Jessie Poggi, a friend from early grade school, took me to a small open-air restaurant run in a parking lot by Carlos Santana, who was a black man with dreadlocks.

I crossed a bridge over a pond and got to the other side to find hundreds of large, fat tadpoles thrashing around in the water. Some were nearly frogs (bright green, plasticky-looking things, not bullfrogs). Bob Hass was there and he asked if I had any jars so he could take some home. I went inside the house and looked around, but I couldn’t find any glass jars, only cans (one with a thick accumulation of dirty candle wax inside) and Tupperware containers. I gave him some and he scooped up tadpoles to take away, beaming with joy the whole time. I wanted some, but couldn’t bring myself to actually touch them.

Some of the tadpoles turned into not frogs, but monkeys. I was talking to someone with two glass bottles with small monkeys inside. The bottles were full of water. One held a chimpanzee and one held an orangutan. I was worried that they might not be able to breathe, but when I looked more closely I realized that they were both smoking cigarettes–the tips of the cigarettes went above the surface of the water and they could breathe in through the cigarettes. They looked insouciant and smoked their cigarettes like 1930’s gangsters with cigars from old movies. I tried to convince the guy to get rid of them. “Why do you want an ape anyway? It’ll grow huge and trash your house. What are you going to do when it’s not small and cute anymore?”

When I woke up, I found out it was International Orangutan Awareness Week.

They had built a wall around the Berkeley campus, and another wall around the closest shops–cars still drove around between the two walls, honking, like the cars in the old city centers of Europe. I was in a car with Phong.