Summary

In “Bon Voyage, Mr. President,” the 73-year-old President sat in a Geneva park “thinking about death” (3). He remembered his first visit to Switzerland. He was now another anonymous person “in the city” (3). He had come from Martinique in search of an answer “to a pain” his doctors “could not identify” (4). After six weeks, the doctors pinpointed the pain in “the juncture of two vertebrae below his waist” (4). The doctor said all pain was technically from the mind. The President had no choice but to have “a dangerous . . . operation” (5).

Feeling depressed, he picked flowers “from the public plantings” (6). He went to a café and had a coffee that would “wake the dead,” though he was not supposed to drink coffee (7). He was still contemplating death when a familiar man entered. Seeing familiar faces was “one of the many persecution fantasies of exile...