“Your dissertation. Your time to waste.” She wastes it with the most intense pleasure. The work isn’t glamorous. It consists of taping numbered plastic bags over the ends of branches, then collecting them at measured intervals. She does this over and over, dumbly and mutely, hour by hour, while the world around her rages with assassination, race riot, and jungle warfare. She works all day in the woods, her back crawling with chiggers, her scalp with ticks, her mouth filled with leaf duff, her eyes with pollen, cobwebs like scarves around her face, bracelets of poison ivy, her knees gouged by
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