To land this position, you have to be able to talk to ducks. Actual ducks. Ducks over the horizon, ducks at the end of a bottle, ducks that if they were strewn out at the edge of a pond at night and you saw them in a bit of light would trigger your phobias. Ducks on drugs. Ducks on the war on drugs. Maybe ornithophobia is really the same phobia as the one with the holes bunched all together in a sickening way: Grackles on a telephone wire are scary because they are one growing row of holes in the universe. The only person I ever knew who had feelings about the universe was someone I read about once in an interview given by his student, who said another favorite teacher of his died an agonizing, humiliating death to rectal cancer, which is to say honey oozing out of a honeycomb is sickening because nothing should be able to move that slowly. To land this position, you can’t be afraid of flying, even though we may struggle when we move that fast. And how would you field the following question. Are ducks inâne?