I Would Be Happy to Leave This Asylum

Couré is a tall but invisible man. Equatorial black. Iron-rail thin. Strong for someone his age, which is forty-seven or thirty-five or once, adding up all the years he remembered dancing with various companies, he calculated fifty-two. He forgets one number after another, filling out the forms he’s asked to fill out. He’s being returned to Guinea, and his deportation papers state he’s forty-one. In America you can’t be sent home without an age and a date of birth attached, though in Guinea such information is not important.