Awaking disoriented from a deep sleep afternoon nap, I walked the 20 yards from our bungalow to the shoreline and then beyond until my head was submersed, my hair floating this way and that like sea-weed. Holding my breath under water, I realized that I felt like a zombie, that I had no idea why I had walked out there, that it was without conscious decision. It was the first thought I had since opening my eyes.

But now my eyes were closed once again. Like I said, I’m underwater, I’m holding my breath, but it’s requiring no effort, no intent, it’s just as natural as breathing on land. What does my mind see with my eyes closed beneath the sea?

A mammoth fat woman is in front of me. She has disproportionate rolls of fatty flubber that are floating this way and that. Just like my hair. Just like the seaweed. My mind hasn’t put a face on her because to do so would make her real. I just watch with calculated interest as her flubber floats left, floats right, floats left, floats right. It’s hypnotic the sway of her cellulite. I am not in the least revolted.

“Ahhuhhhhuhghhguhp!” I gasp for air, springing up out of the surface. I’m a little startled. Not startled, but all of a sudden very awake. All of a sudden wondering how long I was underwater, why I had come out here anyway. I looked southward, back to the shore, to the trillions of grains of sand, the thousands of palm trees, the hundreds of bungalows filled with red and white and tan tourists, the dozen or so hammock filled restaurants.

Angie by the Rolling Stones was drifting out of one of those restaurants. I recognized it solely by guitar notes at first and then the lyrics followed – maybe just in my own head, I wasn’t sure if I could actually distinguish the words or not. I laid back, floated on the surface, with only my mouth, eyes, and nose poking out of the water. Surely I would be run over by a water taxi coming in from Hat Rin on the other side of the island. Whatever.

My ears adjusted to being underwater. I could still hear a distorted, refracted version of Angie; the sea harmonizing with an accompaniment of Rice Crispy-like snap, crackel, and pops. Up above were majestic clouds changing shape and color as the wind blew and sun set. I saw a regal white sheep and a playful polar bear. The rolling stones had stopped their crooning but nothing else followed. Just rice, crackel, pop, rice, crackel, pop.

Floating out there in the sea with an empire of scaly and slimy organisms busily working away underneath me, I was quintessentially unproductive, failing to achieve even sleep. I was looking for meaning in the clouds. My floating or not floating carried no importance beyond missing the next animal that would present itself to me in the sky. A dragon, how cliché.

My mind drifted to a conversation I overheard earlier in the day before my monstrous nap. An Australian businessman was eating alone at his table and staring speculatively out at the bay. He was looking at it in the same cautious way one looks at a car they might buy or a tire with a leak. Finally when his waiter came to give him his bill, this Australian – about 50 with still a full head of sandy blonde hair – asked his waiter to have a seat. “I’m going to offer you a bit of advice,” he told his waiter whose expression was somewhere between dismay and boredom.

“Do you own any of those small fishing boats out there?” began the Aussie.

His waiter nodded and pointed at a small brown boat with bright neon interior.

“And it’s all yours?” the businessman asked doubtfully.

Again, a nod.

“Let me ask you something, what is it you do with your days here?”

“Well,” it was the first time the waiter spoke, his English almost flawless, “I work here about three hour each day, I play guitar, I have wife and son.”

“And what else,” prodded the Aussie.

“No, that’s all. Work and guitar and wife and son.”

“Well, here is what you must do and I could help you if you would like. You see, you have a major business opportunity right in front of your eyes. You need to take out a small loan from the bank and buy all of the supplies to take out tourists on fishing trips. You should charge at least $10 a trip which is less than a fifth of what it would cost them back in their countries.”

“And then what?” asks the waiter.

“And then what!” exclaims the Aussie indignant at first but then smiling and patient. “Well, then you will make enough money to pay back your loan and then you will make enough money to buy more boats, don’t you see?”

“And then what?” again asks the waiter with true curiosity.

“And then? And then you will be able to buy more fishing equipment and you will even be able to hire people to work for you to take more trips out every day.”

“And then?” The waiter was beginning to sound like a parrot.

The Aussie, now impatient: “Then you’ll hardly have to work at all. You will be the boss, the big man, the chief. You do the paperwork, pay the taxes, and let everyone else work for you.”

“And then?”

“Then, when you have enough money saved, you retire to a quiet island and play guitar with your wife and kid,” the businessman said proudly.

Of course, I didn’t really overhear that conversation. It is only an allegory, told to me by my dear friend Matt Kelley, who – if he has the wherewithal to read down this far – is reading this very sentence in my bedroom as he wanders the world in his white Scooby Doo van.

Word.

I know of another allegory, this one told to me by my dear friend Kurt Vonnegut. It is called Asleep at the Switch and:

It is about a huge reception center outside the Pearly Gates of Heaven – filled with computers and staffed by people who had been certified public accountants or investment counselors or business managers back on Earth.

You could not get into heaven until you had submitted to a full review of how well you had handled the business opportunities God, through His angels, had offered to you on Earth.

All day long and in every cubicle you could hear the experts saying with utmost weariness to people who had missed this opportunity and then that one: “And there you were, asleep at the switch again.”

Asleep at the switch was quite a sacrilegious story. The hero was the ghost of Albert Einstein. He himself so little interested in wealth that he scarcely heard what his auditor had to say to him. It was some sort of balderdash about how he could have become a billionaire, if only he had gotten a second mortgage on his house in Bern, Switzerland, in Nineteen-hundred and Five, and invested the money in known uranium deposits before telling the world that E=Mc squared.

“But there you were – asleep at the switch again,” said the auditor.

“Yes,” said Einstein politely, “it does seem rather typical.”

“So you see,” said the auditor, “life really was quite fair. You did have a remarkable number of opportunities, whether you took them or not.”

“Yes, I see that now,” said Einstein.

“Would you mind saying that in so many words?” said the auditor.

“Saying what?” said Einstein.

“That life was fair.”

“Life was fair,” said Einstein.

“If you don’t really mean it,” said the auditor, “I have many more examples to show you. For instance, just forgetting atomic energy: If you had simply taken the money that you put into a savings bank when you were at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and you had put it, starting in Nineteen-hundred and Fifty, say, into IBM and Polaroid and Xerox – even though you only have five more years to live …” The auditor raised his eyes suggestively, inviting Einstein to show how smart he could be.

“I would have been rich?” Said Einstein.

“Comfortable, shall we say?” said the auditor smugly. “But there you were again …” And again his eyebrows went up.

“Asleep at the switch?” asked Einstein hopefully.

The auditor stood and extended his hand, which Einstein accepted unenthusiastically. “So you see, Doctor Einstein,” he said, “we can’t blame God for everything, now can we?” He handed Einstein his pass through the Pearly Gates. “Good to have you aboard,” he said.

So into heaven Einstein went, carrying his beloved fiddle. He thought no more about the audit. He was a veteran of countless border crossings by then. There had always been senseless questions to answer, empty promises to make, meaningless documents to sign.

But once inside heaven Einstein encountered ghost after ghost who was sick about what his or her audit had shown. One husband and wife team, which had committed suicide after losing everything in a chicken farm in New Hampshire, had been told that they had been living the whole time over the largest deposit of nickel in the world.

A fourteen-year-old Harlem child who had been killed in a gang fight was told about a two-carat diamond ring that lay for weeks at the bottom of a catch basin he passed every day. It was flawless and had not been reported as stolen. If he had sold it for only a tenth of its value, four hundred dollars, say, according to his auditor, and speculated in commodities futures, especially in cocoa at that time, he could have moved his mother and sisters into a Park Avenue condominium and sent himself to Andover and then to Harvard after that.

All the auditing stories that Einstein heard were told by Americans. He had chosen to settle in the American part of heaven. Understandably, he had mixed feelings about Europeans, since he was a Jew. But it wasn’t only Americans who were being audited. Pakistanis and pygmies from the Philippines and even communists had to go through the very same thing.

It was in character for Einstein to be offended first by the mathematics of the system the auditors wanted everybody to be so grateful for. He calculated that if every person on Earth took full advantage of every opportunity, became a millionaire and then a billionaire and so on, the paper wealth on that one little planet would exceed the worth of all the minerals in the universe in a matter of three months or so. Also: There would be nobody left to do any useful work.

So he sent God a note. It assumed that God had no idea what sort of rubbish His auditors were talking. It accused the auditors rather than God of cruelly deceiving new arrivals about the opportunities they had on Earth. He tried to guess the auditors’ motives. He wondered if they might not be sadists.

The story ended abruptly. Einstein did not get to see God. But God sent out an archangel who was boiling mad. He told Einstein that if he continued to destroy ghosts’ respect for the audits, he was going to take Einstein’s fiddle away from him for all eternity. So Einstein never discussed the audits with anybody ever again. His fiddle meant more to him than anything.

The story was certainly a slam at God, suggesting that He was capable of using a cheap subterfuge like the audits to get out of being blamed for how hard economic life was down here.

Whatever.

I realized that my skin looked like a raison. A wet raison. A wet dried grape. That’s what I was and it was time for me to swim back to shore. It was also dark.

I was proud of myself – nearly three hours of complete unproductivity. And thanks to my dear friends Matt Kelley and Kurt Vonnegut, it was three hours of justified unproductivity. I went back to our bungalow, did some push-ups, pulled out my copy of A Primer to Jungian Psychology, and fell back into being me.