Wake: January 9, 2006, Puerto Angel, Oaxaca, Mexico.

I've been here five or six days. Each day is one more in a succession of perfect days, the temperature hovering at f degrees, the sweet-smelling air, bougainvilleas tumbling down garden walls, vines twisting around orchid trees. There's just enough hint of a chill in the Pacific Ocean to make it possible to stay in for hours. There are no ugly resorts--just the right balance of backpacker and more genteel ecotourism, where college professors meet city planners and physicians' assistants, and the locals drive cabs and rent rooms to the tourists. Only the poorest--and luckily not many of those--sell things on the beach. There must be hundreds of similar destinations all over the world, with Internet cafes off the beach, like the one I write in. Still, this particular beach--Puerto Angel--has been a fantasy locale for me since I edited David Rattray's book How I Became One of the Invisible in 1990, because the opening stories are set here.

David held a job for many years that had been created for him by an old friend from Harvard. It was some kind of editorial job working on Reader's Digest books that involved--I could be wrong about this--writing historical notes about the Bible. At any rate, there was very little actual "work" entailed in this position, but it gave him an office, some stature, a salary. Behind the door of this office, he wrote poems on an old manual typewriter and translated books by Reno Crevel, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and many others. Additionally, he pursued his own studies in ancient music, Pythagorean cults and various forms of …