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56 Two Squirrel Stories An old friend stands by Rinzai’s bed as he is dying. Have you forgotten? Zen masters usually have something to say at the end. Rinzai points to the ceiling. Listen. Squirrels running across the roof, bickering. He smiles. He dies. He lets Listen be his last word, along with the sounds the squirrels make bumbling so beautifully. That was eleven hundred years ago. Now, last week, Michael Bailey on a ladder reaches to clean off the sticks and leaves from the top of a secondfloor airconditioner. There is a long-dead alarm horn up there too, that a former owner thought would scare off burglars. Wonder what was set to trigger it? It does not warn Michael Bailey. A squirrel bites his finger, jumps up to the roof peak and off . . . circles twice in the air, down around an axis of himself like a treble clef, 𝄞 lands flat as a note, and lies there, full out on his wingspan in the leaves, a Chinese character for flying squirrel. That was not me that just did that. I am brown. What you saw overhead was creamy white. 57 Did he break the skin? It was not that kind of bite. Michael Bailey himself has no business being alive. Twelve years old, I saw him jump from a waterfall ledge near Boone, a hundred feet at least. Forty-two now, less jumpy, racing dirtbikes. I sent him that video that emailed around of those Norwegians in wingsuits skirting the fjord’s rockface and just missing the highway hairpin turn. Michael Bailey’s love of ecstatic flight has so pushed his fear genes into subordination they do not mind following behind silently, with a state-of-the-art camera, just out of arm’s reach— rather than screaming as they should be. ...

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