Flight: A Novel

When Zits opens his eyes again, he’s looking at a rat and the rat is looking at him. It’s “a huge wharf rat, two feet long with intelligent eyes” (119). Zits wonders if he, too, is a rat now. He worries that this wharf rat has come to mate with him. He “[rolls] through rotten food and dog shit and rank water and moldy newspaper” (120). The rat remains in place, staring at him. He curses at the rat, then “projectile [vomits]” (120). The vomit scares the rat away; he thought that the rat would stay and eat his vomit. The image causes him to throw up again. There’s blood in his vomit. He wonders if he’s dying, which is possible because Zits knows that he’s entered the body of “a street drunk” (120).

He hears someone yell at him. It’s a concerned young man. He and his female companion are tourists—“[p]retty white people” (121). The young man asks if he’s okay. Zits says that he’s drunk and asks them questions about himself. He wonders if he’s young or old. They glance at each other, chuckle, and say that he looks to be about 50. He then asks them if he’s white; they declare him to be an Indian, which they assume based on his braids and T-shirt featuring the black-and-white image of “the Apache warrior Geronimo and the ironed-on caption ‘Fighting Terrorism Since 1492’” (121).