I read this episode’s story for the first time in 2003 at New York University’s Silver Center for Arts and Sciences. It was a big honor for me because three highly esteemed American writers were in the audience, poet Billy Collins, memoirist Patrticia Hampl and fictionist Mary Gordon. One of the most wondrous moments in storytelling is realizing much, much later how one of my stories is connected to an earlier story I’d written. You recognize emblems, patterns, a familiar arc in the narrative, something coming full circle. My last episode was about a time I spent in a Buddhist monastery last year where I observed a long period of silence. In Episode 4, I read what I wrote on my last day in the hermitage when finally, I was allowed to speak, a piece I had titled “Almost Like Batman”. I recalled our yoga exercises before daybreak, doing a shoulder stand position in an open hall, where bats would fly in and brush our feet, our toes up in midair. I had thought of Batman then and the time he supposedly spent in Asia where he learned how to vanish behind the shadows, which I somehow associated with an experience I called the incredible vanishing of the self. Almost ten years ago, I wrote a story that happened to my family when I was twelve years old. This story also involves an encounter with bats and ends in a note, somehow similar to how Bruce Wayne’s childhood ended with a sudden death in the family. This one is called Killing the Bats. Less