about eight inches long and brown on the outside. He cuts off one side and inside is a creamy filling. Looks like crème brûlée, clearly delicious and I am eating it with my eyes. It's known as Eye Candy... breathing it in through my eyes. (As a child of three I thought that one saw with one's mouth. My brother then told me to close my eyes and open my mouth and I got the idea that I couldn't see with my mouth... but people do feast their eyes.)

So, still carrying this silver trough, I alight with the two angelic boys on a balcony where Colonel Massek of the advertising firm Van Dolen, Givordan and Massek, where I worked in 1942, is now located. He, the Colonel, says I can go out for lunch. I tell him I've already eaten. The balcony is a thousand feet above the city... stunning view.

"Well," I say, "let's go."

One of the boys says he has "lost it" and it is a long way down. As a test I raise myself three feet off the floor, but none of the kids in the office seem to notice anything, so I take off into what I now eall "my element," out through the clouds, and in fact sit down on a cloud, which I can do because I got no weight at all. Just floating, lonely as a cloud, and the view is so breathtaking and no fear of falling anymore. I got no body to fall. Just me and my shadow. Strolling down the avenue over New York.

There is no hurry . . . no hurry at all.

SOURCE: My Education: a book of dreams by William S. Burroughs, 1995, p.17-18. Passage untitled; title added to aid searches.

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