The story goes that my distinguished ex-Professor Milton Munn faked his own death in the parking lot of Moonrise Movies, a fire-rutted cinema on the outskirts of Wissahickon, Wisconsin, at approx. 10:15 p.m. on April 16, 2011. Leave it to the Year of the Horse to fuck shit up. A bucketful of ketchup and a closed casket funeral and you're dead in the eyes of the ever-living world, apparently. Milton dead? Ridiculous notion. The Mer-People Living Among Us special on the Discovery Channel was more

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... convincing. You can't pull the wool over my eyes. So I lingered around and kept my ear to the ground, listening for gossip of Milton's ghost. Mostly I'd hear nothing, static. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Draw a circle round me, cause I had nothing. Well, if I'm being honest, that's not all true; now and then tips would come trickling in from unseemly sorts. Ambulance-chasing psychics and confidence men, mostly. Some other professional noses. All in all: a whole lotta noise. Still I kept on with the chase; Milton was my golden goose. I spotted Milton in disguise reffing a high school girls' basketball game last July. When the game was over I pursued him past the locker rooms. A thick steam emanated from the open door; a mob of bobbed cheerleaders in jumpers emerged cackling. I weaved to navigate their pom-poms, but it was too late: Milton turned a corner and disappeared into a puff of smoke. In January of the next year Baba Yaga, an ancient Russian witch who slings hotdogs on the corner of Lake and Miles and does impressions of 18 th century steam ships to concerned passersby, told me that her friend saw him buying a Polish sausage with extra sauerkraut in Times Square on New Years' Eve. 4 Then there was the matter of the Lithuanian circus troop in Moscow's Fire District, and the remarkably familiar-looking contortionist who jumped in a box that was thrown in the river. And there was the Polaroid from Jakarta, of all places, delivered in a nondescript manila envelope, of a VW motorcycle ridden by a hooded man who, after some investigation, turned out to be a tall midget in a bald cap after all. And then: what do we have here? Along comes Duke Finley, out of the baby blue, just about a year ago, who says he's spotted Milton hiking Mt. Pine right here, no less, in Wissahickon, not ten miles away from my doorstep. But let's get one thing straight: Finley's a drunk. He said he saw Milton when he was at work, but that would've been at nothing short of a thousand feet up a steel pole wasted on bathtub gin. See, Finley repairs cables in radio masts. He's the only one in town who knows how. Turns out mortal peril lands you great job security. But I figured a thousand feet up a steel pole in a cloud, what does he know? and ignored it. If all these scattered half-stories have scrambled you up -my sincerest apologies. Allow me to tease out the thread of the narrative. Keep in mind I'm writing with one arm tied behind my back. Because, for once, it turns out I was wrong. Finley was right. Milton Munn was on the mountain. For the record I'll state here that as of the mid afternoon hours of July 24 th 2015, I'm reasonably sure that Milton Munn, 67, a brilliant and disgraced ex-professor of Botany at Northampton University, is asleep in a sunpool in the last vacant room of the Marriot in Wissahickon, Wisconsin. I'll elaborate. Allow me to rewind the tapes. A Terrible Incident occurred in March of 2011 of which Milton was wrongfully accused. The jist of it is: someone kicked the bucket and Milton was the fall guy. Someone's got to eat it, I guess. But Milton and I, we were on the cusp of a miraculous something, about to make history, toiling long hours for the Apollinaire Prize,