 
Disembodiments: A Triptych

By S. P. Elledge

Copyright 2014 S. P. Elledge

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Disembodiments **:**

A Triptych

Two Novellas and One Play

by

S. P. Elledge

for Ogdred and Jones

The Triptych:

1.  Solstice Stone

2.  The Homosexualist

3.  I, Symond, A Soldier

 Solstice Stone

A Novella

Hush! Hush! Today, sad Cypris! And consent

To spare thyself—no more thy bosom tear—

For thou must wail again, and weep another year.

Bion, Epitaph of Adonis (c. 100 BC)

trans. George Chapman

excerpt from pages tipped-in within the unpublished journals of Brother Cletus

"Exhale your life, wan flowers; your blushes deep," I read to him as usual from the book, as he listened to me under the deep shade of the towering wellingtonia, which I had told him once had been planted along the inner side of the oratory walk more than a century and a half ago, when shipping such sequoias overseas from America had been the fad. Here seemed an appropriately quiet and unfrequented spot on our campus to find a little privacy, late on a hot summer day, and my Chapman, like the Keats version, is always convenient for referral. Also, I intended this paraphrase of an unknown poet to be a warning to this good friend of mine, this good friend who could have been so much more.

"In grief, anemones and roses, steep;" I continued in the coolest of tones in that cool and leafy corner,

" _in whimpering murmurs, Hyacinth! Prolong_

" _The sad, sad woe thy lettered petals keep..._ Oh, do attend, son! Mr. Chapman's a bit rough, to be sure, but he's also reliably vivacious, and he means every word, nothing like those titivations of Pope or Dryden. Now, allow me to go on...

"Our minstrel sings no more his friends among

" _Sicilian Muses! Now begin the doleful song._ " I lay the book face-down on the moist mossy ground—very bad form for a librarian, I know, but had misplaced the bookmark and had no other in my pockets or in that wallet I wear like a pilgrim, on a strap around my neck. The implied fermata over the sigh that I eventually permitted past my lips was supposed to indicate how deeply those lines were to have affected the two of us. "That used to be famously attributed to Moschus, a Syracusian you needn't trouble about; he died a long time before Christ. But we do know that this is an epitaph for the actual writer's friend or lover, the much greater Bion of Smyrna, even though most of his work is lost to us; I think there are only fifteen or sixteen fragments preserved. Yes, what is it?"

"I was just wondering, sir," my pupil of the afternoon interrupted, "if you've heard him playing anywheres about today? He said he was going to find me the perfect old penitentiary work-song that kind of like would fit into my theme—an 'ironic subtext,' I think he said I should call it."

He—our friend who was really the enemy of us both. What had he been feeding the boy this time? That "theme," so far as I knew, was to concern post-Theocritian epyllia. Not such an original subject, but suitable for someone at his level. Without saying another word, I reached for the flattened book again and pretended that I suddenly and urgently needed to find something in the front matter. Almost simultaneously my tutee stood up and brushed off a few redwood needles adhering to his rugby shirt. That he was anxious to go there was no doubt. "Begging your pardon, sir," he said more loudly than was necessary, trying to stir me from whatever was distracting me within this volume with the broken vertebrae, which had survived my own long-gone days in the classics department. "But I told him I wouldn't keep him too long before going off for his grub at the local, you understand, those were his words."

I did not lift my eyes from the wind-rustled page I had trapped under my fingers. "Of course, of course, do what you must, as always," I babbled, "and remind him while you're at it that he's simply dead-wrong about the Palladists of the Parisian demimonde, they are entirely fictitious, no more real than an alleged anti-papist plot by the Freemasons, who we all know..." But by the time I looked up the boy was already nowhere to be seen, and the sunshine on the other side of the oratory walkway was so blinding it seemed to block passage back into the world from where I confronted my humility, there in the shade of the great wellingtonia.

note: these pages are marked, in triple-underscored letters, "Wrong way to go about a story??"

a fragment of our author's first notebook, soon abandoned

No one should believe anything I write, including this sentence. Ah, an age-old conundrum, that! Least of all should one believe a diary, for a diary is a very curious self-serving thing, one is inclined to think. A diary, a blushing book that ought to be kept locked away, and yet so often secretly yearning to make public what is most private—who is one writing for, why is one writing, after all? Just to wallow in a sanctified sort of literary onanism? Asking myself this, I still do return to these pages, night after night, can't stop myself. Not to wax Wildean, but maybe the only lasting way to overcome a temptation is not just to give in to it, but to give in again and again, until by sheer repetition of the general the appeal of precise specifics is lost. By no longer being able to qualify or quantify particularities, perhaps the desire for such inwardly directed gratification, in this case just a primal need to put it into words, can be brought to completion and hence cessation. Words, words, words! Almighty Editor-in-the-Sky, considering every terse and teary-eyed sentence I have committed to recently sealed legal testimonies, I must ask you time and again if I must write now purely to maintain a cursory journal, or if instead I should consciously as well as conscientiously be setting into place measured passages intended for the ages, not merely for my censorious survivors to discover among my discards—please don't let them sigh or cluck their tongues again!—not long after I am conveyed to the bone-pile. Am I really to assume mine are the only eyes that will ever scan these pages, or is this belated act of contrition in effect my defense, after all—my self-excoriating exculpation, a quasi-evident exoneration of all my real or supposed sins? Stay with me, then, even pander to me, for I must have time to devise new verities. The unfortunate and unforeseen events of this past twelve-month should therefore grant one an occasional extravagance of words, even someone who aims no higher than perfunctory journalism. A poet or writer of fiction would do better. Should I have begun, then, with quotations from my favorite long-deceased eulogists?

I fix my vision beyond my imaginary jailhouse bars with no real purpose in mind, as I far too often do. The day is not a pretty one. It has little to offer me. Like all the others, it goes by too slowly, and yet not fast enough. The broken tower clock opposite tells me nothing new, as usual; its iron arms must have seized up many decennia before I came here, suspended saltirewise at ten and two, so that like certain people I know it tells the truth only be accident.

One has it on faith that the best of published diaries kept by the spiritually afflicted rival the Gospels in effectively portraying their version of the Truth, the untarnished and unvarnished truth, that is—as if God, in this case the Author, should never have reason to dissimulate and falsify, nor to equivocate or prevaricate, least of all to or about Himself. If such is so, the tales told must be very boring, or utterly unbelievable. Outside those of the honorable Saint Augustine and his holy ilk, such religious confessionals as I have dipped into always seem like pages secreted under the sacerdotal cloth and splashed now and then by sacramental wine, perhaps expertly imitating life but redolent of the tomb. Turn the little key, kiss the cover, slip it into a drawer, and die a little more.

Therefore? Other people keep diaries to remember; I have begun these all too frank and honest installments only to try and forget. Surely, I have found over this past month or more that if I banish my thoughts night by night to the all-absolving page, then I begin to deplete myself at last of memories I no longer wish to keep and nurture in this hermitage's oh-so-solitary despair. When each and every evensong approaches, I dash off my brainless blitherings and blatherings into this god-blessed book quickly before prayers; I can just barely metaphorically see my wicked past flushed then into the last of the daylight, only to fly away, following these college-ruled lines toward the vanishing point of oblivion. That is not entirely and irrefutably true; I know the painful recollections, all of the woefully inadequate sentences I write, are still there, indelible as the ink; they well might be seen if my eyes alight haphazardly upon any previous page; so for this reason, and this reason alone, I hope some person some day will indeed take up and read these words—read them and laud them perhaps, or simply produce them as evidence at that final trial when the trumps sound; otherwise laugh at them, burn them, I don't care, so long as I never have to think through these awful things or raid the nomenclature of my psychic anatomy again. Oh, for an ampule of nepenthe to forget! Very well, then, may this book end like a contagion which, by being passed on to someone more praise-worthy and hence stronger than myself, I can rid my soul of forever. Sincerest apologies, dear brother or sister, my only reader, if you are the one infected; maybe (if you are a better person than myself) in reading these admissions full of omissions you will come to understand and, again maybe, even begin to forgive me. Will you, then, be the one to intercede between me and my Maker?

our author's second notebook, not in its entirety

∂

Well, even the most diabolically inspired plans are sometimes torn asunder. He, the balding bad-breathed goody-goody busybody, thinks I should begin anew, verily he does, in perhaps a slightly less periphrastic style. Why not try being more direct, more concise for a few pages, he—suddenly donning an invisible mortarboard—dared to lecture me. By all means, let if off your chest, man! Dear me, dear me, how does one spell that comic-book expression of mortified exhaustion: "eeeargh"? Well, with no regrets I gave up that cheap spiral-bound notebook, anyway, ruckled from so many nights under my pillow and marred with so many inky redactions and erasures it resembled the incunabula of a very bad or very disturbed poet. Besides, one might criticize it for having been both too quaintly quotidian and too full of quirky quiddities. (Please absolve my excesses, patient reader; I've learned well enough that life isn't just a game of Scrabble.) Even my usually precise and even handwriting, of which I have been immodestly proud since primary school days, had degenerated into sloppy, tear-blotted cacography (such a naughty noun, that last one!). Really, there was no excuse for such carelessness, for so much wailing and embarrassing expatiations of my probably less-than-immortal soul. And Lord, the profundity—one would think you'd need a bathysphere to plumb my depths! At least here, on these clean bright pages, within this blank book my would-be bedesman left behind today as both present and incentive, I can begin virginally, since my initial draft of the events has left me more temperate, duly chastened, and yet impatient to ameliorate that prior version of reality—which is only to say: the whole truth, doctor!

He, of course, like all the others, must think I am mad. Although that is a word the medical community these days would categorically never, ever use. (Now I am going to engage in a little divagation for a paragraph or so—no, that is not another shameful thing, but it is perhaps not one of my better habits.) Myself, I've always quite liked the brevity and force and bluntness of the word, mad, its brutish sneer, its British snarl. Mad, is it? Yes, quite bonkers, indeed, my good sir. The Yankee in me still delights in such irksome Anglicisms, and sometimes I am as much amused as outraged at being thought of as the "Mad Monk Murderer," (what The Sun, reflected in The Mirror, dubbed me in headlines, by the way—a glancing judgment, you know) because that Fleet Street conceit sounds more farcical than tragic, like something out of an Augustan comedy, like the Henrys Fielding or Carey. An appellation for a stock character in the tertiary stage of syphilis. Or, to bring things a little more up-to-date, a caricature wearing Rasputin's beard. There is, albeit, a fine line between being mad and going mad. Nowadays, such a malady is considered either a curiously archaic concept or one easily treated. Here, take these tablets, they say, go see this faith-healer or miracle-worker. No reason in these modern times to girth the long embracing arms of the straitjacket around one and slam the iron grating on the way out. But I prefer honesty to psychiatric euphemisms, don't you? Not "bipolar dysfunction." Not "cerebral impairment." Not "cognitively challenged." Not even "temporarily insane." So, then, doctor mine, go ahead—feel free to be unprofessional and call me mad, mad as Nijinsky still doing jetés in his asylum cell like a corralled gazelle; at times it can be a comfort, that simple excuse within a three-letter word.

But (if I may contradict myself before I veer into another deviation) it's also such a small, trite, dull, dim, senseless word, mad. Write it again and again, as I have done, and it becomes a mere design upon the page, a typesetter's decorative dingbat; say it aloud over and over, and it becomes a numbing hum with a glottal thud. Like an overripe apple falling from twig to sod. Mad mad mad mad mad... An easy epithet most usually affixed to men or dogs, don't you agree? Clown dances. Snake pits. Bedlam. Make note of it in classic plots: madness suspected, madness denied, even madness feigned. The artist's madness exulted, the criminal's pitied. Suitable for any occasion, fit for nothing and everyone. A word out of one of the Reverend Dodgson's lunatic ensembles. Everyone's mad here. Mercury, you know, made the hatters mad. I suppose one in your coolly scientific position, wise counselor, might well say any unchecked irrational passion results from certain intensities of temporal chemical imbalance—hate, fear, and most definitely love. Even so, as you no doubt have concluded by now, I am not "out of my mind" for either the short or long haul. Did you know those rascally journalists, quoting nobody, claimed that I "seemed to have hidden sexual motives"? Christ! As if I could keep anything a secret!

Mad, mad, mad... say it again along with me, damn it. No? Was Socrates mad, I ask, when he became the scapegoat of Athens and would rather drink his death than confess his corruption? Still don't have an answer, after these past few weeks with me? Well, then, sure, enough of all that. This postulation or posturing, I see as well as you do, is too arch and has all been done before—and much better—by everyone from Euripides to Gogol to Fill-in-the-Blank. Forgive me my trespasses even as I forgive yours: Hereby I promise, after this page, to regain my equipoise and remain at all times unruffled as I relate past events, even if beneath the table I may be stamping my sandals and the blood-vessels in my lower extremities are fit to burst. In the end it's all a tad tedious, don't you agree—this hoary sophomoric logomachy on what is sanity and who of any of us can claim to be certifiably sane—and I hate having been drawn into it by my enemies. Back in sweet bygone America, if I should ever return (with my dual citizenship, where would they deport me?), should I ever become just one of the crowd once again, I would merely—almost mercifully—be called simply crazy. Everyone does crazy things over there. This Mad Monk could pen a pop memoir and make millions. They'd give me even more tranquilizers and I'd be carefree as a heifer tipsy on fermented apples.

Instead, this fresh diary, I suppose, will assume the form and fashion of what someone in such a sorry state as mine is perhaps inevitably expected to produce: that restrained but still bitter screed customarily and somewhat quaintly called one's "Complaint," as in a court document or one of those archaic ballads of love and lament. Ah, me.

Ah, me indeed. Even so, I am neither mentally disturbed nor intellectually deficient; I feel—I know—this to be true. (Degraded, debased, devalued, I grant you all that—damaged but not deluded!) Neither am I borderline psychotic or semi-sociopathic or any lesser magnitude of totally bat-crap insane, unfortunately; that might have easily explained everything to my accusers. But I suppose I am insanely, colossally stupid for allowing things to happen as they did, with that damn devil breathing down my neck for so long and now all hell to pay.

So... what shall I take from my former notebook to rethink and revise, what to say to you on these pretty palish pages that seem to bruise under the uncouth pressure of my pen? Vent spleen? No, too much. Disentangle and analyze myself? Too much again. Curse God? Absolutely not. Dare to outline my insufferably dire predicament? Very well, then. Here for you is my cell, the very illustration of the Eternal and what's most humble on this earth, and this is my audience: two or three industrious spiders, genus Theridion, casting glistening nets across the sunset, Monsignor Bat stirring in the rafters, and a most dutiful dormouse and its family I hear but never see, though they take my daily crumbs. My lone casement with its shuddering panes and deep-socketed sill looks out over the peaks and lakes of what I still think of as Cumberland, all rimed with silver at the end of this late December afternoon. They say the year is almost 2013, though it could be any of the past nine-hundred. A few of the druidic oaks may have been felled along the old coach road, and there may indeed be satanic mills somewhere on the far side of those snowy summits, but the world right here is still as feudally beautiful as a Brueghel. The ravens circle and taunt a wayfarer trudging village-ward across the high stony scarp opposite these towers, far below a lovelorn vixen yips mournfully outside her den, the sheep have assembled like clotted clouds between the pass and their wattled enclosures, the rocky rills and the wind in the pines play their sempiternal duet, and next summer if by a miracle I am still alive, I shall watch again the cranes building untidy nests between the chimneys and crucifix-tipped lightning rods of the abbey's rooftops. Ofttimes from my vantage point, at this dizzying height, on clear mornings, I imagine I see a glint off the tea-green waters of Solway Firth, to the north and west, reflected on the bare rock-face opposite this lonely place, but that of course must be a deception, for higher fells and tors than those within my compass intervene. Directly beneath this window is my winter garden, replete with those perennials that cheat the frost and whose delicate but death-defying blossoms often grace our altars even in these, the darkest days. Down there, the aromatic wintersweet is all aflower and the aconite is, in this light, an ember-flame. Just a breath or two ago I saw, or believe I saw, a ghostly white-winged insect, large as two outstretched human hands, beat against these icy panes: Suitor to an early hellebore, it could be a rare albino polyphemus (family Saturniidae) that has traveled afar on a jet-stream—unlikely as that might be at this latitude—a wight, an angel, emblematic harbinger of my fate (then again, damn, it looks like it could be just an ordinary Emperor moth). Over there, whitherward the faintly radiant horizon has bled into still fainter indigo, into those diluted dregs of the day, the first star has just winked at me between the distant half-clad beeches like Lucifer's unsleeping eye. Below the ridges, across the blackening weald, true night has descended heavy as a sarcophagus lid upon what our regime calls the District of Eden. Yet elsewhere the earth is bright, argentine, the air clear. Blame my fervid brain, or can all our brethren hear as well a nightingale purling and pealing from its mew of barberry, on this last week of the calendar? Oh, doctor, I could drive you to Demerol with my third-rate pastoral paeans. Indeed, I would rather plagiarize hexameter after hexameter of my beloved Vergil or Horace, but as you know they have taken away most of my books. "Too much for your nerves," my replacement over in the library has said—so courteous, so considerate, so contemptuous.

∂∂

Forgive me; I was out of sorts, I suppose, and could not bring myself to thank you yesterday—and at present I hope you will not think I am doing so solely out of a sense of obligation. Really, though, wine-red leather binding and gilt edges? For something that need be no more finely crafted than an everyday copybook, it looks a great deal like a bishop's custom-made breviary. This is far too charitable of you, when I can be so mean-tempered, I know, so let me list a few reasons why I remain humbled but still so very pleased: heavy bond (thirty pound), high opacity, fine-laid ivory sheets; also, smythe sewn, obviously; ninety-percent cotton rag, a texture that readily absorbs ink but forbids any soaking through; acid-free, toxin-free, archival quality... When you could have just as well picked me up something on the cheap at your nearest Boot's. (Ironic that these scribbled pages will likely outlast many of the historic documents we are rushing to preserve here. In full daylight I can now much better see the splendor of this journal and should genuflect before it and yourself. You of course know how much I love the honest physicality, the heft and smell and feel, of a real book. Plus, try to hurl one of these new "e-books" at a demon in the shadows!) Behold, an armorial watermark on every page and a missal bookmark on a silken tassel to keep my place—again, how very nice! I am sorry I wrote all those nasty things herein, last night by the light of my single candle, before I had taken a good look, and I would tear those pages out if it wouldn't crack the spine. Which, sir, could be greater—the expense or your generosity? I hope you got my new best friend at a discount, "online" I think it is, even if the chamois is sham. Still, for a court-commissioned psychiatrist (if that's what you really are), you must be doing all right, even in the new austerity. And as you can see, I will not be an obstinate or taciturn subject; I shall continue to write freely and at length, willingly and with an open heart, for you—you kind eavesdropper upon my soul, for myself, and for whatever's left of posterity. Feel free to publish excerpts at some future date in one of your highly specialized reviews—I am keen to see my portrayal as a "type" or "case study." (Though the last chance I had to skim one of those academic publications, while investigating a certain rare deviancy, it seemed written in a language further from English than Esperanto.) Surely the fiction one creates of oneself upon the page has the potential to be as real to my reader as a play to a playgoer—and as much an illusion. It is impossible, I am finding already, to write autobiographically with any more verisimilitude than a novelist—which is to say I the subject am drawn from life, though whose life exactly I am not sure, and my semblances may be no more than self-satisfied dissemblings in the eyes of my critics. Excuse me, but I don't intend to be "meta" or "para" or "post" anything. Nevertheless. Artist or artificer, I leave it up to you to tell me, Dr.—I mean Mr. Currier, if I am one or the other or both.

∂∂∂

Without any further delay, it might be best to clear up some misunderstandings for anyone listening in besides yourself. (Hello, future, if you exist!) I am in a nitpicking mood. My "sect," as you have so witheringly if naively dubbed it, was cleft from the Holy Roman Church nearly a millennium ago, after the final of many "disagreements" over sacraments and articles of faith that had occurred again and again over the centuries; and because of our small size and the fact that most cartographers ignored our existence, not to mention that we were overshadowed by starker and more violent schisms in other regions—from the Cathari in the Languedoc to the Bogomils of Bulgaria to the Paulician movement in Armenia—we did manage to survive, if not exactly flourish. (Like those other "heretics," we were said to be dualistic or "gnostic," Marcionite or even Manichean in our ways, rejecting Rex Mundi and the treasures of the Seven Hills and even the idea of property or inheritance. How much of such anticlerical doctrine was fabricated after the actual divorce no one can really say.) Oh, we had our turns astride the rack and the wheel, and could have been awarded gold medals in strappado and skin-flaying, but during that epoch the decadent popes, like the Caesars before them, were more concerned with their sister-mistresses and murderous love-children than a poor band of rebels in the hinterlands such as ourselves. Our "vestal sodality" was however impelled further and further into the wilderness, until we came up against the relative safety of this savage enclave, where only wolves and fire-breathing pards (depicted on our ecclesiastical seal) were our persecutors. This was lately a pagan land and amenities were hard-won, so we were not often objected to by our neighbors. (At first like hermits of old, our forefathers dwelt in hollows hard against the screes, before they learned to quarry and stack stone upon stone. Impressive, this place, isn't it? I believe the Cartmel Priory was modeled after our own.) Our chief and most lasting objection to the Church was, trivial as it might seem today, the preeminence of Latin in the liturgy, whereas we averred that the original Greek rendering of the Gospels was closer to the vernacular Aramaic that Jesus spoke. (This does not mean we held any special affinities or affection for the Eastern Rites, for we did not believe in priests marrying and looked upon copulation of any sort as at best a necessary evil.) Let the Irish take credit for preserving Hesperian civilization throughout the Dark Ages, if they like, for our scriptoria were more concerned with the Balkan peninsula's much older Hellenic heritage, and as you have seen, our revelatory adornments not just of the New Testament and Apocrypha but of Ionic and Aeolian philosophers and poets still dazzle the eye and make modern-day digital graphics (something our cherished Hyrum—I mention his name at last—excelled in) look like the witless daubs of idiot infants. (Have you by any chance heard from Prior Boniface if the project is ready to deliver to the Cheapside firm? Though my electronic amanuensis, the sleek portable computer with which had I only recently been endowed, was taken away as evidence, I hope you will bring that glossy gizmo of yours again some day soon, so we can tap into the aether and browse our legacy.) Some say that in an oblique way we were the academic link between the suppressed knowledge that traveled between the Iberian coast and the Caledonian seminaries then forming just the other side of Hadrian's Wall. I will not tire you here with all the well-documented details, for it doesn't really matter: we are an order that presently numbers little more than a thousand, nowadays tolerated by Vatican City albeit not enthusiastically, as the Ruthenians are, thinly distributed across the hemispheres, with our abbey at these elevations and another in Dalmatia, and a few half-hearted followers of our peculiar brand of faith hither and thither, that is all. A sorry lot. Every one of us male and—no, that doesn't mean we are (or aren't, I allow). You might have memorized my time-yellowed dossier, but I remind you that I was a Classics scholar, not one of the Elect, when I first came here from the University of East Anglia, much like Hyrum, to research early transcriptions of the Athenian (not early Italian) masters. My inherited Anglicanism I wore as lightly as my hippie dashiki, and once I felt I had been sufficiently enticed by a better brand, I was ever so glad to exchange my old habiliments for this modest merino wool habit—which, like the best couturier's, was then and is now hand-stitched, quality bespoke. Truth to tell, it was almost as much the untamed Westmorland landscape that made me want to stop here as any newfound serenity I found in this community's frail fraternity of gentle scholars and bibliophiles. Not—at the risk of underscoring what I should probably strike out—that I have ever been what you might call devout, even though I am or was a prior. (That title, by the way, is simply an honorific bestowed upon what you might call the head bibliotician; it does not guarantee that I am any closer to God than I am to the ear of the abbot.) The sands of time passing through the hourglass of my life have worn away any archaic dogma and left little for my senescent spiritual sensitivity to contend with but a shaky faith in a Somebody I once knew as Jesus Christ our Savior, that is all. The rest is fanciful flummery and funfair high-jinks, all right and well, capable of bringing a certain ritualized grace to the lives of many people, but in the end just meretricious trappings that look out of place on a simple soul such as myself.

One might hold the outline of my life up to the light, and like any good alienist pick out a pattern, revealed perhaps like that heraldic griffin or opinicus statant subtly impressed upon these translucent pages. There is really not much more to me, however, than what you have already seen on my ravaged face, no shocking discoveries lurking within the inner recesses of my manila folder. I did not so much defect to this place as I was effectually stranded; once I threw in my lot, there would have been no way back even if I had wanted to leave. My divorced parents, as dissimilar from one another as salt is from pepper, but acting in accord for once, cut me off without another farthing after my unexpected indoctrination into a "cult" as little-known and seemingly dodgy as (what is now called in simple English) The Anglo-Attic Brotherhood. Well, it was not as though either combined family and government grants (the latter now fully consumed) had ever given me enough to live on—while here I had more than enough to eat and a safe place to lay my head. This abbey, it turned out, was an inviting asylum in many more ways than one. Remember—even if you may not be old enough to remember—that this was in the early days of such well-known scams as The Process and Synanon and Scientology, and though it made not a whit of difference to my parents, at least our order has a long and intellectually distinguished pedigree (also, lucre has never been begged from me, only sweat). So mater and pater gave up on me, as I said, and I gave up on them; at any rate, they would both be buried soon enough, though neither was that advanced in age—my American mother smoked and drank and generally lived herself to death in sunny Baltimore, and her dishonorably discharged R.A.F. officer, still brooding among the stormy skies over here, had a fatal stroke. (Read on to see how this might account for my lifelong feeling of being too British among Americans and too Yank among the Brits: for instance, I never quite know whether to aspirate words like "herb" or "aitch.") Don't get me wrong; my enthusiastic conversion to the Brotherhood had nothing really to do with being from a broken home. Something has to be taken for whole before it can break. (I'll hop fast now, as if over the burning marl.) Mums and Dada had separated before I was born, and found other lovers now and then on their separate continents (of those transitory stepparents I have almost no memories); and so I was raised biculturally, doing time both in the States—grubby cramped row houses and purple contusions down my arm and dentures in the whiskey-glass—and in the dismal industrialized suburbs of Lancashire, where following the time-honored custom I was caned by headmasters and sodomized by foulmouthed schoolfellows, or the other way 'round. Eventually I glozed over such uncouth miseries and convinced myself that I had risen spontaneously, like a child of Blake's, toward the sunlight out of that grime and filth, seeking somewhere something of the like of a whitewashed wall and a well-washed area. After those early experiences and my unwholesome days at university, the monks with their immaculate robes and neat alpine cells seemed so clean, so unsullied, that once I lingered among those immemorial tomes (full of as many wormholes as woodcuts, alas) in yon library, I knew I had found my true home as sure as a young bird that has never migrated before knows where to land in an equatorial clime and construct its winter nest. The brothers were glad to ordain me, for they were few in number and, besides admiring my penmanship, they recognized my skill in classifying and transcribing (on a tomato-red Olivetti!) their lovingly but imperfectly preserved holographs. How right and just that I was now entirely penniless—for all of a sudden I felt rich in spirit at last. I had heard no "inner voices" telling me what to do; there was no calling, exactly, but there was a being called, if you can differentiate. My doctorate was never achieved in the end, more out of loss of desire than lack of money, for once I had surveyed this abbey's archives, it was clear I could leave behind the futile and turn to more fertile fields of knowledge. Here I had chanced upon an uncharted oasis. As well as utter solace. It was a relief after all those years of crowds and commutes, lectures and debates, natter and noise, lust and frustration, to retreat into my room as into a welcoming cave (as had our monastic ancestors), to repose there, to read, to dream, to vanish into silence.

∂∂∂∂

This really is a splendiferous blank book, of which I grow fonder as it grows less blank, and this repro "Vacumatic" fountain-pen you have recently also given me truly is as pleasing to fill as it is to hold. (What a serendipitous jumble-sale find!) You advised me to begin and not end my days with these jottings, and with only a little exertion that method has worked so far; it has even given me a new outlook on things, as well as being easier on my presbyopic eyes. Every morning after matins I visit each pristine page with high hopes, I write quickly and without much thought, blow the page dry, and then bid my adieux to that familiar gryphon now caged behind newly constructed lines. But that is not all. Lately for another inexplicable reason I am feeling in fine fettle—could this signal a slight shift in the balance in our relationship? Something tells me you actually can't help but like me, I am no longer either an object of pity or a specimen on a slide—and in return... well, I must allow that the Scots are oft unfairly stigmatized by the English. (See me play the neutral American, ceaselessly amused though filled with barely disguised disdain. For my part I may be coming to half-like you, as well, despite my odium for your profession.) Have you noticed how my words appear to trip ever more lightly across these pages? It is not only the pen; it is also the unparalleled quality of the bottled ink you have restored to my desk. This ink, a vintage we special-order from Hannover, is derived from actual cephalopods (the label assures me, though the only German I really know is Old and High), and is the sort of product one rarely encounters in this day of synthetic solutions: Gothic black, trecento black, a true black, that is, a living black, a liquid black fire, like that which flashes in a rook or raven's plumage or an ermine's iris. Such a black doesn't flinch from the sun and fade to blue or gray; it has a permanent gloss like a scarab's carapace, and the liquid itself is of a viscosity akin to plasma. My amazing pneumatic pen gorges itself from the well like a vampire at the jugular of his betrothed. (Sorry, but it is easy to get a little drunk on good ink.) The ink is waterproof, too, which means it doesn't separate into turquoise and jacinth-colored smears, as a cheap vial of Parker's malodorous Quink might, if a tear or drop of perspiration should sully the page. Withal, this blackest of blacks, much as I can praise it, is not the color for which our order is known. Please allow me to digress again, sir, to tell you a little about ink and pigment, dyes and paints—for, aside from our liqueur (which has, you must not pretend not to know, kept us financially solvent all these centuries), it is the quality of our highly colored illuminations that we are best known for, at least among certain cognoscenti. Esoteric receipts invented in the thirteen or fourteenth centuries anno Domini are what enable our fantastical ornamentations, those "drolleries" and foliate traceries, bestiaries and botanicas, to glow so brilliantly after nine or ten centuries. No, I don't know exactly what the ingredients were, but do pay attention—the information I am about to impart might help you solve what has been bewildering you.

The artisanship of good ink, like so much that continental culture had learned in those centuries somewhere between Christ and da Vinci, was halted with the Goth and Vandal invasions, while the Andalusian Moors, as they so often did, either separately rediscovered or sheltered the long-obsolete processes. (Let's leave aside the Chinese for now, for that is another tradition.) Always there was a certain amount of magic in the manufacture. In the baddest of the bad old days, a not altogether satisfactory and often quite nauseating black fluid was usually all you had to choose from in most of Europe, and it was made of earthy elements: dung, fungus, pitch, soot, burnt bones. Sometimes iron gall or atramentum. A crude sort of black magic, yes, but not very inspiring. Here among these barbaric foothills, by contrast, so it is well-authenticated, monks dressed in robes just like my own collected and commingled fennel and poison nightshade and wild current-seed and yarrow-root and periwinkle, even invaluable crocus sativus smuggled by pilgrims from the Holy Land. Colors proliferated, colors ran riot. Earth divulged its terrestrial and submarine spectrums, each tint or tincture a sorcerer's brew: hawthorn bark, madder-root red, achin abstracted from lichen, sepia drawn from cuttlefish, seashells ground into powder and mixed with egg-white to make our own Tyrian purple, and many more simplistic but superlatively effective ingredients. Innumerable flowers of the meadows and bright insects of the air contributed their hues to our finest vellum. Don't be surprised, for everything from earwax to soured wine to sow's urine was used in those days to intensify or bind and emulsify distempers. Red, ordinary red, from ordinary red weevils; blue from woad or indigo; yellow from arsenic sulfite; green from buckthorn berries; and argent and gold, the real stuff, even in leaf microns thin, as valuable then as those metals are now. Ransack all our cabinets and cubbyholes, comb our map-racks and document-drawers, look all you like: There are no blues bluer, no greens so green—and marvel again at our incomparable red, seen nowhere else, used when cochineal was simply not enough. A red like aboriginal fire, burning up the very paper it brings to life! A red like the legendary carbuncle set into the forehead of an Eastern idol! Lustrous, alive, perpetually vibrant, a miracle and a mystery. Every few years some interfering forensic pharmacologist comes out here for minute scrapings to scrutinize and subject to any number of baffling tests. One decade they say it is ox-blood, the next fox-blood, and other times the results are inconclusive: but I know their obloquies, and where they say the key component was extracted; I know what they consider so devilish about us heretics. Perhaps you will eventually repeat such rumors as well.

∂∂∂∂∂

O, impatient reader! You are trying to nudge me toward getting to the real story, the plot, I know, for that is why you urged me on with this gift-book; I am not so addled by my crime that I can't sense what it is you want from me, doctor. In our friendly little teatimes, over dishwater pekoe and rock-hard crumpets, I see your Celtic eyebrows tilt upwards whenever I mention young Hyrum Hawkins; I know what it is you'd like me to fill these pages with: erotic descriptions of the youth's muscle-bound physique, impure fantasies of when I found him asleep in a silky bed of foxgloves between the hayricks or perhaps when he stripped naked as Michael Angelo's David to go swimming alone in that cold moss-ringed tarn within the evergreen vortex of our windswept hemlock grove. You want me to continue to overuse the adjectives as long as they're affixed to a sexy male pronoun. Come, haven't you seen the photos? He was tall, I'll make no bones of that, but not magazine cover material; he had no chin or shoulders to speak of, and he was anorexically thin, gangly as a newborn okapi, pasty as a pudding and spotty everywhere (simply everywhere!), and he would run his nose up his sleeve. Behind his thick National Health spectacles, his furtive eyes were foxy and usually quick to dart away but, if you caught them by surprise, they seemed pretty enough, for a boy. He was all adolescently aquiver and yet often languorously slow. Sometimes I had to feed him chocs I'd keep in my desk drawers, just to coax him along on his tasks. He had not yet obtained a grace commensurate with his height; his big feet were always stumbling over packing boxes you'd think I'd put there to purposely trip him. Actually, as youths go today, I suppose he was not so bad, pleasantly presentable, polite to a fault. Unremarkable, you might say. Even bland. When he swore he nearly always added, "beg your pardon, sir." His hair was as short and burry and colorless as a newly weaned shoat's. He wore remnants of what must have been his private school's uniform: narrow navy blue poly-blend trousers, tab-collared dress shirts, nasty pilled pullovers—all a bit threadbare or minus a few buttons and all of which exposed the narrowest parts of his body: chafed ankles, mottled wrists, blotchy neck. He never gave me more than a glimpse of his pants, though I suspect they were Marks and Sparks; even the poorest nineteen-year-old has to splurge on something. (Are you surprised I say that?) Once or twice I saw him from afar, sporting cycling goggles or a little etonian cap that gave him an especially juvenile air, although he told me once that the local topography soon proved too much for his second-hand Bianchi. His middle name was Gruffyd, likely his mother's surname. He was I suppose a farm-boy from somewhere near the Welsh border; I was always quick to correct his drawl and his misusages (tortured diphthongs, sing-songy present participles), and he was just as quick to apologize, as if to a headmaster. Choosing to ignore his substandard English, one of his mentors had persuaded me into believing that he had an assured career in Classics—if "career" and "Classics" can still be used in the same sentence. For a boy who'd recently been playing uppies-and-downies against the yobbos from Workington, he was quietly scrupulous if not almost feminine in his hygiene—scents and depilatories and hair-sheen, though maybe that is regular with the young men these days. When I first glanced into his guest-chamber one evenfall on the way to vespers (not really spying; he had left the door wide open), I saw a good supply of cheap toiletries on his shelf, as well as a badly foxed copy of one of those popular religious thrillers in recent years adapted by Hollywood—thick as the Old Testament and concerning the same age-old fears of God and damnation—broken-backed upon his cot. Later, when I asked him about the book, he studied the floor and said a mate had foisted it upon him; I said it was all right, codded him with a gentle cuff and told him he could read whatever he liked while he was an intern here (they used to call them novices or novitiates) and that we have plenty of Dick Francis fanciers on the premises. The next day he made sure I saw him reading an annotated Aeneid during his lunch-break within the south-facing solar trap. Not long after he made a point of telling me he was especially interested in our fifth-century Vergilius Romanus with its prototypical carpet pages—the one from St. Denis is a mere copy, although this is disputed—because a teacher had recommended it as good original source material for a paper he was supposed to be writing. So he was not so inarticulate as I may have originally assumed. But he was blameless, I swear. Once he asked me to help tie his necktie for him when he was too nervous to get it straight; he had a meeting with his proctor that afternoon and was in a rush, as all the outside world is. The tie was rep silk and might have been the only one he owned, and he might have owned it since he was in lower school, it was so stained and draggled. I well remember the way his Adam's apple bobbed and throbbed hotly against my fingers and his tight collar whenever he swallowed and wriggled, as I cautiously adjusted the knot. He went red in the face, either from choking or embarrassment, and told me I mustn't mind his squealing. I told him I didn't mind a thing about him, and he went redder. An exceptionally well-bred lad, that's how his neighbors would describe him, politeness being a trait so rare in the—oh, please, you don't expect me to go on in this vein, do you? Of course he was attractive enough to me in that way all the young of either sex look to someone no longer in the first or last efflorescence of youth; his skin was not unblemished, you may be sure, but being so new to creation, his long slim muscles were quite as lithe as they were taut—and damn if he couldn't do a butterfly stroke with all the legerity he lacked on land. I enjoy the water, too, you know, though I can only dog paddle. (Speaking of animals, have you noticed how Monsieur Reynard keeps popping up in this paragraph, as if in and out of his burrow? What do you suppose is the author's hidden message behind that? Is it because I hear that poor lone beast yowling below my window every winter's night? Or because that boy was some sort of autochthonic numen of this place, come to haunt me as he had others since the first particle of this place was disturbed?)

∂∂∂∂∂∂

None of this is of any consequence, but I do thank you for admiring my always fastidious (or, as you put it, rather formal) longhand upon these sheets; after composing painstaking notations in a near-Spencerian script on catalog cards for decades now, my hand may be growing shakier, but it still gets the job done. Linked letter to letter as they are, strung evenly and fluently across these pages, my words may look to you almost as regular as those inscribed by a machine, but they do not come that automatically—for since the world effectively ended for me, the progress of my pen is slow to start and quick to stall and even slower to start again. As a connoisseur of original holographic material, I suppose I can admire the swooping angles of my italic and the luxuriant curves of my cursive, but how can one harbor real vanity for something that comes so naturally and effortlessly? It would be like rewarding a rosebush for merely producing roses. Be that as it may, I feel properly taken down a peg every time you sniff and lower your eyeglasses down to the end of your inquisitive nose, probably wanting to ask me why I run on so and why I organize my thoughts by plotting sparse rows of ivy-like squiggles between these daily logs. Let me explain: Those are meant to be hederas: the aldus leaf, our windblown ∂, a scribal tick and later a printer's lovely Doric typographical symbol, an ancestor of the more commonplace fleuron, primmer than the pilcrow with its quasi-Hitchcockian profile (where the uninitiated might see only a reversed "P") and considerably less sinister than the intertwined serpents of the signum sectionis (§). Finical as I am about such things, I used to plant hedera liberally in the shade of my bibliographic addenda, when I knew there might be one person in a century who might notice—and none to care. Go ahead, if it helps you, picture my fussy little leaves typeset, signifying and separating the shifts in my attention, limning that divide between reader and writer, you and I, or perhaps myself and my maker. It may be that you consider such carefully calligraphed headings affected or pretentious in something so unprepossessing as a diary or journal—even one so recherché as this—but I find them the most demure of demarcations, are they not? They give me the same degree of pleasure as a boxwood border or a well-trimmed hedgerow. Like springtime's freshest sprouts I like to set these flourishes just so across these pages, as exact and even as I would have my sentences. Rat-a-tat-tat.

I am also quite aware how these little pensées I show you every now and then are in certain obscure ways like that delusory scrim that comes between stage and backstage during a dramatic performance, a surface sometimes nearly transparent and sometimes opaque, often brightly illumined, though just as often cast into shadow: it is that way at least when I read a book, with the page the author exists upon like that illusive shifting scrim; often I am distracted by the actors under the proscenium, those annoying people and actions that keep me from concentrating on what the living words have to tell me, wherein our minds meet—while at other times, I feel that I can peer right through the muslin, into the machinery ticking and spinning behind the stage, where the Creator reveals His face and I feel connected, bound to Him and His era... but then someone on stage speaks or drops an anvil or maybe it is only a pencil, and I am torn asunder from my own thoughts and my communion with the thoughts of that primordial soul; I am left with a mere lump of wood-pulp in my hands and a whole, less interesting world demands my attention. Damn. By the way, thank you, darling doctor, for fetching me that contraband copy of Catullus, but next time knock louder, please.

I am sitting on my broad window ledge as I write this, the December sun deceptively bright and hot as that of July—and through the cobweb-laced mullions I can see my winter garden beneath me: the snowdrop anemones, my beautiful all-forgiving windflowers, are out, flying in the face of last October's cutworms and these coldest of days! Ah, but the southerly exposure warms the beds, and the high rock walls protect my wan white treasures, these tender blossoms that are the gifts given begrudgingly of our rocky soil. (How very like an old-fashioned homosexualist, you must be thinking, rhapsodizing like this over a few scanty weeds.) Most likely you don't grasp how such small living things affect me, for you probably don't have so much as a potted aspidistra among the Ikea jungle-gyms of your Carlisle high-rise. If you were as interested as your average country squire and I are in digging in the dirt, you too would be swooning with epicurean hyperbole over my shy crocus imperati, my bold and impetuous daphne, my thriving erica carnea (that's winter heather to you), the abundant laurustinus, the swells of winter honeysuckle and winter jasmine, even the oft-derided "dingy" winter hyacinth I have cultivated amidst the gravel. In chilly America, even on Maryland's fairly clement seaboard side, one never saw such splendor at yuletide. I may be under house arrest, but I am still allowed to go down the tower stairwell to my little walled-in curtilage to tend my beds, you know, when I feel up to it. Down there's my paltry portion of Paradise, which I should never have been allowed to be invaded by the thronging Pandemonia of other people. I bring baskets of half-thawed buds and blossoms to Brother Alexis, and when I go to mass (which is not often) I see with what loving providence he has arranged the chaplets between the candles, so that the pale petals catch the light and the heat warms and diffuses their perfume. The scent is elusive, yet suggestive of a realm far superior to this lowly earth. Kneeling there on the cold flagstone floor, looking up into that sun-suffused vision of the Savior, I do not find death such a frightening possibility, but a friend whose arrival I anticipate—as long as He gives me fair warning. I will see no more general practitioners or specialists, I swear; I know my blood is growing more and more anemic, but I do not want their injections or their advice. I eat most of what they insist is boiled or braised for me, I get what exercise I can, but I will not let them prolong this ridiculous condition I find myself in.

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"Auto-erotic asphyxiation": isn't that what you called it? Is this what they teach you medicos nowadays, trying to cover every fetish and foible? Such an ugly phrase, it is, like a term from a sex mechanic's manual, such an egocentric and pathetic way to die, and as I've told you many times, it simply isn't true—I alone did the dirty deed, I take the blame; that's why the authorities have me locked up here, isn't it? Not just because they too think that I'm gaga, that I might cause harm to myself. Naturally I am not happy with those things Dr. Apollonius has been saying now that he has supplied his perhaps too convenient alibis, but give the Devil, that curious contrivance, and his conniving solicitors their due. Today I feel more like writing about Niko—Dr. Apollonius—anyway, and I know you've waited too long for this, just as I've evaded the subject past all patience, so allow me please to lead you by the elbow down this very crooked lane; it's going to take some nasty bends...

How to begin. You do remember that this all started with the Stone—did you say it may soon be on loan to the British Museum? Wonder of wonders. I do wish I knew how our extremely aged abbot, along with Boniface, the good and gormless prior extemporis, managed that, and what this means as regards future tourism and any possible financial remuneration. I will die before we become part of the National bloody Trust. (The money we make from our famous liqueur does not go as far today as it once did, though I hear that the old Nouvelle Cuisine is on its way out at last and the British may soon once more hunger for nothing so much as a good shank of lamb sautéed in that rich rufescent reduction.) As regards how the Stone was discovered, the facts have for some while now been a matter of public concern, and you have probably heard or read the whole story more often than enough, but I will repeat my fractured and incomplete version of it notwithstanding any indicants to the contrary. It all starts rather mundanely. We—that is, this abbey's administrators—receive a sufficient loan from the bank, you might remember, matched by a generous donor (who prefers not to be named even here), to hire an architect and begin the construction of a new wing for our small but very eminent library. We need room for computers and copiers and climate-controlled vaults and all that crapola, of course, and so they chop down a few of the oldest and tallest pendunculate oaks (Quercus robur) on the property and bring in the backhoes. The constant racket from lorries coming and going and the disrespectful yabbering of the navvies is enough to keep me sequestered in the library's innermost office, with all the windows sealed—and still it is as if the jackhammers are at my very skull.

And then they unearth the Stone, and everything around it, even the birds, even the wind, is stunned into silence. No other ruins are about these immediate parts, nary a cromlech or dolmen, so it came as quite a surprise to us all to find this massive slab of gray-green basalt barely three feet under, held fast by the roots of the oldest and most wide-waisted of those ancient oaks. Of course according to law (what law, exactly?) the builders had to stop all further work and call in the experts, or at least an expert. That was Dr. Nikolaos Apollonius, my nemesis, of course, he of the mongrel lineage and impugnable degrees, shooting straight from his base in Oxford to wreak his havoc around here. It was he who precipitously dubbed it a "Solstice Stone," even before the grit was thoroughly brushed from its sculpted face. It was he who almost immediately attempted a translation of an untranslatable hybridized Koine (lingua franca twenty-four centuries ago but totally implausible in this case), he who thought he made out the words "sun" and "god," and he who disputed popular opinion by claiming the almost Constantinopolitan portrait of Christ at the top, with its holy nimbus, was actually something entirely different. Had the Greeks crossed a continent and a channel and traveled far, far up the Pennine Way to here? Or rounded the western protuberance of Europe and, heading for Ultima Thule, been shipwrecked upon nearby shores? Not by any conventional scholar's estimation, not as far as I had ever heard, but then again Dr. Niko (as I'll call him for short, rather than spell out that longwinded surname yet again) is no conventional scholar. You never met such a self-complacent glory boy. His heart was made of eel pie, when he thought it was pâté. Talk to him for five minutes, and you could picture the words upon his tombstone: "The joke's on you."

I met him last Midsummer's Day. Boy Hawkins (that's Hyrum) and I had been at my desk, discussing how to go about digitizing our prized Book of Hours, which takes two weakling librarians to lift or one enthusiastic collegian. Have you taken a look at it yet? It casts a spell, that Brobdingnagian devotional (hardly the pocketable prayer book!), with its big iron clasps and gem-encrusted cover, and inside all those florid rubrications and charming miniatures, the script a fine model of insular majuscule, the twining borders of stylized sempervirens, and as much gold foil as that in the Aberdeen Beast-Book. Let the Emerald Isle boast of its Kells and the French have their Fouquet, for in those peasant scenes, stenciled with all the ludic vitality of a mummer's dance, the Brotherhood boasts something unique of its own, vigorously and meticulously invoked within a volume even heavier and more cumbersome than an elephant folio (that's a printer's categorization, my good man, for as big as it gets). That book was another reason I quit my pursuit of a PhD and came to roost permanently upon this consecrated land. Most of our irreplaceable editions are naturally enough in Hellenistic Greek, since they were assembled here, but the Book of Hours is in vulgate Latin, for it was a donation from a once-influential local family who saw it as more of an insurance liability than an asset. Hyrum Hawkins loved the book, too, and had tended to its care that spring semester like a surgeon helping a patient to recuperate, for it has languished on our unhygienic shelves too long, where wood-rot and booklice are always hungry to consume the past. He used new manuscript-preservation techniques that struck me as both rude and ingenious, for they involve the same sort of intrusive techniques, I suppose, as do those methods by which aging beauties maintain their looks. It was a kind of hi-tech witchcraft. Now had come the day to submit the Book of Hour's pages to the harsh light of our new scanning apparatus, where damaging the unsplit calfskin is always a danger and bindings might burst and precious metals might flake. Thankfully, the lad was ever-cautious and ever-vigilant. The university had prepared him well for these tasks. In the old days, he would have been apprentice and I master, but times and techniques have changed too much for that. He, as much as I, wanted to transmogrify our illustrious library into celestial bits and bytes, to live forever in an online afterworld, where our codices and scrolls could be seen with a tap and a click by tech-savvy Inuits or schoolchildren crowded around a terminal in Timbuktu. (You may have read recently that exactly the same thing has been done entirely successfully with the long-controversial Codex Sinaiticus.) I doubt now if this project will ever be fully realized, despite the assurances the new prior gives, though that is a worry for another year or another man. It is true that when I had Hyrum by my side I felt capable of putting my own life in his strong but fragile fine-boned hands.

It was my misfortune to be alone when Dr. Niko showed up unannounced, for my trustworthy helper had gone off shortly before noon of that day, to have his fish and chips at the village while I finished updating the database he had prepared for me on my lovely new aluminium mechanism, a gift from a rich friend of the abbey. (How strange to think that just a few short decades ago the artillery strike of an electric typewriter was a novelty in our antiquated library!) I was cursing the modern mystifications of the software when I was interrupted. "Brother Cletus, I'm presuming that must be you?" a stranger's reedy voice—close to a woodwind stop on a pipe organ—asked my back. I swiveled and took all eighteen-stone and six-foot-four of the professor in: tank-like but silent calf-length boots with vulcanized rubber-tire soles and nickel-plated medallions for buckles, boots into which were tucked the ends of triple-pleated twill trousers, holding up the trousers a very wide embroidered belt like a Hussar's; then, to the north of this girdle, bold and bouffant, a somewhat clownish barkcloth blouson, patterned with tiny vintage boomerangs; and over that article a waterproof canvas waistcoat more suited to a safari than the sidewalks, right down to its aerated side vents and cartridge-holders: what I suppose was this season's latest style for the presumptively mature man. His bodily features and not his clothes will be even harder for you to envision or believe. To begin, his hairy hands were huge, long-nailed and nearly lupine, and his wrists were as thick as a five-year-old branch of ironwood; his brawny arms and his physique in general displayed proofs of an athletic past—the thick muscles of his thighs and shoulders, especially, tensed the rough textiles of his clothing. His face will be harder still for you to imagine; if you layer the transparencies perhaps you can come up with your own misleading Identikit picture. Around his broad bald pate, which reflected the artificial light from above in an unfortunate way, was a feathery wreath of black curls, vestiges of the Mediterranean fibers of his ancestry, I presume, and giving him the monkish tonsure I lack, as you have seen: my long platinum-gray hair plaited, per our order's usance, down my back in its almost oriental queue. His eyes, I hate to admit, were of that sort so often and so insipidly called "merry," for they were more than sufficiently blue-black, unclouded, and bright; and his trim black beard emphasized the sharp, elongated lines of his chin and cheekbones: it was one of those beards that tapers, then disappears into the dense foliage peeking from the collar and on the other side curling up the nape. His eyebrows were high and ogive like Gothic arches, and they bristled alive and black and moist on his brow, almost meeting whenever he had something witty to say, which was often, or so he believed. Indeed, it was something about the movements of those repugnantly larval eyebrows, rather than his eyes alone, that affrighted me from the first; had this been 1912 instead of 2012, I would have suspected him of being one of those Montmartrian ether addicts. I figured him to be about my age, for though at first glance he looked much younger, I am sure he wasn't. In his day, he might have been rather handsome, but that day had not-too-recently passed, and now the man had a noticeable stoop and the time-sharpened nose of an aging libertine who must soon begin watching his perimeter at midships and consider either dying or plucking those persistent white hairs. Immediately I did not trust him, though I rose and extended my hand; his grip was ardent—and rather hot. "Hi, hi, my good fellow, I've been told all about you and your prodigious talents," he said, stepping back to leer with beetling brows at the whole of me. He reminded me of something out of the grotesquely effete illustrations of Osman Spare or Boris Artzybasheff. (Never mind if you have never seen any of them; you can always look them up on your Internet, as I am sure you do everything). Well was I to learn how Niko always ushered in with him his own sense of altered reality. Perhaps he noticed when we first met how I recoiled, inwardly if not outwardly. "I couldn't be toadying to the wrong person, could I?" he asked me, taking another step back while devising what preposterous thing to pronounce next. I must have found something to say, which he ignored. "But hark!" he continued. "Are you not the resident Thoth, that ibis-headed scribe, Most Esteemed Guardian of the Scrolls, Keeper of Divine Secrets and Doorman to Infinity? Yes, you are indeed, no need to be modest with the likes of me. But how splendid to meet here amidst the labyrinths of Upper Alexandria!" He always spoke like that around me. I do not know why.

"Some of your allusions elude me, to be sure," I countered with some modesty, "for I am not so Greek as Cleopatra was. That is, Ancient as well as Classical Egypt are both a little beyond my limited ken, which is more ecclesiastical in scope." I know you don't believe that I could talk like that to a stranger, but something in Dr. Niko drew it out of me, almost as if I were dummy to his ventriloquist.

He tugged an ear and said, "Well, I do know the difference between a eunuch and a monk! I hope to have many long discussions with you during my stay here. They have put me in a garret not fit for a gravedigger, above some disused tithe barn, you know—or was it a granary? Quaint, I assume it's meant to be, haven't spent much time inspecting the authenticity of the fixtures, but the Prelapsarian toilet will have to do, no worse than many a bad b and b's, I guess. Nice views, at any rate. Soon as I walked in I could smell the heavenly fresh-cut herbage put into this convent's renowned cordial wafting up to me. Please come up and visit me any time. Tonight, if you like. Bring some cider if your Cambrian won't do. We'll share a bottle or three of good cheer and appraise the regional talent, get a little too honest with each other, celebrate the solstice..." He paused just a millisecond, long enough for us both to blink just once. "Come, look at yourself, smiling so disarmingly at me—do you even know what you look like, have you studied yourself in a mirror in recent decades? Do they even allow mirrors in this place?" With a would-be comic swivel of his bullish neck, he cast his eyes about. "That is, you're the very model of a shyly unassuming antiquarian, a quick-sighted High-Church canon in a caftan and tarboosh, equipped with a prebend tidy enough to cater to his fad for forced or forged matyrs' confessions—or maybe it's reliquaries of lately demoted saints bought at auction. Say, do you like spook stories like James's? Not tired old Henry, but M. R. James, I mean, that's whose pages you've stepped out of. Because this is the perfect setting for one of his, tales, I mean. You're perfect, too, my man!" Nobody really talks like that, but Niko did—and must still do. He even went so far as to give me a vaguely Asiatic bow right there and then.

I winced inwardly at all this ostentatious blarney and cock-a-hoop posing, for really I am an uncomplicated man. "I seldom drink or socialize," I said, when given the chance. (My good manners were rubbed off years ago, and I never have appreciated being shoved into the back end of a panto horse's costume, to make a metaphor—his insinuations had also told me that this "convent," as he had deemed it, meant to him nearly the same thing as Hamlet's nunnery.)

"Such hesitancies will not deter me," he countered. "Now, I hear you have all sorts of gizmos and golly-gee gadgetry here, thanks to your pleadings to Abbot Hippolytus. He told me he's quite fond of you, Prior Cletus, really he did. And he also told me you have an extraordinarily clever young bloke loaned from Ulverston, is it, who's been here this season helping you put all this weathered old parchment onto the almighty World Wide Web. I'd like to meet this junior boffin; he's one lucky sodalist, to have been banished to this gulag! A lucky sod, indeed!" He paused in his laughter long enough to take in my reaction. It was noncommittal. "Oh, do forgive my flippancy and my errant Britishisms," he said in another key, "but I'm told that you are like myself an American... though I might have guessed Rhodesian."

I felt myself bridle. "Only half American, I'm afraid."

"In America, half is whole. Just ask your president! And I am actually only a quarter American, though around my colleagues I'll forever be the Yank. Neither of us has the speech patterns quite down pat, do we? So difficult to fake."

"I say!" I said in my most English of ways, for I am sensitive, you know.

His loathsome black-haired hand came slapping down on my back; I could almost feel the hot print sear itself into my flesh. "Compared to me," he said, "you're Jeeves and I'm Buffalo Bill's cyan-eyed son. Well, where is your boy wonder?"

Something in me knew I must forestall Hyrum's introduction to this funnyman as long as possible. "I really don't know," I lied. "He said something about going to see his mother, somewhere on the sunny side of Eden. By that I don't mean she's Eve, I mean on the way to Penrith East, near the hamlet called Eden."

The man's unforgivably dark eyes, eyes that absorbed light but reflected none but a shade of burning blue, showed he knew that I was lying, and that he knew that I knew he knew... and so on. "Oh, well... then..." he said, drawing out the ellipses, "another occasion, then..."

He was gone in another moment, but it was as if he had left a ghost of himself behind, watching me, watching my every movement for hours afterward. Curious. All the time he spent here at the abbey, I had that queer sensation whenever he had recently been about; if you had ever met him, before he fled the country (oh, he calls it a sabbatical, but why in New Mexico for an archeologist who concentrates on the European Middle Ages?), you might have had much the same reaction, I assure you. Come, other people might succumb to his roguish chicanery, but not discerning gentlemen such as we, right?

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Allow me to entrust you with a sort of secret, doctor. This is actually only a theory, but one which I have pondered deeply in my spare time (the hours are abundant these days) and would be willing to stand by were it to be put to the test—and it still might if the autopsy is ever called into question. Maybe you couldn't call it a fully formed hypothesis, exactly, for it might be, in the end, just a half-baked notion. I am just wondering how long traces of digitalis remain in the bloodstream—not being a botanist, you might disremember the stimulant's origins in that favorite cottage flower, d. purperea, what you know as foxglove. Having had at least some medical training, you certainly know it is chemically reactive and is capable of starting a stopped heart—and also stopping a healthy heart. The plant from which it is obtained used to be known as Dead Man's Bells or Witches' Gloves, names that give one a better idea of its baneful characteristics. In very small doses it makes one nauseated and induces xanthopsia, "yellow vision," making one see blurred aureoles around the most unholy heads. Maybe it accounts for some of the ecstatic visions of old. The variety we know is native and grows readily in the wilds all the way to the Arctic circle; you must have passed a few of its lovely solferino-pink and porphyry-purple stalks on your way through the mountain meadows to here and never thought to think anything so unobjectionably pretty could be so deadly. Now, for my theory, such as it is: it seems quite possible to me that our renowned liqueur (what you call simply Cambrian Red, and which benefits from the many herbs grown in our highly productive gardens) might infrequently contain a trace or more of that aforementioned flower, cut insensibly along with the gentian and sorrel and various worts, and then processed and fermented, decanted and distributed; rarely does anyone take more than a few sips, for its taste is so strong and its mind-altering powers as fabled as absinthe's—but suppose it is that trace of foxglove in its bittersweet blend that sometimes, at least, could account for certain side-effects not so usually tied to alcohol poisoning? (Think of wormwood.) Most of the brothers here are "stumblies" or "wrinklies," and their eyes are no longer so discriminating; I wonder how many leaves accidentally introduced into the mixture it would take to have an influence on the normal adult mind—and especially the highly suggestible mind of a young adult subject to the malicious persuasions of something more or less than human. Under the liqueur's persuasion, might one plan and commit acts one would normally execrate? Could one become an addict to this toothsome psychotropic without knowing it? Would one then sacrifice one's own life to that greater power holding sway over one's very soul? I am just asking; you are the doctor here.

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What soon became known in the Murdochian media as our "Satanic Solstice Stone" kept Niko puttering in our midst for most of last summer, for I am certain that he saw in it an opportunity to further his fame if he could but fit his hypothecations to it. No, he argued time and time again, it was neither Roman nor a "standing stone" of the aboriginal astronomers, those people long gone by the century your pantheistic Celts arrived from the south; yes, it had to do with the sun, but not the solstice, hibernal or aestival—in spite of the name attached to it by overeager reporters—and its runic inscription was "obviously" a mutant form of empire-era Greek (I've already addressed that sophistry); additionally, he persisted in propagating the idea that the haloed portrait on the Stone was not of Christ, but of Helios, he of the Myths. (Listen, my facility with language may no longer win me any prizes, but I promise you there is not a single character on that basalt facade which hasn't been worn so smooth it is open to multiple mistransliterations.) Remember my doubts of several pages back? Athenians, he would argue many times over to my very face, shaping his narrative in incrementally different ways on each occasion, had indeed sailed from Ionian to Hibernian waters centuries before Caesar's soldiers did—little bands of adventurers not unlike Odysseus, caught in storms and sent adrift polewards until, spilled upon the shingles directly west of here, they had no choice but to make a new home out of this region's untamed boreal forests and moors, among the tattooed savages. (As I told you before, this is highly unlikely.) He even speculated that this was the reason why our order clung to the Greek alphabet, though of course this abbey was not founded until eight-thousand seasons after the Spartan or Athenian explorers would have presumably straggled over the peaks between sea and lakes. Oh, but, he proclaimed, descendants of the original lost sailors nurtured traditions borrowed and bastardized from the old religion and the old language; over the centuries they would mix unproblematically with the legionaries and Celtic immigrants as they originally would have with the Picts, and it was only over quite a long interval indeed that Jesus became confused with Phoebus the Sun God and sacrificial rites became metaphorical and not literal, not actual or physical. In his final, most stunning, and most flagitious blow to all historical logic and common sense, mixing early Christian ideology with idolatrous practices, Dr. Niko claimed that actual human sacrifices were made at the foot of the Stone, for its inscription (he says) is an invocation, requesting life for blood, offering up unvitiated souls in exchange for the healing rays of a sun seen too seldom or too far away in this northern clime. Well! John Barleycorn as a Christlike figure, I will allow, and the Dying God and the Divine King, and all that Frazerian tommyrot—but Apollo in Anglia is another matter. Who can say how Niko's approximations add up, albeit I suppose it does sound as ominous as a fin de siècle tale of rural skullduggery-buggery in a sylvan underworld ruled by reanimated gods and eccentric barons. (As a lonely teenager, I once gobbled up such stories from the likes of Machen and Blackwood, too.) I do not know how much of the professor's theories his coeval medievalists, from casual Chaucerians to the most exacting Byzantophiles, will take at face value (he's more a turgid storyteller than historiographer, in my opinion), or even how far the professor himself would actually like to leap over logic—for I fear his government-sponsored "research" was just an excuse to hang around here, eating our food and drinking our drink and pursuing interests far from academic.

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That first or second night Dr. Apollonius was to spend here, the shortest night of the calendar, I decided to avoid any further meetings with him and hike down the switchback path into the village, steeper but quicker than the clay-dirt road. I had spent the last eight or nine postmeridian hours inside the library, trying to forget our awkward encounter by reacquainting myself with the internal logic of Hyrum's infernal file system (praying, too, that the young man would come back soon, as promised), but by the time the final, far-flung rays of the setting sun were inching up the chancery's high transoms, I realized I had missed the call for supper eons before; so, thinking I might get a spot of nourishment at the pub, as occasionally I do or did, I "put the computer to sleep" (as Hyrum phrases it, as if one practices euthanasia on electronics as one does on animals), shut the sashes in case there should come a rain later, as often happens without warning way up here in the heights, and set off down the deserted corridors toward the gated forecourt. After several steep and stony descents and partial ascents I know so well I can manage them even on a moonless midnight, I broke into bracingly clear air and headed toward those lights I saw just beginning to twinkle in the copper-colored distance. No one was out in the kitchen gardens or working in the distillery at this late hour, so my fellow monks must have either retired to their rooms to read—or more likely, since most of them are even older than I, to sleep—while the tired and attenuated sun lingered low on the horizon. (At this latitude, our summer dusks are long, fading softly into those "white nights" that the villagers love to make whiter and brighter. There are festivals nearly every week, here and in the neighboring burgs, meaning plenteous mead and brawling in the bushes. Once in a while we can hear the rumble of amplified drums echoing against the abbey's loftiest reaches. I usually avoid all unnecessary human contact during such bacchanals, but something urgent inside me that solstice day, when we all stand still in declination, was driving me onward heedlessly like a rat to the ratman of Hamlin.) On the way downhill, I angled past a series of arcs-boutant to peek at my winter garden, up against the sun-warmed granite far beneath my bedroom, a garden which looks so like an ordinary garden in summer: sunflower gay, hollyhock, and also the Virginian roses lined against the wall, bowing full-budded like debutantes at their first ball; though upon looking closer I spied (O Rose, thou art sick!) disgusting needle-nosed insects feasting on the leaves and copulating in the moist red hearts of the blossoms, which were already dropping petals. The poor girls were barely concealing their rags. Every leaf on every plant around me seemed to be folding under attack. I realized then that our very busy spring at the library, beginning with the power shovels and ending with our dubious visitor from Oxford, had obliged me to neglect my flowers too long—and then, feeling a sudden onset of remorse coming over me, I recalled more vividly that man Apollonius and how it had seemed he was trying to make me an object of scorn mixed with pity earlier that day, though it had all passed for lighthearted joking at the time. I was not responsible for him and would not have to cross his path often, but just thinking he was here on this property, living in that tiny anchorite's attic within the stunted tower of that half-ruined grain bin that we keep for visiting professors and the occasional travel-writer, raised my hackles and whitened my knuckles. Would he be helping himself to our resources whenever he cared to, supping from our communal bowls, and would he be insisting I expose outdated charters and contracts to him that I myself had never gotten around to putting in order? I could already sense how he would behave with my brethren: scratching or slapping our backs literally and metaphorically, giving us endearing nicknames to differentiate us, running small kind errands for those bedridden, bringing occasional gifts just to foster jealousies and rivalry, dishing the dirt on celebrities he'd assume we wouldn't know he didn't actually know, asking impertinent personal questions, taking an unnatural interest in my unimpeachable Hyrum. I'd known plenty of his kind in my days at uni—"swinging" adjunct professors, hip "broad-minded" novelists and artists-in-residence set loose among the undergraduates, polyamorous tutors who'd always be ready to help you through an exam or a doomed romance. It was just his sort of insinuating, ingratiating type that had goaded me, among other reasons I have already mentioned, into breaking off my academic connections and making a new home in this untrammeled sanctuary in the back of beyond. But there was something else about the man, too, which had disturbed me enough to consult my sixth sense—put a little less than slantwise, this Nikolaos Andreas Apollonius stank of something strong and faintly mephitic. Emotions and expectations sinking ever lower, I shut the lychgate behind me, hoping the man was not even now looking down from his dormer, ready to pounce. Whether it was because of thinking of him, my unhappy distant past and the troubling present, or because of the rapidly cooling twilight, I shivered thoroughly inside and out, like someone who has been brushed in the dark by a bat's wing—or somnambulist—and pressed on.

A quarter of a quarter-league from the pub I heard rustic voices raised in song, punctuated with saturnalian whoops and hollers, and accompanied in my roused imagination by the clinking of glassware and lidded steins: Midsummer's Eve revelries, raucous and rowdy even in a place this small and where the average citizen is well into his or her second dotage. Calico light, harlequin light spilled out from the Dacre Bull's open windows and doors, and approaching nearer, I saw that an improvised Biergarten had been constructed upon the cobblestones surrounding, outfitted with Japanese lanterns and harvest tables and benches and those ubiquitous modular lawn chairs. The theme of this party appeared to be this year's London Olympics; I noticed an official banner displaying the cubistic twenty-twelve trademark (I'd seen it before in local shop fronts) and people dressed as soccer players and pole-vaulters—but these days, that might just have well been their street clothes. The regular county set of homely lads and homespun lasses milled about among a masquerade of shadows and glass-strewn tables, either serving Guinness in overflowing mugs or being served. There in the center of them all (I of course heard him before I saw who it was), one cordovan boot on a rung of a backward-facing chair and the other pounding out the tempo on its plastic seat, was Niko, leonine and lionized, perched atop a high stool miles above the onlookers, embracing an enormous Andalusian guitar, which he attacked with vicious strokes and quick-fingered ticklings, singing a song about a great ape who escapes from a zoo and molests old ladies and judges. (Later Niko would inform me it was a song by a Frenchman as interpreted by a Yorkshireman called Thackray, whom I had heard often enough, long ago on BBC Radio 2.) Fortunately I was hidden by a screen of laburnum, or someone might have noticed me standing there conspicuously in my habit, dumbstruck and gobsmacked. In a matter of a few canonical hours, the professor had apparently become a popular and respected personality here, for that gang of barely legal hellions, as well as a few older souses with their fat and besotted spouses, had flocked around him, clapping out the rhythm and singing along on the jaunty chorus, watching his every move with enamored eyes while calling to have pint after pint delivered to him. The guitar was blindingly black, with a mother-of-pearl inlay around its mouth like the stylized rays of a sun, and though not electrified it rang out like a dozen guitars, while his bassoon-like baritone lifted the melody above the stirring chord-changes: a powerful voice, I couldn't argue, almost operatic, even if it was almost as if he tore his larynx to reach the highest appogiatura; and there was a marginally dissonant, almost clanging undertone to both his guitar's bottom string and his own lowest E, like the aftershocks of a fractured church-bell. Sir, you should have heard it just once! It was a voice that captivates crowds but could not truly be called beautiful or accurate, as a conservatory-trained singer's might, though it was often equally rich with vibrato; his effectual vocalization lured, it seduced, it subdued, not because it was subtle but because it was so strong, so insistent and relentless—one felt that with his melody he was chasing you down in a game of hound-and-hare; the listener was merely prey. Of course I would not have worded it so then; I would mull this all during the many opportunities I had to hear him in the weeks to come, for he seemed to carry his instrument about wherever he went, and he carried a stack of fakebooks in his head that might as well have been grimoires, such was the power of that big black guitar's spell-casting. Rambling Syd Rumpo (by which, me dearios, I mean the musical prof) would sit on a garden wall and play for the monks out tending the beds, or stop in a reverberating stairwell to sing to underlings assigned cleaning duties, or we would hear him at eventide, his voice carrying through the open windows of his little attic rooms and far across the mountainside, singing songs in many languages and in many modes. It all sounds quite jolly and innocuous, doesn't it? Well, it wasn't. I could always hear that coldly coercive, calculating quality in his voice, compelling us to forget our endeavors or our prayers and give in to indolence, give in to lying in the warm grass among buttercups and butterflies, to abandon all discipline and worship the summer sun. Even when only I could hear him, or the echo of him, I could still see him as he looked while singing—how his eyelids would squeeze shut beneath the sapient slope of his naked brow, as if he were experiencing some unclassifiable transcendent state, how his fingers would fly across the strings in wild abandon, how his long body would rock and sway and undulate with the calamitous or hypnotic music that flowed through him like a mesmeric current. He drank an inordinate deal, but drink never seemed to affect him. And though I never saw him smoking, whenever I got near enough to him I caught a hint of no run-of-the-mill Mexicali marijuana in his hair and in his clothes, but Moroccan kif, sweet and sultry, such as I had occasionally encountered during my post-adolescent peregrinations. He was your typical devil-may-care sort of dope fiend, I told myself then, though I was to come to realize it was nothing quite so simple as that.

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Little wonder that I wore myself out yesterday before I finished my account of that first night Dr. Niko spent here, for just thinking of that scene still upsets me powerfully—although while it happened, I was more flabbergasted than infuriated or frightened (as I would become later), even if you will see how sheer terror altered me in the end. For there among the partiers, nearly indistinguishable from them, dressed like them and behaving like them, for he was after all one of them, or nearly one of them, was Hyrum, in bleached denim and bovver-boy braces, a cigarette in one hand and a full mug in the other and a pistol aimed at my forehead in that third hand only I could imagine—but he of course could not see me in that polychromatic gloaming, hidden by the shrubbery. In fact, if I had stood directly before him, I doubt if he would have noticed, the music had so beguiled him. Several more glasses sat empty, chiming against one another on the little quaking table before him. He sat alone, a little apart from the crowd. His face was upturned, aglow with unearthly "black light" from a special fixture overhead: enraptured, enthralled, "blissed-out," green irises glimmering and heavy lips wet and slack. Under that bug light, his skin was a lurid green, too, lurid as it was fluorescent, and his mouth magenta, his cropped hair hyacinth-purple; he was a refugee from an elfin land. Where his thick and unflattering spectacles had gone to I do not know, for after that night I never saw them again. Maybe the music had cured his blindness. Unlike the others, he wasn't singing along when I first saw him, wasn't clapping, though his whole body seemed to discover pleasurable frissons with each newly augmented chord and his sports star-endorsed trainers kicked against the empty pvc recycling bin before him, keeping time like a bass drum. His mind obviously did not know what his body was doing—that was clear in his face, lifted upward as it was, hearing more than I or any of the other revelers heard. He stared and strained toward the guitarist who seemed to levitate above the audience's heads, strained and stared as one does into deep night, searching for constellations. The ditty about the gorilla ended with a gut-busting "thwang" upon the guitar, that last chord abbreviated by Niko's broad palm flattening the strings, hand over mouth, and everyone applauded and hooted except for Hyrum, whose feet still bashed against hollow plastic, and whose own hands deliberated over whether to put drink or smoke first to his lips—to quench his passion or stoke it higher. Caught up in the moment, I thought of disclosing myself, running to him, taking his limp body up in my arms and away from that hellacious place, but you won't be surprised to learn I didn't move a millimeter. Besides that, Niko had launched into a peculiar rendition of an old chestnut familiar to many who remember the folksinger resurgence of my youth, a shanty which is usually yclept "The Handsome Cabin Boy." After the violence of the last song, it came on with a hush, almost like a hymn, something entirely new, and from out of the lamplit obscurity I heard a tin flageolet and then a concertina join in—apparently there were other village musicians on the sidelines, more than ready to appease their new god. Niko must have been singing the song in a language I do not know well, if at all—possibly Gaelic or Cymric—but that did not seem to matter to the crowd, who seemed to comprehend every word. Part of me did, too, and I saw the hoydenish girl of the lyrics staring down into the cheval-glass surface of the sea, contemplating suicide, and I saw the vain captain striding the deck, searching for the shipmates who had gibed him, and I heard the infant's pitiable cry at the onset of the final verse. The tune dwindled to its conclusion like a dirge, and the crowd was not unhappy, but silent as if at mass, and immediately their respectful silence was subsumed by new assaults upon the big guitar—something Niko told his onlookers was a Child Ballad, though it was not one I could recognize or find later, about a lecherous friar and a wide-eyed altar boy, and because it was not very seemly, I will not describe it here. What terrified me then, what disturbs me now, was the feeling that Niko knew I was there, hiding like a philandering clergyman within the topiary, and also how he looked across the garden, over the heads of the carousers, directly through the night into my eyes, baiting me with blazing black eyes as he sang one dubious stanza after another. I might have come stumbling out then, laughed as well, enjoyed the prank and joined in the fun, but I saw no fun in it and stalked away, having fully forgotten the meal I meant to make there at the Dacre. Later, I went into the larders and made a sandwich that might have consisted of my own heart.

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The next morning I was determined to say nothing about it at all to Hyrum. He had shown up early, dressed flawlessly in that way the newly sober yet heavily hungover often will, determined not to show themselves for what they are—just as you can always tell the real drunkard because he takes the greatest pains not to appear in any way inebriated. (Even here at the abbey I know the type well.) Hyrum's suedelike scalp was oily with a verbena-scented pomade, his neatly ironed chambray shirt was buttoned to the neck, his trousers were clean, his loud striped socks were only slightly mismatched. His face was also highly colored. The boy reminded me of a sprig of some aromatic herb that has broken overnight into blossom. He greeted me with clear eyes and antiseptic smile. There was really nothing I could say, despite his disappearance the day before and his reappearance at the pub that night, since from February on he had worked so many many hours beyond the hours even we monks work, for no more pay than his bed and board, and he truly was very good at what he did. He was at liberty to set his own timetable; his stay here was more his school's concern than mine (though I would have to write him up, come August); although under twenty-one, he was in every way a free man. "So," I said, pretending not to notice his rehabilitated self, "so! Shall we start where we left off the other day, with that vermiculated distillation of the Theorica Pantegni? By 'vermiculated' I mean the quarto is both richly embellished and worm-eaten. Why, you had only just blown the dust off it. Inside are some simply masterful hand-tinted intagli of medicinal plants." (I should note here that my provident predecessors had over the years broadened our original collection with some quite desirable items.) Hyrum grinned his donkey grin—Pinocchio on the Isle of Runaways—always glad to learn something new, and I found it easy to forgive him. We toiled hard all that morning and afternoon, like the scribes of old, forgetting everything but the complicated tasks at hand, one in mind and purpose.

But, I admit, once we separated after supper, I felt barely speculative yet nearly corporeal doubts loping in and nosing me like the shades of long-dead dogs. Later that night I made certain to go past my young factotum's room on the way toward the lavatory, a route that isn't so spatially efficient, since it means I have to take a left turn past Brother Cosmo's and Brother Hector's rooms and then up a flight of stairs, across a vaulted loggia, around a buttress or two, and then down along the balustrade of another passageway—though I could always excuse myself by saying I was just out for a bit of air. As I stepped lightly along the flags, I devised logical postulations equal to that famous lady and her tiger, the answer being: A) He would be in, callow head bent over his lectern, studying like a good schoolboy, or B) He would be down at the ginmill once again, drinking the elixir of evil poured by my new rival. Worse yet was the "C" I did not yet dare to consider: that Hyrum might be up in the arachnid's web, discussing music and art and other improper things; or worse still, they were together behind this very door at that very moment, knee-to-knee on the cenobite's cot. However. I swallowed and dared to tap the brass knocker, something I had done no more than a handful of times over the past forty-odd years, for we monks are as you might have guessed very private souls. The knockers on our doors are there just so the act of requesting admittance is something not done casually; most of them are probably rusted into place. I stared straight ahead for a moment or so, examining the corrosion upon the brass and also upon my soul. Incredibly, after that moment or so had passed, Hyrum answered with a smile, wearing little more than a smile, bare-chested, wet-haired, all elbows and knees, and gangly and goose-fleshed, for it is cold at night here even in summer. There was a damp bivalve depression on his coverlet where he must have been sitting; I noticed that after his shower he had put back on the same socks he'd pulled on that morning. He looked extremely etiolated and barely pubescent. Again, I had that impulse to take him to my bosom, to warm him, but I leaned aloof and parietal in the doorway. What could be my excuse for knocking? After the smile waned he slouched back a pace from me as those few youths I chance to encounter have an unfailing tendency to do, just staring blankly—not asking, not telling, while I mentioned the temperature and the phase of the moon. It is very "uncool" for the young folk of today ever to appear surprised, yet alone betray alarm—even someone at my remove from ordinary life is aware of this. Hyrum acted as if I made a routine of visiting his room, which wasn't the case at all. The cinnamon on his breath, it seemed, was even stronger than it had been that morning—I could smell it three feet away—and although the room was adequately lit by a gathering of tealights (for we frown on using electricity after vespers) upon his night table, there was clearly no book on or near his bed, only pajama-top and sponge-bag. "What was that you were humming?" I questioned him, aware for the first time that I had been following an almost subliminal sound down the hall. "Humming?" Hyrum answered. "Well," I said, "we all hum familiar tunes now and then without realizing it." "Certainly, sir!" he responded, as if called upon in class. "If I was, I hope I didn't wake you or any of the others."

"Any of the others"! How could I be lumped in with my lumpen comrades? I stood my distance while he sat down again on his bed, a little dazed, it seemed, as if he had just been snatched from sleep. Then I noticed the empty glass at his bedside—and was that one ruby-red drop at the bottom? No, probably just a little of that patented antibacterial mouthwash. "You know," I said, in that way people about to say something one doesn't know always begin, "it's been quite an unusual summer here." He looked up, his green eyes glittering—yes, glittering—in that ecclesiastic light. "How is that, Prior Cletus?" "Oh," I said, wishing he wouldn't gawp so, "you, the new addition, the Stone, all that bish-bosh from the press, that gent from Oxford." His pupils widened almost imperceptibly. "Oh, you mean, Niko? I mean, Dr. Ap-, Appall—Dr. Appallius?" he said, with no more emotion than one comments on ordinary weather. "Dr. Apollonius," I corrected him. "Quite a character, he," I added hastily, and started to chatter nonsensically, the way one does when confronted with such a dangerous combination of youth and naiveté. "Reminds me of a lecturer I once had back in my own college days—that supercilious type, you know; one never knew where his own words ended and the authors in books began. ῾Makes no odds,' he told us once when we demanded he fess up to what could be regarded by some as a form of theft, ῾the blessed Greeks never used quotation marks, either, you know.' Hmph!" Not the bat of an eye. "Anyway, that Dr. Apollonius—as I said, quite a character!" "I suppose," Hyrum said, eyes narrowing just enough to extinguish the glitter. Some invisible insect flew into a flame and sputtered. "Well, well," I said, "we shall have another busy day tomorrow. See you bright and early?" He was shimmying into his pajama-top, his narrow ribs risen, his flat hairless stomach sucked in above the childish flannel pajama bottoms, and his answer came muffled, in the affirmative. I left, closing the heavy door behind me.

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You have been belaboring me too much about my so-called "biological impetuses," Dr. Currier! I have told you again and again that we monks take a solemn vow of celibacy when we are ordained; those lowliest of urges are transmuted into higher pursuits and, one hopes, an ever-expanding sacramental awareness. We kneel and pray when we are tempted; we do not flagellate or otherwise medievally mutilate ourselves, but we do fast sometimes and we do lose ourselves in menial or mental labor when we are feeling susceptible—not as you presupposed, in rough games with our compeers—and, when we are on the edge of surrendering, by self-imposed solitary confinement in our cells. It is not so unpleasant, really: one still loves, one loves more, one loves all. Maybe you won't believe this, but the longer one abstains, the easier it actually becomes (being a married man I doubt you know what I mean). That said, I have not always been a monk, you know. I went through puberty like any other boy. I was capable of falling in love like any other sap. There was an Eagle Scout I knew back in prehistoric Baltimore, back before mankind fell. We were best friends for exactly two years, six months, and twenty days, for I keep our anniversary somewhere in the locked chambers of my heart even now. I was never a scout; after the disaster of my father the lieutenant, my post-boho or proto-beatnik mother didn't like anything halfway militaristic (going so far as to call Baden-Powell a brownshirt); she even distrusted the Salvation Army, but I was happy to be the scout's subaltern, carrying his canvas haversack for him when he carried his Daisy rifle, waiting at his porch door every morning to walk with him to P.S. 109, swimming with him in the nude (as was required) at the city Y, tolerating and nearly enjoying even the noisome scents he would leave behind in the toilet-stall. For months and months I didn't know it was love, and when that word finally formed itself in boldface copperplate within my cerebellum, or rather, in the shower-rooms after one particularly sweaty football match, I was shocked worse than he would have been, had he known, and I determined to break off our friendship the next day. I told him I was going back to England and therefore had no use for any American friends. It was better this way. I could play a lockjawed Bette Davis in a smoky tearjerker better than the actress herself. Amazingly, he was the one who cried. He had a "steady" by then, but I was never jealous; indeed, I enjoyed very much the play-by-play accounts he gave me of their tentative spelunking into bodily cavities. He couldn't see why, how, what next. He didn't know why I had to be so cruel. Ah, but I was—back then. I returned the Gene Pitney albums and Boys' Own Life magazines he had let me borrow, and I did an elaborate pantomime imparting the phrase "I'm at the library" when my mother said he was on the line. He was beautiful, that boy, with square shoulders, square jaw, nut-brown hair, adorably photogenic dimples, nothing at all like Hyrum, in case you're interested. Do you know that old Hollywood actor, Troy Donahue, exemplar of the mid-century Golden Boy? My best friend was that sort of ephebe, more statuesque and in truth even less individualistic than your standard-issue kouros. Standing erect with many medals and merit-badges across his linebacker's chest, his field service cap at a jaunty angle that emphasized his youth, the creases of his chinos knife-blade sharp, and oxblood oxfords spit-shined, he was godlike, if I might say so, and that sash might as well have been a braid of bay leaves. And yet I rejected him and did not even allow him entry into my sordid nocturnal fantasies. Alas, alas, there were no others after him, though I tried, tried often, I was always looking for true love in those early years—not just a merging of bodies but of minds. Yes, even that! I was too idealistic to settle for anything short of a soulmate, though my soul had not yet been gestated or discovered even by myself. Don't pity me too much; I had my fun, I am only human. After my idol was toppled the Sixties still lay ahead of me, like the Corybants' Arcadia in the near distance, where I would join the joyous pinwheel dance. (Listen closely and you too will hear the pan-flutes and finger-cymbals.) Not in Damascus, but on a snowy pass in Afghanistan, on the patchouli pathway to India fifty thousand others of my generation had trod, I stood on a cliff-side, once, and turned back, for I thought I heard something behind me, and that something unseen whistled low and eventually led me here.

You, doctor? What is it like to have a wife at your side and a couple of award-winning children who will carry on your DNA, possibly into the stars, into the infinite? Are happy families safe as houses? You are younger than I and have been taught to respect, accept, even encourage. You must have been born in my gloriously sybaritic Sixties, and grown up in the ugly Thatcherite era, listening to your ugly synthetic trance-beats, taking all the right pills, supporting the right football club, going for the yuppie dollar—or rioting in the streets against the World Bank, for all I know. Regardless, you did the mating ritual like everyone else, you all danced and flapped your limbs like god-damned gooney birds. Do you ever think what it might have been like if you had rejected all your base and odious "biological impulsions" and said the hell with the human race? Is it really that important for Master Sperm to meet Miss Egg and carry on life's inanity? Stop smiling when you read this, as you will soon enough, for I am growing bored with this journal already and my stomach hurts and my head hurts worse and I don't want to go on much longer like this. Can't go on much longer like this, like some Samuel Beckett character. You've known all along that I am not mad, and that I am guiltless above all else, however much I begged to be found otherwise, and our general practitioner has surely told you that, that .... well, I will stop today.

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We can assume, because this is the way these sort of Rabelaisian tales go, that of course bit by bit the boy was being debauched. How could it not be so? Nightly he would go to the pubs, and nightly Niko sang for his suppers thereabouts. Sang for much more than that! I confess it, I began going down to the village those long lingering crepuscules myself, at first telling myself I just needed a bit of unfugged air and a little exercise for a change, then content to acknowledge as well that I wanted to hear Niko play, not disregarding the importance of keeping tabs on the easily misdirected Hyrum. It was easier to join in and safeguard my ward that way than to go on playing detective in the dark. As might be expected, I made a few miscalculations, and my integration into their company was not rapid or smooth—and perhaps always regarded as suspect. Therefore, I will distill a process that took several days, even weeks, into one easily digestible scene representative of them all. Not however suitable for children.

The Dacre Bull is a fairly small and nondescript public house, even as such out-of-the-way spots go, of no particular architectural style and no particular flavor, and two dozen townsfolk will make it feel positively full. (At least it is not cheapened by Las Vegas neon and betting machines, as I'm told pubs all over the country have been.) It is in the center of the village and thus hard to avoid, especially when one is thirsty. When I slunk through the open doors, at the end of a day in June or early July, it was as if I had entered disguised, for I was wearing my one set of "civvies" (a suit which I regret to say is so old it has fallen in and out of style several times) and not my summer habit—for I wanted to be incognito, I did not want to stand out as one of the "nutters," as the locals affectionately call us. It's not as if I could have really duped anyone; even with my ponytail constrained by a collar, I was still known by the innkeeper and his wife, who saw me at their establishment now and then when I missed dinners at the abbey, and I was recognized as well by the "regulars," who are mostly farmers, odd-job men, and retirees. Add to that a mixture of the village "swells," who could spot a monk in mufti at fifty paces, and the pub was chockablock with people who knew me well enough to tip their caps or bow almost imperceptibly, as if I were their parish priest or another somewhat out-of-his-element local dominus. Though I had heard Niko playing here several nights running, those nights when I had pretended I was only out for a postprandial imbibe before hieing off toward a rendezvous with the moon down by the disused quarries, I did not hear him this hour and so felt a little safer entering this lair of the beast while the beast was in absentia. And indeed, taking a quick gander around the low oak-timbered room, I noticed neither him nor my increasingly elusive secretary.

At the bar, between the weathered hoodoos of two sun-blistered hired hands, I ordered my usual lemonade, for as I have said, I seldom drink. Here, the beverage is always served flat and sour and lukewarm, like a cough remedy. The counter before me was slick and sticky, its shellac was flaking, it was littered with coins of the realm and "dead soldiers" (empties, in native parlance), and I had to make a little clearing in the detritus to set my beverage down. No sooner had I done so when another glass butted mine, one apparently filled with black bile, topped with soapy foam, for that glass was Niko's, and it was Niko who had taken on the shape of an ordinary farmhand out on the weekend. How had I mistaken him? He wore velvet-collared corduroy and fustian, and fustian was in his speech as well: "Nectar of the gods, eh, prior? Surprised to see you aren't—uh—lucubrating as usual under the covers tonight, you old rascal! Care to join me and the lark that alights behind that pillar in the snug you overlooked?" For a second we teetered, eye to eye. Then he took a deep swallow, while I took a shallow breath, and before I could decide to speak or run, he resumed, prodding me off my stool: "Come, come, me matey, why don't we drink and carouse now, before we are dust? So it is written. That is, if you are allowed to—ahem ahem—fraternize after work hours?" Every other sentence an interrogation, every third word an insinuation; my face must have flushed hot, but the fingers on my glass were cool, and I followed him deeper into the pub with not much more than a grumble of assent.

"Looky here, li'l buckeroo, I done brung your pardner," Niko drawled in some sort of movie-show Texanian as we assembled ourselves in the farthest possible corner within a booth that was really too small for even just two of us—Niko cagily placing himself next to Hyrum, while I squeezed in opposite, for really I am not so tall as getting on wide these days and any other arrangement might have been far too tight for the kind of intimacy that requires a certain amount of free play of hand, knee, and foot. Hyrum had already blushed and shaken my hand as if I were an unknown quantity, before we settled into our separate selves. The young man held an unlit Woodbine before him, contemplating it, never lighting it the entire period we were there together, in deference to the changing laws or out of respect toward me, for he knew I disapproved. Fair enough; I looked at him with kindness, I always wanted to look at him, for he had that sort of face invariably described as "open." Open to interpretation, you might say. This night I saw something mischievous in his strabismic eyesight, a pupil caught truant, already sufficiently narcotized from his pint of poison. He was wearing an ordinary if rather close-fitting t-shirt appliquéd with what I at first took for a Chi-Rho—you've seen it, that christogram that looks like an X superimposed over the pedestal of a P. Maybe he is religious, after all, I remember thinking. (Later, when I got a better look at his shirt, I saw it was just another cryptic corporate logo.) Hyrum's arms were as pasty as they were painfully thin, and a pinkish-beige acne medication (I suppose it was meant to be "flesh-colored") had been daubed here and there along their length. Both of us old scapegraces solicitously asked the boy how he was doing, but he remained mute as a mime, so Niko jabbed him lightly with an elbow, the way you might have to knock a mechanical doll a bit to make it talk. And like a wound-up automaton Hyrum merely intoned, "I am happy here. Are you happy here? I am so happy here." He meant the pub, not the world, not the state of his or my existence, and yet I answered almost glibly, my inept aperçu like a greeting card from a Confucian sage: "Happiness is where we lose ourselves in the lives of others," or something as humdrum as that. Hyrum seemed to like my reply, nonetheless, for he knocked his Guinness against mine (like water into wine, my tonic seemed to have been transubstantiated by some sleight of hand) and laughed a tinselly, melismatic laugh that lifted all of our hearts before he burbled away into silence again. Niko was leaning heavily against the adjacent wing of his shoulder-blade, the way I used to press against him too when Hyrum and I first sat together at the old microfiche machine, when he smelled like wet wool and sour milk, after a downpour last April, when I was young, again. Nowadays he smelled more like cheap mouth-gargle and misplaced ambition. I wondered what was happening under the table's lacquered surface—footsies, "accidental" brushes, jocular pokes in the lower ribs? Not putting anything past the one with the letters after his name and not on his shirt.

To distract my imagination, I asked the obvious of Niko: "Where's your Ovation? And by that I mean not the applause due you, but your big black guitar." As if it might be in its case under the table, too.

"Oh, that curvaceous coffin of wood and resin," Niko growled, "that overrated box of stale air? I left her dozing in my room, for she misbehaved rather badly today. I was tuning her and she grew so heated by my molestations that she snapped her B and E. Tomorrow I'll have to go into the nearest market town and buy some new Aquilas. And when I've refurbished her and let her out on parole she's going to sing in a slacker key, I promise you; I'm also buying a lead bottleneck to make her submit to subtle glissandos of my will. That is, I'm going to subject her body to some real down-home delta blues. Now that I think of it, that's what I have an ardent and ensurient craving for, as of late." Hyrum revived himself and concurred most emphatically. "Classic, man!" he exclaimed. "I'm loco for slide guitar, Charlie Patton, Son House, Willie Dixon, 'Spoonful,' 'Back Door Man,' The Doors, Clapton, the Zep! Really, that's, like, the kind of stuff I'll never delete from my playlist," and I was surprised, having assumed anyone male and of his age—even a "wonk," "wiz," or "dweeb"—listens exclusively to those spastic boasts of Cockney rappers I occasionally hear from passing cars filled with teenage rebel-rousers, even here in Outer Mongolia. Before Niko could one-up either of us, I addressed the space between my two compatriots: "Do you prefer John the Revelator to Brother Ezekiel's dry bones, then, Hyrum... and you, professor?" As well as going along with the scenario in my own lower-pitched mode, I wanted Hyrum to know I wasn't entirely ignorant of the subject, for in my glory days I had once attended more than my fair share of festivals. "Little red roosters and hellhounds on your trail, it will evidently be, then? We're sure to be transfixed as if by the gibbous moon when our very own Orpheus kindly ensorcells us with a few choice roundelays." Niko snorted at me, fortissimo as a bullroarer, as he does when he's very amused and sufficiently complimented—and that's called laughter. I felt for once I had genuinely placated him. For the moment, maybe for a few days or weeks succeeding, I felt also that we had chartered a new sort of club, and with my bulk deftly slipped between his hulk and Hyrum's much slighter form, I might be able to steer these ships through narrow straits and rest again.

But it is strange, the way those drinks multiplied like loaves on the mount, and how I got merry as a monk after just two, and Hyrum drank too fast and got quieter and quieter, and Niko drank more than both of us put together but remained clearheaded and sober as the proverbial judge. For some while we were all three quite jolly, I think, just floating above the pub's roisterous din, glad to be side by side, silent or too chatty, as I found myself becoming as I responded to Niko's many recondite and laborious jokes. Still, my suit felt hotter and hotter, as well as several sizes smaller, even as I strove to remain high and light as a weather-balloon. You can probably guess that I am not one buoyed aloft for too long on either alcohol or rare gases; a multitude of eyes reduplicated themselves in the specular smoked-glass panels fore and aft of the small cabin-like space we sat in—the eyes of curious villagers, far too curious—eyes that threatened to deflate my spirits, and so I was a bit apprehensive when the keep suggested yet another round. Niko, however, insisted, and insisted he would reimburse me for every round, as well. ("There are but two gods," he declared. "Love and Lucre!") Things got hazier from that point on, but during the course of the first eve that brought the three of us together (there would be not a great many more) I do remember giving Hyrum a stern look when he sank like the dying Achilles against Niko's broad bosom, in feigned collapse brought on by an unannounced fit of helium-pitched laughter. Next, in an effort to inject a modicum of gravity into the general levity, I attempted to ask Niko about his interpretation of the Stone and what he had uncovered so far, whilst fact-finding in the vicinity—enterprises, after all, which were the entire reason he was supposed to be hanging on in these parts (and well-paid for it by a government scheme, too, I incautiously reminded him). Niko sucked in his breath, but before he could answer, I tried to rephrase my question with a little less obvious rancor. I was soon to learn he is most eloquent when very well-oiled. Myself, I suppose I talk like a Frisian when I've had a bit too much—that is, one can almost understand me.

"Your cursed sacrificial stone, is that what you're trying to pin me down about? Egads, man!" Niko yawled with cynical suspirations, as if wounded to the core, and then with a wet forefinger he scrawled something I took to be sham-prophetical (in a Belshazzarian sense) over his reflection on the table's glazed surface. "That cypher, you mean—that fissured cenotaph, that enigmatic epitaph, that cryptogrammatical riddle? It's all of those and more, I swear it is, but no genuine counterfeit! The death of me, it'll be, too, that measly hunk of volcanic sediment—at any rate, it's not going to yield its secret without some shedding of my own blood, sweat, and tears. How old is it? Who quarried it and who carved it? Are they one and the same or separated by a plurality of generations? Did cutter and inscriber even speak the same dialect? Nay, nay, kind brother, don't task me with paleolingual enquiries after I've had as many pints as hours in the night. That monolith is like Memnon, it may as well talk in tongues at sunrise, for it says many things and nothing, and the pidgin chiseled there is what makes it most vexatious... Tut-tut, don't look at me that way—it is some form of gnostic or colloquial Greek, I'll adduce examples of it yet!" He breathed again and glared at me wildly, as if I were a whole theater of doubting dons. "But we'll argufy that hunk of igneous rock's considerable attractions another day, shall we? Opposed to all I have hinted at, I am not yet ready to publish my précis. God, how I wish you'd never mentioned it!" Bringing his monologue to a close, he wiped away his runic formula—if that's what it was—and with it his reflected image on the tabletop, laughing grimly: at me, at himself, at all three of us buffoons. Hyrum was watching and gurgling ecstatically, drowning almost eye-level to the table on his half of the booth, almost lost in the lunar umbra cast by our dark companion. No, time trips me up when I'm drinking past my limit; Hyrum was missing at that moment—in the loo, I suppose. Niko took the advantage.

"A pretty shepherd," he stated as if reading the title of a painting on the wall, whilst looking into that vacant space where Hyrum had been sitting. "Have you ever noticed how becomingly his eyes mirror the sky on a sunny day? I'm so glad he ditched those fugly specs after I told him that. Not to intrude, however. One can tell that you and he are, if you'll countenance me to be spinsterish about it, amis intimes. Mayhap it's true, what they say about monks and minors. Not that I'm telling, wink wink." And he actually did wink.

"He is, is not a mi-mi-minor," I parried with a thick tongue, maneuvering my glass around several others on the table, as if it were a chess piece and I about to make a match. "And he is chaste, chaste as a church. Hardly con-con-consorts with a single one of us any, at any m-moment of the day or night. I don't think, I don't—I don't think the boy has ever so much as h-h-huggered a mate—damn it, I mean, b-b-bussed a maid."

Niko looked surprised, and I suppose I looked surprised, as well, realizing that he was still pretending to be surprised, and as I was saying, we really had consumed too much of whatever was on tap. The rest of the common room and its commoners might just as well have melted away, and maybe the lights had already flickered; I do not know how many bells it was, though certainly all the clamor of the crowd had departed the room. "Churches are not... the criminal sanctuaries... they once were," Niko maundered ominously while gulping the last of his superego-inhibitor, then added, "Not that I am one to cast aspersions—or, even if I could, thaumaturgical spells. I suspect yon cupbearer is ready for whatever he can take, and at his age, even puerile and pimply, he can fooking well get just about what he wants, and has." Yes, he pronounced it "fooking."

I am not one for glowering, but I tried my best. "While he is here, he is under the order's p-p-protectorate," I stammered (as I do when feeling a bit rummy), knowing what I said was somewhat inaccurate, but continuing as properly as I could, "and no one must in-in-interfere with him. He is dependent on merit scholarships and m-m-must, must not, must not be distracted by—"

"Temptations? You should know that a numismatist like myself only collects uncirculated coins, me duckies." Again, that gruesome nictation of his eye.

"Extraneous influences, w-was all I was going to say. B-b-by which I meant that he mustn't become too caught up in, uh, this p-p-personality cult of yours, the music, the allure of the new, adult v-v-vices, Gallic songwriters and the, the—"

But Hyrum had rejoined us—perhaps had never left, and was only now awakening with his childlike head between scabby elbows splayed across the slick tabletop, upon which we had been sloshing half our drinks. His double, spliced at the waist as he rose, met and merged with him upon the reflective surface, so that, made two-dimensional by my bleary eyesight, he looked a bit like the knave from a pack of playing cards. Niko continued as if the youth were not really there, which in a sense he wasn't: "Hyrum tells me his family is Anabaptist, Church of the Almighty Something-or-Other Revelations. The end is near, Six-Six-Six is in the universal product code, the crescent and stars identify the Beast on a tube of toothpaste, and all that—right, Hy, ol' boy?" As if to demonstrate their newfound camaraderie, he slung a heavy arm around his drinking buddy's neck and hugged him close, the pose being comrades-at-arms. More like Zeus and Ganymede, or any old rapist and the barefooted Corydon—I remember that thought coming to me through the haze. Even pickled as a pig's foot, I am forever a classicist.

"That tickles!" Hyrum screamed, and tore away from his grip, spilling the dirt-brown dregs in his pint across the table. "Me mum believes all that crap, I don't. Not lately. No. Not me. I—no, I don't even believe in no God." But he was as one talking in his sleep.

"See?" I said. "He's got no use for that n-n-nonsense. Or any of yours, I m-m-might say."

"You did say, and I'll take it as a good-natured joke, good brother. Onward, boys!" he said, rearing out of his stall with a snort of hyper-masculine energy. "Let us repair to my lamentable lodgings." Stay my hand; here I will stop, this last minute of the last hour of the day.

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And here I will begin this morning. Excuse me now if my chronology is no more trustworthy than an ailing grandfather clock's. Also, as I have said, I am condensing where I might otherwise expand. So it may be that it was not exactly that night, but another night altogether, of another week, or not, when we first all tumbled into Niko's boxy four-door two-tone Vauxhall PC saloon car, parked just down the lane from the pub; next to his guitar, he worshiped that particular golden calf more than anything else in his possession: vintage '67, De-Luxe model, he said, such as he had passionately yearned for in his youth—a prize find he'd come across in a telephone booth (in the advert posted there, he meant), which he had punctiliously rejuvenated and fancified, aggrandized, transmogrified, and vaingloriously glorified (pretentiously so for a relatively pedestrian automobile, if that's not an oxymoron) with all the latest this-and-that, from the convoluted chromium innards under the bonnet (gleaming guts he'd be glad to expose to anyone showing the least bit of interest) to the futuristic quadrophonic console, with all the custom styling and upholstery he could afford, including the bum-warming leather seats we were now sprawled across—myself crammed sideways in the back and Hyrum up front, where his long legs could stretch just a bit more. All of us were perfectly and ideally drunk but Niko of course showed it a good deal less, capable as he was of driving up the bumpy mountain road with easy aplomb, shouting along with what he identified as Azorean fado coming over the speakers, encouraging us on the unintelligible chorus; sooner than I thought we would, we rumbled into position beneath the conical roof and open shutters of the former oast house that the Brotherhood had renovated to domiciliate visiting professors and the occasional travel-writer. (All the while I was hoping my colleagues wouldn't hear us, but then again they were higher up through thick trees, behind stone walls, and nearly all half-deaf.) Niko sprang out of the driver's seat, Hyrum rolled out of the passenger side, and I suppose I must have looked rather silly squeezing myself out of my trap, only to land face-down on the gravel. "Give him the ol' heave-ho," someone said, and next thing I remember, we were all three of us lounging round the hearth in that little retrofitted bedsit, for the night had turned as cold and damp as my brain. I collapsed upon the battered sofa-bed, that shipwreck of broken springs and ripped cushions and smelly mildew all down its duvet, and the other two were alternately crouching in a partially amputated armchair and saddling a cocktail table like a hobbyhorse, for they were taking turns getting up to tend the fire and refresh their shot glasses (and mine, I suppose) with that good strong Islay whiskey shipped down the coast and always at hand around here. I sipped and whirled and groaned with laughter, hating that wide, low-beamed room, the abysmal wattage of its single naked bulb and its outdated carpeting and furniture formerly from good homes—and soon I felt quite ill and near enough to the flames to enterprise an image of my own true self, seated next to Erebus, on an overnight charabanc to Hades.

Niko had taken up his lyre—this must have been another night indeed, for all six strings were intact—and began to softly strum a sort of diabolic drover's lullaby, in Catalan or possibly Basque; I do know there seemed to be something abstractly or atavistically threatening about it, as well as something disarmingly hypnogogic, for I must have been sleeping for some minutes and dreaming of the rugged Bay of Biscay when I heard Niko suggest that now that not a drop was left in the bottle, we should all go down to the "spa," as he put it, to partake of a resuscitating swim, for the fire had overheated us and a Kiplingesque dawn would soon be thundering over Helvellyn. I half-opened my eyes to see my friendly enemy swinging an electric torch, ready to lead the way, and, awake again but lost in time and space, I blindly followed him and Hyrum down the rickety wooden stairs and then the water-worn cobblestone steps that lead to a series of curvilinear terraces embracing a steep slope; whenever I found myself staggering and falling, tripping over tree-roots and excusing myself to the bushes, I felt strong arms righting me again and smelled their swinish armpits close to my nose as we lurched in the Cimmerian gloom down the path, guided only by Niko's thin beam of inconstant light. Where the ground became soggy and I sank in cushions of moss, they left me, and I heard them unzipping and unbuckling and then braving the icy water of our little tarn. I could see nothing, for the torch had died out, only heard them splashing and laughing like infant siblings in a tub. Curses. I crawled to the water's edge, dipped my head into the swimming constellations there, was instantly sober and very afraid. Louring clouds soon quenched the remnants of stars, and all noises ceased, only the wandering wraith of a night bird cooing afar—had my new best friends both drowned? Crawling on hands and knees, I squelched across the moss and rustled through the reeds, lowing like a lost calf, like someone bewitched and transfigured. Everything was silent, everything was black, but there were blacker shapes embossed upon the sky's unforgiving blackness—above me the crenelations of the abbey walls, across the pool two formless forms that seemed to coalesce and divide and then coalesce again like amoebas under a microscope; was it two humans or only waterfowl—a heron and a crane? I somehow could not reduce my bellowing into words, and my one and only suit was now sodden, my shoes muddy, my ankles and wrists lacerated, and I was cold, cold, cold at the edge of daybreak, with sick on my shirtfront and all down my left trouser-leg. There was also a tense susurration in the grass, a rising of an amphibian chorus that once again vanquished the silence, a welter of breezes that stirred the calm and grew into the piercing whispers of two invisible men, and then woozy laughter—my own and theirs—as they lifted me, heavy and slithery and as hard to handle as a manatee, up onto a boulder, back against a tree-trunk. "I'm so sorry, I can't swim, can't even keep the water out of my nose, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry I never learned how," I blabbered, still choking a bit on the tannic water in my throat. I could hear them then getting back into their clothes, hear the gooseflesh rising on their backs if that is possible, but could still see nothing, or next to nothing, as they assured me I was high and dry and ready for beddie-bye. You're correct, doctor, I should never drink, not with my nerves, my bad blood, my liver, my heart, even as big-boned as I am. Hyrum and Niko were very maternal toward me, very kind and considerate, the way drunkards are with one another, as they led me hand-in-hand to my room—which wasn't so far away, after all, led me very softly so as not to stir a soul, and skinned my suit from me in the dark, lay me out on the bed as on a bier, and left me to, as that memorable phrase goes, "sleep it off." Although I was furious even then, I thanked them much too profusely, blessed their patronymics and their Christian names, asked their forgiveness. Nothing afterward was said about my fall from grace, was ever said, especially by me. You see, this rite ending in baptism had confirmed us all as bosom "buds," as boon "besties," or so Hyrum would word it, dismissing everything else—and in a way, gave Niko complete license in the future, as I was to find out for myself. What will come to light on those blank pages, which, like the numbered days of my life, are decreasing too rapidly? Ah, life—my life and my love! Always I feel the wind from the winged chariot in my ears. The remaining existence allotted me seems nothing but a freefalling fugue, a howling headlong rush of hours. Oh, shut up, Cletus!

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Now that we were so "palsy-walsy" (dreadful, I know, but Niko was prone to such banalities) or—as was closer to the truth—now that we had agreed to act like we were friends, having achieved communion of minds and malted barley, I began seeing more of the professor than ever, though never through need or desire; he just seemed to have triplicated himself, as industrious people seem capable of doing, and was around every other quoin and corner, serenading birds or brethren, flying like a speed-racer against the cant of our twisting roadways in his black and yellow Vauxhall, inexterminable as Beelzebub buzzing through the heather. Now and then he would stop and offer me a ride down to or back from the village, and when I did not care to sweat any further in the midsummer heat, I would accept and slide in across the always somewhat tacky perforated pigskin seat. Once, late of an afternoon, I turned and saw limber-limbed Hyrum slumbering in the backseat. I was surprised; it was a Sunday, after mass, when I had presumed the naïf had hitchhiked home to visit his mother and siblings, as he did now and then. "We've been swanning about, here and there, is all," Niko asseverated, as if I had already accused him of something. "You know, just skylarking, my fine feathered friend." He always found a great deal to snicker over in his wordplay—I did not. "Hy and I took 'brunch,' as you and I might call it, at this very kitschy tea room down the valley, midway to Whinfell Forest. The decor was a scream, must not have changed a thing since 1974. Frightfully ultra infra dig—I don't suppose you'd ever deign, would you? They serve not only tea and scones these days, we discovered, but also bloody marys and mimosas, as if it were Dallas or Poughkeepsie. I suppose it was more of a roadhouse than a teahouse. Topnotch mixology, but our scally pally really should have stopped at two. Careful, Cletus, don't jostle him, let him sleep." He jabbed a thumb rearward at the body tossing and turning behind us. I felt a little chagrined to be left out of their plans, as well as concerned more than ever for Hyrum's health and welfare. How had this sunny-day assignation come about? Whose idea was it? Once I ascertained that the boy jackknifed behind me really was snoring fit to drown out our voices and the souped-up engine of that vehicle, I said, "We missed Hyrum yesterday when he had promised to help us take some Fairy Liquid—as it were—to a crumbling codex or two. We had to rely on Brother Vestal, who really is too blind these days to trust, when we were counting on the acuity of the boy's much fresher eyes." That was not strictly true; I had granted Hyrum the freedom to consider weekends entirely elective—though he had failed me but once or twice before. Note also how I distanced myself from a seemingly too personal concern by using the royal first-person plural.

Niko snorted in that overweening way of his, as if bursting out of his stall into the ring, and slapped my knee hard, heedless of waking the youth. "Cor blimey, look at 'im, don't he 'arf go!" came the inevitable riposte in one of those "voices" he did, and then, dropping the coster jive-talk, added, "That's because he was with me, you big nurker, delving through the alluvium into the midst of our midden."

Immediately our rivalry became clearer than ever to me. If I had bothered to look out the library windows that afternoon previous, I might have seen the two of them scrabbling in that mound of earth across the way, making their archeological mudpies around the base of the Stone. I hadn't even been aware that Niko was directing any further excavation before certain tests were returned from the appropriate labs—wasn't that a job anyway for his students in Oxford? Midden! What "midden," you mudder? I had been down near the pit often enough to see there was only clay and loam there.

We were now ascending the rocky road toward the abbey, and it was hard to tell if that quaver in Niko's voice was a barely concealed haughtiness or just the inadequate shocks of his auto. "My students are all on holiday," he informed me, looking at me obliquely as he drove, "and Hyrum's graduate advisor, this woman Jones, assured me that our exploratory excavations would indeed be educational for him—if a bit out-of-the-ordinary, she qualified herself—also the find is what you might consider a rara avis, in that it has fluttered into our very hands, a tweetie bird happily not beaten all round the bush. My metaphors, not hers. This Jones is a bit of a dimwit but sees how I can be an asset, considering Hyrum's considerable liabilities, not exactly being at the top of his class. You know, formidable in my rather undernourished field, honors here and there, a good reference to add to the lad's résumé, silly as that might seem to someone outside the hallowed halls of academe. Right. And to have his own name linked with my exegesis of the Stone may indeed do wonders for his career. So I expect he'll be spending more time with me in the coming weeks, if you don't mind. You see the importance. He has a lot to learn about the cultures of the peoples who settled here and who made you and your religion and your religion's books possible. You do realize how terrifically important that is to a young man dependent, as you have said in so many words yourself, on the generosity of the state. And today the embattled empire considers our ethnocultural roots not just historically revealing but politically motivating. What with the continued influx of Poles and Pakis, you know. One could argue Cameron and the Eurosceptics are mainstreaming the National Front. Let's not even go there. It's not however just about glamorizing Picts and Scots anymore—there were waves of Angles and Saxons, of course, as well as Britons, the Belgae, the Lowlanders or—no need to spell these terms out for a person like yourself—or Maeatae, as well as plenty of Gauls, Vikings, Danes, Romans, a late influx of Moors, and, I am convinced, a few long-lost seafaring Greeks. Everyone has roots to claim these days, and the DNA trails are quite fascinating. Don't look at me like that—think of the child, man! He has much to learn. His experiences this summer will amplify his mind as well as his cv. I'll put in very kind words about you, as well. Calm yourself. You know that boy's like a loose sheaf of mismatched foolscap—you can't and shan't bind him."

I had listened patiently while the good professor delivered his oration, adverse to the rage rising in my veins like mercury in a thermometer, like the fever I felt now upon my brow. Obviously my benignant influence was being shifted away from myself, like stones raided from a downfallen temple to build hovels. Right under my nose, Hyrum was being dragged down into the depths of Dis. If the professor monopolized him at the "dig," if he fully succeeded in nobbling my industrious intern away from me, I might never finish the project alone that we had begun together. The boy would of course lose interest in the purity of Classical Studies, with all this postmodern interdisciplinary claptrap, and drift forever away from me. I glanced again into the rearview mirror at the juvenile twisting in the seat behind me, those long limbs and the long torso with its high skinny pitiable ribcage something like that of a greyhound's. Was he just simulating sleep to hear what we had to say about him?

"Did you know Hyrum writes poetry?" my chauffeur asked, out of the sky-blue, thin sierra air. "Not bad stuff, really for one so green."

I had unhinged my jaw, wholly aghast. (What does it mean, really, "aghast"? A literary trope, merely, as if an ancestral ghost—see the Old English origins of this word—has risen out of your right-hand pocket and shouted "boo" in your face.) If Niko had gone on and told me these alleged poems were in Latin, I couldn't have been more astounded; Hyrum had never shown me a single line, never hinted he wrote anything but term papers. When he knows how much I love my bards and lyricists of the well-burnished Gold and Silver Ages. When I once removed a few too many of the onion-skin layers of my soul by telling him I had won a poetry contest in my sixth form at the secondary, between exiles in America. When he was mine alone to nurture. What powers of persuasion did Niko possess that I did not? (Don't answer that.) Look the other way for a moment, reader, please: my coldly dispassionate story, with all its reserved or otherwise buried Uranian dimensions, melts into hot angry tears here—I do remember asking crisply but politely to be let out of the car immediately, to which Niko replied, "Certainly, for we are here," as we pulled in between the high tower-gates of the monastery's walls.

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We need to back up a little before I go on. One might ask why (you know very well who "one" is) we don't and won't see or hear a bit more of the evil genius on these pages, in those brief weeks of forced camaraderie before our relationship went awry. More than acquaintances we were, less than copains, overlooking any pretenses. True, Niko called me many things, including "chum." (How I hate that word and its rank smell of the harbor and deboning knife, and how I hate false friendliness.) But one ought to know by now what a deceiver he was and apparently remains. Even now it is hard for me to extrapolate from the actions and conversations of those dear demented days when I allowed him within my company. So, for you now, a bit more encapsulation instead. What we have glimpsed so far of that mix-and-match chimera has always been colored with a slapdash brush (guided more by fear or fury?); I can show you the raptor's eye or simian fingers, count the wiry hairs marching up his wrist toward elbow and bicep, measure the bullock's broad back, alphabetize the hoodwinkery and hijinks worthy of expulsion from the most liberal college, or together we can summon up his monstrously malevolent laughter, but to assemble the whole man is undeniably harder than it was for Mrs. Shelley's egomaniacal inventor. An astute analyst might say I have purposely fragmented him in my mind, because to take in the whole overwhelming fallen Goliath of him at this date, after all that happened, is too much. Time was merely another currency to be spent lavishly at the Dacre, and when Niko grew bored of that safely domestic harbor, he would rove (with or without us) further afield—wanton evenings squandered in other lounges and alehouses, tourist getaways and holiday camps, high streets in market towns, low streets in seaports, as far along the River Eden as Kirkby Stephen in the Pennine Dales, then westward back over the Cumbrian Range and all along the near coast, anywhere he could meet people and sing or tell tall tales or in analogous ways make himself indispensable. One might conjecture—the same one as above—that I had fallen as susceptible to his sway (if only for a prolonged moment or two) as surely as Hyrum had, and that might be partially true. Often he towed me and Hyrum along, if I could convince him to return us to these grounds before it was too late, and other times I heard of his solo sojourns into parklands and lakelands that were as untrodden by me as far Cathay. Always there was that boastfulness just tempered enough by his humor or lampoonery, that exaggeration of team ethics, not to put his potential audience off. Sometimes people even threw five-pound notes at him. We can riffle the slides on the carousel, match up the audio, and see and hear him once more at the venues he maneuvered or talked himself into, mostly playing for free, rewarded by the applause and adulation only: "Thanks and all that for listening to these goat-songs I've eclectically chosen for you. Songs in Cornish and Manx and Lowland Scots and even plain old English. Now if you will I'd like to debauch a little of the delectable Django of the gippos, hampered as I am by ten full digits"; and this, "If I had Blind Willie McTell's eyes, well then I couldn't see this here guitar," or this, "Here's a number we used to bang out in my old headbangers' chamber ensemble, Earl King and the Abductors"; and lastly this: "You might recall this sapphic oldie from about a hundred decades ago, when I was but a tyke, and it's called 'Sally Go Round.' " He'd play, we'd feast on the lager and chips, and I should never have let down my guard. Was Hyrum ever alone with him those nights? I tried to make certain that could not happen, but no one was telling me anything then. I was an idiot.

∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂ (quickly torn from the book and discarded)

In the name of all that's most holy, you really are asking me for too much, you good-intentioned but vastly confused interlocutor. Do you really know me—do I really know you? I do not even recall the color of your eyes, nor could you mine. One simply cannot expect the diary of a "madman" and a reputedly habitual liar (call me Ananias, then!) to explain things for you like a novel; I cannot provide many well-thought-out scenes with "rising and falling action" (such as was instanced in literature classes I often slept through) leading to a denouement I'll find only on my deathbed, for life doesn't have the shape or artistry of even a very poor piece of fiction; it takes delirious dives into low comedy between tragic or (worse still) totally inconsequential episodes; characters we think we have come to know are "built up," only to burst before our eyes—or waste away, never amounting to much; people die before we have made any sense of them or bury clues in unread footnotes; and we are all our own worst unreliable narrators, telling ourselves and each other whatever we need to get by. That's what it means to be fallible, to be human. You're not going to elicit any of your tidy answers out of me, sir, as you might from other reports on behavioral "types" or "personality profiles," for you haven't yet asked me the crowning question: the perfect question at exactly the right moment, whose answer will explain me, my history, my hopes and sublunary desires, my fears, my reason for being alive here with you now, at this time, in this room, on a damp and dripping January morning, with spiders knitting and dormice snoring, sitting opposite from you on my firm sexless bed as you suck surreptitiously on your mechanical pencil. (That is so obvious of you, Herr Currier!) Why, oh why do vivisectionists of your sort think they can succeed in anatomizing a patient's ticklish psyche in an effort to explain everything? Isn't it best that we both remain enigmas to one another, enigmas being strange and beautiful and really the best thing about what we'll stick to calling "life"?

So, no, I can't give you all of what you're hoping to find here, for I haven't found it yet myself. I can't go on to itemize each encounter with my enemy or fill in that sketchy adumbration of Hyrum, for I am here neither to indite a work of classical equipoise, nor to aggrandize a tempestuous escalation of dialogue, description, dialogue that results in the breathless reader exclaiming, "Oh! So that's how it was!" Such a story you can take to the tabloids. This one is for myself alone, really. I have half a mind not to let your stylishly bespectacled eyes gloat upon the rest, for from this point on things get even stickier, and my shuffling and compression and selection might be better served at least in part by summary and synopsis.

Besides, you're just wondering if I loved the boy as much as I hated the man.

excerpts from The Shadow Journal

This mute and inert but still very hungry thing before me will be my shadow journal, the chronicle of my times and my sorrows that will never be seen by any eyes but mine. (Sorry, but that includes you, Stewart Currier, and I'm going to be sure to destroy this before I die.) How else could I continue to write and remain honorably honest? If my lion tamer insists, I will continue to dash off daily entries in the journal he gave me, stuff those costly pages full of inane details that can't possibly reveal the real Prior Cletus, even crib Penguin Freud Reader dreams to make him feel better—while item by item I will disrobe myself as I never have before, upon these considerably more crinkled loose-leaf pages. Why? Maybe because it frees me somehow. Maybe because I hope the sentences I preserve here will take the weight of grief off my back or lighten the burden of my many sins. Still, still, still... How hard it is, even so, once the cage-door has been lifted, to compose with limitless uninhibited abandon, and how futile it all very well may be! Didymus Chalcenterus of Alexandria wrote four-thousand books and all of them are lost. There may therefore be no point in writing even one, but not to have attempted the task would be the grander folly, I think. So what if I can verify nothing, or no more than provide the final colorful clue in a paint-by-number murder mystery. (Trawling for the red herring in my plot?) Give me a chance—and you give me one, too, even if "you" and "me" are one and the same. I will, I will, I will rally, I will try to carry on, against all odds, making no bets and expecting no returns. Why not? I can say anything now, now there is no one listening but myself.

Fortunate of me to find this battle-scarred binder with its rusty rings, where I once used to keep a register of my scanty expenditures, buried within the innards of my desk; I will now keep it behind that loose piece of masonry only I know about, behind my wardrobe, in a corner—with a little effort I can maneuver the block back and forth and place this book in the hollow there as easily as hiding items in the hidden compartments in the back of one's medicine chest. Ain't I clever! Clever as a cold-blooded killer.

Well, quite well, I remember that muzziest of mornings, a morning slow to rouse itself and draw up the sun, a new day deep in the doldrums of July, a Tuesday, when Hyrum first failed to show up for work—not late, as he seldom was—but not at all, with neither a word of warning nor promise to make up for lost time. I am an early riser, as all those in my walk of life must be, but lately, since that last car-ride, I had not been sleeping well, or sleeping at all, and I often beat the sun in starting on the business of the day. Diligently but a little less than delightedly I would sweep my room, skip the peasant's breakfast we solitudinarians usually share, and go down to haphazardly tend my garden or walk up the scrubby ridge to observe the sun begin its lazy summer pursuit of the zenith, reluctantly rising as it did from vestures of iridescent mist into a clearer atmosphere, coruscating now low and then higher through the distant treetops. Later I might observe marmot pups at play in the alpen-grass at my feet or kestrels kiting high and silent into the freshly painted beryl-blue of that hour of the day, or I might just sit there on a promontory, still very sleepy, musing half-awake of this kingdom as it must have been before it was assaulted by one after another of Niko's invading hordes: placid, isolated, fecund, pristine, a promised land indeed, but promised only to bird and beast, not man; even the trespass of angels would have been a contamination. England's green and pleasant, this sceptered isle—pah! In my long-loved Eden Valley there was no England and there would be no scepters. Niko was far away; even Hyrum was forgotten, for the moment. I was ruler and sole occupant of my own kingdom, up there on the heights, all alone at the beginning of a burning bright day, surveying a landscape devoid of any rooftops or smokestacks and intended solely for me, so beautiful it all was that it aggrieved me passing sore. Only the silhouetted sails of a lone windmill, wheeling like a triskelion, betrayed any sign of a divergent conception—your so-called civilization. Humans always dirty, make foulest what they most civilize, do they not? I am not really a student of ancient or modern history, but of the history of words—two parallel but distinct streams—and so don't understand really how we—that is, my nonexistent reader and I and all those waves of conquering races—came to be here, embodied, whole, an inharmonious mix of bloods and tongues, in what we call the "world today." Yester-eves and yester-morns mean much more to me... and I realize I am going on like this too long, though this is how I often feel in high summer, on the threshold of something new that is the echo of something timeless.

Hyrum was, as I have probably written before, a prompt young man, unusual (I am told) for his generation, and quite often he was at his carrel, where he kept his notebooks and "netbook," even before I arrived at my station at or around seven-thirty. The other monks, who rotate shifts to help out in the archives, often won't turn up until nearly noon. (In winter, most work indoors willingly; in summer, begrudgingly, for then there are fields to tend, and at all times the distillery and the usual more urgent domestic duties.) By quarter past nine that overheated and increasingly disquieting morning I had begun to fret—he unfailingly told me the night before if he wasn't feeling like getting up early the next day, and I always told him it was no capital concern of mine, for he was keeping us ahead of schedule as it was; but after the previous Sunday afternoon's unnerving ride with Niko, I was as wary as I was weary. That had been the weekend, when we can sometimes afford to let things go slack, but this was just another working weekday. Certainly Monday had been similar to all other Mondays we spent together, even if in fact he had been a few minutes tardy because, he mentioned offhandedly while lowering the blinds against the sun, he'd stopped to chat briefly with Niko in the kitchen-yard. Nothing more was said regarding the man—as if we had made a pact to pretend for at least another eight hours that he did not exist—and we toiled devotedly at our separate tasks pretty much nonstop until suppertime, barely talking or interacting unless when necessary. Maybe I should have noticed that was more by design (his) than default (mine). Now that Tuesday was here, I was wondering if Hyrum was expecting to report to Niko and the Stone every morning at seven or eight sharp instead of to me, all because his Miss Jones believed it might improve his comps. I went to the narrow window between the book-stacks that best affords a view of where the laying of the new wing's foundation had been so hastily aborted: no one was there on that barren red scarification in the earth, and I saw no figure or figures coming up the hill from the oast house. What was I worrying about? I asked myself; there was nothing wrong with the boy taking a stifling summer day off, after he had moiled so unrewarded in this dreary place for half a year. So I went back to my desk, stoked my computer to life, and began reviewing the files Hyrum had provided me with the previous Friday: they were photographic scans of some of the relatively insignificant work we had done the month before, a book of choral lyrics in "modern" Greek derived from the Ancient Greek of Ibycus of Rhegium, miniated and emblazoned by our own monks in the twelfth century. Zooming in and looking at the minuscule depictions of pastoral life garnishing the capitals at the start of each poem, I was once again struck with a genuinely religious awe by the artful mastery of my dear deceased antecedents: the LCD monitor in effect illumes the page from behind, as a photographer's lightbox does, so that one is looking at the picture as if it were made of particles of isinglass with a full clear white moon shining through—the stained-glass colors never had looked so vivid under the inadequate lighting of our reading room, and the details astonished me once more. Obviously painted with fine brushes of no more than a few boar's barbs, in any random embellishment one might count the rhombuses on a yeoman's leggings or admire the lapis lazuli of a bluebottle's eyes. Elsewhere in another tiny Eden ornamenting the letter Epsilon, and bold against a diaper pattern of silver and ultramarine, I spotted a faun playing upon a syrinx in a lunar-washed glade; upon the faun's raised middle finger was a ring, and upon that ring a cameo of the goatherd who would be his True Love. And in that goatherd's eye a reflection of me... By all the powers above I wanted to live forever in that micron-scaled but ever-expanding universe, where things are static but miraculous, the way the fractal pattern of a lacewing butterfly's intricately ocellated wing is miraculous, or the way a rose that is formed from a calyx that whorls around a corolla of petals clustering around a stamen is miraculous. (On an island is a lake and in that lake is an island and on that island is a pond, etc.) In no time at all it was noon and the meal-gong was sounding; Hyrum had still not shown his sallow face, and I went to lunch with that sinking feeling that is not really in the heart or brain but the stomach. I took my meal silently, but then I take all my meals silently; a few of the brethren mutter to themselves over our simple repasts of bread, mead, and cheese, but none of us talks much here—and that is how we like it. It should come as no big surprise that the others, who had grown to seem not much more than a game of shades and shadows to me, don't populate the pages of my dual journals too often. Today, however, I wanted to talk with Hyrum, knew I must talk with him, and so searched the dining hall with mounting anticipation, still hoping he would show up with an excusatory grin on his lopsided lips and an account of oversleeping after staying up late reading that recently Englished version of Vergil's Bucolica I had given him. But he never did appear, and I had as lief get back to work as not, sensing it was best to lose myself once again in microscopic realms.

I did not sleep well that night and went to my office the next morning—a Wednesday, I believe, for that is what usually follows Tuesday—sleepy and irritable as an owl disturbed by crows. Purposefully I arrived late, so as to avoid any awkward meeting when Hyrum came up the stairs; if I timed myself right, he would be bent over scratch-paper in his carrel and not even see me as I sneaked down the passage and turned the corner toward my cluttered desk. Once seated, I dawdled there for more than an hour, making certain not to make a single sound, doing little else other than double- then triple-checking a list of bound periodicals against several enchiridia, but never heard a rustle or cough from the other side of the wall; I stood at last, coughed loudly myself, stretched, and sidled over to where I still but distantly hoped I might see Hyrum's well-shorn head bobbing to that inexplicable, invisible music he would listen to through his earpieces, gobbling sultanas from a box as he "crunched his numbers" or hunted up arcane terms in a handy copy of the Lexicon Heptaglotten. But, no, he was not there, and his aerodynamic Airbook (or whatever he said its brand name was) sat there blind and inert but for the soft slow blink of the stylized pome on its lid, and not a pen or pencil had been moved since at least two days before. With an exhalation of defeat, I looked over the orderly pyramid of volumes I had loaned him from my personal library over the summer, too orderly to have been looked at with any enthusiasm: the Argonautica, a little Aeschylus, some Aristophanes, a rendering of Ovid or two, Callimachus, Polybius, and other names that would mean even less to anyone else. (I had hoped he had outgrown the Fitts and Fitzgerald Americanizations and would turn more willingly to the originals.) There was always the possibility that Hyrum was back in the furthest stacks and had not heard me when I entered upon my silent sandals—but I searched every aisle and alcove and found only Brother Vestal, asleep on a bench, feather-duster in hand. Once again I tore to the windows overlooking the excavation, and once again I found the site still and empty except for a few hunchbacked rooks scratching amongst the flint chips like rheumatic nuns sorting alms. Looking toward the guesthouse, I could not see the familiar smugly satisfied winkling of the Vauxhall's aureate roof anywhere upon the parking, and so assumed Niko had gone into the village, or peradventure to more far-off crossroads, even to Barrow-in-Furness, where he had mentioned he might go to review their parish registry. And I supposed he had taken Hyrum with him, faithful acolyte, willing victim. That did it for me: I decided to go into the village myself, to Digby & Sons, Stationers for some much-needed quills and nibs (i.e., carbon paper and correction tape for the yet-undeposed Royal we still need for interoffice memos and legal forms). And if I happened to see the Vauxhall careening down the street, then I might be a bit wiser, as well.

I love the musty old store filled with its obsolete paraphernalia of a vanishing analog world, more of a museum (thoughtfully supplied with informative tags) than a retail outlet these days—but mind you, Digby is well over ninety and both his sons are in their seventies, which afforded me plenty of time while they scuffled among the dusty shelves to watch out the plate-glass window to see who strolled or drove past. Even if Hyrum were not with his Svengali, he might be popping into the pastry shop next door for a currant bun to make up for the breakfast he had missed again. I even went so far as to prepare opening remarks: "Fancy meeting you here," "Hi-di-hi, my long-lost friend, I was wondering when—," "Listen, you little scamp, you deserve a proper dressing-down." Forty minutes later, once the elder and junior Digbys had settled on the proper number and form of receipts and nudged me long enough for gossip from the mount (which is almost always nonexistent, though I did get to report the exciting news that our elderly abbot had had a severe bout of podagric gout), I departed the establishment with my purchases secured but my spirits lower than they had plummeted for years. I did not relish the thought of returning to the library, which lately seemed as tenebrously uninviting as a cavern after being out in the bright hours, nor to my room, where nothing awaited me but the middle and final acts of a Senecan tragedy (fabula crepitada) that didn't seem half as tragic as my own life; it was still an eternity until noon, so I went up the path to my garden, intending to weed and perchance do a little mulching of the myrtle. But there I saw a fritillary with a bedraggled under-wing attempting to balance itself upon the ivory lip of a lily, and I knelt down before the plant as if before a fetish or graven image, in unfeigned sorrow for the poor insect dragging its mangled appendage behind like a clubfoot and still trying to sup from the slippery chalice. The poor creature could not possibly live for much longer. Mr. Stewart Currier, that fine and well-learned man, would think I am trying to deal in veiled metaphors, but these are simply the facts. The rest of the day I did manage to toil and sweat whilst cursing the invasives, missing lunch, mindless of the time, losing myself in the rhythms of manual labor—a much-needed antidote to all those mind-numbing minutes I'd spent squinting at screens and flyspeck print that season . The next day, I determined for myself, I would pretend Hyrum had never visited our little lost kingdom and I would set about the perhaps now-impossible task of ethernetting or etherizing our archives single-handedly.

And yet... fairly early the next day, a horribly hot and horribly humid Thursday, as soon as I deduced that Hyrum had not done any midnight collation of electronic documents (as he sometimes was wont to do) and showed no sign of showing up before nine, I stamped the floor and charged directly toward the stunted tower that held Niko's rooms. On the way there I bumped into ever-faithful Brother Vestal coming from the wellhead, looking like a wizened Hermes under his petasus (our traditional sunhat) with a bucket in either hand; I asked him if he had seen anything of my assistant since the weekend before. He set first one bucket down, grunted, set down the other, broke wind, palpated his grizzled jaw, and asked me how tall the bloke was, and did he have ginger hair or no? Bearded and a bit tubby? Could he be Irish, and did he wear spectacles? In a fit of exasperation at all my bonce-bobbing, he hacked up some phlegm in disgust and asked, "Well, then why is't thou art looking for him?" in that mock-biblical mode we monks sometimes like to affect. "Is he mebbe a little lame in one leg?" My reader should know that not only is Brother Vestal very old, he has grown as slow as he is blind; with impatience I swept away from him while he was still contemplating if he had ever in fact seen Hyrum before and beetled off down the cinder-strewn path. Then I all but leapt up the stone steps and the wooden stairs to come face to face with Niko, buck-naked at his half-open door in the full sunlight. My enemy was more than hairy enough, as those from the Morea tend to be, and I saw that not only his laughter reminded me of the stockyard. (Note: we are used to such nudity here; it is an all-boys' club, after all.) He was polishing his dome with a terry-cloth towel, having apparently just dried the rest of himself. "Welcome!" he assayed, opening the oaken door further to admit my width, utterly unabashed at having been caught still damp from the shower. "What a surprise! I hadn't yet opened my umbraculum for the day, but you may set up audience, if you wish." He took a step back, but I went no further, and balancing there on the threshold, stuck my head suspiciously inside. From within I heard the sound of music on the turntable—music incongruously prettyish and pentatonic, a gamelan ensemble or something I should remember from the Estampes. "Oh, lawd amercy," Niko drawled and poked me rudely somewhere in the vicinity of where my ribs used to be, "he's not here, if that's what you're after, Cletus my friend." As ever de trop, with a forefinger he pulled down an eyelid over one of his evil ebon eyes and only then wrapped the oversize towel around himself as one would a sarong.

"What makes you think..." I began, trying not to look at him but also trying not to look as if I were avoiding looking at him.

"Look at you! As green as if you've been dipped in ichor." As usual, he cackled at his sidewise insult. "Why, ye don't even know, do ye, ye 'owd 'oss?" He displayed his porcelain veneers so prominently that I noticed for the first time that each of his canines was set with a tiny black diamond that I suppose were intended to complement his eyes. It was only then that I entered and sank into the nearest chair (a hard one), pressing my heart back into my pounding chest, and prepared for the worst. What had this ogre done with my child?

"Know what?" I demanded, once I had my breath back, with what must have been an incredibly dimwitted trout-like expression upon my face.

He was sauntering about the room now, in no real rush to answer me or get dressed. He touched a remote control and the tinkling music obligingly decreased in volume, so we—or at least I—could think a little clearer. From the metal clothes-coffin in the corner he withdrew the necessary outer habiliments for the day, and from an open-mouthed suitcase the unnecessarily garish underclothes and socks. At the same time he was slurping from an king-size earthenware mug of what he referred to as his "catholicon" (it was merely yerba maté, I was quick to learn, a custom he had either picked up in the pampas or a health food store) and making skeptical faces at the screen of a small device he called his "smartphone" (if I had a phone myself, I'd want one very dumb), all while heedlessly ignoring my asthmatic heaving and tabletop-tapping. At last he pulled up his snug paisley-patterned y-fronts and even tighter trousers and sat down across the kitchenette table from me, still bare-chested and still sweating from every pore. It was more than obvious once again that he, in today's vulgar parlance, "works out." I tried looking away.

Taking one last long draught of his noxious potion, Niko eyeballed me in that same blank way he did when thumbing through messages on his phone (I've seen my shrink sneaking peeks at his, as well, when our fortnightly sessions run too long) and then gleefully taunted me. "You forgot, didn't you? Silly old cunt!"

I blubbered, or something like that.

"Blimey, sorry to give you such a start. That's just a word blokes use about blokes these days," he explained himself, sidling into his usual badinage. "As meaningless as the British 'brilliant.' But about Hawkins. That straw-haired wrenboy. You couldn't have forgotten, could you? Last week, at the Dacre? Zounds!—the frothy nectar, the sour syllabub, the twisted toothpicks, and the pickled ovoids that hobbledehoy can stuff into his gob all at once! Hours and hours of jocular elbowing and bona Polari——and she acts like she wasn't even there. Ooh, purge yourself, dearie, tell me what you remember, do!" He went all hips and wrists, suggestive of skip-roping down Piccadilly with a lily, very unbecoming for a man his size. "Cast your mind back, man," Niko resumed, seeing I had nothing to counter such effrontery, "cast it back to when we all three performed gleeful renditions of those Wigan Casino standards they keep on the Rock-Ola. 'Tainted Love'! 'Right on now!' And then there were those tunes my guitar taught you, from Memphis Minnie and the mighty Mississippi Sheiks. 'Come inna my kitchen, sittin' on top o' the world...' And we were! Ha! Look at you goggling at me. Don't act so daft. In the course of all that whee-diddly-dee, you gave him explicit permission. And later—"

Here I intercepted him and his ever-shifting accents and exaggerated gestures before he should go further. Just by pronouncing it "Shakes" I knew whatever part he claimed to be Yankified must be as counterfeit as this tale. "I gave him no permission at all. I mean, it's not really up to me to process licenses or allow him passes. Ask Miss Jones herself. No, and if you intend to keep on stealing him from us to scratch in your vile mud-mound, I can't stop you. You're both right, it's good practical real-life experience, or what you may. He's of an age. But this does not mean he's yours to per—to persuade into doing what's not best for him at such an impressionable time of his young life. His family's moved into Shropshire council housing, he's never known such flash in person, you've got to remember he wants to read the greats, not muck about their graves. Permission for what?"

Niko coaxed me back into the chair I hadn't realized I'd risen from and set violently rocking, and then he slapped me on the back in his usual way, with a meaty, moist, too enthusiastic palm. "Steady now, steady she goes!" he barked. In a more conciliatory key he added: "Rightio. Now, Hyrum has helped me investigate a photostat repository of runes and sigils recently extractable from the double-u-times-three, that is, the Interwebs, but so far he hasn't stuck one thumb into your vile russet loam. In fact, he's been away since Tuesday cockerel-crow, more than—what-is-it—two days now. If you hadn't gone one-for-one against me until all the way up to lock-in that night—I told you to stick to quarterns, didn't I?—you would recall that he asked leave to go take a self-guided walking tour to those overhyped meres down south and west of here. It is midsummer break, you know, schoolkids are scattered all over blessed Albion. Have you forgotten your own vacations, must be a half-century back? Night before last he was at a hostel near Haweswater, if my memory and his mathematics coincide. In a day or two or three at most he'll be all the way up Windermere, where he says he wants to summon Billy Wordsworth from atop Orrest Head and wander lonely."

"Wordsworth?" I gasped, putting aside everything else for a moment. "Is he neglecting our elysian Hellenes for all that Romantic twaddle? And here I was priming him for the wonders of Theocritean hexameter!"

"Should have fed him some more lewd Latins first, Petronius or Apuleius, say, and you'd have kept his pecker up," Niko riposted, and then I looked at his laughing, swelling chest and remembered where we were and why I was there. All, it seemed, was not lost, and yet I did not for a moment believe everything Niko had to say to me, ever. I found myself tightening the rope of my habit and chasing that frog from my throat.

"So..." I said, rising this time for good and surveying the depressingly disheveled apartment as if I'd left something behind, which might have been my dignity, "he'll be back within a week, won't he?"

"Or ten days. He said he'd take the express back to Keswick and a bus from there if the weatherman did not cooperate. Even with that loan of sixty quid I gave him he's going to be scurrying back sooner rather than later, when he finds you can't find a Spar grocery with day-old curry sandwiches around every naffing sheepfold." At last he had put on his shirt—an atrocious pirate's camise with a sunburst across its back—and then picked up a leathern satchel that had just manifested itself on the table. "By the way," he said, peering avariciously into the deep partitions of the satchel, "over in the U of C library at Newton Rigg—do you know there's this super-surreal sculpture of King Kong lying on its back like the Cardiff Giant on the way there?—well, never mind, over in their library, almost without intending to, I've discovered some surprising things about this gamy little lamasery. Oh, just some scraps of ballads, hand-printed chapbooks, cheap broadsides, and the like, some pre-Gutenberg. The Twitter of their day, you know, or maybe you don't know. That poor chatelaine of the reference department, she has the patience of a martyred saint—and I was such a sinner, asking for photocopies of ephemera that must have disintegrated on the glass platen. They should keep their books on chains the way they do in Zutphen or Hereford Minster, if they expect me to stop pulling them off the shelves. All hail the Oxford faculty ID, it gives me powers to demand just about anything from anyone, better than a license to kill. In the end, what I found could make even the Earl of Rochester flush pink as a putto. Oo la la! A very scandalous place this little retreat for extra-refined dandy ascetics used to be! Très incroyable—that's your actual French for they got away with murder, in those days."

Although I severely wanted to go, I stopped on my way to the door and turned back toward him. "Tiresome rumormongers, every one of those critics! Jealous burghers and quasi-literate tradesmen, repeating such tosh. All right, you know very well that back in unenlightened times practically every monastic order had its fling with what are called the black arts and Baal-veneration. Even the Premonstratensians. Very run-of-the-mill stuff. Those long cold nights before the Renascence could get very boring. But this place was never an Abbey of Thelema."
He simply couldn't stop guffawing as he shook some photocopied texts from the satchel onto the table. I saw strange solar designs and rude woodcuts. "Oh, nothing so mundane as a hazing from the Golden Dawn," he commenced in a new and more virulent tone. "According to my sources, a few of them quite convincing, things got a little dicey with the county's more, let us say, well-favored yokels and younkers. You know about morris dancers and maypoles; well, this was a somewhat more immoderate fertility rite, carried over from Eleusinian traditions. My own extrapolations suggest the conventual fabric of your friary was interwoven with the sacrificial and ithyphallic cult of earlier times... Think about it, it all makes sense, in retrospect: Prolonged sado-masochistic game-play... the inglorious orgy that is crucifixion... slow death in general, leading to the ultimate arousal, the thirteenth station of the cross—and then a dripping corpse. Check your early depictions of that carnival atop Golgotha—they're all about proving the Lord's virility. Christ with a stiffy! Not like your impotent, whitewashed blond-haired Jesus of later ages..." I could have screamed, to hear such calumny heaped atop calumny, but at the moment I was too stunned to articulate a single word. Listen to me, that man harbored an almost Erostratian lust to burn this abbey down for his own glory! Knowing he had the advantage and seizing it, he pressed on: "Anyway, to get back to my main point, my chief discovery. The dubious origins of your famous extra-incarnadine and anti-oxidating pigment are apparently rather bloodcurdling, but I'll leave that up to other experts. That heady infusion of what some call Deadman's Bells—or is it Balls—to spike your 142-proof cocktails, a key part of your mystic rites, is ingenious. I really had no idea until I did all that sleuthing. Curious how that base and primary color is like a long viscid teardrop down the annals of your peculiar little gentlemen's clubhouse. But every culture has its favored hallucinogen, some of them with more caustic aftereffects than others."

"Stop!" I commanded from the doorway. "We are nothing like that nowadays, and you know it. All of that came about as a further persecution by the Vatican. Gregory the Ninth. Old news. You, Mister Malleus Maleficarum, you son of a witch-hunter, are sounding like a Hammer Horror."

With an animalistic swipe he sent the pages scurrying across the room. "Leave the stones unturned, then," he said, waving me away, barely able to contain his mirth or his maliciousness. "I'll ignore anything you want me to ignore. You're right, it is all picayune and a goodly amount unfounded. Some would say you were no worse than the Waldensians. But nothing so far contradicts the theory I am forming considering the place of that megalith in your organization's observance of the holy sacrament. In fact, everything so far falls into place quite nicely, and though there is no name I am as yet certain of—Mac Gréine, the Irish called him, the Son of the Sun, the Gaulish Grannus if you will—this particular Boreal Helios lived and thrived here centuries after he sailed his trireme out of the mare nostrum's blue arena. It's not exactly Graeco-Roman, yet it has a radial crown and not an ichthys, and you know the truth of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti as well as I do. Terrible things, that rock has seen. It's almost in its own unparalleled way like that Aztec altar dedicated to Huehueteotl. That clean-shaven imago intaglio, so reverently engraved, is really so unlike what we expect in a portrait of the Prince of Peace."

Or he might have said something similarly esoteric along these lines; I was no longer really listening, this was all such cockamamie codswallop—and if anyone wants to look into our records, that person should feel free to do so; I'll even help them, if they make haste. Not surprisingly, our disagreement quickly devolved into wild claims and wilder name-calling. To the outsider it would have been hard to tell if we were jesting or not; I was not sure myself. "My speculation is that your order was maybe more Delphian than you ever imagined," at some point my enemy declared, his voice with as much swagger in its swazzle as a drunken Punch, "with its demand for burnt offerings and bodily sacrifice. Tell me now if you don't believe as I do that the lifeblood of innocents was mingled with the berries of oak kermes in your scribes' inkwells. Your predecessors had also their own cutthroat guard and plots against the papacy. Some authorities assert that during certain reigns your backsliding recluses harbored quite a few catamites among the catacombs. Hi! A monkish molly-house, in so many other words. Only a simpatico sheriff or two kept this place from being razed by angry serfs."

"You blackguard!" I railed back at him as he snickered through blackly flashing teeth at me. I would have strangled him there and then if I'd had the strength. "You slanderer, you two-faced philanderer, you charlatan, you betrayer, you menacer, you, you—" and I floundered; where is Roget when you need him? The last expression I saw conquer Niko's countenance was that of an enraged god, not an amused mortal. Something or someone nearly fell and another thing burst like broken glass and then I was walking very fast (can't exactly run these days), and I only noticed where I was and what I was doing when I was back in this cell, for the first time in several eternities on the cold floor, praying on my knees to a God who quit believing in me decades ago. Dearest diary, it was another bad day.

Over the past month or so, those few times Mr. Currier—who insists on being called Stewart now—has chosen to browse through the pages of my public journal (always in my room, in my presence, bent over the object on his knees like a pupil with his primer), he has reacted with no more than a few well-tempered ah-hahs and ahems—like someone reading difficult poetry or like any good progressive psychoanalyst, I suppose. Look at me just sitting there on the edge of my bed, reading the calligraphy of as yet unsprung cobwebs in the window arch. Silently "Stewart" (can't get used to that) makes a few notations within his coldhearted scratchpad, and I am patient, and I never try and make out what's behind his rapid flourishes (once by mistake I did see a few numerals and a sum, the rudimentary backside of a feline, and the words "noetic displacement" underlined twice). Yesterday, however, he caught his breath while looking over that last passage about my unrehearsed colloquy with a doubtful divinity (a section I'd borrowed from this very uncommon commonplace book), tore up something he'd just been writing, and asked me how often I think of my former assistant. Often, of course, I said as briskly as I could. His counter-offer came just as fast: And how do I feel about that? An amateur's response, for I said something unambiguous. And what do I think about how I feel about that? Another amateur response from me. We could have kept drawing the spiral around ourselves forever with that kind of circular logic, so I took "Doc" Stewart gently by the wrist, like the old padre in a combat movie, and stopped his tongue by telling him I don't think so much about death, really, or I think as much or as little about it as I think about life, and though the boy is dead I believe there is always a third ill-lit exit marked neither "Life" nor "Afterlife." What ever can you mean, Brother Cletus? he asked, taking off his bifocals (if he ever had them on that day; I really can't remember). Signifying—oh, nothing, neither sound nor fury, I airily replied, and promptly remarked upon the influence of the obliquity of the ecliptic in my winter garden (soon to be subsumed by all-conquering spring). "The axial tilt of the earth," I said to his nonplussed gawk.

He expelled an empiricist's sigh and concluded that I am avoiding or diverting certain topics, at least in his presence. Next he will be wondering why the slow passage of time in a tiny room hasn't inspired further mawkish memorials to the deceased. Oh, sweet Mothering Mary, I've tried on those very pages I've proffered him, but if you had read more exactingly, Stewart Currier, you would have noted my many failed attempts and yet still have seen how the young man is something like an acrostic that reveals itself only by looking at it sidelong, for by studying such subterfuge, the realization should have dawned upon your subconscious as a foregone conclusion. The imprint of Hyrum's spectral footsteps shines through like a mackerel mottling across the winter sky's upper strata. Am I making myself sufficiently obscure? The surest way to cloak one's motivations is with words.

And then the man inquired after my health, and because he consults regularly with our venerable MD, he knows as well as I how many stones I have lost, how short my breath is, why my hands shake so. One by one, I can feel my life-sustaining cells shriveling up, day by day it is harder to find where I last placed my feet or measure how long it is from one heartbeat to another—and I am not being melodramatic. It is not all in my mind, damn it, man! Don't try to cozen or confute me with placebos or false-bottomed questions or inconclusive evidence. Medical tests can't explain everything, any medical man can tell you. Still, it matters little to me if the specialist or the general practitioner believes I am perishing or not. In fact, I'd rather have my wise cross-examiner Stewie disbelieve me—in fact, in fact, I am not even going to let my eyes fall upon this page or the next again.

Those tomb-raiders performing my autopsy, somatic or cerebral, will never learn about that prototypical nightmare I had last night, the ur-dream that any red-blooded Red-Book Jungian would kill for, since it appears—I insist only appears—to hold the right combination to a very secure lock. Asleep, I am as usual the universal, omniscient eye; I can float forever without thought or desire in an infinite amniotic ocean of stars. All is peace and all is achromatic blindness (dreams are always in the present tense), but out of that void, as one might expect, is vomited the light of an unknown sun. In the newly created sky, within the orb of my sleeping conscience, the troposphere is perfused with a roseate glow: a flotilla of cloudlets comes skidding in on a warming current; rapidly the fleet agglomerates and transforms first into a line of Norse long ships, and then into great groaning galleons of thunderheads, colliding with and surmounting a mass of cumulus cathedrals, ocherous pagodas, billowing and bloated ziggurats, and lastly the tremendous empurpled face of Yahweh; with a searing detonation of cannons or kettledrums the clouds expand, oxidize, explode, ultimately dripping heavy and cold—no, hot—ferric drops like... like—you've guessed it—blood. And then I woke up from these outlandish similes. Or didn't, because it wasn't just an involuntary vision, my good man, it's what I am privileged to observe every time a mighty storm steals up the valley, as it did last night, as it did last July, for it was now and it was then, it was whipping up both midwinter's black ice and midsummer's mustard-colored dust, unfurling its funereal pall all across these hallowed grounds. It was surely the most powerful and unsettling storm we'd had since that devastating tree-felling lightning-stunned one six months gone by. Ever since then, I tell you now, every time thunderbolts blast and it begins to pour from the hellish heavens, such as happened last night, I hear that banshee laughter again, rising ever higher, and feel a penitential kiss like anguish on the back of my hand.

The Shadow Journal continues, on the verso side of the previous pages, upside down and back-to-front

Hyrum recounted to me his uniquely nonlinear version of the events a few worry-filled days after they happened. Difficult as it is at this hour to unravel the strands, I will attempt to make calendric his jumbled, anti-chronological account. (If only I could rip out and discard the ill-spent hours of my life as I have some of the failed excursions into my journals.) Previous to filing his report with me, my wayward secretary had crept back to our library on the morning after he returned from his tramp, looking very wan even with a sunburned nose, with his eyes sunken in plumbago hollows and a burgeoning crop of blackheads emerging on his forehead; he was altogether more stuporous and attenuated than ever, but so fixed in his expression and wrapped in such a shroud of silence I did not dare to ask him anything, as upset I was with him and his outward appearance. We merely nodded at one another and went our separate preordained ways. Several times I passed him on my way to retrieve this or that very important cyclopedia or biblical concordance. He had apparently set to work catching up on a transcription he'd begun weeks before of a few sorrowfully splodged codicils of our twelfth-century forebears (too crabbed a hand for my own failing eyes!), nothing of importance, but it kept him busy and lost in a parallel world that had nothing to do with him or me. The profits of glebes and the bequest of psalters or plainsong compendia to one's surviving brothers is the sort of stuff that puts me to sleep, but such tottings and tallies always seemed to lull my understudy into a state where even the boom of supper's gong could not rouse him. So I let him be. We worked steadily all morning, until around elevenses—usually a time for reanimating him with some reheated Bovril and maybe a treacly scone I'd fobbed from the breakfast sideboard—when I heard a vulpine puling coming from the direction of his carrel. Though I know it can be dangerous to intrude upon another's private misery, I could not refrain myself from putting down the herbalist's taxonomy of toxicants I was consulting (yes, Niko, dear, they also called our fleur du mal an herbaceous garden perennial, "partial sunlight to deep shade") and tiptoeing over to see if Hyrum was indeed whimpering or merely humming too loudly along with his i-whatchamacallit player. "I'm not crying," he stated, looking up once he felt my presence, although his eyelids were inflamed and there was a certain amount of condensation under his nostrils. "It's this bollocky piece of shit." "Maybe I could—" I began. He snarled, bit into his lip until it was white, and thrust his laptop (displaying that dreaded azure-hued "window of death," as "techno-geeks" like Hyrum call it) away from him. Still standing above and a little behind him, I nevertheless took the plunge and tried to embrace him in a manly way—the first time I had ever been so bold—intending it to be like colleague to colleague, friend to friend, even father to son, but the maneuver was necessarily awkward, and he shot up and told me to lay off and why do you always have to be looking at me that way, you frickin' poofter, or something like that—I couldn't really hear through the sobs—and ran from the library. I stood there for a solid minute, an interminable caesura, simply unable to move, wondering if I were going to have that cardiac arrest I'd once or more been warned of; though my blood-pressure was vacillating wildly, I felt as if I weren't really in my body at all, so it did not matter. (Foreshadowing one's own demise—a questionable practice in les belles lettres, but in my case the truth!) It seemed as if that lump of fat and flesh below were not even my own body. For you see, I was up there in the cobwebby rafters, looking down on that horrible old gray thing, immobile and wooden as a piece of heavy furniture, making a sound like something slowly being ripped to pieces, falling apart.

After lunch hour, when I tried to eat but couldn't and tried to avoid the other inmates' probing eyes but couldn't, I retreated to my cell and (unusually for me) fell fast and firmly into a deep sleep, as if my body were no more than a heavy bundle of sticks thrown off a bridge into deep water. At some point—it must have been getting fast on toward the bluest hour, for I could feel, I swear, the shadows growing longer across my bed and body—I heard the tentative knocking on my heavy-hinged door: not a series of raps, but just one muffled hammer-blow every ten seconds or so; I knew without consulting my ego that it must be he. "Enter!" I cried out in agony at last, like some spurned courtesan to a disinherited suitor in a Feydeau farce.

Hyrum did enter, looking sufficiently contrite, scrubbed raw yet smelling more natural, like a real boy, than he had in some months. Immediately I forgave him; in truth, I had already forgiven whatever he might do or say to me in the past, present, or future. He stood there—I might say cap in hand, except I was to learn he'd lost his cap somewhere on a fencepost—not saying anything but expressing a lot through his breathing, until I invited him to lower his featherweight form onto my desk chair while I repositioned myself on the cot opposite (exactly as do Stewart Currier and I). His eyes were still rosy-rimmed, but he had done an admirable job of putting his face back into place. Only an almost imperceptible downward curl of his raw lower lip lingered there. "Stonking great view, sir," he said at last, looking out my window toward what was actually a rather garish if not to say tarted-up summer sunset, with rouge on its horizon and mascara running down the distant clouds. (That is not a pathetic fallacy; that is exactly as it looked.) The remainder of his half of our conversation (which was almost entirely one-sided) I will translate from his lazy Northern Slang into English. It is curious that a lad so intelligent was so unintelligible whenever he tried to speak, though I hazard this is not an unusual deficiency among both the scientific and artistic sets. You may consider yourself fortunate, impossible reader of mine, that I have not previously tried to replicate in this or any diary more of the actual words he was accustomed to speak.

My suppliant began naturally enough with an apology. He couldn't remember if he had ever asked my permission to take leave or not, or if he had, whether I had given it him. That Dionysian night at the public house was lost (as most such drunken interludes are, eventually) in the brumous wastes of time. He had never meant to take any liberties (again, not his actual words). He had only thought it would be... Go on, my chavi, my child, I prodded him, literally prodded him with a tip of my finger on his rather high and prominent clavicle. .... Well, then, he had set out happily on his ramble, with no more viaticum than knapsack, canteen, sponge bag, and a vagabond's staff he had stripped from a blackthorn tree. (I could see his inadequate footwear, his rapidly reddening knees and arms, his brow shaded by that Tour de France cap, even from where I sat in time and space.) The sun was shining as it is wont to do, the sky was up there, and he had the Ordnance Survey maps, knew where the Tourist Information Centres were—and some money he'd been loaned (never mind by whom, sir) made him feel rich for once, in this countryside where good air and clean living were free. That first day he had hiked for many an English mile, passing few other pilgrims because it would be a ways (just outside our sacred grounds begins the back of the back of beyond) before the rocky footpath would merge with the wider, more well-traveled route to the Lakes. The nice thing was, he stressed, everyone he did happen to encounter was laughing and seemed so friendly and carefree, too, that maybe for the first time in his life he felt on equal footing (literally and figuratively) with other people. Once he encountered a group of exotic women in saffron saris, flitting over a stile like a cluster of butterflies; they smiled and waved their bangled wrists, and he thought for a moment he must be giddy from the heights, but soon reckoned they must be on a Ramblers package tour, misdirected on their way to Beatrix Potter in Troutbeck. At noon he sat within the reticulate shade of a walnut grove fast by a rippling ford and drank his pricey energy drink; from that canopied hollow he looked up and out upon a lovely sheep-dappled dale that imitated a John Linnell aquarelle, a landscape smutched at the lower left edge by blue-black smoke blown from an apiarist's bellows. A country boy, he had seen all these kinds of postcard pictures before, but that day everything was new. Do you know Flammarion's famous wood engraving of the fiery wonders of the empyrean being unveiled in the presence of the cosmic wanderer, that awestruck alchemist with an alpenstock down in the lower left-hand corner? I suppose Hyrum felt a little like that seeker of knowledge the first morning of his first day, with all the earth now magnanimously smiling upon him in an almost psychedelic epiphany. Even as inadequately as this exaltation was described to me then in our privacy, for the first time I had to suppress considerable regret that I had not been asked to make Hyrum's sojourn less solitary.

There was no need to trouble my vanity, however. That night in the youth hostel at Burn Banks on the Haweswater Reservoir, Hyrum's short-lived euphoria soured; the other backpackers were anything but rapturously dazed versifiers (just a load of toffee-nosed tossers, to put it in Hyrum's vernacular), and the air was dank with their expensive "body mists" and even more expensive drugs. By the time he had disassembled himself there was no hot water left, and to make matters worse, the rag of a towel he had had to put a deposit on was stolen while he was in the showers. Everyone else seemed to be in amorous pairings or intimate groups, and their Estuary English was as shrill to his ears as all their flash jewelry was to his eyes, and of course someone had to go and call him a "gumby" (a dated derogative, I'd think) behind his back. (He had to admit that our crotchety and dour clan didn't seem so bad after that night.) The egg banjo sandwich—now too stale—and Bulmers cider—now too warm—he had packed did not a supper satisfy. To top it all off, his bunk was lumpy, pillows and sheets nonexistent, the bog a hundred miles down the hallway, and the dormitory a sea of snorers.

At first light, Wednesday of that week, he had arisen before anyone else and, soft-shoeing around his katzenjammered bunkmates, left that den of iniquity as quickly and stealthily as he could. It grew so hot that day that he did not walk a third as far as he had hoped to—in fact, he had spent most of the day futilely traveling in one unbroken circle; when, late in the afternoon, he saw a very familiar-looking kissing gate on the public right-of-way and then the metal waymarker on a post pointing to Sadgill in one direction and Bridgend in the other, he realized his tragic mistake and could have killed himself. Instead he pulled off his boots, bandaged his blisters, and after drinking the last of his bottled water, limped back to where a broader bridleway cut across the path and then down it to some unnamed place next to an unnamed lake, where he found a little faux-Helvetian inn deep in an extravagant patch of gillyflowers, kept by an elderly woman who was so glad to have a guest at her out-of-the way place she fretted over him as if he were her own grandson. She wouldn't take more than twenty pounds, she fed him on mutton faggots and trifle until he was bursting, and gave him the best (she said, and may not have been lying) bed in the cottage. Although the windows were painted shut, there was a bathtub big as a boat with no timer on the hot water, there were masses of coconut Nice biscuits free for the taking on the tea-tray, there were cool clean sheets, there was a Watchtower on the bedside table that was highly amusing to read before he drifted off into well-contented sleep.

In the morning, that heaviness he felt in his stomach from eating too much after practically starving himself earlier was matched by a warm and oppressive sulfurousness in his room. It took him a long while to get up and pack his things. His landlady cossetted him with first a hot-towel rack and then waffles and lingonberries, and naturally he had to pay for all this sumptuousness with a long lecture from her about Russell and Barbour's prophecies of the "last days" and why he—because a young sinner must be washed in the blood of Jesus—should accompany her to the nearest Kingdom Hall as soon as possible to prepare for his eventual baptism. She thought she'd reeled in a live one, but he made his politic excuses and took off at a gallop, even though the weather (as it is wont to do even in July, at these heights) had turned much cooler and grayer, as if the earth had aged a thousand years overnight. He crossed a series of fallow fields and came out of the other side of a coppicing into that sort of weather, so typical around here, that is an element thinner than water and yet thicker than air: a kind of frigid mist that permeates your clothes and your very soul to the point where possibly neither will ever feel warm and dry again. It was too soon to give up and head back toward the way he'd come, so he continued on southwards, through mud up to his ankles, slipping on stones, sliding on wet turf. It really was too arduous a hike to take in any of the sights, if there were any sights; he felt like he was moving through one of those hokey cinematic representations of that final super-terrestrial state, cheaply effected by enough dry ice to simulate an afterlife consisting of nothing but souls drifting through countless marshmallowy clouds—how very tiresome, I agreed. Once in a while he might suddenly meet a fuliginous face looming in all that mind-numbing albescence: a Highland ram as lost as he was on the moor, challenging him to remember his name or the three ages of man. The precipitation began coming down harder, a proper cloudburst this time. His feet were soon swimming within his plus-size wellies (hand-me-downs, of course); and his only other rain-gear consisted of one of those thin, insufficient plastic ponchos sold at pharmacies in little envelopes like prophylactics; it soon tore in several strategic places. At nearly invisible waysides he several times came close to falling over steep embankments into engorged streams. The deluge finally lessened, but the skies were no less cloudy. Something or other hooted as if it were the dead of night: a warning. So, then, so what if Jesus or Jehovah seemed displeased with him. Hyrum told me he kept his mind alert by concentrating on a few lines from the opening invocation of the first book of the Georgics, which he'd memorized in a second-year Latin class: Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram vertere, Maecenas... and so on; my doctor (when I eventually repeat to him this story, as I must) may have preferred to scan the verses differently at the Royal in Inverness, but I think we could both agree the subsequent dactyls could be summed up something like this: "Let me sing, Maecenas, of the glory of Gaia tumbling season by season across the haughty vauty welkin."

I am not certain how far he got in his silent recitation before he heard someone walking not far behind him and soon so near it seemed a sort of guardian angel, as it were, was almost at his elbow: an oft-cited hallucination of explorers under duress: remember Eliot's footnote about the Trans-Antarctic Expedition in The Waste Land, remember also how it all began with the voyage to Emmaus. For a moment Hyrum wondered if he should run, despite the hazardous conditions, when the veil of fog lifted enough to reveal the most incredible vision—a tall black-bearded man in a broad-brimmed parson's hat carrying a young sheep, very nearly a lamb, across his shoulders. The apparition appeared at once familiar and strange. Then the wraithlike personage shook with laughter, and Hyrum saw it was Niko, all out of context but in his usual outlandish clothes, a drawstring bag and his guitar (both shrouded in waterproof tarpaulin) slung across his back. Immediately upon reaching Hyrum he set the poor beast down, which scurried bawling across the heath, and squeezed the boy so hard he squeaked like a dog's toy. "Hello!" he hallooed. "Fancy the chances..." (Of course!) And next he proceeded to explain how he had rescued the stunned and motherless weanling from certain drowning in a raging beck. (The odd thing was, it had stopped raining and Niko was virtually drip-dry.) "Just set out from the abbey this morning," he went on, "so I daresay even if I did hear of a few shortcuts I'm a faster walker than you. And look at you—slithy and oiled as a river otter! Though considerably less adapted to the thinner air up here, I can tell. And I thought I was supposed to be the urban interloper. Come on along, now, I'm taking you somewhere to towel off, mister."

Although Hyrum resisted, he realized his protests were not too forceful or convincing (and after all, he was soaked), so he allowed Niko to take him down a graveled side-path he somehow knew was there, between almost impenetrable hedges of blue-berried juniper. What was the man doing here, and how had he chanced to intersect with him at just that particular time? Already it seemed to Hyrum that he had entered a dreamworld. There were the ghosts of trees and black frenzies of ravens chasing each other through them, and from afar, deep in a phantasmagorical valley he could not however see, he heard the plangent chiming of goat-bells and the consonant overtones of a waterfall. "It so happens," Niko was saying a little breathlessly, for the angle of ascent was becoming acuter, "an old compadre of mine hides a little hidey-hole up here he told me I could use whenever I'm passing by. I know where he keeps the sexton's key. You'll like it, and we can spend the night there and hope for a better day tomorrow, what?" They were so high up now and he was so enervated from what had turned out to be a long climb, Hyrum could not think what to say—could not think at all. By now my reader (!) should know how very insistent Niko could be. After they mounted the jagged crest of the ridge, where veins of mica like ice ran through the plutonic rock underfoot, warming sunlight at last succeeded in breaking through the fogbank clinging to the near side of some unassailable peak far ahead of them. Soon, on a lonely westward-facing terrace, they paused to absorb the sights and sounds. Curiously enough, even though the long summer day had seemed set apart from common time, the sun was already beginning to snuff itself out, and flocks of noisy tits and other songbirds were settling in for the night. It might have been impossible for Hyrum to have left at this point, for he said the scene before them was worthy of a Pindaric ode: wildflowers crowding every crevice, cliff-face aflame like the gates of Heaven in the long slanting rays, a skittish family of roe deer scattering into the thickets, an invisible thrush warbling its bell-like orison, etc.—you know, that sort of easy sentiment. They didn't have much farther to go.

The remote retreat was a kind of long-retired church, Hyrum explained, "a chapel I think you'd call it, sir."

"Roman or nondenominational, would you guess?" I interjected, always the pedant.

He sat there, big golden-green eyes penetrating me. "Never mind," I said, "irrelevant. Go on, please."

Well, he said, it was a rum sort of place, a gothic heap of masonry and ivy and chancel glass perhaps better described by Oliver Goldsmith, a real fake ruin on the outside but done up like a holiday rental on the inside. All one room, mind you, self-catering. A fridge, a cooker, copper-bottomed pots and pans hanging from the beams, a slouching sofa, a hunchbacked chest, disreputable chairs, potted maidenhairs, a serviceable loo, a colossus of a hearth where maybe a communion table had once stood, and a huge Nile barge of a bed. That bed made Hyrum a little nervous, but Niko assured him that if he took off his soppy things he wouldn't bite, he was too busy making a fire. Besides, they'd already been together in the altogether within the tarn (even though then it had been too late at night to see quite enough, Hyrum added). A few hushed minutes passed. The rising crackle of the logs and clucking of a disapproving clock's pendulum were the only constant sounds inside. Outside, the natural world was unnaturally still. Once the rasp of a corncrake almost made Hyrum jump out of his skin. There was no turning back. Niko had already stripped off his rain-jacket and flowery blouse, so Hyrum, who really was not so modest as I have probably made him out to be, took off what he could and handed the items over to Niko to hang before the flames he had coaxed into life. It was then that the young man noticed an almost panoramic post-expressionistic canvas above the mantel, a study in black upon black, with a few five-inch-long scarlet slashes across it, as if it had been clawed by a rapacious carnivore. "Irrespective of these rather bourgeois trappings, my friend and absent host is a very serious artiste," Niko informed Hyrum, "who takes more after Francis Bacon the good polymath than the portraitist. That is, not a sinner but a saint. Even so, Old Mother Thatcher once said my friend paints even more reprehensible pictures." Hyrum did not like the painting any better than his grandmother—or Maggie—would. Back to back they were drying themselves before the flames, and then, both of them realizing the awkward silence, each at once suggested gathering things to eat. All Hyrum had left to offer was a boiled egg or two and some damp biscuits, but Niko was well-stocked; he had salami and some blue stilton and potato pasties and Marmite and Cadbury bars and prawn sandwiches and apples and oranges and whatever else in not a small part he must have filched from our pantries. Naturally enough, the famished youth availed himself and was glad as well to drink the very good very dry Alsatian wine Niko must have also acquired somewhere along the way from the abbey that morning. He probably drank far too much of the wine, while Niko seemed to drink very little, and so though Hyrum's retelling was extensive, we will now elide some embarrassing hours that were to come. For his own part, the older of the two remained relatively modest; the only further items he removed were his high-priced wristwatch ("Anonimo, Firenze, you know") and trademark boots ("Damn, this catch is getting loose," he cursed, yanking them off); Hyrum said at first he felt a little silly standing there in nothing but his smalls, waiting for the rest to dry. But Niko kept his distance. The hour grew late, the room darker, the boy less and less inhibited, and the selfsame storm that I thought I had only dreamt was now marching down dingle and dell and across pasture and paddock towards this least-trammeled of properties. If Hyrum had bothered to look through the rainbow facets in any of the chapel's oriels, he would have witnessed clots of clouds boiling up from below, and if he had traveled from window to window to watch the storm's progress, he would have seen the lightning flash here vividly emerald, there amber or aquamarine, and there the same hemoglobin-red I saw at the height of that hysterical cauchemar I described a few versos back. But Hyrum did not stir, abstracted as he was from ordinary concerns or fears. Niko was playing his guitar—always molesting that detestable instrument!—playing songs in minor keys that snuffed and circled around for a few measures until eventually scaling the hangman's tree: haunted standards like "The Gallis Pole" and "My Name it is Sam Hall," and also "Good Mason Lamkin," with its culminating stanza that chilled the boy's soul: Lamkin was hangit hie/And the fause nurice burnt/in the caudron was she.. Hyrum knew some of the ballads from an aunt's old Topic Records compilations and also his pirated American Folkways collections, but others might have been penned by Niko himself. The Riesling drained, Niko held aloft a Eucharistic flagon of our abbey's very own garnet-bright liqueur; at first Hyrum, who swore he had never yet tried it, did not like its taste at all, but after a few more tentative swallows the hot prickling along his tongue became increasingly pleasant; some poetaster has likened it to "the reddest of red berries burning in their own sinful splendor," but that, forsooth, is not a good description, as among its one-hundred and thirty-two ingredients there are few berries, and those are blue or black. Why the substance is so very red, like our renowned pigment, remains an iatrochemical mystery known only to Brothers Cleon and Cadmus, and each knows only half the recipe they have been entrusted with by their predecessors, so one is no good without the other. "That particular liquid," Niko told Hyrum, who was no longer really paying attention to much of anything but the cherry-red drops clinging to the side of his goblet, "is what I procured from the most subterranean of the abbey's many cellars, a vintage no longer available, and even if it were, no longer legal. Never ceases to amaze me, how easy it is to pay off men of the cloth, or in any sort of uniform. That might be hundreds of years old, judging by the peculiar warped bottle it came in. See how it glows in your glass like the bloodshot eye of a mythic beast? No thank you—well just a teensy bit, I want you to have as much of the rest as you like. Allow your tongue to absorb it, then consult not your head but your heart—there are seven distinct flavors within, from the earthy taste of the finest black Périgord to the tart pulp of pomegranate pips. What sorcerers those monks are. Easy, easy—there's plenty more!" Niko's and Hyrum's eyes met over the rims of their unholy grails. "So, how do you like it now?" Hyrum heard his guide as if from down a wire-and-cup telephone. Another thing—the combustion in the fireplace was peculiarly yellow, in fact every object in the room seemed to have acquired a sickly jaundiced aura. "Xanthopsia," I mouthed to myself, fearing the worst. An ocular side-effect of the forbidden herb. Followed quickly by fatigue and loss of appetite. Still Hyrum wanted more: he was feeling quite relaxed; he was feeling quite well. "Allow me to search for my plectrum and presently I will twiddle upon my theorbo a mite more," came someone's voice.

The song was, I gathered, one often known as "The Twa Magicians" or sometimes "O Coal-black Smith." There are as many versions as there are verses. It is the aeonian tale of pursuit, avoidance, seduction, and capture. A maiden meets a man, but the maid is a witch and the gentleman a wizard; he hunts her through numberless incarnations, each one outwitting the other every time, always at the very verge of consummation. Maybe that is what love is like, ever and anon out of hand as soon as you think you've finally conquered it. The strange thing was, Hyrum contemplated, listening to the entertainer hollering and thumping, it felt as if he himself were at first the hare while Niko was the hare-hound, then he was the quail and Niko the wildcat, then he the fly and Niko the spider... (Even in death there could be no respite: One became a corpse,/a corpse in the cold cold ground/And t'other became clay/and smothered him all around.) Hyrum felt himself whirling downwards as if through a leviathan's bilious esophagus into the very entrails of the cruel chant (got up its gut, as he put it), and then, kneeling then on a prieu-dieu before the fireside, he imagined or didn't imagine that an Ovidian transformation had actually occurred in the domed space above him, and, descending from the arches, was a man-sized tarantula with a sunspot on its swollen thorax. Did he scream? No. He felt even if he had tried that he would find that he had no tongue, and anyway his limbs were useless, and if you had asked, he wouldn't have remembered what species he was himself. All right, he saw that Niko was just a man, so why did he have the halo of Eos all around him? Evil should not be so blindingly beautiful to look upon. Outside the storm was crashing and thrashing, the winds so fierce it felt like the chapel must have been uprooted and propelled through boundless space. Rain fell on the tin roof with the sound of a mob assaulting a barricade, the sound of the Circle Line and the District Line pulling at the same time into a London Underground station. It was a wonder he could still hear this song that would never end...

Hyrum, who had remained nearly motionless upon the cane-bottomed chair before me for most of an hour, showing little emotion and speaking in a monotone that rarely rose above a mumble, began then to crumple; his shoulders buckled, he folded up his knees, his chin dropped to his chest, he made that keening sound I'd heard coming from his carrel earlier that day. Everything beyond my window, I noticed, was now saturated in gray, and the white walls within were growing gray, as well. We had missed the sixth and penultimate prayers of the day and were just then missing compline. Important to keep things hush-hush. I excused myself to set a match to a wick, and then it was the boy who approached me from behind and hugged me to his bony body, as if I were the life-preserver saving himself from a cold and stormy sea. Now, everyone knows I am shaped something like the foot soldiers on a chessboard, so that brittle scarecrow frame against my rotundity must have looked comical, but I took it all in stride, enjoyed the sudden warmth of his gratitude, and then steered him back to his seat so he could finish his tale. His squinched-up face looked like a beaten child's, but nobly had vouchsafed no tears, and for the first time that endless evening held my gaze as he spoke, with clarity and more simply, more eloquently than did the tough guy he often pretended to be. He was indeed stronger and perhaps wiser than I once had thought.

And so. He woke after that enraged deity in the shape of a thunderstorm had triumphed and moved on, leaving behind just a steadily pecking rain. (When did he fall asleep? Was it even sleep?) He was on the big barge-like bed and though Niko was lying alongside him, revealed by an undying fire, the man was fully clothed and was not touching any part of him. Instead, he was murmuring low some type of lullaby that was more chant than song. Though it seemed to be in a tongue Hyrum could not understand, he could pick out what sounded like the occasional word in the language of Homer and Calliope, a language, which unless he had access then and there to Allen's Vox Graeca, he could never hope to pronounce correctly aloud, even if he was fairly certain Niko quoted couplets that rhymed phobos and diabolos and worst of all agōnia and thusia (victim or sacrifice). Niko, it was true, was prudently not fondling him, not even looking at him; it may have been possible, however, that Hyrum had rested his head on Niko's muscled shoulder, so close the professor's breath was upon his cheek—a breath neither disagreeably sour nor garlicky, as I would have guessed, but rather bracing; it cooled his stinging flesh in an oddly pleasing way, as eucalyptus or menthol will—which doesn't sound so bad, except that even then Hyrum was thinking to himself, "Here I am in bed with Satan himself, and Satan wears too much cologne."

Suddenly the chapel was silent, that sort of deep, empty silence one only notices when a constant sound—in this case, the last of the rain and Niko's soothing voice—after a long unmeasured passage stops. "Let's play a game," Niko began the pillow-talk, turning on his side to look the boy directly in his eyes. A game? we asked—Hyrum then, I now. Yes, a game. Yes, a game, said Niko. "I mostly suck at sports," Hyrum confessed, using that once unprintable American idiom that has flourished over here. No, not that kind of game, Niko assured him. A game to make him feel good—very, very good. Even better than that liqueur had made him feel. No! Yes.

Let's hurry here. Doctors probably read all too often about similar indulgences in their books on psychoneurotic aberrations, and I have learned more than enough myself. The "game" involved, I could infer in part and surmise in the remainder, a variety of yogic breathing, slow and rhythmic, prolonged and deep, a trick to bring on that highly elevated quasi-spiritual and psychosomatic state tantric practitioners, I have read, seek to obtain and then sustain indefinitely. Arouse, hold, do not release. One might even call it a kind of torture: a subtle and then subtly increasing pressure upon the carotid arteries of the throat, accompanied by a steady and sensual manipulation of the laryngeal prominence and other parts known only to Adam. At first it didn't even feel like sex, because that wasn't what Hyrum was wanting, but he fell back boneless and elastic as an eel under the gentle but increasingly hypnotic force of the professor's ministerings. Not all of Hyrum was so passive. But he wanted it to stop. All through it Niko was smiling, even chuckling to himself now and then, only interested in giving, not receiving pleasure. That was somehow maddening. It was as if he wasn't really even there. Still, Hyrum could not in the end resist, could not help but mindlessly enjoy it all far too much—and the fingers continued their rhythmic and circular motions, until the entire palm of one of Niko's monstrous hands wrapped all the way around Hyrum's throat, while the other hand—never mind. He felt like his physical self was climbing stairs, climbing stairs, step by step, about to achieve something at the top landing of the long and grueling flights... At some point the parts of him broke into two—body and mind. His body was doing something, feeling something, but his mind was far far away. His mind was at the edge of an abyss. His mind was drawn down and down that bottomless hole. His mind found only blackness there. Only blackness.

"Don't try and remember it," I told Hyrum, reaching across the space between us to hold his thin and trembling hand. "You weren't in control of yourself that night, you were sick from that powerful drink. Drugged, I daresay. He played you like an avatar in one of your video games. More accurately, he cannibalized you. And you simply weren't you. Don't you see I adore that real you I see here and now, not whatever you became for a few long moments then." He regarded me and perhaps my whole wretched unlovable state, his eyes shining gold-green and green-gold in the candlelight, imploring me to say or do the right thing. And then the magic moment was lost when he snuffed his runny ruddy nose and curled up a corner of his chapped, doglike upper lip, exposing the jagged, crooked incisors behind. For a second I thought he might smile or laugh sarcastically, but he sighed instead. He drew his hand away, after a moment thought better of it, then gave it back to me with a squeeze of my wrist and another, longer exhalation. "You're wrong," he said, "it was me then as sure as it's me now, me then maybe more myself than I'd ever been. It was like—like he set something loose inside me. And now I don't know where to put it, where to hide it. I hate it, but it's me. Maybe it's all I really have."

I hate more than ever what paths I have to tread from here on. Rather would I follow my meandering thoughts to another time—I need go back only a couple of years, when I did not have to ask myself what happiness was—back to one of those tentative morns of earliest spring, where, in a windless corner of a nearby woods, I once heard and then saw a common kingfisher (Alcedo atthis) that was rapping the chisel of its beak against the hollow trunk of a half-dead birch. As always when I see that familiar lazuline flash, I remembered how our word "halcyon" derives from the legend of how, at winter's solstice, the bird can preternaturally calm the waves to build its nest upon the water. At first I thought this particular male must be drilling for insects, though this is not the way kingfishers normally feed themselves; as it mounted higher and higher up the peeling silver column, its rapping grew louder and more impatient, and I realized it was either trying to attract a mate or warn an enemy from its own tribe. And yet there was no other bird I saw in the immediate area, and the trickster was publicizing its existence to no real purpose. I do not think this behavior is typical of its genus. Perhaps recognizing the futility of its actions, the bird gave up and shot back toward a riverbank in the distance. The woods were again silent.

Of course, I am that kingfisher. There is no one listening in this solitude, the words I use to express my absurd predicament are useless, whatever heights I attempt with my prose, and besides there is nowhere to fly to in my tiny room.

Some things should not be written. The boy was not well. He was so frightfully knackered, as my mates on this side of the Atlantic used to say, worn to such a fidgety frazzle, that before my eyes I could detect him beginning to dissolve into the gently diaphanous, softly eddying smoke-rings of shadows dispersed by the tallow candle in my room, could almost see through him out my window into the starry bible-black. Hyrum was disappearing before my eyes that night, just as surely as he was going to die too soon. Snap out of it, back to reality! I told myself. Gently I told Hyrum to stop sniffling and sniveling, that he needed plenty of rest now, to forget about work tomorrow, and sent him off to bed. I can't remember if we embraced again for a longer time upon my doorsill, or if that is merely something I wish had happened. Certainly I do remember rightly how insubstantial, how very nearly emaciated, his slim-boned body looked from behind, after our sotto voce good nights and sleep tights, and how swiftly he faded away into nihility. This when it had seemed to me many times over the past few months that he was the only solid, imperviable being in an entirely insubstantial and transparent world.

The next day I went back to my garden instead of that library which had lately felt to me more and more of a workhouse than a place of work. When I was at my desk, in the dim and cool when all the earth without was refulgent with summer, I felt as discolored and dusty inside as those obsolete volumes stacked all around me—disintegrating factualized fancies and imaginary histories which mean nothing when the language isn't truly your own and the pictures are as foreign and strange as missives from another galaxy might be. Only among the climbing vines and midsummer blooms, beneath a sky as spotless as it was metallically blue, did I feel as tranquil and integral as the rest of the earth's growing things. Disembarrassed of my cares for the moment, I, too, felt part of the whole. As I divided the waxy rosettes of an overgrown patch of alpine saxifrages or watered thirsty sweet peas, I lost myself in my own sort of reconstituted English eclogue, in birdsong and sunshine, the industrious hum from Brother Virgil's nearby hives and the skyrocketing of territorial martins, the peal of goat-bells and the purl of woodland freshets, the lowly hedgehogs in the grass and the prisms caught in dewdrops, the petals and wings and leaves and cries and breaths of life and living. Oh, Lord, I longed to cry, let me be consumed!

Where was I? Right, right—among my flowers, simple and impeccant as an early saint or a stylite looking down from his height. Or not so sinless and simple as all that, for more of what I had heard from Hyrum the night before began to seep back into the forefront of my thoughts—mortifying details omitted from the account above that only now, in the peace of my garden, began to fall into place, my tawdry imagination helping to fill in a few of the blanks. Once my vision sharpened, I could see him just two nights before, alone in that conveniently inaccessible hideaway, the desacralized chapel, in the middle of the storm, alone on a profane mattress with that horrid man. One was naked, the other clothed. Somehow that made it all the more obscene. What else had he told me? "He... he did other things while I slept, I'm almost certain of it," he had blurted between sobs, shifting uncomfortably on the rustling webbing of my chair. "I'm still a little sore, I guess." I did not fully comprehend and did not even choose to remember those remarks until now, for whatever reason. The monster! The fiend! The scoundrel! There is not enough invective in all of Martial's epigrams to express my hatred of Dr. Appollonius. When he woke at last, the boy would be alone—not a trace, he found later, of the previous night in the ashes of the fireplace or in any cupboard or cubbyhole of that dybbuk's den. First the clock on the wall informed him that it wasn't morning any longer; it was already well past noon, with all that green and purple sunshine pouring through the diamond leadlights as resplendently as a peacock flashing its feathers (again I select my own words for some of the things the youth could not express) and with a thousand geese trumpeting all around the building (though when he did leave he did not see a one, so maybe that was just his head); and here he was clad only in his skimpiest in the middle of a "humungous," strangely undisturbed bed. At least his clothes were neatly folded on a footstool, and next to them was a kerchief bindle tied up with several items of food and the hot slap across the face of a twenty-pound banknote. (Well, that was decent enough of him, I had wanted to tell Hyrum; at least it paid for his coach-ride back to Penrith.) Gradually he pulled himself together. However, his recently fractured brainpan was hurting so hard—like there to being a bundle of sharp flints brattling around inside, he said, with surprisingly eloquence—he didn't remember anything about what had happened the previous night for several more eternities. Then he still could not recall exactly what had transpired once the "game" had begun. It was just a game, wasn't it? (Was that my question, his, or both of ours?) He did swear he never wanted to see Niko again because—because... and then I realized that I myself had not seen the man since Wednesday morning, before he had left to catch up with Hyrum on the trail. Despite never really wanting to see him again, either, it would be necessary for me to confront the beast. Only I could hope to reason with him, convince him to leave or at the very least stay clear of my charge; it might have been better for someone else to talk to him, but whoever I might deputize would only fish for too many facts. And what would I ever say to Abbot Hippolytus? Niko must have beaten the boy back to the abbey, for I had seen the day before that he had placed a sort of awning across one side of the dig, either to shade the Stone from the damaging sun or to obstruct the site from any further casual observation. We would investigate later. Where I was in the quietude of my garden, taking the path directly to the visitors' residence would be far easier than going all the way around the grounds to the Stone, so I headed that way first. There too we could talk in private, bluntly and honestly, mano a mano, so to say, no longer disguising with fulsome speechifying the particular point that we were two competing males of the same variety.

After calling up to the man for several minutes and receiving no answer, I ascended to the attic level and paused for just a moment outside the door that dared me to trespass. It was no good weighing the dangers; eyelids closed and breath held, I took the plunge. But I might have known: the undersized flat was vacant of any occupant, save the vermin; although there was enough refuse and disorder for a small army to have been responsible, I could tell immediately that Niko had left—the space had that affronted and forlorn ambiance a dwelling acquires after being abandoned without warning. To add to the air of desolation, a vinyl disc was even still twirling forgotten on the radiogram—the sound of silence, or rather, the sad repetitive lisp of a needle upon the edge of the old Parlophone label. (The professor had last been listening to the Bestiary of Flanders and Swann, I noticed when I went for the knobs; the comedy album was part of a collection endowed along with the hi-fi to these rooms a generation ago by a resident theologian who, I remembered, had decided that a little silent contemplation goes a long way.) Next, on to survey the damage. All of Niko's luggage and all his clothes were gone, although the sink was filled with stinking sponges and grimy dishes and the dustbins were overflowing with rubbish. The bed was a disgrace, the water closet an abomination. Who was he expecting to clean up this pigsty? Knowing full well he was too cunning to have left behind anything that would hang him, I nevertheless began idly poking through the clothes-locker and dresser and lastly the medicine locker. Nothing much anywhere in those places but the dust and lint; he must have been at least mindful enough to snaffle all his favorite shirts and quasi-legal pharmaceuticals. No discarded condoms or sex toys, either, in case anyone's thinking along those lines (I certainly was). On previous visits I had seen how quickly the regulation EU recycling containers were filling up, and now that Niko had gone, rank upon rank of empties lined the window sills and bookshelves; in fact, they had been filed regardless of rank upon nearly every surface available: Hawkshead Windermere Pale and Brodie's Prime, mostly, as well as your run-of-the-mill stouts and porters, and the harder stuff, too—Pimm's here, Smirnoff there, and even a few thoroughly exhausted bottles of our well-respected Red. I kicked a bottle of Californian Cabernet (eclectic, wasn't he?) down the lino and turned with some disgust back to the rank-smelling garbage. Digging deeper into this very recently formed midden, I came across putrefying wrappers of Appleby's organic brie and their really rather delectable Eden Ivory (the shops in the village were coming up), orange rinds and apple cores, marrow piths and olive pits, disposable razors and dental floss, newspapers still reeking of grease and malt vinegar (just a punter as common as a Wycliffite Bible beneath the polish!), receipts, snot-rags, a deck of playing cards we had decimated, a leather thong (no, not that kind, silly, the type that ties your hiking shoe), a dented mouth harp, a half-blind pair of sunglasses, dried-up biros, and most frustrating of all, one partially unraveled argyle sock—which only begs the question, why throw away one and keep the other? All of course would make first-class evidence, though I had to ask myself then, evidence of what? That he, like myself, had once merely existed? Feeling rather played out, feeling like an hilarious travesty of a real detective, I fell onto the grubby couch and considered what I should do next. Obviously the interloper had hoped to secure his archeological treasure as best he could before running off. Maybe he had feared what Hyrum might tell me, maybe he had merely returned to his campus to attend to other matters before the new school year began and would be back here some sunny weekend soon. Yes, he would most likely show up here again. Unless he were afraid of something... Whatever the case, I could not let matters be as they were; like it or not, I would have to go to Abbot Hippolytus and lodge a preemptive objection to any plans for the professor to resume his presence on our property. Or else... what? The abbot and I rarely spoke—he existed on his own plane and I deteriorated on mine. He of course was very very old and had seemed old even when I first was admitted to this place. During my probationary period he had seemed to admire me well enough, albeit in a begrudging way, and then over the years we had drifted apart, as these things go. In truth he had never liked me and I had never liked him.

All the same, I must seek his audience, and I must seek it now. I rose from the dampish couch—another wave of vertigo surging through me—and set off posthaste for the administrative offices. It was really too bad that things had come to such a pass, but so be it. A daunting proposition, in any event. On my way back uphill I confess I dallied with a flirtatious breeze and counted two robins, three rooks, a merlin with a vole in its grasp, and a sun-struck nightjar; in the insect category, a sleepy Purple Hairstreak, a yellow vagrant—G. rhamni probably stranded north of its range by the recent storm, a few hymenoptera and coleoptera (ants, ordinary beetles) that scuttled away before I could ask for their proper names, and I think the caterpillar of the Scotch Argus.

Lay Brother Hepastian has always been a kind of Cerberus at the gates of our abbot's lair. He is a pertinacious bulldog of a man, nearly a midget, and he squats in the outer office on a revolving high chair that glides between his desk and filing cabinets. Very little gets past him. On those infrequent occasions when I have encountered him here in his native habitat, he is invariably behind a yardstick-wide legal ledger, which I have long suspected shields a recent copy of OK or Hello! on the other side of its covers (at least he has never demurred whenever I offer him a sop in the form of a crowns-and-stars magazine from the village post office); no matter what, as soon as I dare to come near, he will ceremoniously clap the ledger shut. He holds no opinion of me, I know, but I was glad nonetheless that after all this description I have given you (I ask again if there will ever be any "you" out there) he was out and I could enter without any unnecessary fanfare or falderal. We have no buttons to push or intercoms to ring here, so an unassuming rap upon the darkly varnished wainscoting of the sanctum sanctorum will do.

Inch by slow inch, like a tuatara aroused from its siesta in the sun, the abbot jerked his bald and maculated head up from his shoulders and took me in, or as much of me as he could see with his rheumy, heavy-lidded eyes in the paraffin-lit murk of that cork-insulated and velvet-draped chamber (and here it was almost noon!). "Eh? Eh?" he croaked, his pheasant-feather plume poised in midair. I did say plume—one of his many affectations is his use of an old-time quill and inkstand with all its components (inkwell, sand, penknife, penwiper, blotting board); he keeps a running account, now consisting of dozens upon dozens of Coptic-stitched notebooks, detailing, so it is said, every minute and every iota of his extraordinarily uneventful life, from those favors he had to ask from the Trinity at sunrise to his last satisfactory evacuation of the day. He can do as he likes, but I shudder to think of the poor soul who will one day have to contend with these ineditable logs in our library—I at least will be in my tomb. For a moment, with barely a glance at the page, he returned to his latest entry, shaking his tail feather at me, as it were, and finished his thought before (with much regret upon his face) setting the journal aside. "It's you, Brother Cletus, it's you," he said, as if he must remind me who I am (much as I'd often like to forget). "It is indeed fortuitous that you came to me of your own volition today."

I stepped forward. "So glad you feel that way, Father Hippolytus," I said, trying not to get excited, "because I wanted to tell you as soon as I could that Dr. Apollonius has fled from our good graces without one word or note of thanks or farewell. Furthermore, he has left our visitors' accommodations a shambles. The audacity of that man! He might have at least—"

The abbot interrupted me. "It is not our policy to interfere with guests of the abbey," he told me. "He may do as he likes, son... They all do as they like, hélas." His voice was cracking even more than usual. Not for a moment or two would I realize it was cracking with anger. "Doubtless he will either be back in due time to finish up whatever on earth he is doing, or someone else will be sent to replace him by an authority higher than my own—governmental authority, I mean." He puffed on the page before him and peered aslant over his bifocals at me. "Good Cletus, please attend. This is a serious matter. You must know that it has been reported to me that your bibliothecal adjunct was seen departing your room at a shall we say untoward hour yesternight."

A look must have come upon my face, but I said nothing.

The abbot had grown so incensed in his lethargic reptilian way he was nearly choking. "Need I remind you what happened back in the nineteen-seventies?" he asked, painfully beginning to hoist himself up from his throne. "We can scarcely afford any malicious rumormongering in this day and age of priests and pederasts. Unlike the Vatican, we do not have the funds for barristers and solicitors and settlements. You must explain yourself. Oh, and do quit wringing your hands—you look about as pious as a horsefly saying its prayers!" He had finally reached his full height—which, while still considerably shorter than mine, appeared far more intimidating, in his amaranth-red cassock and black watered-silk fascia, not dissimilar to one of those venal princes of the Church that members of our own order have always derided.

"We were... we were having an innocent discussion," I said with amateur disingenuineness, but shame and guilt (prithee, tell me for what?) might as well have been written in uncial across the stave of my brow. "The boy has had some... some personal issues." People today have issues, I have learned, not problems. Why I did not say it was all Niko's fault right there and then I do not rightly know, even now. I had come to this chamber to accuse, but now that I was accused instead, something like fear (of retribution or self-exposure?) must have held my tongue.

My learned advisor leaned over his desk—a desk made from one three-foot-wide beam of a quercus robur hatcheted down a thousand years ago—and as much as expelled venom into my baffled face. "It's not just the fact that he was in your room so late, for that could conceivably be excused—it's the frequency and intimacy of contact that your associates have observed over these past several months. You have been seen plying the youngster with potent drinks down at the Dacre Bull. You have been heard telling him things most of us will only reveal in the strictest confidence, and then only to old friends we can trust. Once someone saw you in a thicket, watching him as he bathed himself down by the old granary. Amidst the gorse, son, upon the brink of pleasuring yourself."

This last I knew was more than an ordinary fib, but I was too confounded by these unforeseen imprecations to explain this clearly to the abbot. Botheration! It seemed the entire abbey was suddenly full of spies and snitches. Even as I was speaking, I tried to think back and pinpoint any time or place where I might have done or said something that could be deemed inappropriate. Nothing but what I have already detailed on these pages came to mind. In truth, I was also highly disturbed by the abbot's stirring of ashes long gone cold—those nearly forgotten months back in 1972 or '73 when I had had another youthful collaborator helping me out in the library. At the time I was very little older than the lantern-jawed and red-haired scouse who had motorbiked down from Glasgow to peruse our sizable collection of Brythonic "curse tablets" (those supplications on lead plates written in the mysterious language of demons) and, more generally, to smoke a lot of hashish in our unpoliced pastures. I cannot deny that sometimes I joined him. No matter his beefy physique and somewhat oafish demeanor; he was honestly rather sweet and trusting, with a genuine interest in Epictetian ethics. Inevitably we developed a mutual attachment. (It does not even matter if it were romantic or not.) On a couple of occasions he took me on his pillion to witness the corybantian rock festivals of Glastonbury and the Isle of Wight. In that bygone era, with my long hair in a braid, I could wear my robes like a Moroccan caftan and fit right in with the last remnants of the original hippies. I led my new consort to the Allerdale Ramble along the coast, and we slept in the dunes (in those days you still could). Things eventually came to such a pass that he was on the cusp of joining our chapter himself, when an uncle or cousin—or maybe an uncle who was a cousin, given what I'd learned of the inbreeding of his family—drove onto our grounds one day and, amid a lot of shouting and distorted claims of everything from brainwashing to deviancy, hauled my bonny laddie away, and I never heard from him again. As Hyrum might have said himself, it was like being kicked square in the goolies. What was his name—what was the skiver's name? All right, it was Terry—Terrance. I had never really forgotten him—and neither, apparently, had the redoubtable Hippolytus.

"Brother Cletus, are you paying any attention to me?" the abbot snapped, his small voice pitched to a treble clef, his liver spots seeming to have become even more livid. He had emerged fully at last from behind his ink-splotched desk. The prayer beads tucked into his belted sash swung and clacked as he paced with arthritic steps between me and the podium upon which he displayed his Bible. I half feared he was about to flog me with those heavy strands of malachite. His tirade continued. "Do you think I am speaking just to amuse myself? Are you even cognizant of your indiscretions? One fears that even though you are well-versed in all things ecclesiastical and can give me the Linnaean names of every critter that creeps or crawls, you do not know the order of your own mind." He struck his right temple for effect, and I would not have been surprised to hear his cranium ring as hollow as a bell. "Now, in the name of all things decent, I want you to reflect upon what I have just said. Go away now, go to chapel for a change, go to your garden, go somewhere you can contemplate the marvels of our Savior. Beg Him for forgiveness. That is, if you still believe in the Holy Redeemer at all."

There are many things I wish I had said then, and I did attempt a few, but every time I opened my mouth the abbot cut me short and ordered me once again to leave his office. Soon I saw that Lay Brother Hepastian was tittupping down the hall, and not wishing our discussion to be overheard, I bowed to Abbot Hippolytus and made a brisk departure. Hepastian blinked at me as I breezed by but said nothing. I was glad to be quit of that place and to return to the sanative balminess of a bright summer's day, though I was still too demoralized to think straight. No one could blame me if I did not go to the chapel or my garden, so I hied myself back to my room and there I remained through a long sleepless night and until the next morning. And then it was the young Hawkins who knocked again upon my door.

At once I told Hyrum, who still looked highly gamboge about the gills, and on whose breath I seemed to detect a whiff of something sweetly medicinal, that he should go to the library without me that day and finish up whatever work he had left, so he could demob from my service and return to school the next week or so, as (I reminded him) he had already agreed to do. Today—or tomorrow at latest—must be his very last day at the abbey. Again, we had already settled that when we last talked in my room, hadn't we? I also told him that Dr. Apollonius had departed, leaving only drained bottles in his wake, and so we could close that unfortunate chapter of our lives and start recovering from all that had happened. Maybe some day, after he had sought some counseling and was feeling stronger, we could meet somewhere far from this abode of a hundred eyes and discuss the arts or philosophy or anything else beyond our individual human frailties. It took all the summoning of my powers not to break down after the ordeal of my censure the day before. Topmost in my mind was a promise to myself not to disclose any of my ongoing pain or anguish to the boy. "Tomorrow therefore I will say goodbye to you," I said without a jot of emotion. Naturally I was trying to keep things on a strictly professional level, but Hyrum looked so immediately crestfallen that I had to follow him out into the corridor and tell him softly as I could that I simply wasn't feeling well enough to prolong our conversation, that was all.

"I know what I promised, but I really truly need your help today," he entreated me, stepping on my shadow and grasping for my elbow as we went past one open door after the other. Thankfully I saw no one inside any of my cohorts' cells.

He reached out to me one final time. I flinched, shaking his hand away, and swung upon him with genuine perturbation. "No! No! Listen, I can't help you anymore, young man, you must get that through your damned thick brain-bone," I expostulated as loudly as I dared. "Let's not go into why. You must believe me when I say that I simply cannot do you any further service as long as you remain here."

He stopped, and though I walked on down the corridor he continued to address my back. "Oh, but you can help me, sir, you can! Before I leave I've got to finish my big paper—it's right here in my bag, on my Mac—I've got to get it done before I go back to my classes and... And Niko, Niko, he told me you were the one who could help me most, that you have a super-keen sense—sensibility. Only you can tell me if it's any blanking good and what I need to fix or cite and all that rot." When I turned around again I saw that he was still standing before an open window in our chapterhouse, reexamining the thick floppy foppish two-toned laces on his unscuffed sneakers (the nearest he got to anything flamboyant in his wardrobe) and waiting for me to reply.

I did, of course. "Our erstwhile friend and colleague said that about me, did he? And what do you think he could have mean by that?"

When I came near again and Hyrum caught my gaze, I saw that those flecks of gold in his jadestone eyes were lit up, and a fire seemed to be kindling anew within his soul. That is, for the first time since he had buttonholed me that morning (forgetting I have no buttonholes), the young man actually came to life, was practically bouncing on his aerodynamic soles. He could probably tell that I was starting to give in. He must therefore run for as long as the torch fueled by hope was still flaming high. "Niko said he was really no good with the es—esthetical stuff, he was just one for facts and figures, really, but you're the one who really feels things, really gets how poets and writers tick and stuff, he said, and so you would twig it all. Please, oh please, sir, please, Prior Cletus, I know it's a shitty thing—begging your pardon—to ask so much after what I dumped on you the other night, but now it's all down to whether I get credit in the end or whether I've wasted this whole year."

It is easy to flatter someone who is so rarely flattered. The fact that the college professor had seen that I could formulate a more valid judgment of academic worth than a braggart like himself worked on me like an opiate. (Only later did I reconsider and conclude that Niko was, in stateside parlance, "passing the buck.") Standing there before the window looking over the orange pantile roof of our herbarium, I felt shaky as a jelly aspic and managed to ask the boy to follow me then and there to the monastery's furthest cloister, concealed by high ivy-laced brick walls, where we could hide under the overgrown pergola and he could read from his mirrorlike screen, and maybe nothing but a lizard or two would come snooping by. Although at this point—someone more cheeky than myself might add—why the hell should I care?

As we took our places under the deciduous canopy I warned him that the gates to my stores of knowledge were growing rather rusty; I could no longer declaim at length from Hesiod, and I had trouble differentiating the Aeolian dialect from the Aeolic of Lesbian encomia. (He paused a moment in wonder and then the name of the poet "Sappho" formed on his silent lips.) In truth, I had only ever been a bantam and a batman among real scholars, but knew I would have to puff my chest a bit to meet the boy's expectations. At playing older and wiser I still felt inadequate. A very long time ago when I had attempted to direct my Scottish sidekick Terry's revision of a theme on eighteenth-century translations of lesser first-century lyric odes, the results had turned out as confusing as the ox team-plows of old-time bousrophedronic writing (the next to last is a fourteen-dollar word defining that which swerves from left to right and left again). Nevertheless, never say never again. Tomorrow, I reminded myself, the boy would be gone permanently, so I commanded him to begin. Hyrum said it was the current practice to hack out punning titles for school reports, and the heading on his own tentatively announced that the topic would be "From Greek Idylls to World Idol—The History and Importance of the Classical Song Competition." "World Idol?" I asked, peering over his scraggy shoulder, but all I saw was a reflection of myself in his bright looking-glass. "It's one of those network contests, like the X Factor, sir," he said, as if that cleared anything up. "Go ahead and read," I said, making more room for him on the cool marble bench.

When he was done I closed my eyes and took a deep inconclusive breath. Birds were still twittering around me and the terrestrial globe was still rotating, and I was the same woebegone person, but he seemed more than ever to me like a thing virtually unformed and yet nearly insuperably ripe with promise. "Your grammar may be beyond repair," I began. "For one thing, we mustn't abuse the subjunctive as they do in Yorkshire."

"Yeah, but..." he began, but already I was lecturing him: "My child, never mind, look around you, for here we are in Arcady, wondrous Arcady, though most would call it just a blind alley or dead end of the old Roman Empire. Yonder flows fair Cumbria's winding River Eden. Scafell Pike afar to our east could be Vesuvius or Etna of the sun-parched south. Pretend for a few beats of your heart that those are wild grapevines, not wistaria, and every larch here a cypress. My habit could serve for a chiton girdled with—what is the word?—a zoster, yes, and if those are billy-goats I hear among the wattles up the mountain meadows, let's make them fauns, the pesky rooks harpies; and of sheep-sheds let's construct temples, because our antiquated abbot is nothing but a quidnunc, a busybody, an ass-eared Silenus, and this place a veritable ruin; further exercise of the imagination will make of your computer a scroll of papyrus—and therefore the bloggings and twitterings of your generation no wittier if certainly less lasting than the communal Pompeiian wall. Can we also conflate druid and dryad? Rhyme byre and lyre? 'For you, na bred to barn and byre,/Wha sweetly tune the Scottish lyre'—alas, I can no longer call at will upon the original quotation or even name with certainty the bard, though I was obligated to memorize it at school. But I am wandering away from my thesis like a little lambkin lost, recklessly following cowslips. All I mean to say is that the pastoral poets of whom you write should not be seen as demigods or beings cast down from Olympian heights, for they could just as well be those shambling farmhands you see wrangling their flocks from village green to pasture-side. They loved life, they loved the land, they loved one another most, those simple poets and guardians of livestock. And, I allow, the occasional nymph or goose-girl. But, you know, it was as much a concerted illusion back then as it is now. Their world was on fire. Battles were taking place all around them, people right and left were being massacred or enslaved, civilization as they knew it was about to topple. Same as here, same as now. We can't ignore all those tragedies that surround us and could very well annihilate us, but I see nothing wrong in creating a refuge, as best we can, a secluded demesne safe from wind and rain to retreat to, a place to lick our wounds and nourish our souls and discover ourselves in what we, like as not, for lack of a better word, call Art. Such undertakings will not only make us stronger, but also give us stronger motivation to master the venial sins of our own lives or likewise and otherwise brook our neighbors' peccadilloes. Nothing has ever really changed; that's why those lines we take it upon ourselves to study and sometimes memorize still ring so true to our ears. We will all be in the falling rain or else in the eddying dust some day, but the shrewd perceptions of a few elegists and lyricists will live on. Well, aphorism or sophism, you've approximated the aim of my arrows already. I've never doubted that you are inventive on your own. Now, in this monograph, you needn't treat those long-ago lyricists as if they were somehow set apart from society—they were society, they were in the thick of the catastrophes and cataclysms of their age. When weary Horace returned inconsolable from the Augustan wars..." And I extemporized further in this vein for probably much too long. The long cooling shadows of afternoon drew on, and although Hyrum had listened attentively at the start, making notes with an actual pad and pencil, I could tell inanition was getting the better of him (somewhere in our discourse he had disclosed to me he hadn't been able to eat in almost two days). With an awe-inspiring yawn, he stretched himself on the damp grass at my feet and peered up expressionlessly into the plumy boughs of the larches overhead. Eventually he shut his eyes and eventually he was snoring very softly and regularly, like a beast recently birthed, a calf or foal, safe within the protection of its pen. I hadn't the heart to waken him and remind him that I was supposed to be helping him somehow. He could also very well have been hungover again.

I looked down at him; his long-sleeved t-shirt had ridden up his hairless and boyishly convex belly, and the elasticized waistband of his dotted-swiss underpants was visible above his belt-less, low-slung dungarees. One of his arms was thrown paler-side-up across his face, to shield himself from the sun, and he had in the abandon of sleep shoved a thumb under the double-stitched placket of his flies, between the copper rivets. Perhaps there is a similar pose in some terracotta Tanagra figurine. Farmer's son after haying. And then Hyrum rolled face-down in the grass, his trousers and trunks unconsciously rucked down together, exposing two or three inches of erubescent buttocks. If I had been a less honorable person, I could have molested the boy right then and there and he might never have noticed, his sleep was so sound. Double quick Niko would have unsnapped his snaps, dropped his Bermudas, parted his shirttails... Before I could follow this surrogate rape to its mussy end, Hyrum turned leisurely over again, and there seemed to be a smile, almost a smirk, on his thin blistered lips. He could very likely be dreaming of being a herdsman among the groves and paddocks of Arcadia; maybe in his slumber he could hear the sound of cithara and panpipe, or taste the lips of another as young and raw and untested as he. Surely, in that irreproducible moment I could have touched him, even kissed him. Instead I just looked on and admired—and I ask my unknown reader, wasn't that more than enough?

When it seemed I could take it no more and would have to tear myself away, Hyrum shot up without warning from the ground, instantly awake, instantly animate—as if I had indeed tested his flesh. His sleep-slackened eyes blinked several times, he stretched and yawned, smiled sheepishly at me, then asked his Woolworth's watch for the time and frowned at its reply. "Sorry, mate," he spoke at last as if to a real friend, tearing a burr off his elbow, "but I've got to go—I mean, I should go back to my room and work on my paper before I forget all that wizzo advice you gave me. I'll never be able to thank you enough... Hey, don't look so down, sir! You really did help me, I knew you would. Listen, I promise to show you what I've done before I go. Well, it's late. Better run. Be seeing you." I leaned into him in case he might take me to himself as he had done the other night in my room, but he did not, instead grabbing his pack and taking off at a gallop, as if like Alice's liminal albino leporid he were late for a very important appointment. I put my own self back in order and turned to go as well, when I noticed the little silvery relic sparkling in the grass where he had lain. It was a small switchblade-like object with a sort of metal nubbin like a duckling's beak at one end—a flash-something, I think I'd heard him call it, and I'd often seen him snap it into the side of his computer. It might even have his disquisition on it somehow, so I knew I must get it to him right away.

In my haste I was thwarted, for coming around the corner of the shortcut I was taking was Brother Vestal, and he was already waggling a finger at me. "Heigh-ho and howdy-do, me fresh feller, don't be running off," he shouted from under his sunhat as he approached. As usual, his back was bent from the burden of carrying buckets from the well; "Here, nothing doing, nuncle," I cautioned him, and seized the yoke from his shoulders, then set all aside on the grass. The old man heaved a hollow sigh of thanks but, remembering his general gripe with the world, punctuated himself by shaking a fist in my face. It was a playful gesture, but his signet ring flashed like a basilisk's eye in my own. "Ah gotta bone or two to pick with thee about thy perfesser-friend. He woke me up in the midst of a swarny sweet dream t'other night with all his carryin's-on." Brother Vestal's bedroom, I well knew, looked diagonally out across the open space next to the library, where construction had been interrupted last spring when the Stone was discovered. His was the sole occupied cell in that particular corner of the grounds, all the rest there having been relegated to lumber rooms or otherwise left empty due to death and attrition. Few people ever went up that way, but Vestal reveled in his remove from the mainstream of life. Rumors were he slept in the austere style of the founders of our order, on a simple reed pallet with no fire under his hob, and he fasted from sunset to sunrise, no matter what the season. Could be during those off-hours he meditated a lot; could be he just slept. "And how is that so, that your sleep was curtailed?" I asked, not really wanting to be mired in conversation when I wanted to get to Hyrum's room before he took a nap or whatever it was he was in such a pother to do.

"Well, now, lemme think on it," Vestal said, sitting down on a boulder to wipe his brow. "There's a puzzle fer thee. It were such a whoopin' and a hollerin' you'd'a thought the debbil hisself and all his court was out there stirrin' up the dust. Never heard nothink like it! So Ah looked out me winder and Ah couldna' see a thing in all that chokedamp, 'ceptin' a torch or taper flashin' 'gainst that sorter lean-to your graverobber friend done built 'round that damnable stoon they drug up. Gimme the screamin' habdabs, it did." At that, he let loose a terrific earthquaking belch.

"Is that so?" I said, as amused as I was curious. "In the middle of the night, you say? And there might have been two people you heard?" Already I was trying to jibe the disjointed testimonial I'd heard from Hyrum and the trash I'd rifled through in the abandoned guest rooms with this spanking new spanner in the works. When Niko had come back from his clandestine tryst with Hyrum, had he gone to finish up what he could at the dig before collecting his belongings? But why in the black of night? Had Hyrum accosted him there—had there been a tussle between the two, or another attempted "interference"? There were too many infuriating or irrational possibilities, including the possibility that the old man had indeed just been having a bad session within the House of Sleep—and I was never any good at improvising crime scenes in that board-game known as Clue. Soon enough I would heedless of my own misgivings have to don my deerstalking cap and investigate.

"Quair thing was," Brother Vestal was cackling, "sometimes it soundered like they was a-laughin' and then Ah couldna' have said if they was a-cryin'. Blast it all, t'was the rarebit we et at noon—jest 'bout turned me inside out, good Brother Cletus. Still, indigestion or na, me imaginin's or na, thou woulda swore too that thou heardest some kinder twanglin' on some curse-it instrument, like they was out there trippin' the light fantabulous. Our Blessed Lord only knows fer sure. But Ah do know one thing—somethin's been happenin' uppa that-there demon stoon." He hooted in derision whilst hopping a little capriole, burlesquing as usual his own overacting. We both knew his idiom was only half-authentic. Then he massaged my shoulder with a horny, callused palm and squeezed his puffy eyelids tight, as if he were trying to will himself back to that midnight hour, so he could see more clearly what it was he was trying to describe. "Mebbe t'was the cheddar," came the refrain, "mebbe t'was the maukin, but it gimme a mickle might of chills right up and down my spine and Ah cain't for life of me figger why no one else heard a thing. Ah do know they collapst part of a badger set when they first commenced ta excavatin'—and those stinkers tend ta wail like souls in holy perdition." I thanked him many times over for his report and told him he should go catch some kip, since he obviously had to try and enter again that delightful unfinished dream. "Not such a bad ideer," he said, his heavy terrapin eyelids purple and wilted. "Now Ah wisht Ah could stand here and jabber wi' thee all day, brother, but Ah best get a move-on before it pisses rain. God bless-a thee," he concluded, shrugging on the yoke with its buckets once again before scurrying away down the footpath.

As we had talked the troposphere had quickly become curdled with clouds—literally out of the blue, without any warning, as often happens at these heights—and a fine whitish mizzle was already thickening the air. Therefore, I was glad to hasten indoors myself and seek out Hyrum's room down the long voluminous corridors, cerebrating along the way upon Brother Vestal's somewhat cockeyed recount—supposing it were true, what could it mean? Only, I suppose that Niko was every bit as maniacal as I had always thought. Maybe he had pressed the boy into further servitude or obeisance to Azrael. One must do more investigation into the history of the Occult Arts, I supposed, not wanting to do anything of the sort.

As I approached Hyrum's room I slowed my footsteps and stilled my respiration—at his door, I pressed my ear against the jamb, listening for proof that he was either sleeping or stirring; if he were sleeping, I would not want to disturb him, but if he were up and wearing a furrow in the floor or tack-tack-tacking at his keyboard, I would knock and give him his flash-whatever. I heard neither such sound, only the guttural rising and falling of uneven breathing—not that of an insomniac or snorer, but of another quality altogether: the gasps would recede, then all would fall silent, then they would come quicker and higher, shorter and sharper, then with an almost painful intake of air die away, sometimes resolving into a choking sob, sometimes brought to an almost unbearably bestial whine that almost but never quite became half-vocalized words of anguish or ecstasy—never, however, growing any louder than a soft steady asthmatic whistling calculated not to be heard out in the hall. (If I had not had my ear cupped so firmly to the oak, I might not have heard a thing.) Once or twice I thought I heard a second voice, but always just when I had nearly convinced myself that someone else was in the room, the utterances would extinguish themselves again. It could very well have been that, as not-quite mature men are prone to do, Hyrum was only having a particularly intense nightmare—for it sounded as if an incubus had straddled his chest—or it could have been something else that I dared not picture in my mind. When at last my ears could no longer take what my brain imagined, I raised my fists in order to bombard the door—but at just that exact instant the short nettlesome commedia dell'arte character of Brother Anselm came skittering around a corner, big black book under his arm as usual, robe and rosary astir, the very image of hysteric and fanatic vengeance, hailing me the second he saw me.

"Prior Cletus, halt, halt, cease and desist this deplorable behavior, please!" he admonished with unconcealed pleasure—for he is as virtuous concerning the affairs of others as they come—and dragged me none too gently by the elbow further down the breezy corridor, nattering in his superior way all the while. "Say here, don't you think it might be best to leave our serious young scholar alone for just awhile? He's been asking everyone for advice on a very important essay he is writing, so leave him to his task. Forgive me for reminding you, as well, that our admirable abbot has asked me yet again to help keep fraternization with guests as well as religious persons here on retreat to a minimum. We all know how tempting, how very tempting it is to have these emissaries from the great outside world here, with those baubles and blasphemies they may bring from beyond the pale with them, but we all must remember the separate and discrete journeys they and we must stick to, must stick to undeterred by novelties and other forks in the road." He paused to exhale at last, and breathed something like brimstone into my face. I looked him right into his pores, still too sandbagged to say anything, and then started walking away from him. "Oh, you know I hate playing the killjoy," he continued at a faster clip, following me down the corridor, "being the most junior member here, but if I didn't say something right now, someone much worse than I might be commissioned to do so." Although he had tried to inject a modicum of self-impersonation into his remarks, chuckling at his own unkind choice of words, his advice, well-intended or not, came unwelcome.

Not in the mood to be treated like a reprobate by a subordinate, I spun on him and assessed his stunted presence before me in two nods. Dear me, I suppose I must take the time to freeze the action and describe him a bit here on this soiled page, since much else might have happened differently if he had not so impolitely interrupted me that afternoon. This Anselm is an earnest young novice, rather like a shrew or other small insectivore I must say, with his trim black beard, his moist needly nose and clammy little fossorial paws: i.e. adapted for digging into other people's business. Plus I cannot abide his skreaking taunt of a voice! Such a skunky sort of flunky is out of place here—I've thought it many times—the nearest thing we have to a zealot in this province, being a recent convert and a true believer who cannot be shaken in his faith (even at my worst I was never this bad). Outside the Greek-Hebrew Septuagint (Hatch's Concordance) he always carries (he had come to us via an Orthodox seminary that he probably considered too newfangled and libertine), I believe he detests nearly every other type of literature or art, and since until my incarceration I ran the library and acted almost as a cultural gatekeeper and discriminating disseminator of information, he most likely detests me with equal fervor, if not furor. His eyes are aflame with Savonarola's bonfires. Why had the abbot admitted him to our order—to counter the wickedness encroaching on our sacrosanct grounds? Or just because we should be happy to add anyone to our decreasing population these days? Dear Brother Bandersnatch's belabored attempts at humor always only aggravated the situation whenever I had a rare confrontation with him—usually about some disputed apocrypha or eschatological sticking point or maybe a variant he didn't think worthy of being on our shelves. He also has a way of stirring up small flurries of dissent among the rest of us, pitting brother against brother in unlikely ideological rivalries. Once recently he had helped spread a garbled assumption that I was planning to quit the priory for a sort of New Age Butlin's resort. (I had told someone in jest that I thought we should erect a sweat lodge on our land, since they were all the rage.) His door was just down the hall from Hyrum's, more's the pity to say. There is or was an ikon of Częstochowa's prideful Black Madonna strung upon it. "One thing, and one thing only, my righteous Brother Anselm, for you to remember if you possibly can," came my acerbic rejoinder, after I had rapidly considered all that I have collected in this paragraph. "So many months on, Master Hawkins is no mere guest or visitor. And another thing, he is my colleague, an invaluable assistant, and I have a right to speak with him when I please and how I please and where I please. Forgive me for reminding you that you have no authority over me, my friend."

"And neither do you have authority over me," he snapped, but just as abruptly appended, changing his tack, "not that I mean anything by that. Please, let's not have a dustup. In fact, our meeting here is fortuitous, for you were just the man, just the very man I was looking for, and I thought you might be here, when I couldn't find you at your office or in your room—do you mind if we go down there, around the corner, and sit for a moment in the box-room?" Beady eyes clicking with increasing speed, I could tell that he was assembling something grotesque in that Meccano mind of his. He leaned confidentially into me. "I realize that might sound like a highly unusual request, but I must show you something important immediately, for our eyes only. And I promise you this has nothing to do with anyone's radical readings of scripture."

Having no idea what he was getting at, I considered for a moment before I reluctantly acquiesced and followed him apace, feeling my persecutors already nipping at my heels, down the corridor and around another corner into the storage room, which was tucked below a flight of stairs and therefore conveniently out of earshot of anyone passing by. Once we were seated on packing crates in the half-light, like movie mobsters planning a bank heist, he took an object out of the leather wallet he wears like me, suspended approximately at the level of the solar plexus, and held it out to me—a little luminescent screen burst into life like an electronified flower, and I saw a jumble of tiny sans-serif letters before me. All highly strange, like an inscrutable threat from a tiny god. I drew the hood of my robe up over my head, as if chilled, which I guess I was by this eerie interlude. "Allow me to put on my readers, as well, to make the words out better," I said. "But I must say this is most odd, most odd, assuredly."

"Let me explain first," Anselm said, clicking the "mobile" off again before I got a chance to take further stock of it. "A few weeks back Dr. Apollonius and I ran into each other at the Stone, because you see I really am curious about these things; I'm not so much of a retrograde fundamentalist as you might think—you see, I even have this phone my twin sister gave me to keep closer contact with her out here in the wonderful wilderness. Anyway, in the course of my last protracted conversation with the professor, he asked for my number—charmed it out of me, I guess—in case I'd like to see some of the photos he'd taken of the Stone at various times of the day, when the sunlight reveals particular characters or numerals not always visible at other times—I have a few he emailed me on this phone and will be glad to show you them some time, some I hope more convenient time if you like. Interesting things." Because the room was so ill-lit, his eyes seemed capable of switching on and off like his mobile; they seemed to blink on now as he leaned across the space between us. He was whispering, too loudly: "Now, you should know I am the only inhabitant of this order with a cellphone, indisputably the only one, so please don't let this get about, for you see I only get reception in the village center. Such a pain, especially when I'm having to keep in touch with someone who—well, never mind, that's just personal stuff."

With my half-glasses at the end of my nose, I held my hand out for the device, but still he held it back. "What does this have to do with me?" I asked, growing annoyed again, trying to peer over the demilunes of my lenses.

He pinched up his nose, wiggling his whiskers, and leaned conspiratorially across the space between our crates. "You see," he continued, "I was leaving the chemist's down the wayside a while ago when my phone vibrated—"

"Vibrated? Is it out of order?"

"No, I mean it was doing me the favor of announcing to me that it had received a new text-message. That means it was sending me written words, no voice involved. Turns out—turns out once I apprehended at least part of it, that the text is for you. Obviously he knows you don't communicate with the rest of present-day life. Naturally, I had to read it to know that, and still I don't entirely grok it. Maybe you will."

This time I snatched the device from his scrabbling claws and flipped up the lid to reveal again its gentian-blue screen. "It was delivered early this morning," Anselm was saying in the meantime, "but of course it wasn't until I came down to town that the message got to me. Please tell me what it means, at once. I know it's from Dr. Apollonius. It seems the man was in rather a rush when he typed this with those big Cro-Magnon hands of his." Anselm was bending over my shoulder now, rereading what I was reading for the first time. I could smell a fetid local cheese on his breath, and I did not like how his hot little body pressed indecently against mine.

The message, sans capitals or punctuation, read even more cryptically than a telegram sent under the duress of a military battle (and I'll try to reproduce it as best I remember it):

anslm pls telll pr clee etus i m @ jrsy

fmly mtt=rs 2 $eettle b4 fall term b-gins :(

*sor ry* h0pe 2 xplain s%n

#keeep hyrm awy fr stonneee

it<has dangrus + deead ly popwers nun/can compr?hnd

lol ;)

thx 4 ur h=lp && cheeeer's !!!

y0lo, bro. ** niko a.

Brother Anselm tried to help, tapping with a blunt fingernail at the orphic slate that glowed brighter now like corundum and then like chrysolite in the semidarkness. "Silly man should have used autocorrect! His efforts to stay au courant are shambolic. It might as well read, 'Mene, Mene, Tekel, u-Pharsin.' The beginning is easy—'Anselm, please tell Prior Cletus'—but then he starts losing me... For instance what is 'jrsy'? It could be the place or it could be something football players wear, eh? And is he saying something purposely humorous, or something purposely oblique about the Stone? I don't use emoticons and neither should he. Besides, this Samsung is an outdated model and sometimes things don't display quite right, but it must also be that the professor is a very impatient no-caps kind of texter with an 'e' that sticks. Not surprising, since he seemed a positively visionary, deep-thinking man but always, always short on time. Except when he was playing his guitar, of course. Ooh, he was terrible talented. Once he played us to a fare-thee-well something he said he transcribed from someone named Gainsbourg, and it was quite nice, really quite nice, almost like a Bach prelude, 'Je t'aime something.' Lovely."

Being well used to the abbreviations and unique forms of shorthand sometimes scribbled by successive generations of commentators in the marginalia of tattered palimpsests, I could guess at most of Niko's intention, but not all. Was "jrsy" the Channel Island, where he may easily have had friends, or the Garden State, where I think he might have once mentioned his retired aunt lived? (Or was it a tiny town in, say, Lapland?) If the rest meant that Hyrum must keep away from the Stone because it has powers none of us can comprehend, that was even more puzzling and disturbing. He was trying to frighten us even at a distance. In retrospect, I think his tease about the Stone was more to rib me than warn the boy. He was always doing that sort of thing, always thought like Brother Anselm that he knew where to find my ulnar nerve—once he told me that if I touched the Stone while wearing a crucifix I might be struck by a bolt from Jove, or at least the gore of long-forgotten sacrifices might rub off on my hands. (Also in retrospect, months and months later as it is now, I realize that a text-message could be sent from anywhere at any time; even if he was pretending to be in Jersey or New Jersey, he could have been anywhere else—even right under our very noses.) " 'Thank you for sharing,' as people say these days, but I think it's a load of gibberish," I said to Anselm then, getting up to go, and headed back down the passage toward Hyrum's room. Surely I would at least have to tell the lad, in some round-about way, about this not-so-funny joke of Niko's.

Anselm was fast behind me, tugging at my sleeve again like a bullying child. "Where are you going, Prior Cletus? Not to disturb that youth again, after all I've said?" He laughed a high brassy little laugh. His lank, oily quiff fell over his forehead in a most displeasing curlicue.

I stopped in my tracks and thought better of going back to Hyrum's just then—he was, after all, probably sleeping, still recovering from his hangover. Belatedly I surmised who most likely had grassed on me to Abbot Hippolytus. Anselm might very well have seen Hyrum leaving my room the other night. "So! So!" I hissed under my hood like an aroused cobra, allowing him to catch up with me. "You're the one who wags his tongue too much around here, who meddles and muddles, eh?" I tried to make it sound like something of a joke between old friends, but it wasn't a joke.

"Maybe, maybe not, my good brother," he said with a minatory scowl, cinching his silken sash tighter around his scrawny midsection. "When one has eyesight one can't help seeing certain things."

If he weren't such a pitiable little thing, I might have throttled him. "You!" I impeached him outright. "You were the one, then, weren't you..."

"The one—what?" he said, shoving his shaggy face into my own, trying to pretend confusion. And then he added quickly, altering his pitch, "We never see you in chapel, Prior Cletus. We never see you on your knees. Never see you say the beads. Do you even pray, these days? How far have you fallen away? God has eyes keener than any of ours, you know!" I told you he was a zealot.

"Don't presume things about me—and let me go. The boy is soundly sleeping. I'll see him later, in the refectory, I hope, since we have not a palaestra to wrestle our dilemmas to the ground, and I'll tell him of your analphabetic text, as you call it. And our vis-à-vis will be none of your business—nothing for you to fink like a skink about."

He drew back, opened his pursy little mouth to show his pointy little incisors, considering something more to say, but declined. Because of my considerable seniority and because I towered over him I suppose he found me alarming, in spite of his sneering sanctimoniousness.

"We'll talk another time about the Deity," I added, and moved past him. I did not look back as I left him there between the swinging dormitory doors, stunned and affronted, like a rat when the trap has snapped.

At first I went back to my room, but the assortment of salacious epithalamia I was browsing could not amuse me, my Ovaltine and digestive cracker would not soothe me, the view from my window offered only drizzle and fogbound anxiety. Neither could I sleep. It was almost as if I heard a voice I could not quite apprehend calling me. I found myself lacing on my sandals without really knowing why. Again it seemed that my feet knew where they wanted to go before my mind did; I was heading around to the other side of the abbey, where the Stone slept, now shielded by its tarpaulin. In under five minutes I was there. Though by then it was beginning to rain, and hard, I slogged defiantly across the soggy grounds and lumbered up the slick incline to where the relic lay on the other end of the denuded plot, I clambered over Niko's steep "midden" of commingled humus and clay, I skidded clumsily down to where the Stone rested—last I had seen, a quarter-buried in the mud of the pit. Finally, there amidst the cold wet gusts of the aroused storm, the shock of what I saw nearly felled me: the once proud basalt block lay shattered in several pieces about the concavity, shattered as if someone had attacked it with dynamite or a sledgehammer—or had it been rent asunder by a single, well-placed lightning strike? In the viscid, almost palpable darkness, with the torrent from above like shrapnel upon my back, it was impossible to tell. The Stone had already been so defiled by age and time that it would be hard to say for sure if there were a recent blackening along its broken edges, which might be the case, had it been split by the force of a strong electric bolt; indeed, such a circumstance was possible, if not provable—the Stone would therefore have to have been blasted during the terrific electrical storm that had barraged the precinct seventy-two hours before, that night Niko had in effect eloped with his unsuspecting quarry Hyrum. And now before me: the hieratic visage effaced, the indecipherable lines eroded. The very ventricles of my heart seemed to contract, scalding ice froze my lungs, my tongue clogged my throat, my stomach turned over, I felt ill right down to my toes. I sank rain-soaked to the ground among the fragments, wondering if this was at last the seizure of which I'd long been warned. All was chaos for a minute, and then the sound of distant howls (animals or ancestors?) brought me to my senses. Drawing on the last of my mental and physical resources, I crawled on my hands and knees through the saturated soil, searching for clues in that Acheronian night—a discarded tool, a scrap of burnt notepaper, a fused piece of glass or metal, perhaps—but found nothing, knew I must give up trying, at this hour of the apocalypse, in such a monsoon. I shinnied out of the pit again, wondering if anyone had witnessed the destructive thunderbolt—although there had been so many that night, who could say? Only Brother Vestal's room looks out over this plot—and he said, I think, that he had been woken not by the storm, but by shouts and music—or had that been the night after the storm? With his memory and his imagination I might never know for sure. Not until later did I ponder what would happen with our friends the archeologists and paleographists now, and how Niko might take the news of his treasure's demise.

At the moment I only wanted to get back to Hyrum, to tell him of my discovery, and to order him away from the premises at once. Something terrifyingly malignant had visited the abbey, and I must keep the boy safe; I could even go with him, ensure he was safe as we outran this chthonic power that had been unleashed at the abbey. Yes, we could run away together. Why hadn't I thought of that already? I could and should flee from this Praetorian outpost—I could leave its howling wraiths and its aging abbot and its busybody inmates behind—and start anew somehow, and of course so could the boy. Maybe I was a little mad already.

Absorbed as I was in my fear-filled visions, I did not even hesitate when I came to Hyrum's door, but burst through in a bewildered flurry of wet, muddy sandals and vestments. There he was, safe for the time being: stretched out almost fully dressed, fast asleep, one arm flung across his chest, the other dangling, his gracile frame draped over the edge of the bed like Wallis's highly romanticized painting of the boy-poet Chatterton. I came closer and lay my hand on Hyrum's pitifully thin shoulder. There was no response. He was not asleep, my reader knows that already. As soon as I opened the door, I should have known, I should have realized the situation. For a moment I will suspend time and emotion as I gaze upon his body. The neck of his double-x cotton t-shirt (the one with the ouroboric emblem of some pop band or football league) was stretched low, exposing almost the whole diameter of his beautifully vulnerable white throat, strangely striated with raw red scratches or abrasions. The beloved face was as sedately innocent of expression as one of those encaustic portraits painted upon Faiyum mummy cases. (Damn my erudition, but that was truly among the first things I thought.) His eyes were closed. No. His eyes were open. No, they were definitely closed. A little sebaceous perspiration still gave a lifelike luster to his waxen brow. There is no sense in trying any more to describe all the horror of that moment, a moment in which it seemed my own heart had stopped, as well. It cost me some effort to undo the tie knotted around his neck—his only tie, the one I had helped him straighten for his visit with his proctor so long ago. Nothing in the room was noticeably disturbed; the casement was wide open, however, and rain had splattered the books and papers below it, on his simple workman's desk. Perhaps a few other things were out of place, but I was in no state to take in every detail. (Was one of those details glimpsed far below the window—something like a black and yellow fly threading the track back to the coast—or was that just something my feverish brain cells added later?) I closed the window and propped myself against the desk chair, forcing myself to breathe again. In memory, I cannot avoid seeing an emptied bottle of our sect's best on his windowsill, and an upturned tumbler there, also. (What was that glinting under the desk? Is that my faculty to preconceive things, too?) The facsimile of Salmasius's copy of the Cephalian Anthologia Graeca (including, I admit, the bawdy Boyish Muse or Princeton's Puerilities), which I had recently loaned Hyrum, lay face-down beneath the chair. The famous piebald sports shoes with their trendy laces rested neatly under the foot of his bed. There might have been a balled-up sock and a mouse—the electronic kind—forgotten amid the dust there, as well. I wandered out of the room, dragging the fraying necktie I held in my hand behind me, altogether unable to construe where I was in the world—or indeed, what the world was.

At some point Brother Anselm had rushed back to Hyrum's cell when he heard me crying out—my utterances no easier transcribed than xenoglossia, I was told much later—but I managed to stumble past him and out into the corridor leading back to my room before he found the body. At a subsequent hearing Anselm was to claim that the boy was still breathing, albeit quite shallowly, when he came upon the crime scene; he had lifted Hyrum up, pounded his chest, tried to force air down his throat, done whatever he could, but the boy, he claimed, had expired without a word or sound on his lips. "Hypoxiphilia," someone was to propose much later. (Look up Kotzwara, composer of "The Battle of Prague," or for that matter, the playwright Motteux. There are many more examples.) The young monk would eventually claim that it looked like there might have been a struggle in the room, although anyone could tell you that youths of Hyrum's age do not keep the tidiest rooms in the first place. Nothing Brother Anselm declaimed at his hearing should be entirely believed, has always been my (widely discounted) opinion—but then the upstart was also entirely convinced, at least at first, that I was the murderer. Worn and torn, 'buked and scorned by innumerous attestations and subornations, even I was eventually persuaded by indictments, as I've told the doctor often enough, and at times still can't quite decide if I did or did not. Do it, I mean. It was Anselm—Anselm!—who gave so many implicative and damaging interviews to the gutter press and who stoked the fires of malicious scuttlebutt. "Accessory to the act" or "mindless murderer," which is it, Brother? (Only lately, with the analyses of criminologists and pathologists and psychological experts still belatedly coming in, has he come to me to ask forgiveness, which of course, like a verifiably innocent martyr at the stake, I have granted.) If the abbot and my more loyal friends had not intervened on my part, I might well have ended up in prison or an asylum for good or, at the minimum, been impelled into actually posting a million-pound bail, rather than be given—after considerable punitive obstacles were hurled—the comparative liberty of house arrest until the prosecutors should fully come to their senses. And the professor, one might ask? He too was questioned extensively, either by Scotland Yard in Saint Helier or by state troopers in Hoboken (after all this time I really can't recall which), and then released—palavered his way out of that hole, per usual, I reckon. Not surprisingly the unscrupulous absconder came up with watertight exculpations and incontestable and entirely circumstantial "proofs" of his being elsewhere, and because of his professional credentials, no doubt, he was unchained and is now enjoying an extended sabbatical—working on his analysis of the Solstice Stone, he has told investigators, for he still has many "amazing things" to reveal about it once his research is finalized. So he claims—we shall see (or never see). I have never heard from him again and neither has anyone else in this locale, as far as I know. The fragmented Stone has been lifted from the pit, as many of its pieces glued back together as possible, we are told, and it gathers dust in some unknown national warehouse, awaiting further analysis and eventual exhibition at the British Museum or possibly the Ashmoleon or a similar Oxbridge collection. Again, we shall see—or not. In the meantime, my sentence has in effect been commuted, and I suppose I have been at least to some level exonerated—not, however, by myself, not quite yet, not quite fully. (A true reconciliation is yet to come between my Maker and myself.) The abbey, it turns out, has irreproachable legal counsel and will hold to its goal of avoiding any further investigations. But tortuous procedures and juristic mechanizations have been costly and time-consuming; originally, I was detained and hauled about and incarcerated for days at a time, though all that ordeal was a blur to me then and still is to me now. Exactly how and when I arrived back here I don't even remember. I was called back and forth for interviews and testimonials and took uncountable oaths and signed umpteen affidavits. No one did me the justice of telling me the whole story of what was going on; my nerves were perfectly shredded by this purgatory of prolonged waiting and indecision. Bouts of insomnia besieged me, rounds of penitential fasting left me feeling thoroughly macerated. I thought myself mad. Mad mad mad... wait! I've tacked to such a tract once before, in another notebook, at another time, and can't say it worked then, either. Yet however one looks at it, my situation was maddening. Anyone who wasn't mad already would have been driven mad in my situation. To put it another way, beyond peradventure, I was "wasting away," body and soul—or have I said as much already? Must I say it again? Nothing happened for an interminably uneventful longueur in the drama that had become my life—nothing much could happen. In the grand old tradition, I was leaving everything up to fate. At times it seems life writes me, I don't write life, but life was lagging. Too much is too boring or redundant to explain or expound upon here. Such a hebetudinous chronology of unreclaimable time is not why I keep these crinkled and much-abused pages in constant flux. My future exegete will have much work cut out for him or her! (That is, should anyone ever chance upon this bathetic mishmash of irate rants and cris de coeur.) Most of those weeks and months of legalistic limbo I keeled practically catatonic from one dismal prospect to another; I had experienced a minor myocardial infarction (so they say), after all, when they first came with a summons, and was hospitalized on and off between trips to the magistrates. There were many times whilst looking out my window that I wished I had access to the innocent-looking foxglove growing in secretive corners of my garden—they say one petal can do you in. I would have eaten the entire flower. But for too long I was not allowed out of this room, and my meals were delivered to me. During that span of time, when my only freedom was idleness, I lolled in my excess wretchedness like a sickly aesthete, like another Ronald Firbank or Stephen Tennant, staying abed for a fortnight at a time, conducting a well-constrained social life from the safety of my boudoir. All the inmates we have here, even Brother Anselm, were curious enough to stop in and pump me for information on a regular basis, but since in general we all can barely stomach one another at close range, I had to be careful to see as best I could that no two visitors overlapped. Besides, I hadn't the energy for too much blether from the world outside my door. I have no friends or family left in the exterior world to bother me, thank God. Lying on my cot at the close of day, I would make periodic inventories of my inner organs, like a night nurse going from bed to bed, attending patients: Lungs? Check. Stomach? Check? Heart? And so forth... I was still all there, but for far too long I was unable to read or do much of any use with my brain, for by the time I had got back to this monastery they had confiscated my books and PC and—worst degradation of all—forbidden me to extract books from my own library. And now, in this perhaps ill-conceived and sadly executed apologia, I am back, alas, where I started. Greetings, world, I am ready to state my defense...

But it is not over. (Does "it" mean my life or my crisis? Can't really say.) Today a most extraordinary thing has happened. This morning, as I was putting these pages, my memento vivere if you will, back in their place behind the loose block of broken masonry in the wall behind my wardrobe, I pushed the book a little further back than I usually do and struck something that I had forgotten I had placed there late last summer, on the date of Hyrum's death. It was of course the flash-drive (there's the term for it!) I had found in the grass that sunny afternoon we had spent side by side in a deathless and totally dreamt-up Arcadia. What could I do with the drive now? I had no access to a computer, no idea really how the thing worked—or what I might expect to find on it. In the end it came down to relying on the good graces of Mr. Currier, my friendly court-ordered therapist, who despite writing only the most perfunctory—even laughable things—for him to read in the journal I keep in parallel with this one, I have grown to almost willingly endure (dare I say like?) as our months of acquaintance have lengthened. I have even managed to trust him, knowing now that he thinks I am blameless (so long as I don't inadvertently switch journals), and accordingly when he arrived without warning quite late this afternoon—after having left a few weeks ago for a holiday in the Balearic Islands—the first thing I did was hold out the object to him in the palm of my hand.

He blinked over the tops of his narrow little eyeglasses. "And what are you doing with one of those, my friend, when often as not you've told me that 'backing up' is something you never even learned to do with a car?" he asked, gingerly taking the curious thing from me as if it were a holy relic, a finger-bone of some unknown church father.

"I'd misplaced it somehow," I said, half-truthfully, "and I was hoping you could pop it into your device so we can see what's on it, since I no longer have my own machine at my disposal."

"Hmm. What might I be expected to find, then?" He was already pulling out of his satchel that nitid tablet he sometimes takes notes on with a special stylus (an up-to-date version of cuneiform, I had mused), so I knew he'd taken my bait. Although I had no real idea what one of those drives may hold, I told him it might be something with real bearing on my case. Maybe it was something I had neglected to show him previously, something I had written and consequently forgotten in the weeks leading up to the crime. (In truth, I was hoping it might be Hyrum Hawkins's personal papers, or at least his to-do list.) That assured him, and though he might have more wisely handed it over to the constable, he popped it right into the side of his electronic pad. After a few tense seconds watching him assault his screen with a forefinger, doing something necromantic, I suppose, he came across what he called a "hierarchy" of folders within my—that is, Hyrum's—drive. "There's a folder here labeled 'Drafts' and one labeled 'Email' and another called, let me see, 'Mis-cel-aneus,' misspelled—really, Prior Cletus—then there's 'MP3s' and another called 'JPEGS.' These are yours, really?" I said nothing, revealed nothing. "Okey doke," he said with a perplexing wise-to-it sort of wink, "you want me to look into any one of them? The photos, maybe?"

"Photos?" I asked, not even seeing exactly how that was possible, though I should be used to such wonders by now. (But on such a tiny thing?) "Oh, certainly, the photos—yes!"

He glanced somewhat suspiciously at me again but tip-tapped some more on his tablet, nevertheless. "Hmm..." he said, his eyebrows leaping up. "Awfully blurry that one—suppose you were experimenting without a flash... [he was flipping impatiently from one poorly composed photo to the next] ...or taking them underwater ...if not in a cave ...or is it some sort of grotto? Here are a lot more, all similar, I'm afraid... Look at those stained-glass shadows—a presbyterial light, it is, if I may speak like yourself; I remember that much vividly from my boys' choir days. Up in the triforium, you know, all these bizarre colors, the way they tint one's flesh, the way eyes reflect the glow... reddish, greenish, bluish, like these, quite lovely in a way... Hmm!" At last he turned the tiny screen toward me—all I saw was an indistinct close-up of someone's body, nearly black but for a contour of lucent blue, what might have been a thigh or lower hip. "I suppose they're meant to be arty?"

"Well, that's a qualitative judgment..." I equivocated. "Go on to the next clear one, then..." Immediately a somewhat less optically aberrant picture flashed upon the screen—this time the breastbone was lit with a sickly glass-green glow, and it was evident that the nape and a good deal of the trunk of the subject was at least partially bare, though it would still be hard to identify the age or sex of the subject. My as-always unflappable adviser swiped his finger across the glass to the next photo—and I saw the vividly tinged chest, the sensitive button of an exposed nipple, the elongated throat stretched convexly with what appeared to be some kind of ligature wound around it; before I could say anything, Stewart Currier scrolled rapidly through several other pictures in the series—one saw the body as it appeared to shift and roll under multicolored light: different camera angles and framings of lean, pallid, definitely male (yet smooth, svelte, nearly androgynous) shoulders and arms and wrists; and, having given a side-glance to the last of them before turning away, I convulsed with an awful twinge of recognition, seeing part of a big, black-haired hand that seemed to be either holding back the drooping body as it tried to rise or else forcing it into another position. The photographs' violently sexual nature, even as unfocused and fragmentary as they were, was undeniable. It was all too much. I covered my face in my hands and was crying noiselessly before I saw, through my interlaced fingers, Stewart at last looking away from the tablet himself as he asked, "You didn't take these, did you? You don't know anything of their subject or context?" Tears still flowing, I lifted my head and jerked my chin left and right—it was too late to get into these things I had confessed to this notebook but not to the one I reserved for him. He anesthetized the machine and yanked out the drive. "Well," he said, "you needn't see any more." Furrows still fixed on his forehead, he shoved the demon-possessed appliance back into his bag. ("I didn't take them," I answered his earlier question.) He nodded his head apologetically. "I didn't think so. I'm so sorry you had to see any of them. This drive couldn't belong to Dr. Apollonius, could it— no, he'd be much too careful to leave behind anything incriminating, as you've made clear, and he'd be the sort to encrypt anything he filed. But these photos are of the young man, aren't they? I see, I see. This is his flash-drive, then. Hmm. Don't worry, I know you didn't know. I'll try to explain it to the authorities—all in due time. But tell me, what do you think they mean? Were they sent to Hyrum's email account? It would definitely appear so. I noticed that each of them is tagged with 'from Phanaeus 21 07 12.' Batch processing, I assume. Could contain geodata. That could be helpful. Well! Very curious. Who or what is a Phanaeus?" He spelled the despicable name—both a god and a scarab that rolls in dung. I sat there, lifeless in my chair but for the tears. My attendant's eyebrows peaking, his glasses slipping the rest of the way down his nose, he gaped out the window opposite, as if something out there might give him the answer he needed. But there was only a wan, lackluster sunset on the other side of those panes. And of course, the big tower clock staring us in the face—frozen hands, crux decussata, St. Andrew's martyrdom, no time, time lost, for I was clutching at mind-motes; and here I sit, merely another thing wound down. My friend would not rush me; he was making a point of that. Given this lull in the conversation, I regained my senses long enough to probe the glossary of mythological entities held within my fragmented neurons for further classical allusions, but could not find a solution at the moment. My memory was failing me yet again! "Listen," Stewart said between my renewed sobs, "if you can ever recall anything else important that you witnessed or were told about during that time immediately before the, the—episode, I hope you'll open up to me. Your heartfelt exposition and detailed explication of last summer, coupled with this photographic evidence, might go a long way in conclusively proving your utmost innocence once and for all, even for those not yet fully convinced."

"I don't wish to exonerate myself," I said for what I hoped would be the last time, forcing back the rest of my tears with an indecorous honk.

He pushed his chair closer to mine and took my hand in his. "You don't have to keep on blaming yourself," he said, his nacreous gray eyes searching mine. (At last I had determined their color exactly.) "But, and I tell you this as your friend and not just your therapist, you can't or needn't be guilty and guiltless at the same time."

I just continued looking at him, holding tightly onto his hand, wishing he didn't have to leave me yet again. Very soon he would be departing the abbey for good, his assignment over. I would be on my own again, even if I were to live here for the rest of my life—although my failing heart tells me I won't have long to wait.

This I must not forget but will attempt to immortalize on these very mortal pages. Last night, after Stewart Currier had left—or some time early this morning—I finally had one of those "psychologically revealing" dreams that my Grand Inquisitor (as I used to think of him) has always nagged me to reproduce in words or speech; the revelation was almost laughable in its patent blatancy, but I will be glad to entertain my highly qualified nutcracker with it later, if that will make him happy. (I must remember to copy it into my public journal as well, for his delectation.) Very seldom do I remember my dreams, and then they are nearly always as mundane as the activities they ineffectually strive to reflect in their funhouse-mirror way: here I might be seen weeding the garden, pulling screaming mandrake out by the phallic root; there I might be listlessly dusting the armadillo-armored covers of a set of antique almanacs—more alliterative mnemonic device than memory. Or I might merely be cleaning my teeth or mopping the floor, endlessly, endlessly. As in other contemporary fictions, nothing much ever really happens, nothing much comes of anything. But last night's dream seemed made-to-order, right off the Freudian assembly line. In it, I am back at the Dacre Bull, a tankard full of self-pity before me, my eyes concentrating on my reflection within a pentagonal drop of sanguine liquid on the lacquered bar; in addition, both of my hands are hooks and so I will not be able to lift my drink—ah, Tantalus! (Already the symbols are pouring down hard and heavy.) Who should be down at the other end of the bar, on a dunce's high stool, but the tormentor of all my waking hours, Niko Apollonius, dressed in black tie and tux like one of those slick Sicilian lounge-singers so popular in my youth. (I can see them full-colored and bright as day now, Al and Vinnie and Dino and the rest, though they were confined within my family's monochromatic twelve-inch Philco then.) Of course the fatal Shinola-glossed guitar is strapped to Niko's taurine torso. "Thanks—that was a melody every bit as merry as 'Lloyd George Knew My Mother,' don't you think?" he is explaining in medias res. "A gusty lusty lay, as they say. Oh boy, gee-whiz, Lord Zephyrus! Better p'raps I should sing these accompanied by virginal and mandora. Now, how to top that—I can edify and entertain and enlighten you with anything from the interstellar falsetto catches of John Jacob Niles to the unseemly codpieces crafted by Peter Warlock. Pick and choose as you like from 'The Cuckoo is a Pretty Bird' or 'The Knacker's One-Eyed Widow' or 'Poor Tom's A-Cold' or maybe none of those, but something from Cecil Sharp's songbook." (Peculiar how a dream will plagiarize real life, for I am certain those phrases were stolen from some actual banter from his days of busking about the district with me and my prentice by his side, last summer.) I want to get up and stop him but, since this is a dream, and a not very original one, at that, I am paralyzed, and so he launches into a troubadour's song that I have long loved but fear with all my heart he will contort and pervert: "The hern flew east, the hern flew west, lully-lullay... the falcon hath born my make away..."

His voice rings out clear as a cantor's in a room become jampacked—yes, now my dream-self has become aware that the pub is full to overflowing—but I cannot bear it, every graceless grace-note torments my eardrums. "The falcon hath born my love away..." Then I look around and see that all the death masks in the crowd are his—outfitted with the same Mephistophelean beard, the same curly black corona of hair, the same jesting eyes, the same furry and sardonic brows. Oh, dear. It was a multiplication like one of those computer-generated special effects in those movies Niko and Hyrum used to rave to me about. (Once they dragged me to a cinema in Penrith, and I was both puzzled and revolted by all the pointless fiery explosions—and could not tell if the 3D actors were animated or not.) Although in this dream I am still unable to move, I begin to shout at the original of all these replicants, hobnobbing up at the bar: "What have you done with the boy?" I demand. "What have you done with him?" Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. By this point in the Morphean template everyone should be encircling me, laughing and pointing; instead the mob of look-alikes turns its eyes away and silently melds into the garish colors of the brewers' adverts on the walls. And then I am awake, or I am here at my desk, writing this down and wondering where I stopped dreaming and began designing as I moved my hand in a daze across these lined sheets. Maybe there is no difference, and it does not matter, for no matter what I write here and strive to imitate or emulate, based on my ever-evolving memories, these words are no better at posing and painting a simulacrum of real life than the most earnestly directed cinema verité dream will—regrettably will—in the end.

To continue, with gladdened heart and soul, to continue... Our first day with the clement breath of springtime in it, so I climbed down to my still near-frozen, sleeping beds to start pulling the dead and dying things to make way for the new. This is in a sense my first ceremony of the new year, and I felt so invigorated by the sunshine I was determined that this year—at least as far ahead as I could visualize it—would be no different. For the first time in a long time I felt not the least bit un-sane or even slightly unbalanced. I was neither my old self nor any self I had recently assumed; I was simply me. So I beavered away in that summery light, allowing no thoughts of anything more pressing or pertinent than the bulbs ready to burst from the soil and the calyxes poised to blossom at the ends of their branches. Soon it grew warm enough to lower my hood and take off my moth-eaten cardigan, especially thankful to shed that layer after having overheated myself raking twigs and other debris around the sadly depleted winter heliotrope (now atrophied and infested with some kind of pernicious dry-rot). Out of the pebbles had sprung a prematurely blossoming anemone hepatica, bright as a paschal candle, and this set me to cogitating upon the legend of that beautiful youth loved by Aphrodite and cursed by Apollo. To cool myself, I sat in the shade upon a decommissioned millstone that serves as my bench and tried to reconstruct that poem that began roughly (transposing it in my mind, as it were, into the key of our own alphabet), "Kalliston men ego leipó..." But who was it by, and where did the next faltering foot lead? The poem was so famous I should know it! "...leipó phos Helios..." Giving up trying to find a rhyme, if there were a rhyme, I next set about rearranging the garden cloches, stooping to comb and caress the dewy white shoots each by each as I shifted and set back into place their glass bells; I found myself humming something from the desultory church services of my childhood, a borrowed spiritual about Jesus and Lazarus, I think, though I have long forgotten the words. It seemed every renewed wave of my memory and my past was slewing deeper and farther away from me, washed out into a sea of oblivion. After all, I had willingly been trying to forget so much, for so long. How much of me would be left by the time spring was full upon us? Lest I fell back into melancholy again, I returned to my labors and was digging out a little puddingstone that had been heaved from the ground during a recent hard frost when I was accosted by Brother Vestal, as ever and always on his way either to or fro the wellhead. "How goest thou, son o' God?" he said, beginning to make the sign of the holy rood across his chest, but dropping his hand as soon as he saw it was only me. He might have been mistaken for a tramp, swathed as he was in greasy woolen balaclava and mittens and heavy herringbone ulster, greasy scarf pulled down over his hat and ears and knotted beneath his chin, and he looked much colder than I felt at that hour. I couldn't help but notice that he was shaking even more than usual—more likely from palsy and age and overwork than the weather.

Tactfully ignoring his own condition, I told him that the winter had treated my garden almost as roughly as it had treated me. "Aye," he said, "it's been a hardship, it has. Ah am sorry to see thou hast been tormented, and have pled with the abbot to be kinder ta thee. It's but his gout makes him come on shirty like ta that."

I thanked him and told him I understood; after all the abbot is well into his nineties. Vestal was by comparison a youngster. He volunteered to me that he still had the occasional nocturnal disturbance, even now that the Stone was gone and there was nothing there but a pit rapidly greening with the first grass of the year. The badgers, however, had moved on from their partially excavated tunnelings, and now it was a litter of fox kits that was keeping him up nights with their yipping and yowling. Just the unhappy revenants of sandaled centurions, I told him, and we laughed at this old joke of ours. Then because I rarely leave my room or talk with anyone else for any duration of time, the old man caught me up with some of the rumors circulating through the abbey; we would be resuming construction of the library wing soon, a rare books dealer from Snowdonia would be blessing us with a visit in April, the distillery was due for another inspection, Brother Alexis had the chilblains, the oast house had a Hamelin-grade infestation of rats, and oh yes Brother Anselm was departing our company effective immediately. Leaving us?! I asked, hoping my interrobang would be assumed. Aye, my informant replied, there was a certain lass in the village who could no longer bamboozle anyone by saying it was a simple case of the belly-bloats. At that we both laughed uproariously and hugged one another and went back indoors arm in arm, my humpbacked yokefellow and I. And then kindly old Brother Vestal was gone as if he had never been by my side, just another ghost of a distracted hour. I suddenly felt very alone. Nothing to do for it but trudge back in my room, wishing I had available to consult a collection of Juvenal's curt critiques with their mordant warnings to women. What had the satirist said about the pregnant courtesan? The library was still off-limits (informants were everywhere), and I could not readily withdraw the appropriate stanzas from memory. Yet another hectare of my realm lost to me, probably forever.

In the dead of night, however, the rest of the hymn I'd tried to invoke earlier began coming back to me, piecemeal, divorcing me from sleep as I strung Praxilla's dactylic meter back onto its strand syllable by slow syllable—as I had done once long long ago in a course on seventh-to-fifth century melic poetry (and indeed one should sing these words, rather than recite):

κάλλιστον μὲν ἐγὼ λείπω φάος ἠελίοιο,

δεύτερον ἄστρα φαεινὰ σεληναίης τε πρόσωπον

ἠδὲ καὶ ὡραίους σικύους καὶ μῆλα καὶ ὄγχνας·

Oh, those giants of song and their immortal words, like incorruptible saints! Quite suitable are the anglifications of H. W. Smyth and Sir Rennell Rodd; Zenobius derided the ultimate line, but I have always found the poem touching for its marriage of the inferior and the ineffable, the eternal and the quotidian. The hymn is a lament. Fair Adonis, banished at an early age to the netherworld, is asked by the shades there what he misses most about Earth above: Sunlight, he says, and moonlight, and starlight, as well. Also, cucumbers, apples, and pears. What will I miss most? Much the same, although I prefer Blue Wensleydale and wild damsons.

As soon as I saw his achingly emaciated back retreating down the corridor outside my room, I knew it must be he, even if he be only a cruel figment or shape-shifting entity by now. I crept up to him and saw how he was, to all appearances, little more than a pulsation or shimmer in the atmosphere, an illusory interplay of sunbeams entwined with the shadows of a late February afternoon. It had been a wet day and only now had light stolen through the thick tulle of the nimbostratus. "Friar's lantern," "ignis fatuus," "will-o'-the-wisp": they are the same, that febrile fire that sometimes plays over the northern fenlands at dusk, and he was not much different. The phosphoric silhouette turned to me and took on a bit of substance, concentrated in the amber-colored eyes and familiar, lambent smile, suspended in the air amidst the dancing dust particles.

"Hey, Hyrum," I greeted him, as if he had never gone away. "Stop here awhile. And tell me what it's like where you are now. Don't be afraid to be honest—is there anything you're missing of us here on the other side?"

In the last pale rays of the sun, I touched his evanescent shoulder; I could tell he would imminently disappear, so we had to speak quickly. "I don't know, sir," he answered me, and although he would have pronounced it something like a cross between "I dunno" and "I dunna," here I will give him King's English at least as good as mine. This is my fantasy, damn it. What should it matter to anyone that he was only the ghost of a ghost? He has likewise never been more than a mere shadow of a shadow upon these pages.

"Surely you miss something," I said. "Or someone."

A long pause. "I guess my dog Cato," he said at last. "He's a Sheltie cross. A mighty fine dog. Likes to herd hares and their wee piping leverets—that's their little ones—as if they were sheep."

"A dog? You never mentioned a dog."

"There's my barmy old mum and auntie, too, God bless them, and my sisters, but I think I miss my friends more. Colin and Niles and Shell and the rest of the gang. We used to have some good times back in the secondary."

"I never realized you had any friends, but I suppose I should have considered that possibility. You always seemed like such a loner, to me. A lot like myself at your age, I reckoned. But that may have been a case of what you might call self-reflective vanity. I still can't imagine you ever having to carry on a conversation with any of your tongue-tied generation."

"Be that as it may, sir, we had some jollification, and I do pine for them—but still, good old Cato even more."

"Well, I suppose you would. Regret the loss of your pet, I mean. But what else do you miss—things, I mean?"

He seemed to be contemplating for an infinite minute, diminishing in the dying of the light. Then he spoke: "I miss books, it's true. There's nothing to read here and so I never get out of my own head. There's so much I never had time to read, all your bygone epics and sagas and serials—and some of that newer stuff, too. When I was alive, I shouldn't have minded so much the time it took to get through a few hundred pages. And I would love to hear some music again, especially the blues—Sleepy John and Blind Lemon and Tampa and Kokomo and Muddy, whatever you've got—and maybe some of those Appalachian tunes my folkie aunt used to frail on her banjo when I was but a tiny tot, things like 'Foggy Foggy Dew' and 'Foggy Mountain Breakdown,' misty troubling mysterious things like that.

"And I'll add that one still longs for, needs the simple things, too—needs the cooling rain when it comes on the heels of a hot day like a miracle, needs the sound of nesting jackdaws in irate conversation, and the yeasty taste of good beer and good bread, and the feel of smooth stones underneath one's feet in a river, and even sad or silly things, too, like spring's first kite caught in a tree or flame-winged skipperlings drunk on a salt-lick or paper Remembrance Day poppies, or—"

But I stopped his tongue, for I realized his own voice had become subsumed within mine. (Next thing you know, he would be so didactic as to tell me those particular jackdaws were Corvus monedula spermologus and skippers were of the Lepidoptera family Hesperiidae—as if I shouldn't have known that already.) "Please excuse me for broaching what might be a touchy subject," I exscinded—with a gesture of remorse—his desiderata, "but could you tell me anything about where you are now? This may seem rather blunt of me, but... What's it like?"

Once more, I allowed him to go back to speaking closer to the way he actually spoke: "Fecking lousy. Boring as blooming hell. Pardon my bluntness, sir. But there's bother all to do here, and the worst thing is I've got to go on being myself, just my lonesome self, forever and forever. Never evolving, never getting away from everything I already know, just being obliged to exist and exist and exist for all time. You can't imagine what it's like."

"Oh, but here in the abbey, where days and nights have been the same again and again for as long as I can remember now, I certainly do know what it's like. All that time passed and here I am, still myself. Though I suppose a little changed."

A breeze of unknown origin stirred the air. "I've got to go, sir, the angle of the sunlight through that window is going to sweep me right away."

"But there's so much more I'd like to ask you!"

"Sorry, sir. But, you know, you should have asked me these sorts of questions sooner. It seems now you missed the opportunities you once had. Here comes the sun—and there it goes beneath the sill. I must go down with it. Look for me another time."

Then he was gone, and I felt the last of the oblique rays cross my face as the sun sank rapidly under the far-off horizon. But there was still so much I had wanted to ask him! Why had I expended so much of my brief time with him absorbed in such footling chatter? We could have really gotten to know one another, had I simply asked the right questions. But, too late, too late. I realize now I hardly knew the boy. Ghost of a shadow, shadow of a ghost.

Life goes on, so they say, even if I haven't felt much like writing lately. Today my cruel friend and kind enemy, the physician who regularly makes his rounds of the abbey, has told me that I must eat more, I must feed my red corpuscles. Why eat, when food has lost all its taste? He tells me I have dropped another stone. He takes my pulse and frowns. He lectures me some more. He shakes my hand so-long. At some point every goodbye is no better than a final farewell.

One and twenty days, that length of time between the new moon and the full, finds me at last back on these pages after the shock of discovery—by that I mean those pixelized photographs that in imagination grow even more vile than they perhaps really are. I almost wish I had looked at the rest now, and I wonder what will become of that drive in the hands of bailiffs and barristers. Or did he destroy the device, as I think I begged him to? Well, anyway. Stewart Currier has indeed left for good, though he promised to check in on me now and then, at least via that obsolete art of letter-writing (since I can't or won't do electro-digital communication, it will be nice to get some real mail again, quaint as that is in this new century). I have to admit I miss him, but I won't dwell on that, because I have returned at last, exhausted but elated, from a most interesting outing.

This morning—the always promising, often disappointing first of spring on the calendar—was so unseasonably warm that after breakfast I decided to doff my woolen winter habit and don my summer-weight one—I hadn't worn it since that chaotic day of my initial detention last summer, when I first went off my head. Drawing the robe on, I felt something cold, knife-edged, and metallic deep in one of the deep linen pockets—all at once it came back to me: spotting the shiny object on the floor of Hyrum's room just before my mental collapse, picking it up, depositing it in my pocket, and just as soon forgetting it; curious to see again what it was, I extracted the object and held it up to the sun in my hand, as if it were a living thing, a flower or starfish, and I admired again its craftsmanship. It was a nickel-plated ankle-buckle in the shape of the octagonal star of the Uralic peoples. This I knew because Dr. Apollonius (who liked to drop Finno-Ugrian words as if he knew the language) had once told me that he had spent some time trailing Herodotus among the redheaded Budini tribe of Udmurtia. If one were to look upon my window, one would now find the star depended there, a glistering thing upon a string, catching the light when it can. Does it prove or disprove anything? I wonder if when he was interrogated a buckle on his boot was found to be misplaced. It is the stuff of a cheap mystery, but still it would be interesting to learn.

Later in the afternoon, after nursing the newly resurrected iris ungincularis in my garden and after a long restless nap during which I both slept and didn't sleep, I declared defeat and settled upon going for a walk to uncramp my legs and revivify my ever-flagging life forces. How could I fritter away the rest of such a lovely day inside? Finding the buckle, for some possibly very obvious reason, inspired me to return to the dig on the other side of the abbey, beyond the winged buttresses of the library—the library I might never be permitted to return to. I hadn't been over there since they had shipped the shards of the Stone away to be reassembled, and so I knew I wouldn't find anything but mud and scars where it had been. But I was surprised to discover how quickly the scars had healed, and how now bluebonnets and primula were poking their heads up through the ochre-colored clay there and all across the vacant lot. In another season or two one might not even be able to tell that there ever stood a mighty tree where the pit still remained, or that in the same spot had been uncovered a mysterious Stone that had only, in a roundabout way perhaps, through fate or chance, brought tragedy to this place. Since I last saw Stewart Currier I have been beyond tears; my ducts have all dried up. Yet I could have cried to see that dewy verdure upon the land. Pity me that I did not truly love life until just before it would be snatched from me! Often I sang this, and even out of the grave I shall shout it. Oh, to have the wine of youth full again upon my lips! Spring was coming on. Spring would make all the earth beautiful again. Soon the bluebonnets would be abloom and this field a honeybee-mad mass of cerulean flowers, as it had always been in the past. What was the past, after all? A boy's coy smile, his mildly deranged eyes and nervous hands, too; a sense of camaraderie and mutual purpose; the satisfaction I got in being a mentor, a model, a friend—an undeclared, unrequited, and very continent lover. My old enemy I was already succeeding in forgetting—I would probably no longer even be able to discern his sinisterly handsome profile from that of any number of long-dead senators and admirals I have seen molded in the cold plaster of a bust or frieze. The eyes and lips and teeth of the youth I held in my mind, however, remained as ever-present and ineradicable as they were inviolable. Yet I knew as long as I persisted in living, the more romanticized my version of still-recent images and episodes would inevitably become. His face and words would be idealized, acne healed and accent altered—and once we idealize a thing we are eradicating the truth. Alas, alas. I told myself I was becoming maudlin contemplating all of this, mustn't complain, keep calm and carry on, and so I walked further, past the dig, out across the fields, through the canted stone gates, and down a little-used path I knew, into a thick copse of slender silver beeches quivering in last year's leaves upon the summit of a small rise.

I followed what I assumed to be a young red fox or pine marten slinking through the undergrowth, something twitching in its mouth—a baby bird or vole, perhaps; it was too far ahead of me and the moth-like light in the wood too faint and uneven for me to tell for sure. Forestalling any apprehensions, I scrambled down paths probably only deer normally use through the recently germinated nettles and fleecy catkins, trying to keep up with the rapidly retreating animal. At length I lost it, took several tricky routes and hopped several times back and forth across a rocky stream or its doubles, and realized I had lost my way; I had entered another, more expansive stretch of tall pine-woods, a place I rarely venture into and had even in the past been a little afraid of. There were no paths here, just narrow passages between the scarred trunks of trees, and I walked aimlessly for a league or longer, until once again I came out into the open, at the top of what might be the same sunlight-stippled ridge I so often admire from my bedroom window, and took a breather there on a fallen log, saluting Ol' Sol, already setting sail for the western lands. (All-powerful, unconquerable Sun! Et in Arcadia, you—not just Death—are here, you are everywhere, you can even be traced to this page, for it is your rays that are soaked up by cotton fields and forests, and in the end refined into the substances that make up run-of-the-mill writing paper.) I rested, thinking my highfalutin thoughts and biding my time, plotting my course homeward, and only after about fifteen minutes, I think, did I notice how the forest was as still and silent as the deeps of the sea—I couldn't remember the last time I had heard so much as the call of a single crow or the sough of southerly winds through all the overhanging pine boughs... until, looking toward the horizon, which shone as if it had been electroplated, I heard a sudden deafening rush, like a locomotive roaring upward into the heights above earth, and then saw an irruption of starlings out of the recently harrowed barley fields spread beneath me. Up they came, bird after bird after bird—a mounting tide of sentient energy, an accelerating whirlpool of wings, the seething mass hurtling with avian fury against the low-gathering clouds. I stood and watched wonderstruck, although I had seen this balletic ritual agitate the skies of England before. A murmurration, ornithologists call it, when choir upon choir of passerines ride the sunset thermals, following some inexplicable sense of direction, swooping and swirling and stunt-diving all together in some fluid supernatural synchronicity, leaderless yet each in perfect acrobatic alignment. From my summit I saw more and more starlings funneling high into the air, clustering into a whole that almost wholly obliterated the landscape, a seething assembly that hovered for a few seconds and then exploded with a cacophonous burst, only to reform in an instant—gigantic ever-moving, ever-fluctuating constellations of birds, gyrating first into something like an immense living fist and second a catherine wheel and third a flowing fountain. And then at some unseen signal the flocks scattered into ten thousand or more separate individuals and went shrieking into the heights of the trees, where they would pass the night safe in their numbers until sunrise. As I followed them with my eyes, I felt my heart or if you prefer my soul expand in my chest, thrilled by an overpowering longing to evaporate likewise into vespertine smoke, to become part of something as universal and unnameable as that all-enveloping, all-consuming swarm had been. Take me up with you! I longed to shout, Take me! Please, God, if you really do exist, take me up! But the starlings had already merged with the skeletal lineation of the trees, became one within the jungle of branches, one with the night... and I was given no choice but to thrash and fumble back home through bramble, bracken, and briar. Several times I tripped over roots and stumps and many times I scratched and bloodied myself. The vertigo was upon me again, and I felt as if I were swimming groggily through that undergrowth. My heart and my head both were seized with numbing pain, but there was no turning back now it was full night. It is a wonder I found a way back to the abbey, but I had as always the planet Venus above to guide me. O, Hesperus! O, Phosphorus! We share one star at the break of day and at sundown. And so here I sit once again at my desk, chasing the eternal "now" across a blank sheet of paper, the "now" I try to undo, to smother with words, but will never, can never. Staring out my window at nothing at all, at the noonday sun, I am wondering what will come of me next, wondering how much farther and how much longer I can possibly go on. My neck aches, reminding me I still have a body, my wrist wobbles and my backside itches; I do in fact go on—and yet my soul longs to pour out itself into that great shining emptiness.

Posthumous

Prior Cletus (né Charles Blakelock Dugan) died on the evening of March 21, 2013 of a seizure brought on, if the somewhat idiosyncratic obituary in the county newspaper is to be trusted, by a prolonged case of acute anemia coupled by arteriosclerosis and the "personal turmoil" of "an ongoing criminal investigation." Further investigation by a larger media concern reveals that his physical condition during the months leading up to his death had been worsened, in his doctors' opinion, by severe mental stress, occasioned by the well-known controversy that undoubtedly contributed heavily to his demise. He was sixty-five years old and had served the Anglo-Attic Brotherhood for forty-four years, thirty-seven of which he had been director of the abbey's well-regarded library. Found among his few existent belongings were two handwritten volumes: a journal that had been a present from his judge-appointed psychotherapist (who has so far declined to publish it) and a loose-leaf notebook, discovered by accident within a deep gap in the stonework of his small private room. This latter item was found to be partly gnawed on by rodents and nearly illegible, marred as it is by so many redactions, smudges, and lacunae that it was deposited with no notice in the abbey's substantial archive of books and documents, where it still awaits transcription and further evaluation. The bones of the recently deceased are interred in the ossuary (also on the property), stacked anonymously atop his predecessors; his skull is like the rest marked in tar with a Roman numeral—which, if you look in the necrologies kept in the offices there, will tell you his dates and his title, all one really need know.

inspired by Walter Pater's Apollo in Picardy

The Homosexualist

Or, The Yellow Chair

A Closet Play on Plagiarism

in Two Acts

for J. S.

Note

_This seriocomic excursion is, in some respects, a forgery. The first act, although very much altered from its source, is greatly drawn, in both substance and style (sometimes almost word for word, probably for much too long) from a case study described by Dr. Ludwig Eidelberg, M.D. in the book_ Take Off Your Mask _(an edition that might have been described more recently as "pop psychology"), first published in 1948 by International Universities Press (possibly a reprint or revision from a foreign printing), as read by this author in the volume_ The Homosexuals: As Seen by Themselves and Thirty Authorities _, published in 1954 by The Citadel Press, New York and reprinted in paperback up until at least 1966; there an excerpt was included as the chapter titled "Better Than the Love of Women." The playwright, perhaps foolhardily, believes he has transformed the source text enough, in both essence and intent, while giving it an entirely new context, to make this work a unique and quite different thing, different not least in design—not exactly a parody of what may or may not be a representative selection, but also not entirely outside that term's boundaries; whether or not Dr. Eidelberg's estate, if there still exists one at this late date, would care to disagree is not our concern here. (It is also not in the playwright's interest to investigate the_ real _Dr. Eidelberg and his research beyond this extract.) That the original monograph may have been written in German or Polish (the latter was Dr. Eidelberg's native language, though he was schooled in Vienna) and translated into English by another unidentified person also puts this work at an even further remove from its source, some sixty-five years in the past. Nevertheless, without Dr. Eidelberg's amusing dialectical argument and keen ability to make of a psychiatric analysis a particularly affecting piece of literature, this complete and self-contained work would never exist. Here, then, for better or worse, is a collaboration with a ghost._

The playwright was drawn to this material not so much for its content as for its approach to the core material. Dr. Eidelberg appears to take as much pleasure in the dramatic possibilities inherent in his confrontation with the "composite" patient as a novelist might; immediately upon reading his dialogue, one can see its potential as a theater piece, though of course what already existed on the page would be only half the story . The original article, it seems to this author, is as much fiction as it is science, and like most science fiction it is indebted to the prejudices and misunderstood "truths" and "norms" of its day. The doctor never uses the term "homosexualist," but that is one which of course would have been known to him, in the German equivalent, at least. Certainly, considering the era in which he thrived, the good doctor (from this evidence) might be considered surprisingly tolerant, if not nearly apologetic, in his attitudes and practices.

Names, locales, and other specifics have been changed from the material that inspired this piece, though it is important to note that, being a composite, those specifics had already been changed by Dr. Eidelberg or his editors, and this patient never really existed any more than a character in a novel conceivably could.

The second act, though of course dependent upon Dr. Eidelberg's teasingly inconclusive study, is entirely drawn from the imagination of the playwright, and hence the playwright is entirely to blame for its contents. It is suggested that those who manage to rustle up a copy of Dr. Eidelberg's original report would find it perhaps a more entertaining enterprise to adapt the scene themselves, rounded off with a happy or unhappy ending of their own devising.

_Epigraph_ **: The Homosexual in the Classical Orchestra, Part I**

"The homosexual impulse might be compared to the bassoon in an orchestra; sometimes it plays solo parts; whenever it speaks at all, it gives distinctive coloring to the music; but often it is quite silent; the driving power, the player's breath, is not so significant to us as is the quality imparted to the concert. Let us suggest then .... that homosexuality may be regarded as a pulsing, vacillant coloring of an individual's way of living his life, and assert that its expressions in _habitus_ , in personality and character, in genitality, in conflict and in psychosis, constitute an exceedingly challenging province in the field of psychiatric study."

George S. Sprague, M.D., "Varieties of Homosexual Manifestation," 1935

Characters:

DR. GREENE: A respected psychoanalyst, trained in America and Europe. What is frequently called a "bland, unassuming" man, around fifty years old. He has a graying mustache and wears a bland, unassuming if well-cut gray suit; nondescript club tie; and round tortoiseshell glasses. His only items of apparel that might be considered halfway "dashing" are his suede spectator shoes, and those are very old.

CYRIL WYNDHAM: A more than promising young painter. He is a fairly slight, suspiciously good-looking young man, just turned thirty. He probably has lustrous if rather lank blond hair a little longer than that of most of his contemporaries, and wears a vaguely Tyrolean double-breasted suit of green loden with braided piping, a cerise shirt, a polka dot bow tie, cerise socks, and the latest trend in tasseled loafers, with a bold yellow pocket handkerchief flowering from his breast pocket. He walks and moves and speaks rather languidly, if a bit haltingly, as if aware he is always being scrutinized, which he often is. Anyone not altogether innocent among his onlookers of the time would recognize at once that, while not exactly a "flaming queen," he is a decidedly non-latent _homosexual_ of the male variety.

Scene:

Dr. Greene's office, on an upper floor of one of the less assertive Art Deco buildings in downtown Chicago. The office is mostly furnished in sleek early mid-century Moderne, all cherry-wood and chrome, though there is something not exactly stylish about it all, and already it seems a bit outdated for this era. Someone, possibly the doctor's wife or secretary, has made small but bold additions to these somewhat cold furnishings: a bright bouquet of yellow long-stemmed roses on a pedestal, a potted aspidistra or two, and copies of several popular impressionist works—like windows onto other worlds—lighting up the beige walls. Outside the high Roman-arched window on far stage right we see mostly clear blue sky and the tops of some of the taller skyscrapers in the Loop. A heavy office door with a transom, far stage left, remains closed until the end of the act. There are of course the requisite African masks scattered about and most noticeably a Venus of Willendorf figurine on the doctor's broad shining cherry-wood desk, demoted to the role of paperweight. Also on the desk are a large chromium-plated cigarette case and complementary matchbox, a large art-glass boomerang-shaped ashtray, several thick medical texts in a pyramid, a discreet Bakelite clock, a chrome reading lamp, a blotting pad, and various stationery items of the era. On the floor before the desk is some sort of expensive primitive-print rug, probably Mesoamerican and from the late nineteen-twenties. The heavy walnut desk chair, no doubt comfortable with its springs and leather padding, might be a relic left over from the end of the last century, but no matter, for we seldom see much of it, except when it accidentally swivels into view. More importantly, there is a streamlined black leather couch with one arm but no bolster, just a bit raddled with age, a few feet from the desk, but at a safe remove from it and nearly perpendicular to the wall. Next to this couch, considerably more intimate with the desk, is a decidedly uncomfortable-looking chrome and black leather armchair. A long-stemmed standing lamp with an adjustable brass-brimmed glass crown presides over armchair and desk; and a patient might conceivably remark to the doctor how much that fixture looks like one of those pie-plate spaceships from Flash Gordon or Captain Video, but none probably ever has; something about this office is too serious for that kind of joke. The time is early afternoon, May, 1950.

The Play

Act One: A Case Study

As the lights go up we see CYRIL WYNDHAM pacing the polished floor of the office, one hand casually thrust into his exquisitely tailored trousers, perusing the room's décor and possessions, while DR. GREENE, wiping and adjusting his glasses, looks on somewhat amused from the well-oiled wheeled chair behind his desk. Cyril pauses at the couch before he reaches the armchair, looking at the good quality Van Gogh reproduction on the wall between chair and couch. He strikes a pose with one hand on his hip and the other drumming fingers against his chin, almost affectedly but quite naturally for his character.

CYRIL WYNDHAM: I see you or your decorator has a fair-to-middling taste in paintings. This Van Gogh with the yellow chair, one of his ones from Arles—not bad! _(Talking to himself:)_ And _so_ predictable. _(He glances one last time about him at the room. Suddenly he seems to relax, pads over to the chair beside the couch, settles into it like a cat who has at last found the perfect sunbeam in which to curl, and manifests a gold cigarette case from one of his many pockets.)_ Smoke?

Dr. Greene leans quite far over to take a cigarette but doesn't light it. Cyril studies him intently for a moment, with the eyes of a fellow professional, then leans back in his chair, taking a cigarette, as well, but also not yet lighting it.

CYRIL _(continuing, as if he has already been talking for hours, though he hasn't)_ : Could be I'm still not certain, Doctor Greene, that you're quite the person I'm looking for! _(Dr. Greene looks at him with cautiously raised eyebrows.)_ I know how busy-busy all you doctors are, and I apologize once more for taking up your time this way, so _impromptu_ of me. _(He pronounces_ impromptu _and any other words or phrases which might be taken for foreign very precisely and with the original accents.)_ I'm afraid that I'm _not_ the kind of patient to whom you're accustomed. I have, of course, many friends who have been or are being analyzed, and I've done my required reading about Freud. I've seen _Lady in the Dark_ at the Lyric, and I know what you consider _normal_ and _abnormal_ and how you try to 'help' those who've lost their bearings, so as to—what is it—so as to 'return to their rightful place in the community.' _(He says this last bit with a trace of disgust, as if quoting something, which he is.)_ However, the trouble with me is that I'm not one seeking any sort of community, and I don't ever intend to! I've always pretty much _enjoyed_ being apart, different...

DR. GREENE: I see. _(Beats a rhythm upon his desk and nods, trying to get Cyril to stop whining and fidgeting.)_ Mr. Wyndham, you may—

CYRIL: Oh, why be formal in a joint like this? _Cyril_ , if you please. _(Gestures coquettishly with his unlit cigarette as if just meeting someone at a bar.)_ And I may call you—

DR. GREENE _(like a man avoiding a live trap)_ : _Dr. Greene_ , if you don't mind. Let's stay on more impartial terms, at least at the beginning, please. Such, I'm afraid, is the standard protocol. _(A pause as both men appraise each other briefly, wondering if anyone has won this initial sparring match.)_ Mr. Wyndham _(Cyril gives him a piercing look)_ or, well, if you insist, _Cyril_ , there must be _something_ about yourself which you don't like, or you wouldn't be here and wouldn't have wanted to see me in such a great hurry.

CYRIL _(settling his willowy curves as deeply as he can into the rather unforgiving angles of the chair):_ Oh, certainly, certainly! There is _something_ I dislike, although you'll probably consider it a trifling detail of secondary importance. _(He flicks at a dangling gold identification bracelet on his left wrist, which he goes on to virtually wave in the doctor's face, as if taunting him.)_

DR. GREENE _(unfazed, but blinking from the glint of the bracelet)_ : Something connected, I presume, with your sex life?

CYRIL _(looking annoyed, although this is not far from his usual expression)_ : _Really_. Such a trite phrase. Why not simply call it 'your love life'? Or do you modern medicine men consider romantic love passé, one of youth's forgotten frailties? Cute little Cupid has been outsold and undone by Eros. _(Once again as if quoting or paraphrasing:)_ 'Almost every male adolescent goes through a phase of homo-cathectic longings, often expressed in what are commonly called _wet dreams_.' _Ugh_. Do all prominent doctors of psychiatry recognize only glands and their unpleasant discharges?

DR. GREENE _(smiling again):_ I hate to disappoint you by saying that the discovery of glands and their functions doesn't change romance into a hackneyed matter. At least, not for me or most of my colleagues. However, I'm sure you're not concerned with _my_ views about love, but would prefer—shall we say?—some help for _your_ glands.

CYRIL _(sitting up, alert):_ You've hit the bull's eye, Doctor, uh, _Greene,_ if you insist. My love life is _perfect_. I love, and am loved, as few men are. However, there is a certain element of frustration, or shall I say, disappointment in the _execution_ of my love, which, because it is activated with such _ferocity_ , interferes with my happiness. If you could help me eliminate this tiny but crucial weakness of mine, I'd be ever so grateful. _(Throughout this speech he has been lighting his cigarette with a match he has taken from the box on the desk, quite at ease, and now inhales and exhales a single puff, watching the smoke spiral in the air, toward Van Gogh's simple yellow chair. In the meantime Dr. Greene at last lights his own cigarette.)_

DR. GREENE: If you do want my help, you'll have to be a tad more, well, _specific_. _(Draws in on his cigarette slowly, contemplatively, so as not to miss a word.)_

CYRIL: I know that I'll have to, but it is _rather_ painful, even humiliating. Still, there's no reason to beat around the proverbial burning bush. After all, you _are_ some sort of doctor, aren't you? So I might as well get it over with... _(Abruptly stops smoking and looks over the top of the desk, as if searching for something among the many items.)_ Doctor, aren't you going to take notes? I thought _all_ psychiatrists or psychologists took notes. They do in the movies.

DR. GREENE: That's psycho _analyst_. Never mind, they're often confused. And it's just not my method to take notes during a casual interview like this. Don't worry, the pens and pads and ink-blots will all come out in due time—if I do see you again, that is.

CYRIL: A bit like flinging oils about without making any preliminary sketches, wouldn't you say? Or is that a bad analogy, more applicable to those in my own line of work? _(Receiving no response other than a noncommittal nod, he clears his throat, steadies his cigarette, and begins delivering what sounds a bit like a well-rehearsed argument.)_ Perhaps I might sound conceited, but I presume that my name may have been somewhat familiar to you before your secretary got my call the other day. Chicago is _so_ provincial, especially its art world, when one hardly has to be around for more than a couple of seasons to become practically a 'legend.' As you probably already know, I was born here—Evanston, actually—and that was, uh, _thirty_ long years ago last month—April 1, 1920. So like yourself I am now _irremediably_ old. But, maybe you realize this, I've still become fairly well-regarded for such a superannuated _ingénu_. Could it be you've seen some of my little daubs? _(Dr. Greene nods, again noncommittally.)_ My latest 'masterwork' on exhibit at the Adler Gallery just a block or two from here has _already_ been featured in the _Daily News_ : it shows a very young and very pretty boy looking into a cheval glass, from which he sees his image emerging somewhat changed and somewhat more _girlish_... _(Looking the doctor directly into his eyes, leaning across the desk.)_ Well, you ought to know this pretty boy is _real_ and he unreservedly and unconditionally _loves_ me.

DR. GREENE: Perhaps then you should tell me something more about him. _(Leans back with his cigarette, prepared for anything.)_

CYRIL _(shrugs)_ : He himself is of as little _real_ importance as the original yellow chair that Van Gogh used as his model. _(Gestures with his cigarette toward the picture on the wall behind him.)_ For your future records, in which, I presume, figures will be more important than ideas, you may note that he is nineteen, looks _all_ of twenty, and acts like a goddamn pouting six-year-old. This pretty young boy loves me, but my ability to express my own love is... _impaired_. I'd like to eradicate this ridiculous _weakness_ , that's all... I know that you headshrinkers don't consider my love _as_ love, but as a _perversion_ —and that you'll probably advise me to do something drastic about it. It's ludicrous, of course, to treat my love, just because its object happens to be a boy instead of a girl, as if it were a malady! _Ugh_ , what's so extra-special about _girls_? _(He shrugs exaggeratedly and adjusts the wings of his bow-tie.)_ Why should an intelligent man lavish his time, his money, and his love on those bedizened, feeble-minded creatures? How can a female be expected to understand a _man_ , to know what men really like, since they're so _different_ , so altogether alien? And how can a man love organisms so dissimilar, or expect to be loved by them? So what's wrong with my being happy in my own very special way? _(He sits back, pleased with himself, then jumps with pain—he has singed his well-manicured fingertip on his glowing cigarette butt as he was putting it out in the ashtray on the doctor's desk.)_

DR. GREENE _(almost as if smiling at Cyril's fleeting pain)_ : But _are_ you happy?

CYRIL ( _unhesitatingly_ ): Certainly! _(Trying to talk while sucking on the tip of his burnt finger:)_ Well, I am as happy, and as _unhappy_ , as the usual human being... If Monty's—oh, that's his moniker, I mean Montgomery—if he's with me, I'm happy. Without him, I am wracked, wrecked. _Voilà_! But I'm _not_ unhappy merely because I'm in love with a boy instead of a _girl_!

DR. GREENE: Why do you assume that I'm against your choice of a love object?

CYRIL _(shrugs again)_ : Oh, I've read some of those analytical articles, the racier ones, and I know that you would call me an outright _pervert_.

DR. GREENE: Never mind the name. That's purely a terminological misconstruction. As a doctor, I'm only interested in helping the patient.

CYRIL: Does that mean that you can cure me of my sexual _insecurities_ without interfering with my ideas about life and love?

DR. GREENE: It means that I would try to help you to the extent you _want_ to be helped. But I can't guarantee that analysis won't interfere with all your other personality traits.

CYRIL _(gets up from his chair and paces the room once more, then halts before another picture on the wall and executes another pose)_ : That sounds tricky to me, doc!

DR. GREENE: It's really an honest warning. When we start an analysis, we can't predict how much the patient will _decide_ to change.

CYRIL _(returns to his chair but doesn't yet sit down)_ : But I _know_ what it is I want to change. I'm sure nothing you could tell me, nothing you could discover in my tormented and terribly symbolic dreams, with all your medical mumbo-jumbo, would influence me in any other way.

DR. GREENE _(lowering his eyeglasses)_ : Oh?

CYRIL: I know that I may be _forced_ to change my mind against my will, while not realizing I'm doing that at all. That's what you're hoping to accomplish, admit it. I know that, in analysis, supposedly everyone becomes dependent upon the analyst. You'll become the lover I can never possess. Or my father. Or both. I'm not entirely stupid—I've read enough books. At least the sexy parts.

DR. GREENE: Psychoanalysis is still a young discipline, but those books emphasize that contemporary science can only—

CYRIL _(saluting)_ : Hurrah, God bless you, science! What could be more wondrous than science, which has given us the armored bra, the steam-powered razor, the A-bomb, and rubber baby buggy bumpers? _Science_ , which in the past has told us you can judge a born murderer by the bumps on his scalp or the slope of his chin or else by reading résumés in the stars; _science_ , which says we're cousin to the baboon—an insult to the baboon; _science_ , which wants to take all the beauty and mystery out of life by telling us the moon is simply a big unpolished lump of coal and our hearts have only four chambers instead of room enough for the whole world!

DR. GREENE: No need to criticize further, Mr. Wyndham—I know science's limits as well as anyone and envy your flights of fancy; I envy you artists and your freedoms, I do, living among sunflowers and bullfights. If I were a painter, I often wonder as I'm hustled through the endless museums of Europe, what would I paint, and how? Forgive me for getting dangerously personal and unprofessional here, but a person such as you could answer me—does one have to be psychotic or an outcast to produce great, lasting art? These are old concerns of poets and painters, I know, but I really do think that on a day-to-day basis you have it easier—luxuriating in the attractive _surface_ of things, exuberantly orgiastic bodies and scintillant seascapes, or at worst playing dress-up with your fears. _(He raises the top book from the pile on his desk, a volume flimsier than the rest, wanting to making an object-lesson of it but forgetting his point immediately.)_ How... how _do_ I put this? From my very own cadaver in anatomy class to sounding the depths of the clinically insane's hallucinations during my visits to the Cook County Hospital, I have seen and heard horrors that periodically make me ask myself if I am either masochist or misanthrope, for that's what the uglier side of science leads one to dwell upon in the wee hours, while one's blessedly ignorant wife snores away. _(A fugitive expression of repugnance, as if he has seen a spider dangling before him, crosses his face and is instantly erased. The audience is beginning to think that perhaps the doctor is not quite so coolly achromatic as that polite character actor upon the stage—or rather, within his office—pretends to be.)_

CYRIL: See? This is why your science must be overhauled, before we are all madmen. I am afraid that like most thrill-seekers I am a _devotée_ of the new and the shocking, but this scientific culture of ours is too quick to subject us to cruel experiments of the sort they unearthed at Nürnberg and too easily places new and improved Greek fire in the hands of bigots and bullies. From the Crusades to this warmed-over conflict called the Cold War. Bah, s _cience_!

DR. GREENE _(lovingly stacking and aligning his books as Cyril speaks, as if to prove their weight and worth, then subtly altering his tone)_ : This same science, which crafted the bright colors on your canvases and allows us to hear the spirits of Caruso and Galli-Curci as if they were in the room with us, singing to us alone. Trust me, I often see little difference between medicine and art, both as imperfect as ourselves and our nervous systems. We are born questioning and probably will die with still more questions on our lips, but at least science tries to provide some answers along the way. If the answers are altered over the years, that doesn't mean the effort was futile. _(Pats the top of his pyramid.)_ Think of penicillin mold and think of the growing need for a polio vaccine. Psychology too is the servant of man, earnestly trying to ameliorate some of mankind's pain, too much of which is self-inflicted. Maps we've been able to draw so far of the human psyche are still mostly empty, vaster than Antarctica, with only vague territories claimed or staked out. What can we ever _truly_ know? Yet, as is often said, the beginning of knowledge is to know what we do _not_ know. So, please, if you will, do us the favor of returning to the import of your visit.

CYRIL: Such _is_ the import. I fear I'm going to be drawn and quartered by your brand of science. I _know_ , I _feel_ that I can't change myself, even if I wanted to.

DR. GREENE: Then how do you expect _me_ to change _you_?

CYRIL: Well, I'm not so terribly naïf as to expect you to do it merely by _ordering_ me to change. As I've already told you, I have read enough. _(Revising both his tactics and physical expressions:)_ Hmmm... I remember one case history in particular, about an unfortunate _married_ man who merely fantasized about other men, without ever daring to approach a single one. But, as he progressed in his treatment, he actually initiated his first affair with a golf partner. That shows how clever-clever you doctors are! For a prolonged while he got his kicks, while he continued to _seek help_. He kept up the analytical treatment, reporting his dreams like the daily headlines, saying what went through his mind, and so forth... He kept on with this parapsychological vivisection because the doctor was so _very_ kind and he was confident that nothing would interfere with this new love-life. His wife, of course, suspected nothing. Then the doctor surprised him. First he showed this poor misguided soul that the people he was afraid of represented his _father—_ and next the doctor shocked him further by proving that his boyfriend really represented his _mother_! How grotesque! The man who, regardless of his marriage, thought that he had succeeded in freeing himself from females, was only to find out that the man he loved was not a _real_ man at all, in fact nothing more than a garden-variety _fairy_ , a promiscuous flit. _Ssshit_! _(As he draws out the last word, he begins once more to pace the room, this time stopping abruptly before the same Van Gogh he had envied at first; he looks at it even more intensely, then reels around to face the doctor.)_ Since reading that case, I suppose I've lost some of my inner confidence. I've begun to doubt... Can it be that Montgomery, my fetching curly-headed Monty, isn't a boy, but a _girl—_ to me? That, in spite of the physiological facts which I see and enjoy, it's—well, shall I say 'his soul,' because it's definitely not his mind—which makes me crack up over him? _(Walks over to confront the doctor on the other side of the desk, firmly placing both palms down on its surface and leaning in.)_ Do you know _why_ you love your wife? Do you know the real reason why you spend half your life and half your income on that gorgeous, overdressed, stuck-up—excuse me— _bitch_ I met outside the elevator? Come now, relax, doc, I know without a doubt that it was she. How could I have mistaken her for anyone else? Oh, she is cool, a carven cameo. Positively _reeking_ of White Shoulders, too, just the sort of fragrance a jealous husband buys... No, I hope you don't put _her_ through the magic X-ray—or you may find that she isn't a woman at all, but your father—or your great-uncle! _(Retreats to his chair and sits, looking out of the window at nonexistent clouds, satisfaction on his face.)_ I'm sure you don't bother about your own tidy unconscious. You couldn't afford to, not at your exorbitant fees—and not with the kind of hats and furs your wife wears! Georges Kaplan of New York, I presume? Balenciaga? _(A long pause, while he searches the doctor's face for any sign of being perturbed.)_ What _did_ that doctor mean, when he said that his patient's boyfriend represented his mother, et cetera?

DR. GREENE _(trying not to seem ruffled, controlling any emotion by staring as expressionlessly as he can at Cyril)_ : He meant— _I_ meant, because I know you know very well that that doctor was me, as described in _my_ paper, which you must have looked up at Northwestern's or Loyola's library—that the feeling that man had for his 'friend' was, in part, the emotion he felt for his mother when he was a child.

CYRIL: Now, how was he able to discover a truly incredible thing like _that_?

DR. GREENE _(pleased with himself, stroking his mustache)_ : Good enough, since you've obviously done your research on me, you should be able to answer your own question. It was possible to see what this patient of mine wanted from his friend through his own dreams and associations. The desires expressed in them not only reminded him of the pampering he had received in childhood from his rather mollycoddling mother, but were actual repetitions of his earlier experiences. However, there was _one_ important difference. _(Assumes more of the usual oratory style of a practiced lecturer now.)_ In his relationship with what he called his 'boyfriend,' my patient not only played the role of the infant who is nursed by his mother, but also cast himself in the _part_ of his mother, nursing a child—his friend. He not only insisted on being loved as an infant is, but also on the fulfillment of all his wishes at one and the same time.

CYRIL _(nodding enthusiastically, as if watching a play)_ : Yes, your description—or shall I say, your analysis?—seems nearly correct, I know from my own perverse experience... But what's so _wrong_ with my love, as long as it makes me—or him—happy?

DR. GREENE: Allow me if you will to quote from an article by a high-ranking authority that has just been published. _(He flips through the book he had previously removed from the top of the stack, since then open and lying await on his desk, and quickly finds the passage:)_ 'There are no happy homosexuals, and there would not be _even if_ society condoned their actions.' My emphasis. Now, to go on: 'Their problem is internal: Unconsciously they _want_ to be disappointed to justify their feelings of being unfairly treated.... A man who unconsciously chases after disappointment cannot be consciously happy.' It may be that I am unable or unready to entirely agree with that thesis, but in practice I fear I've found it to be as true as not. Now, as long as your way _seems_ to make you happy, there's no out-and-out necessity for me to interfere. But the fact that you're here today shows that it doesn't—make you happy, I mean. Why _are_ you here, would you mind stating again?

CYRIL: Well, a _normal_ man isn't always happy, either. Disappointments can't be avoided. You can't assert that being in love with a woman with _breasts_ and all those other icky things, instead of a boy, is a guarantee against confusion, unhappiness, and misery.

DR. GREENE: There are as many different kinds of women as there are, well... new hats and handbags each season, apparently.

CYRIL _(almost sneering)_ : But your own adorable wife, you would have me believe, personifies _perfection_. She loves only you, has eyes only for you, darling! She has but one wish—to make you (and I suppose whatever perfect children you might have engendered together) happy. Ah, sweet domestic bliss! I suppose you'll tell me next she's every bit as glamorous and seductive as she was on the first day you set eyes on her. Doubtless. She's spent a lot on upkeep, hasn't she? I suppose you _never_ get green with spleen because that 'brainless nincompoop,' as I recently heard another man much like you address his mate in a fit of despair regarding a banking overdraft, is unable to examine a difference of opinions intelligently. I suppose unlike me you've _never_ actually cried out in the agonies of jealousy, all because your beloved is attracted to some shallow-minded, heroically muscled moron, who she'll in turn desert as soon as a man with more money and fame makes her an offer! _(Noticing that he has become agitated and is no longer really addressing the doctor or talking about the doctor's personal problems, he reins himself in. There is an awkward pause as he collects himself.)_

DR. GREENE: So... your pretty boy is really quite a bad boy, isn't he?

CYRIL _(looking slightly startled at his hands, which he has clasped so tightly together in his lap he has dug the nails into his own flesh)_ : You can't call him either good or bad. He's neither, because he's unable to differentiate between right and wrong. He's an unbearable _child_... He picks and chooses and takes what he likes and _uses_ people and things, and he creates mayhem and destroys idylls, and what's worse, _he_ doesn't mind—he actually encourages me to do the same...

DR. GREENE: But _you_ do mind, don't you?

CYRIL _(raising one hand to his face, to study his identification bracelet, as if he must be reminded of his own name)_ : Naturally I do.

DR. GREENE: I suppose it is difficult for any adult to accept without protest another adult playing the part of a bawling infant.

CYRIL: Indeed, an infant in the anal stage! Oh, it's _humiliating_ , degrading, demoralizing, and I simply can't help myself... Oh, please, Dr. Greene, can't you teach me to take it all as lightly as Monty does?

DR. GREENE: I'm afraid that I can't. Because I find your reaction to your friend's behavior unqualifiedly justifiable.

CYRIL _(after a sudden pause, forgetting his bracelet)_ : Then what on earth shall I ever _do_?

DR. GREENE: Mmm... maybe you should go and find another, ahem, 'friend.'

CYRIL _(looking petulant)_ : But they're _all_ like that, you see! You don't know _them_ , the call-boys and hustlers and common street punks, or else you wouldn't suggest— After all, I've had some experience with the whole lot of them, with their instabilities, the ebb and flow of their affections, their promiscuity, their outlandish lies... But that's somehow _why_ they attract me.

DR. GREENE: Exactly, exactly. Now, in analysis you may discover that this attraction is based on some sort of misreading of social signals, that you stick to this attraction because you're afraid of another, and that, while this fear was justified when you were a squalling bedwetting child, it is senseless at the present time. As a result, you may decide to act as an adult, to cease repeating your formative experiences, and to accept the fact that you're no longer a helpless infant. Could be you may even fall in love with a strong and mature woman. You see, that's why I can't guarantee that analysis will affect only your _sexual_ weakness. It may end up changing your entire personality. You may, ipso facto, become a new man, a _different_ man.

CYRIL _(with increasing irritation)_ : But what about my art, my _painting_? Will I want to stop handling brushes and solvents when I discover what art means to me—subconsciously? You may be an excellent conjure man and an expert in flushing the sewers of the soul and all that; you may know, exactly to the minute, how long optimum lovemaking should last, and how much a man should invest in making it last longer, but—

DR. GREENE: But—

CYRIL _(more softly)_ : Don't be offended. I really am getting to admire you, as I admire anyone who lives by his wits. You're not just one of those cuckoo-bird Viennese analysts who claim everything is all about sex and sex and nothing but sex... I assume that, in spite of being a psycho _analyst_ , you don't share in the super-biological outlook of Herr Freud and don't try to reduce the infinite variety of human thought to simple schoolyard representations of our embarrassingly under- or over-sized genitals... Nobody could deny the existence of the libido, but for God's sake, let's admit that there are additional drives, desires, and tendencies!

DR. GREENE: I don't know why you accuse Doctor Freud of being some kind of sex maniac. Even if you haven't bothered to read his books, you must admit that his standing, as well as the results he achieved, should show that he wasn't interested solely in coitus, or its simulacra.

CYRIL: As I already confessed, I've read enough of the dirty parts, Father Greene. Doesn't old Sigmund preach that all neuroses are caused by a lack of sexual intercourse? Isn't psychoanalysis based on the dogma that the human being is impelled by a base desire to just get out there and _fornicate_?

DR. GREENE: If that's the sole impression you got from what you read in Psych 101, then there may be something wrong with your ability to interpret the nuances. _(Standing to the side of his desk and once again beginning to sound like a lecturer, as if he were facing a classroom.)_ First of all, our friend Freud never preached. Psychology is not a religion. On the basis of data he collected in treating otherwise untreatable neurotics, Freud developed a theory in which two instincts were suggested: the sexual and the narcissistic. After years of further research, he changed that theory into one in which he defined the two main instincts as sexual and aggressive. But he never insisted that his theory was the _only_ possible approach to take when regarding the complexities of instinctual drives. He even referred to this pet theory of his as a sort of 'mythology,' and always stressed the difference between the actual facts he collected and the leaps of faith he made. The theory of instincts, far from being a psychoanalytic credo, is a sort of, well, filing system for the aggregation and organization of the material we get from our patients' unconscious minds. _(Returns to his chair and sits down again with some finality.)_

CYRIL _(apologetically)_ : Could be you're right, Dr. Greene. You see, I'm not a scientist. I am however an _artist_ , and if I work hard enough I may even become an important one. When I studied Freud and Jung and Adler and all that lot in freshman year, I wasn't interested so much in ascertaining whether their texts contained indisputable truths, but sought only to obtain a certain sort of _aesthetic_ pleasure from them—and I did receive that, to a point, as do those frumious frauds Miró and Matta and Magritte, to name only a few of my better-known rivals. Anyway, to get back to the subject at hand... Many of those scientists' ideas appear highly stimulating, while others sound, let me put it kindly, a teensy bit hyperbolic. _(Now standing, too, and doing a bit of lecturing himself.)_ But, _as an artist_ , I know that, in creating new things, we all must exaggerate. Without the feeling that what we've just produced is the most important thing in all creation, we would never dare disturb the peace and comfort of our fellow man. You see, I realize that we all prefer to be unperturbed; we all appreciate the status quo. But some of us are pressured, at times, to interrupt the colorless monotony of life. Something infiltrates our self-defenses, explodes in our hearts and our brains, and we have to rise and give testimony to what's happened. We discover new continents, new realms of the imagination; we tame nature, liberate reason, and alter humanity's thoughts about itself and the universe! _(Now as if speaking to a packed assemblage, from a dais, his voice rising almost to a shout.)_ Yet they arrest us, jail us, try us, hang us, burn us, _crucify_ us! We are their scapegoats, their cracked looking glasses, their own worst fright-mares. We suffer all the passions of a million Christs. Just because we are _different_ , because we see things _differently_. Still and all, it's not as if we had any choice... _(Blindly backs into his chair and almost collapses onto its seat. Sighs with a flourish of his hands. Soon he is much calmer and barely raises his voice above a whisper.)_ Forgive me for voicing this opinion, doctor, but you mustn't regard me the way you would your _average_ patient. You might end up admiring _me_ the same way I've begun to admire you—but I myself, I hate to say, am not here to be admired. I want your help, _need_ your help, to be sure. I want it, that is, on the condition that you won't interfere with my love life or somehow stymie my work. You must savvy that it would make me miserable to be deprived of my ability to paint or to love, just to be cured of a so-called sexual _weakness_. I tell you again, I am not your _ordinary_ nutcase... You'll have to take another tack, alter your modus operandi with me. Compare me with anyone, if you really must; confuse me, however, with no one...

DR. GREENE _(emitting a low whistle)_ : Now I _am_ confused. Dare I compare you with other patients to see how _different_ you are, or would it be better to abstain from all comparisons, lest I _admire_ you and your talents too much? Either way, I wouldn't want your fan club to deny me membership.

CYRIL _(pleased, grinning, gives a satiric salute)_ : _Touché_! Next time, I must prepare a better riposte of my own. Why, you _are_ as smart a smarty pants as she said you would be... Hey, Dr. Greene, I have a truly _marvelous_ idea... Would you like to lunch at the University Club with me some day soon and meet my young Montgomery? As they say, he's simply _divine_ , you'll see for yourself.

DR. GREENE _(briskly, professionally)_ : I'm sorry. We don't meet our patients socially, and you could very well become one. You get the picture, it would interfere with your treatment, the sacrosanct doctor-patient relationship.

CYRIL: Now, _really_! I guess I ought to salute you again! In order to help me—that is, if I decide to undergo a _treatment_ —sounds like a regimen at a spa or a procedure at a salon—let me begin again: In order to safeguard my treatment, you're willing to give up an opportunity to meet a rising star such as myself socially and mingle freely with fair Chicago's most celebrated _artistes_?

DR. GREENE ( _rather amused_ ): Hold it there, please. Why should you assume that my refusal is a sacrifice? How do you know that I _would_ like to dine with you and your chichi friends, even if you weren't my patient? ( _Ceremoniously stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray atop the desk._ )

CYRIL _(after a shocked pause, as if he has never been denied before; then covering the wounded look on his face with his florid, bejeweled hands)_ : Oh, _well_... _(Somewhat louder and clearer, in semi-sarcastic tones:)_ Lord, lord, this is preposterous! I feel it is very possible, kind sir, that you _don't_ like me, after all. That you might even despise me. For being... _different_. _Abnormal_. After all, I'm a... an _artist_. Still... why snub me outright when you're obviously such a... such a _sophisticated_ gentleman?

DR. GREENE _(leans back in his chair, folding his hands):_ Go back a little. Why should a lack of interest in dining with you indicate that I despise you?

CYRIL _(palms still over his face, softly again)_ : I do suppose you think people would talk, seeing the three of us together. _(Peers between his fingers.)_ Please tell me you wouldn't think that. ( _Momentary pause._ ) Pretty please? ( _Another momentary pause, broken by a little cheerless laughter._ ) Dear, dear, this _is_ terrible! You should _never_ have said what you did, you—you _philistine_! Everyone wants on _my_ dance card. I've supped with Mayor Kennelly, I've sucked up to goddamn Archbishop Stritch, I've hobnobbed with any number of doyennes and deans, mavens and ministers. Oh, the insult, the _insult_ —I'll never get over it!

DR. GREENE _(unmoved by Cyril's half-serious gestures)_ : Well, if you truly want to be analyzed, many such blows will have to fall. To be cured, you must be able to give up the idea that everyone _admires_ you, as you put it, and that the lack of admiration means disaster. _(Cyril looks up from his hands, tears nearly dripping from his reddened eyes.)_ Now, don't be absurd, my good man. Colleagues and critics will give you all the attention and appreciation you demand. Maybe friends, too. You're a grown person, strong enough to take rejection, indifference, even—

CYRIL: But you don't _understand_! An artist who gives so much to others _must_ get something in exchange, or he grows cold, he trembles, he freezes to death! Might as well snuggle a slab of ice. Only one thing can melt me. After the solitude of the creative act, I feel immobilized, nearly dead; I feel empty... and personally, I need attention, affection, _love_.

DR. GREENE _(dryly)_ : We _all_ need love. However, you may be right. Participants in the creative fields may ultimately need more than others. But don't you get enough love from your 'divine' Mr. Montgomery?

CYRIL _(suddenly invigorated once again, half-rising from his chair, spreading his arms)_ : Tut tut, I'll never have enough! The more I get, the more I want! Even when I'm with him, when I'm happy, when you'd think I'd reached my fill, I'm still not satisfied. When the doorman rings, when I hear the elevator rise and feel the tension rising inside me—mounting floor by floor until it hurts like hell, as I wait for him—I feel that tension begin to dissipate, even then... When I unlock the door and see it really, really is Monty, my prodigal boy, I begin to breathe more freely, and life magically becomes a joy! I feel happy, flush with promise, at least in those first few moments of reunion... But those minutes pass, and his words, our first shy pettings and then bolder manipulations, the way he looks at me and the way I look at him—everything which helps me release my tension—begins to produce a new, even stronger desire. _(Dramatically, like a silent movie vamp, caressing his own cheek.)_ My lips, which quenched my thirst when I kissed him, grow more fiery still, and the passion spreads from where it has kindled in my loins. I feel my very soul aflame. The bed itself could be on fire!

DR. GREENE _(somewhat baffled by Cyril's histrionics)_ : At the risk of sounding like I have too prurient an interest, could you try if you might to be more anatomically specific, a little less metaphorical?

CYRIL: With a virtual _stranger_? I really haven't the _nerve_ to tell you whether it's anything like premature ejaculation or post-coital depression. I suppose you would say it's all a matter of _performance_ —and together Montgomery and I share some sort of stage-fright. ( _The doctor flashes Cyril a look._ ) You think I'm being coy, but coyness is crucial to my nature. _Camouflage_ , one of your profession would say.

DR. GREENE: For the time being, let's just call what you experience a _dysfunction_ and go on from there...

CYRIL ( _perturbed, but proceeding_ ): As I was telling you, even during the unequivocal height of the act, something inhibits our love-play. Another presence is in the room. A part of myself or Montgomery remains always so cool, so strange, and afterward everything seems so, so...

DR. GREENE ( _interrupting, the words too soon on his lips_ ): —And you feel unfulfilled?

CYRIL _(flatly)_ : Not quite. Maybe. I suppose... It is complicated. You know, when I love someone, just the fact that I love him makes him the most desirable, the most intensely attractive person in all of creation! Montgomery, on the other hand, feels that anyone who stoops to love _him_ must therefore be inferior. See, I do know psychology. Because he thinks he is worthless himself, he feels a real _repulsion_ for anyone who lusts after him.

DR. GREENE: Then your relationship isn't so very happy, after all.

CYRIL _(deflated)_ : You've hit the nail on the head, for it isn't. Yesterday, I spent three tiresome hours at a cocktail party on that street Chicagoans persist in calling _Go-eeth-ee_ , given no option but to answer all sorts of silly questions. And why was I there? Because I was hoping that he would show up, and I'd be able to talk to him, light his cigarette, touch his hand... _(His mouth twitches, as if he might cry again.)_ But he didn't show up, the sneaking bastard...

DR. GREENE _(deftly forcing the dagger deeper)_ : Maybe then he simply doesn't love you.

CYRIL _(soberly looking at his pristine nails, switching tactics)_ : Oh, but he does, he _does_. These beautiful but dumb brats all fall for brains, don't you know. He loves me in that suffocating way any infant loves its nurturer. He loves me because he _needs_ my love, my protection; when I paint him, he becomes a real Adonis; talking to me, he feels witty; going out with me, he is rich. Without me, he is no longer so distinctive. He returns to the unwashed and unremarkable masses from whence he came. Yet, he does love me, doctor, he does, and I think that's why he also hates me. Why, he tries continuously to hurt, humiliate, and outright _escape_ me!

DR. GREENE _(after ceremoniously clearing his throat)_ : Why don't you let him go, then?

CYRIL: It's not so cut-and-dried as all that. By seeing him, I don't have to _think_ about him. You see, _I_ need him, too! Montgomery has no more brain or soul than Pygmalion's statue or Hoffmann's clockwork dolls. He's a butterfly, a gaudy peacock. This incarnation of beauty, without memory, without conscience, completely inhuman, half-animal and half-god, might as well be my twin brother! He is too much like me, and we are too much like all those half-men who resemble ourselves. We understand each other, yes, and agree on practically everything—with the exception of those considerable points on which he is wrong. Without him, I'm bored; I have no ideas and can't paint, can't even get out of bed. I _need_ my Montgomery, and I need the pain, the infinite frustration he brings me. ( _Takes another cigarette from his case and lights it quickly with his own small pocket lighter, while scarcely looking at it._ ) Don't misapprehend me. I am not a masochist. I loathe taking orders. And, just my opinion, but whips and chains are in the _worst_ possible taste. I don't like pain, but still can't create without some cerebral form of it. My brain is—I hate to say it—like the womb of a _woman_. There, I have said it, and unfortunately it's true. My ideas are like—what are they— _ovula_. They must be fertilized to multiply, develop, and grow. I'm like the humble oyster, which to produce a shining pearl, must be irritated by a grain of sand. And screw me silly if I don't throw my pearls before swine... _(Seeing that his profanity hasn't gotten much of a response from the doctor.)_ Ah, you will _never_ sense what I mean! But if Monty, who can't distinguish a Pablo Picasso from a Norman Rockwell, can sometimes guess what my paintings try to say, then, by a similar miracle, you too may get what I _feel_. _(Draws a deep breath from the cigarette and looks anxiously across the desk.)_

DR. GREENE _(rising from his chair again)_ : I'm glad you've given me a sporting chance. In reply, I'd like to assure you about your work. As a rule, I _don't_ reassure my patients. Rather, I stimulate their criticism of themselves and inevitably _increase_ their worries. _(Chuckles a little at himself while moving around his desk clockwise to face Cyril.)_ But in this case, I don't mind telling you that my experience, and that of my confrères, indicates that analysis, in the long run, is very unlikely to hinder artistic ability in the least, even in the case of certified genius. _(Inspired by Cyril, he has taken a new cigarette from the case on the desk and automatically lights it with a match as he talks:)_ To be sure, the neurotic defense mechanism and self-actuated creation stem from similar drives. But if an individual has inherent abilities to produce auto-gratifying works of art, he almost always avoids becoming debilitatingly neurotic in the popular sense. We circle close but don't interfere with that part of your unconscious which allows you to create. Therefore, I think I can promise that, should you start your analysis and be cured, your work won't be negatively affected one iota. In fact, it might even _improve_. _(Exhales a cloud of smoke.)_

CYRIL _(looking up at the doctor as he meditatively puffs his own cigarette)_ : But what about Montgomery? As I've explained, I'm unfortunately unable to work at all without him.

DR. GREENE: You worked before you met him, didn't you?

CYRIL: Yes. But there was always _some_ Montgomery or Montague in _some_ bar.

DR. GREENE _(sits on edge of desk, closer to Cyril)_ : Was it _always_ a boy?

CYRIL: _Always_ , of course. Girls just don't appeal to me.

DR. GREENE: Did you ever try to discover why?

CYRIL: Yes, I suppose I did. First of all, women are frigid. That is, practically every one of them... Go on—you're going to say your beautiful animated mannequin of a wife should be excepted, I presume.

DR. GREENE _(biting his tongue as he prematurely puts out his cigarette)_ : Wait a minute there. _Practically_ all? Then you admit there may be other exceptions?

CYRIL _(pursing his lips)_ : Mmmm... I was just thinking of Doris. Oh, Doris, you dodo!

DR. GREENE _(triumph awakening in his eyes)_ : _Doris_? Now, who is she?

CYRIL _(self-consciously dangling his limber wrist)_ : Oh, just some nice, innocent girl who's in love with me.

DR. GREENE: Is that so? Innocent but not frigid? _(Seats himself on the other side of the desk now.)_

CYRIL: Neither frigid, nor a nymphomaniac, nor inhibited, nor flagrant. Just a nice, normal girl. Or woman, what have you. Nice, as I said. Normal, as I said. Well, not altogether _normal_ , or she wouldn't have fallen in love with _me_.

DR. GREENE: Does she... ?

CYRIL _(with a sigh)_ : Yes, of course she knows... A few days ago, we had it out. I'd begun to notice that she was getting a little _too_ interested in me and my paintings... You see, she's a pupil of mine in a studio workshop I teach now and then at the Art Institute. An older student, practically an old maid—thirty-two or so—and a tad maternal, I'm afraid... Well, she's been coming on strong this spring, and frankly I'm beginning to feel a little embarrassed for her. _(He stares down at those beautifully manicured fingernails of his beautifully elongated artist's hands.)_

DR. GREENE: Possibly even annoyed?

CYRIL: No, not annoyed. Just embarrassed, for her sake. A little scared myself, perhaps. She's only a shopgirl, after all. She wouldn't _rape_ me, but I don't want her to waste her time. After all, there are plenty of _normal_ men around who'd be ready and willing to take her as she comes. We have, however, forged a sort of friendship. So, a few days ago, while we were sitting in the Palmer House mezzanine sipping vermouth after class, I asked her rather bluntly what she was expecting of me. Her answer was just as blunt—'Only _you_ , silly.' Providentially, one might write, some mutual friends arrived just then, and we interrupted our conversation. The next day, I received _sheaves_ of _splendiferous_ dafodillies from Carson Pirie Scott, with a letter—a nice one. She writes well. She ought to be a writer, not a clerk or a painter; there's no money in painting! _(Looks up at the doctor and puts his hand into the inside pocket of his silk-lined jacket.)_ I have the letter here. Would you care for me to read it to you?

DR. GREENE _(nodding, barely able to contain his interest)_ : Mmm-mmm...

CYRIL _(pulls out a monogrammed envelope, removes the letter, shakes it flat, and reads, imitating the breathy voice of a young woman)_ : 'I want you, Cyril. As simple as that. It's not too much, because less wouldn't satisfy me. And it's not too little, because you mean so much to me, and it's not just some sorority crush...' _(Looks down at the letter after he has finished reading it, smiling. He folds the letter carefully and replaces it in its envelope. Gently, ironically, he puts it back into his pocket as if it were a last telegram from the battlefront.)_

DR. GREENE: And what was your response?

CYRIL: Oh, I felt flattered, naturally. Who wouldn't? Well, probably you wouldn't, because all your patients are in love with you. At least, so I've heard... But my patien—my pupils, have better etiquette, on the whole. They usually only fall in love with each other, poor things. _(A pause, then smiling, to take the sting out of his words.)_ Really, I wonder what your patients see in _you_. That bolshie mustache, for instance! I'm not at all impressed. But maybe it's just because you're not my type.

DR. GREENE _(smiling as well)_ : Be that as it may, my patients begin to 'fall in love' with me, as you put it, only after they've spent a few strenuous weeks on that couch. We doctors merely call it transference.

CYRIL: Oh, really? _(Pats couch on his right.)_ This couch, this ungainly, ungodly thing they marked down at the Merchandise Mart, has some magic power?

DR. GREENE: No, no, not at all. But when they lie on it, they can't see me! So they can imagine I'm William Powell, or even Lauren Bacall, if they prefer.

CYRIL _(laughing)_ : Good... pretty good! I probably should keep a score of your sallies... But, to return to Doris, if I may—I wish you'd advise me how to go about handling her. You see, I _do_ rather, _sort_ of like her. Come to think of it, I guess I like her a tremendous deal. That is, for an older woman who likes playing the flirt and the temptress—one gets used to such types in the art business. But she doesn't induce the positively fiery response, the heart palpitations, the drying lips, that I get just by picturing Monty in my mind!

DR. GREENE: What kind of emotion does Doris produce in you, then?

CYRIL ( _shrugs_ ): Oh, I feel at most pleasantly relaxed, rocked in a bassinet, as it were, at ease.

DR. GREENE: But sometimes you do get... embarrassed?

CYRIL: Oh, only if _s-e-x_ is mentioned.

DR. GREENE: And she knows about Montgomery.

CYRIL: Of course, of course.

DR. GREENE: Is she jealous?

CYRIL: Curiously enough, she _isn't_. Come to think of it.

DR. GREENE: Why not, then?

CYRIL: She's convinced that I'll drop him in the end.

DR. GREENE: And fall for her?

CYRIL: Exactly. When I told her to look for someone else because I simply couldn't love her, never could love her the way she wants to be loved, she just laughed, and said, 'But you _do_ love me... You're just not aware of it yet!'

DR. GREENE _(raising his eyebrows)_ : That's quite an intelligent girl!

CYRIL: I knew she—you—would like the _idea_ of her... _(Gazes out of the window at the skyline, over the head of the doctor, silently petting the arm of the chair. Jingling his ID bracelet again, as if to wake himself back up, he suddenly assumes a confessional stance. Dr. Greene remains sitting on the edge of his desk, all ears.)_ Oh, very well, then—I might as well admit it. You must have guessed already. _She's_ the one who's really responsible for my being here. She said, 'I think you love me, but you're afraid to recognize it. Why don't you go to one of those doctors, and find out for sure? I've heard of a really nice one, a book-club friend went to him...' She meant _you_ , need I add. And she coerced me into calling your office on Monday.

DR. GREENE: I see, I see. Have I failed to meet your expectations?

CYRIL: I really don't know, really. You don't _seem_ so bad. You're not quite as stuffy as the bearded shrinks one sees in all the funny pages. But that's beside the point... What do you think I should do about Miss Doris?

DR. GREENE _(crossing his legs and folding his arms)_ : Curious, this... She seems to be highly perceptive.

CYRIL: You don't actually think that she could be... _right_?

DR. GREENE: Well, you did what she wanted, and you—

CYRIL _(unsettled, interrupting)_ : Only to show how _wrong_ she was! At first, I said I could never consult you, but she said that to refuse categorically would only be a sign of fear. That sounded like some sort of double-talk to me, but after all, I could spare a few minutes, you're close by, and I had a few questions I've always wanted answered, so I agreed to come to the mighty oracle. Now, what _is_ your advice?

DR. GREENE: You'd better stay away from both Doris and myself, or you may discover that she's right. You may find out that your supposed lack of interest in women isn't genuine!

CYRIL _(frozen at first, then glaring like a gorgon at the doctor)_ : So you think that I'm just a compulsive liar? That my love for Monty is only smoke and mirrors? That I'm some sort of cracked actor, making this all up to entertain you? _(Gets up from his chair as he talks and strides restlessly about the room as the doctor watches him. Cyril goes to the farthest vase of flowers and fiddles with the blossoms while the doctor returns to his desk chair.)_

DR. GREENE _(swiveling in his chair to face the wall, not Cyril)_ : By no means, by no means! But your discomfort whenever Doris mentions sex may not be as simple as it appears... It may well be that you're concerned not only with _her_ falling in love and its resulting disillusionment... Obviously, her honestly expressed emotional needs represent no real danger, because, as you so aptly put it, she wouldn't go so far as to rape you. But your own subconscious motivations may overpower your defenses, and force you to admit that you're not quite as—shall we say 'different'?—as you would so happily pretend to be.

CYRIL _(turning sharply from the flowers, tossing one stem that has pricked him onto the floor, then returning to the doctor's side and standing over the desk, fuming)_ : That's utter, unmitigated _tripe_! Are you suggesting that I'm afraid of my own emotions? I, who regard myself as the mere executor of my desires, I, who preach that an artist should disregard all inhibitions, in order to express the eternal truths? _(His voice begins to tremble, and he drops his cigarette case as he once again withdraws it from his pocket. He retrieves it, and, still looking as if he wished he could paralyze the doctor with one glance, picks up next the silver box of long silver-tipped matches from the desktop. Once he has fished out a match from the holder with fumbling fingers, he puts it into his mouth, instead of a cigarette. Seeing the doctor notice his error, he tries to correct himself, inadvertently dropping the match onto the floor.)_

DR. GREENE _(lighting another match and holding it to a cigarette he swiftly places between Cyril's shaking fingers. For a very brief moment he must hold Cyril's wrist to steady him as he lights the cigarette)_ : Now, please, do calm down. There's no use getting overexcited—at least, as long as you're not on the analytical couch. Intellectual riddles, as you would have them, aren't solved in bursts of wrath or reprisal. You have asked my advice and I have proffered my opinion. I didn't say with any finality that you love Doris and struggle with repressing your love for her. I merely said that I have a suspicion that such _could_ be the case. If you're interested in proving that I'm wrong, I am at your service.

CYRIL _(sitting down with his cigarette, calmer with each narcotic puff)_ : How long do you think this—this _trial_ or unholy inquisition will take?

DR. GREENE: Oh, a few weeks, or a few months, or—

CYRIL _(furiously exhaling smoke)_ : Just to unearth what I feel deep down inside? Pompeii hardly took longer to excavate. And how long would it take to _change_ me, just in case you're...

DR. GREENE: A year, perhaps two—perhaps more.

CYRIL _(thoroughly crestfallen)_ : But that's far, far too long!

DR. GREENE: Didn't Doris warn you?

CYRIL: She did, but I couldn't believe it. She said she would wait for me, even if the cure took five whole years.

DR. GREENE _(smiling)_ : That sounds like her own five-year plan.

CYRIL: To me, it sounds like a five-year sentence in hell! Curse that wicked woman!

DR. GREENE: At least, _she_ knows what she wants.

CYRIL _(grimacing)_ : That's why I prefer Monty. He's more... well, flexible.

DR. GREENE: And less serious.

CYRIL: You still doubt that I love him?

DR. GREENE: No. I'm convinced that Montgomery sometimes does make you happy, then again causes you no end of woe, and I certainly won't deny that he may have stimulated your work. But the intensified feelings you have for him—are they the only ones you can produce? Or do you use those emotions to outmaneuver others—like the man who hires one thug to protect himself against another?

CYRIL _(pulling a face)_ : Thanks for the complimentary simile. Why don't you stick to your biology and speak of all those fascinating toxins and antitoxins?

DR. GREENE: Apologies. Anyhow, you get what I mean. The fact that you're so tolerant with your feelings, so interested in their expression and satisfaction, doesn't mean that you're not using them to keep other emotions behind a regular 'iron curtain' of suppression. _(Chuckles at his own joke.)_

CYRIL: Why _should_ I be afraid of them, or any part of my own delightful self?

DR. GREENE: Because such feelings caused you so much trouble when you were an infant, and because you believe at some level that they're as powerful now as they were at that time. Your love for Montgomery is like his mixed concoction of love for you—love well-diluted with hatred!

CYRIL _(almost pugnaciously)_ : Who says so, who?

DR. GREENE: You have. You told me that Montgomery continuously tried to hurt and humiliate you. You paid him back by calling him—forgive me, you know I haven't been taking notes yet, but I think you said something like 'an Adonis without conscience, a brainless brat'—

CYRIL: But is it even possible to love without some degree of hate? Don't you also always hate the person who rejects and frustrates you, no matter how much love you have to offer?

DR. GREENE _(leaning back in his chair, drawing a deep breath)_ : Your hate is not the result of your being in love, but of your choice of Montgomery as its object.

CYRIL: You mean—if Monty were someone else, I'd be able to love without that kind of frustration, and without hate?

DR. GREENE: _(nods)_ Uh-huh...

CYRIL _(fidgeting in his seat)_ : You may be right. But if Monty would love me as I _want_ him to, I'm afraid I'd never paint. Since he doesn't, I want the entire world to give me that love I so generously flaunt with my brush.

DR. GREENE: Perhaps now you think you wouldn't paint, but in any event, you'd be a more satisfied man.

CYRIL _(staring into some unseen light outside the window, about to become theatrical again)_ : I don't want to be happy... Not at that price, anyhow! No _real_ artist would sell his work for such cheap romance. You, dearest doctor, will never ever figure me out... To me, painting is more important than any momentary happiness, more important than life itself!

DR. GREENE: Some, I think most, artists are able to love _and_ to paint.

CYRIL _(turning away from the window, looked directly at the doctor)_ : I doubt it. Most of them are like me—more interested in the _idea_ of love than in the boys they do love.

DR. GREENE: I know quite a few artists who prefer girls. In fact, I have it on the best authority that the majority of them do.

CYRIL _(wearily)_ : Let's not quarrel about it. I'm prepared to concede that a few actually do. But their love for women is no different from my love for Montgomery.

DR. GREENE: Permit me to point out something else. There are artists who have quite normal relationships with their love-objects.

CYRIL: What do you mean by this word we keep shuttling about—' _normal'_?

DR. GREENE: There's a good quotation here. _(Takes up an oversized volume on the desk, shuffles its pages for a moment, then finds his place.)_ Normal, normal, let's see... 'A relationship in which the object does not unconsciously represent the father or mother, and is not regarded as merely a part of one's body, but as another human being...' _(Without a pause looks surreptitiously at the clock on the desk, which faces only him.)_ We have no more time for this kind of discussion... Mr. Wyndham, _Cyril_ , although I'm no artist myself, I'm aware of the difference between your approach to reality and my own. But you aren't the only painter in the world, as I'm not the only scientist. In addition to your work, you're entitled to a _normal_ life. The happiness of a normal life is certainly not reserved solely for the unimaginative masses. We may both, say, spend a few happy decades looking at that yellow chair of Van Gogh's... _(waves his hand at the picture; Cyril turns to evaluate it once again)_ ...but we don't have to try to sit on it. I prefer something more, well, _comfortable_.

CYRIL: Well, _I_ don't. At least, I _think_ I don't... Oh, you're a dangerous, dangerous man, Dr. Greene. A few more sessions with you, and I'd fail to differentiate between right and wrong. I'd begin to doubt—am I a coward or a hero? You're like a married _woman_ , who can make a genius feel like a heel!

DR. GREENE: Some married women make a heel feel like a genius, Cyril.

CYRIL: That may be your own experience, but I don't care for the type. If there were only a woman who could make a genius feel like one... I'm afraid that if there _is_ such a woman, she's already somebody's wife. You assume, don't you, that I'm talking about your _own_ inimitable wife now. That's the trouble with you. You take everything _so_ personally, and you behave as if the patient were interested solely in _you_! _(Gets up abruptly from his chair and moves toward the door. The doctor looks again at the clock, this time more pointedly, rises, and accompanies Cyril to the exit. Cyril pats him tentatively on the back with a conciliatory laugh.)_ No, I'm afraid that you're not the man I'm looking for after all, doctor. You might very well succeed in curing my sexual weaknesses, but the price you'd exact is simply too high. _(The doctor looks at him, very close now, while Cyril hastily adds:)_ At least, I'm _so_ terribly busy right now that I couldn't spare as much as three or four hours a week, even if I wanted to. It could be I'll be able to some time in the future, when I finish my projects at hand and my teaching.

DR. GREENE _(remorseful, shaking Cyril's hand)_ : Perhaps, let's...

CYRIL _(energized one last time, tossing down Dr. Greene's hand, stepping three paces back, away from the door, and appraising the other man from head to toe)_ : Really, doctor, I hadn't thought of it before—but you'd be a delight to paint. Why, just look at you! In a manner of speaking, I do find you peculiarly... stimulating. Must be that mustache. You're so... so— _carnal_. Or is _carnivorous_ the better adjective? Oh, my. You're the perfect illustration of a certain _type_ , at any rate. You ought to be _in_ a book, not write them. ( _Trying to gauge Dr. Greene's reaction, which is slow in taking final form._ ) Ah. Is it actually conceivable that my painting you would somehow be considered a sacrilege? We all know the Commandments say, 'Thou shalt not make graven images unto thy Lord.' _(Pauses for effect.)_ So. Tell me, when would you like to schedule a sitting? Now, don't deny me!

DR. GREENE _(after looking both surprised and then flattered, trying now to appear indifferent)_ : Would you consider it vain of me to say I'd enjoy posing for you very much, Mr. Wyndham? One sometimes wishes to be on the other side of the equation. But I have so many commitments right now, too, you see, that I can't see how I could accept the honor. Perhaps some day...

CYRIL _(deflated but conceding the verdict as he turns the doorknob)_ : Well, let's be truthful, it's your loss as much as mine. If you'd sooner remain moral, I mean, _mortal_ rather than immortal... Oh, never mind—it was just a notion! Thank you even so, my good Doctor Greene. _(Opens the baize-covered door and speaks with total sincerity, if that is possible for him.)_ Honestly, from the bottom of my heart, sir, I thank you for your kindness. Thank you. But I couldn't possibly give up my dear Montgomery, you know. I _like_ pretty boys, I really do, can't help it, and I _don't_ want to change. I hope I haven't consumed too much of your time—and that you have no hard feelings, because really I myself don't and won't... _(Steps over the threshold hesitantly, looking back one last time, as if hoping the doctor will change his mind—or he, Cyril, will.)_

DR. GREENE: Of course, no hard feelings, of course not. It's been an enlightening discussion. Best of luck to you, then, Mr. Wyndham. _Cyril_. _(He and Cyril mutter further pleasantries. They shake hands perfunctorily, impersonally, this time like strangers at a railway depot. The door closes slowly behind Dr. Greene, and he stands staring at it for a long moment, then sighs—whether with relief or sorrow, it is hard to say. Lights down.)_
 Act Two: A Rebuttal

_Epigraph_ **: The Homosexual in the Classical Orchestra, Part II**

" ...it [homosexuality] cannot _possibly_ be compared to a relatively insignificant single instrument like the bassoon in an orchestra .... it is like the strings in the orchestra, which are not so loud as the horns, maybe, but have a very important part to play... "

Karl A. Menninger, M. D., _ibidem_

Scene:

The same office, looking almost exactly the same, although it is nearly five years later. The flowers are different, there has likely been a substitution of one or two of the paintings on the walls (although "The Yellow Chair" remains where it was before), and the various items atop the desk have been rearranged, but all the same there is little to tell us that much time has passed. Outside the arch of the room's single twelve-foot-high window, the sky is at present a cold violet-gray; we may even see a few furtive snowflakes coming down. It is an hour long past noon, early February, 1955.

When the lights go slowly up, we see Cyril Wyndham gazing contemplatively out of the window, far stage right, at the opposite end of the stage from the door and a narrow hall tree whose gibbet-like silhouette we must have overlooked previously. While the scene progresses, the simulated daylight without dims, and even now the effect is of a premature—and increasingly lavender—wintertime sunset on Cyril's face, which looks rather peaked and pained. The years have exacted a surprising toll on him, and he is so much changed, it is almost as if a rather older understudy has taken over his role. As opposed to what he wore in the first act, he is now in a sober but still finely fashioned dove-gray pinstripe suit, a much more elegant reflection of Dr. Greene's own rather nondescript mouse-gray jacket and trousers. Cyril's shirt is ecru linen and his handkerchief and tie a restrained dusky blue; when we see his socks, they are the same subdued hue. His hair is more conventionally groomed now, with less of a sheen to it, though still with a somewhat extravagant wave. The doctor's trademark mustache is almost all white now, and his eyeglasses no longer tortoiseshell, but more severe gunmetal-gray horn-rims. There is currently a pipe-rack among the smoking paraphernalia on his desk (including a curious object whose function will be made clear later), and he is puffing meditatively on a cherry-wood pipe, sitting professorially on the edge of his desk a long distance from Cyril. Perhaps somewhere afar we hear things we never noticed before: the rush of wind up the skyscraper's glass and steel façade, faint typing, a mysterious bell now and then.

CYRIL _(his forehead almost touching the frosted windowpane)_ : That poet was wrong; February is instead by _far_ the cruelest month. Mercifully short, maybe, but still so bitterly cold, so gray, so _dead_.

DR. GREENE _(knocking his pipe against gabardine knee)_ : Then you're here because you're feeling depressed? Suicidal?

CYRIL: I never said anything like that. _(Leaves the window and crosses the room, observing the pictures as he moves along, like a docent monitoring a gallery. His walk and gestures are weightier and more angular than they used to be, if also less fluid, and it seems at times as though he is just barely holding back other forces deep within his still slender frame. One might say that he seems to be impersonating someone else's idea of masculinity rather than personifying it, and the effect is rather uncomfortable to behold.)_ Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Pointillists, they all bore me! Give me Expressionists, Fauvists, Vorticists, even Art Brut—life raw like a wound, full of broken bodies and infernal machines and every sort of temptation and torture. I'm surely a better artist now than I was five years ago, doctor, but why is it the older I get the _harder_ it is for me to paint? Don't answer that; that's not why I'm here, either.

DR. GREENE _(laying down his pipe in the ashtray and folding his arms as Cyril gradually nears)_ : Then why was it so urgent that you see me, Mr. Wyndham?

CYRIL _(ignoring him)_ : You know, I used to fear that if I _changed_ , really _changed_ , so would my art—and I don't mean for the better. You reassured me it wouldn't have to, I remember that... Well, at first it was neither worse nor better—just _different_. Not even I knew exactly why or how. But the critics noticed it right away, said I'd become surer, more mature, less of that _enfant terrible_ they'd made of me themselves. Actually, they were all just relieved that I'd turn the distorting mirrors of my canvas no longer toward pretty boys, but to pretty girls. Critics _hate_ having to admire _masculine_ beauty; that is why there are relatively so few nude males in museums or art books. Of course, such pictures are all over the ateliers and garrets, but few dare to buy them! _(He sits hard down on the couch.)_

DR. GREENE: Careful of that couch, remember. It might bite you!

CYRIL _(jumping a little)_ : Oh, I'm no longer afraid—I've seen plenty of these couches over the past few years. Leather ones, plush ones, hard ones, soft ones, ones like quicksand—ones wide enough for two, if you get my drift, other ones too narrow even for a soul as gaunt as mine. And the doctors! They came in all different types, too. Ones with antebellum muttonchops, ones with vandykes, Edwardian beards, unkempt free-love beards, mustaches spare or dubious, others bristling with anger, even one analyst who was clean-shaven—though that was a _lady_ doctor, would you believe it? I could never tell _her_ all my secrets! _(Pats the couch lovingly.)_ Oh, and I've become _quite_ the disciple of St. Freud since you saw me last. I've ingested jargon now like 'retrogressive auto-sensual behavior' and 'polymorphous perversity' and even 'mechanisms of psychogenic potency disturbance.' Magnus Hirschfeld is now someone I often encounter and knowingly smile at, as if at cocktail parties. The _Psychopathia Sexualis_ makes a classy doorstop, you know. _(Interrogating the desk-lamp:)_ Am I intersexed? Oversexed? Am I a morphite or an urning or third-sexer or changeling or simply some invader from Mars? 'Check Box A or B, please.' Arrested development or over-development? Latent or overt? I must be one thing or the other, they all say! Oh, why can't I just be protean, like the _gods_? _(Looks toward the doctor, as if expecting more of a response.)_

DR. GREENE: Go on please, Mr. Wyndham, you're just as loquacious as ever, I see.

CYRIL: _Cyril_. Otherwise it makes me feel like you're just another former student of mine. Some plump heiress who simply _adores_ painting hoboes or Pierrots... You know, one doctor suggested a lobotomy. One of those foreign ones with a fierce and pointy Toscanini handlebar. I might have gone through that for Doris, but I'm _so_ afraid of losing even so much as the memory of a single French lesson—or a singular lifeguard in an indigo-blue bathing slip I saw once on Oak Street Beach back in the summer of 1934! And then there's hydrotherapy and shock therapy—I'm certain they work well in cases like mine, your medical books are full of such happy life masks, but I just can never find the time for it between débutante sittings and orthodontist appointments. _(Begins to recline on the couch, though one foot remains dangling over the floor, as if he might have to leap up at any moment.)_ Hypnosis did no good, though for some reason I started craving men with shiny pocket watches... Another doctor wanted to fasten electrodes—down _there_ —and make me watch a very lewd sort of stag show, but he just seemed _too_ interested in wanting to get my drawers down. Besides, I'd already done that business with pornographic flashcards and connect-the-dot charts and Rorschach tests—and they _all_ look like butterflies to me, every single one, damn it!

DR. GREENE: Yes, some methods are a bit extreme, I admit, but the science is still young—and some men will do _anything_ to change, even if the cure is, as you know, worse than—

CYRIL: Will they, now? Well, I did _change_ , eventually, all on my own—easy as quitting cigarettes, right? Just by acquiring a marriage license. And Doris will gladly tell you it's been a very satisfying eighteen and a half months.

DR. GREENE _(standing and brushing his knees of any tobacco ash)_ : Ah! Now I remember. You see, my memory is good even without notes and even nearly—what is it?—five long years later. She, your Doris, was in love with you long before you realized you were in love with her, am I correct? There's an enterprising young woman for you, a young woman who doesn't let a few insignificant obstacles get in her way!

CYRIL: I suppose you could put it that way. She supplanted Monty—Montgomery, my moody model, if you remember—supplanted him in my psyche, just as you said she could. Whether she is my father or my mother or my aunt or my second cousin twice-removed I still don't know. Maybe you don't recall the joke, doesn't matter.

DR. GREENE _(smiling, going over to the couch to clasp hands with his patient)_ : I'm very glad to hear that! Truly, _very_ glad. Congratulations! It is a very difficult transformation, I assure you. I had a gent in here last month who needed a sort of 'refresher course,' if you catch what I mean. _(Mumbling to himself.)_ Couldn't keep away from Greyhound stations...

CYRIL _(acting as if he hasn't seen the outstretched hand, cringing into the upholstery)_ : Doris is _très heureuse, très jolie._ So content with me. And she's crocheting jumpers these days, not flinging paint about the way she used to. Odd how women can give up their talents so readily when that damned stork comes a-knocking. You could well guess, she had some genuine potential, for a woman.

DR. GREENE: Now, I really must congratulate you again! _(Insists this time that Cyril take his hand and vigorously pumps it.)_ Believe me, once you're a father your life will change in ways you never expected.

CYRIL: Or _wanted_. _(Withdraws his hand and slaps the couch. Dr. Greene retreats a bit.)_ Oh, I've been ever-so faithful to her, _to the uttermost_ , since the moment she convinced me to marry her. I can't even talk to a good-looking boy these days without feeling a little _sick_ inside. I gave up teaching at the Institute for that reason exactly, and though it's beside the point, I no longer really need the money, anyway.

DR. GREENE: Is this what's troubling you, then? This 'sick' feeling you get?

CYRIL _(sitting up, adjusting his tie)_ : Not exactly. I can take antacid for that. Oh, the doctor I see now—not another damned analyst, just my general practitioner—prescribes _yummy_ things for me: things to help me relax, to help me to sleep, to wake me up again, even to facilitate _relations_ with Doris, not that I really need those. _She's_ never been one to quetch. Science _is_ wonderful, don't you agree? In the future, I suppose they'll be able to bottle talent—though I'm sure it will still taste like cod-liver oil going down.

DR. GREENE _(chuckling as he moves back to his desk chair)_ : Ah, yes, but I'll never believe it's all just a matter of chemical imbalances or glandular supplements. There are dreams to be deciphered, and family dynamics to re-engineer—and those all-important infantile stages, quite riveting stuff, to tell the truth...

CYRIL _(with a little of his old drama, grasping the chromium arm of the couch, tilting his chin to the side)_ : You were wondering why I had to see you so precipitously... Well, it is a bit difficult to know just where to begin...

DR. GREENE: Then begin at the beginning.

CYRIL: As they _always_ say. Listen, I need a smoke—offer me one, do please, doc. _(He rises to go to the desk, where Dr. Greene is quick to remove a cigarette from the metal case.)_

DR. GREENE: Of course. And a light—no matches this time, just that new-fangled lighter. _(He demonstrates an overly large lantern-like mechanism on the desk that automatically flares up like a genie and ignites the cigarette.)_

CYRIL: That sort of thing could take all the romance out of a street corner encounter! Thanks awfully. _(Draws in a long, reviving puff, like a man who has been famished.)_ I _could_ begin with the letters and telegrams and phone-calls. _(Trying to squeeze all the theatrics he can out of these hints.)_ Jesus, they just won't stop!

DR. GREENE _(lowering his glasses, impulsively combing both sides of his mustache with an index finger)_ : Whose letters and phone-calls? Need I guess?

CYRIL: I'd totally given him up, I swear! Could go for _days_ without thinking of him a single second. Destroyed the sketches I had and gessoed right over the last portrait. Felt like a murderer removing all traces of the crime. Once in a while I couldn't hold back a phantasm or a fantasy, but Doris was always there, she has a terrific knack for knowing when and when _not_ to try to hold me—and so even _he_ began to fade. Like a silkscreen poster left too long in a shop-window... But I should have known the bastard wouldn't so easily forget such a powerful influence as myself. I should have known he'd not had the last of me.

DR. GREENE: Is it blackmail? In that case, I know of several lawyers who handle cases such as yours.

CYRIL: No, it's not exactly blackmail of that sort, in my particular situation. You see, I'd been sending him checks when he needed the assistance, during the transitional stage of all those doctors and dear Doris's incredible patience. He has quite enough in the way of funds now, because he also has a new lover, a Chilean tennis champ living on a trust fund far larger than any amount that I could ever hope to make. So it's not that.

DR. GREENE _(leaning in closer across the desk, considering taking his pipe back up)_ : Then what could it be? What is the subject of these harassments?

CYRIL: What, indeed! Montgomery was always such a temperamental, high-strung young man; he is capable of forming ferocious attachments to the silliest things—a rescued teddy bear from his nursery days, a nasty little dachshund I once gave him, a painted-up downtown hag he calls the Virgin Mary, and _me_. He doesn't want to let me go—not that he wants to leave the Chilean and all his Incan ingots, either. I've told him quite matter-of-factly that I'm a married man now, a father soon enough, and can't see him or be part of his darkling existence any longer. It's an old, old story. A muse spurned. Nostalgia for something that never was. Don't think I'm so naïve that I didn't foresee this happening.

DR. GREENE: Still, he has no _real_ pull over you any longer—can't he see that? The logical side of him must accept that you're reformed. You've transmuted base metal to wax alchemical.

CYRIL _(taking another long draw off his cigarette, then tossing it still smoldering into the ashtray on the desk)_ : Certainly, I've been cured, just like a side of pork. There was this one wacky witch doctor who told me I needed to love _him_ instead of Monty! Cured me of about five-hundred dollars before I realized I could never fantasize _kissing_ that penciled-on mustache.

DR. GREENE _(unconsciously pulling at his own facial hair)_ : Psychoanalysts are, I'm afraid, like the rest of mankind, fallible and often foolish.

CYRIL: Monty does really still love me more than his Chilean, I know, I'm resigned to admit, and I can't condemn him for his good taste. But I can't see poor Monty-boy, either.

DR. GREENE: Good for you. It would only be _regression_. Sorry—another annoying term!

CYRIL _(gesturing with fist to his heart)_ : Oh, but I _want_ to! See Monty, I mean. Desperately want to—but can't.

DR. GREENE: Of course not—think of Doris. Think of the baby.

CYRIL: No, I'm not thinking of _either_ of them at all. The truth is, in a very agonizing, lingering way I still love my big bad Monty, too. Oh, _Monty_! _(Begins to cry a little into his sleeve.)_ That part of me _never_ changed. You see, maybe you can change all outward signs and inflections, redirect impulses and sublimate or substitute, but you can't alter the soul the way a plastic surgeon alters the body. _(Recovering from his crying jag, and with increasing passion:)_ Thanks to doctors and Doris, I am no longer a _homosexualist_ ; I can't _act_ upon those desires I once had without making myself ill and betraying my legally wedded wife and all we stand for together, but I am afraid that I still have the soul of a _homosexual_ and always shall have. As the philosopher asked, is evil something we do or something we _are_? Whether I was born this way or not, maybe your science will never be able to tell me, but this is one part of me I _don't_ want to change; I insist it is the part which most makes this inconstant and inconsistent thing I call myself _me_ , it is my _essence_!

DR. GREENE _(controlling his own emotions by brushing dandruff from his lapels)_ : Please, Cyril, you are declaring the war over before the outcome of the first skirmish has been declared. I've heard these sort of arguments time and again from other men who _believed_ they were permanently condemned to be homosexuals, as well. Men who now thank me for helping to redirect their orientations, even when it can take years—sometimes decades—of hard effort. Remember that you love Doris, above all, and that is what will win the battle for you. And naturally you will love your little child, who will need a normal upbringing.

CYRIL _(suddenly enraged, leaping from the couch)_ : _Normal_! There's another abhorrent word! Remember how I told you I never _wanted_ to be normal, that I spit on _normal_? I don't want to be bourgeois or Biedermeier; I am a modernist and merely wanted to discover the inner truth about my love life, why my thirst was never quite fully slaked. Why Monty left me wanting. You and most of the other doctors told me it all had to do with _sex_ , because of some self-mutilated clubfooted prince and his kookie mixed-up family—because I needed to love a woman, or needed the love of a woman, and I did as I was told because I was tired of the sniggering and deceptions, and I thought that was how _I_ felt, too. Up until the letters started to arrive, and the late-night phone-calls, I could have gone on deceiving myself forever. Perhaps.

DR. GREENE: Then it seems you no longer _want_ to be helped. You should give up Doris and go on back to the faithful Montgomery, then, if you truly believe that will make you happier! I warn you, though, that the results of several independent studies show that after forty your life might as well be over...

CYRIL: No, _no_ , you don't get me! I want them _both_ , and yet I am not what you classify as a "bisexual." I've browsed that Dr. Kinky's report since I saw you last, and I see I am an unregenerate Six! Or at least a Five. Not afraid of women any longer, but closer to recognizing my true self at last, thanks to Monty's lamentable pleas.

DR. GREENE: Oh, that presumptuous zoologist _Kinsey_! To think I've heard of frustrated, vengeful wives placing that book underneath young Mr. Vidal's on their husbands' nightstands, a novel you must know pretends to vindicate the infamous Kinsey Report... _Kinsey_. Honestly! I'm not sure I would trust such biased canvassing, until more studies are made with fewer self-selected volunteers.

CYRIL _(looking over his shoulder slyly as he faces a nearby painting, at last onto a topic he wanted to bring up long ago)_ : Why, doctor? Afraid you might tilt the scale a bit too far yourself? A little too near to those who loiter among the lower four percent? Maybe it's contagious; maybe we're rubbing off on you. Ah-hah— _frottage_! Shame on you!

DR. GREENE: Let us not be jejune. I'll admit to a token amount of hero-worship and certain explorations during my boarding school-days like all healthy heterosexuals, but I am a very happily married man.

CYRIL: _Just_ like myself.

DR. GREENE: No, not _like_ —sorry, sorry, I don't mean to compare. But I regretfully have to say to you, as unprofessional as it might be to talk about my own private life, that I've never had a single homosexual experience, 'to the point of orgasm,' as that man baldly phrases it. Anyone can see I am no Caspar Milquetoast. But neither do I pretend to be a Casanova for the ages. I do my duties in the civic sphere and in the bedroom as most liberal-minded, free-thinking American males do, and it pleases and does not trouble me.

CYRIL: Certainly your wife might not agree.

DR. GREENE _(stopped in his tracks)_ : I cannot unriddle at all what you're implying.

CYRIL: 'Conjugal incompatibility' is what the _Sun-Times_ gossip columnist reported—which is I suppose a notional way of saying there's something a bit peculiar about your marital habits. _(Quickly, knowing he will be interrupted.)_ And gosh golly, she's still such a knockout, as the collegians would say, could be a stand-in for Rita Hayworth! No wonder she looked so familiar to me that time I saw her in the lobby the first time I visited here—I'd been seeing her in the photogravures for simply _years_. Elspeth, a name you don't forget, either, _(as if parroting_ Debrett's _:)_ 'the youngest daughter of Wilmette's illustrious Blauvogel dynasty, of foundries and charitable foundations galore.' You landed a big one, old boy... Tell me, in a complicated case like this, how is the alimony calculated?

DR. GREENE _(incensed)_ : Mr. Wyndham! I can do without your misguided sense of humor, and I remind you this is a _professional_ visit.

CYRIL _(barely batting an eyelash)_ : But I am not really your patient, so I imagine I can say anything that pops out of my id until you throw me out that door. But you won't do that because I am charming and I _am_ on your side, and I have much more to say.

DR. GREENE ( _his anger only somewhat abated)_ : My soon-to-be ex-wife and I are on extremely good terms, if that is any business of yours; in other respects, I really would be insulted.

CYRIL _(craftily)_ : But what about your talented and handsome son?

DR. GREENE: My _son_? My wife with her background, as you know, might not be able to avoid the notoriety of the scandal sheets, but you must leave my son out of this.

CYRIL: Well, as a father-to-be I could use some advice on how to deal with differences with my wife in the rearing of our son—or our daughter—those are usually the options when it comes to gender, so I've been told.

DR. GREENE: All couples have their disagreements concerning parenting. It's a matter of compromise. Our son has always been a special case, since he has a remarkable IQ, albeit one he hasn't quite managed to corral yet, and as an only child has been more susceptible to a higher caliber of spoiling than I might have originally wished. He is a headstrong lad, who I will agree his mother makes too many excuses for. But that isn't reason to—

CYRIL: Which brings us back to Monty and why I dared to tread these turbulent waters in the first place. You see, I wasn't bringing up your divorce out of some wish for a little S _chadenfreude_ , as you German-trained doctors would have it put. I was schooled in France myself and we prefer to spread the ol' _joie de vivre_ wherever and whenever possible, so I hate having to bring up these disturbing matters concerning other people's problems—and their problem children.

DR. GREENE: Morris is not a problem child. He was a musical prodigy, for one thing. He has limitless potential.

CYRIL: Exactly what I used to say about Doris, and yet I have such problems with her, too! But, please, tell me more about Morris—he sounds _darling_.

DR. GREENE _(unable to stop himself, as if this is a rant he regularly inflicts upon his friends)_ : _Once_ a darling child, all right; then a sullen, hard-headed, insolent, impulsive, compulsive _teenager_ with too much grease in his hair. And a motorbike! We tried so many methods—Piaget, Montessori, Waldorf, Steiner, Dushkin, somebody Suzuki in Japan; it began to feel more like we were dealing with a feral child raised among wolves, rather than one brought up among _au pairs_ and tutors. Even though I insisted that he try pre-med, Elspeth bought him that blasted saxophone; he was cutting classes and reading those criminally crude EC magazines when he should have been reading the classics! Have you ever looked at that book that came out last year, _Seduction of the Innocent_? Proof that the horror genre leads to juvenile delinquency, and I am afraid my son Morris might have become a certified hoodlum if we hadn't curtailed his allowance and called in the Marines. By which I mean a pair of highly qualified child psychologists. One must practice what one preaches, after all.

CYRIL _(shaking his head in either sympathy or disagreement)_ : Poor kid probably should be wearing one of those sort of cages the Victorians locked on their children to keep them from physically abusing themselves, right? This amazing twentieth century! When I am a father I wonder what I shall do when my son wants to scratch a tattoo of Jayne Mansfield onto his chest, or worse, wants to study for the bar. _(Slicking down an imaginary mustache:)_ Your Morris must be acting out domestic anxieties all over the place, under such extreme pressure to perform like a circus seal while still developing, courtesy of your bankbook, a very expensive personality all his own.

DR. GREENE _(waking up with his eyes shut tight, as if that will make Cyril disappear)_ : Stop! Stop! I fail to see how my son Morris is any of your concern. Let's please refrain from mentioning him again and get back to your _own_ desperations. You so urgently wanted to talk of them!

CYRIL: And _this_ is most urgent of all. You see, Monty might have his virile tennis pro, but he still likes a good night on the town. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if he were still picking up a little milk money on the side. Half of his calls come after midnight from some nightclub so far, far south in Chicago I suspect it is run by equatorial negroes, negroes of the sort who throw drag balls and enjoy getting whatever they can from blameless young, good-looking white boys. I suspect you would categorize Monty as a quasi-alcoholic pseudo-homosexual, and I'd agree he is not entirely trustworthy, but last week he seemed so _very_ despondent, and so adamant that I hear him out, that for once I didn't hang up the phone. Doris was asleep in the next room, and it's a wonder she didn't wake up when I shouted my protests.

DR. GREENE: This is all growing rather tedious. Please come to your main point.

CYRIL: All right, then. Mendacious Monty meets a lot of interesting people at this club, and he has a way of drawing even the shyest and most reticent of souls out of their pearly shells. Once he even met that actor—what's-his-name, Stone, Rock, Brick?—there under the neon fairy-light of the bar, he says. ( _Deliberating with himself._ ) Or was it Charlton or Farley? Whatever, Monty has a fantastic flair for remembering names and faces, much better than mine. So when he bought your son a drink or two or twee—

DR. GREENE: My son? _Morris_? Your friend must be mistaken. Morris I admit has had his share of setbacks at school, and that conservatory he last attended brought out some of the worst tendencies in him and his choice of music and friends, but he would never frequent the sort of den of iniquity you have insinuated that one is. At heart he's still an all-American red-blooded straight-as-an-arrow male.

CYRIL: Then I guess Monty was lying again when he told me that your son Morris was soon feeling so _ebullient_ on his Shirley Temples that he was telling Monty his entire life story—about his father the notorious mountebank who didn't love him and his mother the spoiled princess who would have been happier with a girl and the prep schools he was asked to leave and the smashed-up sports cars and the best friend who's a hophead... Hmm—the amateur would say it's a classic casebook example, but I needn't humor _you_. I'm on your side, I know that half the things Monty told me about your son simply couldn't be true. Well, to go on, that's Morris, according to Monty, and Monty remembered how I'd once visited you and talked of you nonstop for weeks—Monty with his remarkable memory—and Monty thought maybe _I_ should get in touch with _you_ again so _you_ can get in touch with _him_ so people won't be talking about your underage son visiting this lounge of ill repute! Monty knows how things get into the papers.

DR. GREENE: That's black—

CYRIL: No need to go that far. It's really just Monty's troglodytic way of trying to do a kind deed at the same time as insinuating me further back into his life.

DR. GREENE _(exploding, slamming closed a book which has been lying open on the desk)_ : _Blackmail_! Blackmail _me_ to save my son, to profit your recidivist boyfriend— _(Half whispers, half cries to himself, forgetting for a moment he is not alone.)_ The fucking faggot! The filthy dirty scheming lying little _faggot_!

CYRIL _(remarkably calm)_ : Steady now, Dr. Greene, steady, I'm still here, remember—there is no call for clinical terms such as those. Not very professional of you!

DR. GREENE: All right, all right, I'm going to have to ask you to leave now. You are not now and never will be my patient. _(Gestures toward the door, almost rises, then sits down again. Begins again, at a more moderate volume:)_ Just because my son was seen at that kind of place— _claimed_ to have been seen by a discreditable person who might just as well have learned all he told you through other means—doesn't signify a thing. Morris has always had an adventuresome streak. He plays bebop jazz. He has smoked hemp-weed, yes. Admitted it. And burnt a few bridges. But that doesn't make him any sort of _criminal_.

CYRIL: Like me? Like Monty and all my old prancing, swishing crowd?

DR. GREENE: That's not what I meant, and you know it. My son is barely twenty. This is indubitably just another one of those adolescent phases I deal with constantly. Read about them in any of these books or a thousand others. _(Reshuffles and tosses the texts across his desk.)_ What you have told me couldn't possibly be corroborated. I will not pay any ransom for someone's depraved figment of the imagination. And neither will Elspeth. Believe me. She's got the bigger balls. She'd sooner kill or be killed.

CYRIL: Come now! Monty has not breathed a word to me about money or anything like it. He is _not_ one of those ordinary hustlers who haunt north Michigan Avenue or the rocks near the Belmont marina, able to spot a wealthy man even with most of his clothes off. Trust me, I've dealt with that _other_ sort before. But, here, let me give you his number, _(pulls a business card from his pocket and scribbles a number on the back of it, which he flings upon the desk)_ just in case you'd like to talk this over with Monty himself. If you don't believe me. I wouldn't if I were you. Call him, I mean. I find this whole business sordid and reprehensible, but what can I do when Monty threatens to hurt himself, berates me, and then tells me he still loves me, too? How can I _ever_ give him up? He's not bad, no worse than your son. I didn't mean to implicate _you_ in anything. Doris be damned, I probably _should_ see Monty just to shut him up.

DR. GREENE: You must be out of your mind.

CYRIL: Well, aren't all of your patients?

DR. GREENE _(managing to laugh despite it all)_ : So, Cyril, this is why you insisted on seeing me at such short notice. _(Pause as he rearranges himself.)_ Listen, forgive me, I am sorry if I lost my temper, truly sorry, I've never done anything like that, but this could be a very serious matter. We've seen our share of deputies and deans in the past. Yes, it could be serious again.

CYRIL: Or not. These things have a way of working themselves out. Cool down. No one is claiming your prodigy is working his way down the pansy-strewn path. He's just a kid, after all. Probably just another thrill ride to him. Taking a stab at the seedy underbelly. Picking up band-mates. Checking out how the other half lives. I agree, that music is _atrocious_. Also, Monty is obviously only trying to use you and your son to get back at me. _I'm_ the victim here. Don't you see that? I am the victim. Don't think I came here to insult and abuse you. No harm will come to your son, as if Monty were ever capable of doing even a Chihuahua any real harm—and once again I don't get a single _frisson_ that your son is _comme ça—_ neither does Monty, I'm reasonably certain. It's just a nasty turn _I_ have to follow through on, a matter to set straight, as it were... _If_ I decide to see Monty again, _if_ I can bear it... _(Straightens himself and his tie.)_ Yet, oddly enough, that is still not the entire reason why I needed to see you today.

DR. GREENE: Oh, really? Now that you've reassured me that my son is possibly not really an invert or transvestite or drug addict, was just slumming it, trying to _épater_ _les bourgeois_ once again like one of these juke-boxing, hot-rodding beatniks one reads about, you actually dare to think you can have still more to ask of me.

CYRIL: I do, actually. See, you're a _nice_ man! Lately, after all my frustrating analytical encounters, I've been doing a lot of reading, catching up with the latest advancements in the medical field, as it were—reading books as boring as bank statements and books as lascivious as Hollywood tabloids, reading books such as your own. Reading them with eyes wide open in the back of my head.

DR. GREENE: I'm not sure what you mean. Books such as mine, I'm afraid, are what they expect us doctors to write these days, the publishers. And the patients. Still, I suppose I should accept any praise I get.

CYRIL: I wouldn't.

DR. GREENE _(a little taken aback, but hiding it by polishing his lenses)_ : Tell me why not. I'm not vain about my writing style. Without a good editor... My wife always says my prose reads like the instructions on a jar of her health-nut wheat germ.

CYRIL: Droll! No, that's not the issue—you write adequately enough, for a doctor. But I'm referring, as you probably well know, to the chapter on—I think it is—'matters of sexual misidentification and misalignment.' That prolonged interview with the 'typical young homosexual'—

DR. GREENE _(looking as if he were slowly sinking into wet concrete)_ : Of course, that patient is a broad composite; I've seen many such confused men as yourself, could be a half-hundred or more of them over the decades, in fact. I hardly recall our sole interview, and you can't charge me with taking notes! What small part of you may have filtered through to those pages I disguised more than adequately, I would say. No one could look you up in Ma Bell's directory, no matter how closely one probes those pages.

CYRIL: Naturally, you lent me a Mardi Gras mask. But really! "Cerise" socks and shirt and a saffron-yellow handkerchief! I was never quite so outré, even at my boldest. Maroon and pale amber, at most. But worse was the way you described what most other knowledgeable adults have taken for inoffensive idiosyncrasies—I come off like a simpering, skimpering, silly old nelly. A mincing, mollymawking _milliner_! A right royal Queen of Queerummania! Ye gods! _(He places palms on swiveling hips, whether in defiance or parody of his own self, it is hard to tell.)_ As if I haven't had to negotiate with hulking he-men such as yourself all my nearly thirty-five years and never learned to temper my instincts or inclinations, even in a relatively tolerant atmosphere. _Really_!

DR. GREENE _(going for his pipe at last)_ : As I said, that is a composite, an amalgamation, a quasi-fabricated creation—a chimera, in a sense. That character represents something which exists maybe only in mankind's collective unconscious. A necessary device in my line of work.

CYRIL: So, in other words, a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together from dead hat-makers and cross-dressers and child-molesters. _C'est une travestie sérieuse!_ I suggest, doctor, that you leave that sort of invention up to the genuine artist. We assemble figures all the time from various models—a lovely face here, a shapely thigh _there_ , an enigmatic moue, a guileful grin all from this or that Antinous or Aphrodite who fluttered by our studio window only for a moment—we don't create to instruct or exploit, but to show humanity things it might otherwise overlook or dismiss. You, on the other hand, are a _plagiarist_. You stole the Sea Island cotton shirt off my back, the quintessence of my Hong Kong-tailored soul. Even in the cheapest, most transparent _roman à clef_ one can't get away with what you pretend is just research. Like so many doctors I saw, you took transparent _delight_ in burlesquing what you see as my affectations!

DR. GREENE _(lighting the pipe he grips tightly in his hand, speaking thoughtfully after a pursed-lipped pause)_ : Mmm... I don't see how the scientist's task is all that different from yours as an artist. You're speaking of discovery.

CYRIL: I am speaking of _art_ , which _is_ a sort of self-discovery, I concede, for the artist at least. What it means to men like you I simply couldn't imagine. _(Looks up to the painting above him.)_ Something to brighten up a prison cell, is all. A yellow chair in a peasant's room, only to be utilized or given a price tag, I suppose, not to be questioned.

DR. GREENE: How does one question a chair?

CYRIL _(sighs and takes out his handkerchief to pat his forehead)_ : By sitting on it! That is, to experience it, you have to _feel_ it under you. Every splinter and warp. _(He stands to spread his arms, as if sweeping in all the pictures in the room.)_ To feel the anguish of a Van Gogh, the joy of Klee among his twittering birds, the unutterable melancholy of a Surrealist's still life of boxing glove and astrolabe! Oh, how can you _ever_ know what I mean? The sciences would like to drown all men such as myself in formaldehyde, descriptive labels attached. Abolish us forever, or at best, make of us a circus sideshow.

DR. GREENE: Are you speaking of artists or homosexuals? Anyway, you might as well know, my wife chooses the artwork here and at our homes.

CYRIL: And have you ever met her antiques dealer? Her dressmaker? Her cosmetician? Her interior decorator? Her caterer? Her landscape gardener? Her poodle groomer? _All_ homosexuals, I assure you, every one! See, _we_ make possible what small amount of beauty and taste you manage to bring into your dreary gray-flannel life. But none of those men is a true artist, in the sense I was just speaking of. The true artist creates and does nothing _useful_ whatsoever. The soul of a true artist is beyond your petty concerns with who loves whom and why and what-for. We summon up the dawn like the thunder of the El. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with archangels.

DR. GREENE: So you came here not for help with your sex life, or to blackmail me, but simply to niggle over what you consider an unflattering portrait? Surely you must have it on good authority that your life-models are not always fully pleased.

CYRIL: Oddly enough, now that they are women, ladies of society and good standing whose husbands can well afford me, they _are_. I make them all much younger and more alluring than they actually are, just like an embalmer or Estée Lauder. It's the _men_ —especially Monty—who are so querulous: the nose is positively Durante, they say, the coloring looks like a bad case of Teutonic rubella, the teeth are crooked! But to get back to your chapter—why do you put such _hokum_ into my mouth? And such platitudes! Why do you make it seem as if I am speaking for all men of my stripe when I am just an individual, like you? As if Shylock has to stand for all Jews or Othello for all coloreds? My wrists do _not_ dangle like parched callas. Honestly, I never stuck a match in my mouth thinking it was the inevitable phallic cigarette. You made of me a contemptible figure! A fatuous footling! Why is it that he-men, hetero-men, so-called _real_ men can't find it enough to leave off after kicking us around the recess court and punching us in the groin for fun? Why go on doing it all through our lives? Why, _why_ did I have to _change_ just to satisfy society—or was it just to flout society's expectations? Oh why, oh why did you insist I marry Doris to save myself?

DR. GREENE: I never ordered you to do any such thing. I merely wanted you to find your own way to your deepest feelings. Those feelings you compensated for with arrested anal-oral fixations. You _have_ told me you love her—

CYRIL: And I _do_. She is not like most women; I've never had to hide anything from her. And I'll love our child, I will. It's just that—that she _lacks_ something. Something _I_ lack, too. Maybe I think Monty has it. I don't know, but after talking with you as openly as this, I do know now that I want to see him again, I _must_ see him again.

DR. GREENE: My advice is to stay as far away from him as possible, lest he want even more from you than he no doubt wants from me or my family.

CYRIL: You don't know him; he was made the way he is by unfortunate circumstances. In a sense, you two are not altogether dissimilar. You share a certain _je ne sais quoi_ , perhaps a stubborn determination to wrest a living in a civilization designed by physicists and podiatrists. Like you he must live by his wits, even if they be different sorts of wits. You are by far more dangerous than he is. And I do feel sorry for him, I who was given everything by pampering parents, a spoiled-rotten only child who always got his way. I gave Monty the single thing he could never really connive or wheedle or outright steal from someone— _unconditional love_. Would it be inexcusable for me to ask if your wife ever gave you that much? Why, then, would she be divorcing you?

DR. GREENE _(removing the pipe from his mouth as if its taste has gone bad)_ : Once again, Mr. Wyndham, I should not consent to your saying such things in my presence. If I didn't feel somehow a little sorry for you—

CYRIL: Sorry! _(Mockingly, but more as if he is mocking himself.)_ An overpriced quack such as yourself feeling sorry for someone of _my_ good breeding and talents. _(Leveling his shoulders, puffing out his chest.)_ And with my perfect posture. Would you be less sorry if I took off for Denmark like that poor little in-between we've all read about in the papers? That gives you _real_ men some comfort, I'm sure, waving your magical surgical knives and wishing us into what you always thought we should be. Artificial _women_. And here I sit still ever so glad to be totally male, notwithstanding it all... Well, I _never_. _(Fans himself with a nonexistent feather fan as Dr. Greene continues to puff.)_ You know, the amusing thing is, my delovely Doris has recently met your wife at more than one Lady's Auxiliary or Fortnightly Club soirée or some-such tiresome fundraiser. Chicago is a small, small town—witness your son and my Monty. You see, now that she is my wife, people want her at certain ladies' social do's, of course—adds just a bit of bohemian flair by proxy, I imagine. People always ask if I'm as tyrannical as I'm made out to be. Or as _beauteous_. By the way, Doris said your wife is _très_ _noblesse oblige_ —imposing, if a tiny bit shrill. And they discussed the possibility of my painting _her_! Apparently _your_ wife was so interested she gave _my_ wife your unlisted home number—and you know what, I might just do that! Paint her, I mean. I wouldn't mind another commission in the coming slack season. _(Assumes dreamy expression, with half-closed eyes:)_ Yes, I can see it quite clearly: "Profile in Aquamarine," or "Elspeth in Emeralds," something like that, with a sort of chlorotic sheen and a scalloped shell or hand-mirror in her palm and perhaps the suggestion of seaweed in her swept-back hair. Yes, yes... a siren, that's she!

DR. GREENE: Droll, your lordship. Do it then, your high-ticket portraiture, she has more than enough cash on hand. And discuss me all you like. Tell her I'm a Neanderthal. A bounder. A cad. But not our son, don't mention him, I beg you. She is very sensitive on the subject.

CYRIL: You know, it's remarkable how silent both I and my subjects are when I paint. The air of a chapel or even the tomb, until something has risen from it.

DR. GREENE _(glancing unashamedly at his clock)_ : Now—about that small section of my book—I'm entirely within my legal rights, you know. No one could claim I wasn't fudging the facts to, ahem, 'protect the innocent.'

CYRIL _(hurt in his eyes)_ : How very _vulgar_ of you—as if I would ever think such a thing. We both have an agreement, don't we—that the character you described is more caricature? Agreed that no one could be so _effete_ , after all. Besides, as I mentioned, I never wore cerise hosiery. Also, clearly I don't talk like a case-study in a textbook. If a friend were ever to read that, no one's ever going to tell him who posed for the portrait, is one? Likewise, you're not going to name names when you've had one too many sidecars at the next American Psychiatric convention...

DR. GREENE: All my confidences are like Swiss bank accounts—you would need a little key and a special code. And I promise to never use so much as an eyelash of yours again!

CYRIL: As pretty as they are? Good, then, that's settled... As for my other _complexes_ , or what you will, Doris has already suggested a crafty young doctor who does miraculous things with injections. Oh, I _do_ hope he's good-looking! Just teasing—in fact, I hope he's as old and sexless as you are, with an even worse facial adornment.

DR. GREENE: For your own sake, I concur.

CYRIL: Disregarding everything I've said, sometimes I wish I were as sexless and analytical as a scientist myself. Just to rely upon cold computation, instead of trying to snare the flittering purple shadows of fancy in a muslin bag or tracing the contours of the soul in conté. How dashing I would look in surgical mask and smock, and those chic rubber elbow gloves, leaning over the smoking abyss with gas-mask and Geiger-counter. _(He mimics gazing into a void, as a warlock into a cauldron.)_ A modern-day approximation of Blake's Jehovah with his caliper compassing the cosmos. Oh, Galileo! Oh, Edison! You had it easy, and if one was burned at the stake and one was made a millionaire, it makes no matter—they both realized that the sky is blue not because it is prettier that way but because of some trick of the light. William James, scientist and philosopher, you make even a diaphanous being such as myself feel whole and solid.

DR. GREENE: Such _abstruse_ abstraction this late in the afternoon is not very scientific, I can tell you that. _(Glances again at his clock.)_

CYRIL: Oh, for Pete's sake, you doctors and your confounded clocks! As if a few extra minutes ever made that much difference in anyone's life. My models don't pettifog if I hold them an extra hour or so—more money in their undernourished wallets. And you can charge me this time, I don't mind. It's well after five, I'm sure, so you can't have anyone else waiting, either. _(Peering out window:)_ Look, the snow is coming down like excelsior now—and tomorrow is Valentine's Day, the most nerve-wracking day of the year, and I haven't even been to my favorite _chocolatier_. I wonder—do divorcing couples still trade sentimental cards? Just out of habit?

DR. GREENE: To tell you the truth, I hadn't even thought of it! And I'm afraid Elspeth goes in more for expensive baubles than bonbons. Listen, Mr. Wyndham—Cyril—now that we are really more than just doctor and patient, if we were ever even so much as that, now that we are in a sense, _friends_ , or at least sympathetic enemies, could I ask you something quite frankly, man to man?

CYRIL: _Really_! _(Winking.)_ Such propositions usually only come much later in the evening.

DR. GREENE: Ha-ha. What I mean to say is, Cyril, a man like you has more the elusive emotions of a woman, wouldn't you say? I mean that in the best possible way.

CYRIL: If you mean that I am more _honest_ in my emotions, the way a woman is, then I could accept such a comparison without concern. Contrary to their reputations, I have always found women to be the most incompetent liars, especially when it comes to matters of romance, despite Mata Hari, despite Tokyo Rose. Remember _Lysistrata_! I can read a woman's soul as others do tea-leaves. Oh, females can fib about who forgot to put Rikki Tikki Tavi out or who misplaced the tickets for the Cunard, but their craniums are crystalline. One could even admire them for that.

DR. GREENE: Well, then, maybe you can help me to grasp why when it comes to a woman and her, her _offspring_ , a mother can so often love the things a father hates most? You can guess what I'm alluding to. And I know you're yet to be a father and your Doris loves you irrespective of any flaws in those diamonds you flash about, but can you puzzle out why women make the choices they do? Do they do these things just to flummox the beasts they call men, or is it that they just... can't... help themselves?

CYRIL _(striking a Rodinesque pose, fist to chin)_ : I see... Well, I'm neither agony aunt nor sob sister. But I could venture that your conundrum is that you're asking a woman to divide her heart, a heart which much like mercury is indivisible, to ask her to stop loving one to appease the other. Doris, bless her, never wished that of me—she accepted Montgomery, knew that she, despite any ultramodern psychotherapeutical theories, couldn't really replace or substitute what only _he_ could offer—but instead made of herself something different, appealing in its own right. She didn't try to compete or to conquer; she merely lay down an offering and _waited_.

DR. GREENE: I'm afraid Elspeth is not at all like that. Elspeth smothers like an early frost. All her life she has commanded—if not _de_ manded. Every bit her father the admiral's daughter. Someone in love can enjoy following orders, including me, damn the woman. She has played astonishing tricks upon Morris's jejune urges and repressions. All that S _turm und Drang_ you've doubtless heard about is empirically correct. It's ironic, isn't it, that Morris hates me more than he could ever hate her.

CYRIL: Maybe _that's_ why you want to ruin him.

DR. GREENE: Ruin him? That's patent nonsense. I love him much more than his mother ever could, and he can't see that.

CYRIL: All fathers want to destroy their sons, eventually—or is it the other way around? What _does_ your Freud say? Really, you know so much more about these sorts of things than I do. I'm a ninny of an artist, one who's barely educated despite all those years at the Sorbonne.

DR. GREENE: Pardon me, I suppose I hadn't thought out my question well enough. It's a muddle, life. A muddle and a mystery. I suppose in the end we are _both_ unhappy men.

CYRIL: Speak for yourself! I'm determined to find a balance in _my_ life, as I have in my art—and to love and be loved, no matter what form or function that takes. Yes, talking over these things with you today has _convinced_ me that above all else I _must_ see Monty again. Doris will understand. She always understands. I could either envy or hate her for that. She would have no qualms about sharing me; she has been in on the game from the start. After all, I married her and introduced her to _people_ , people she might in her former life never have met. She is incapable of being anything _but_ happy. Somehow I need to know if I can be happi _er_. Only when I see Monty again, even so, after all these many months, will I know exactly what it is I feel and what it is I need now. Whether you intended to or not, you've helped me to establish that. But don't worry—I'll reassure Monty that that couldn't _possibly_ have been your son Morris he talked with, no matter how much of my own money or how many of my own tears it might take. I can stage a pretty good breakdown. Feel free to rip up that number I gave you; you need never talk to him.

DR. GREENE _(touched, on the verge of crying)_ : You would—would do this for me?

CYRIL _(imitating a tough guy)_ : Listen, buster, I'm no magic fairy bestowing blessings... I'm doing it out of my own selfish needs—as a way to keep Monty under my control. It's complicated, but, you see, I know it works with him. It's not about extorting more money out of me, as I've already said, but it is all about revenge. He's never asked for more than just enough 'help' from me. Remember, he's ancient now—almost twenty-five, and other younger and fresher faces have supplanted him. He is a neurotic with morbidly onanistic tendencies. Homosexuality, I will repeat to him from texts I just can't swallow myself, is not a drive, but a defense mechanism. Listen to me analyze—who's the doctor now?! Anyhow, I've had a revelation because of you; he'll be grateful this time in a way he never was before. Whether or not he severs ties with that coffee-colored athlete matters not a whit to me; men like ourselves are good at sharing. Monty is both rather dense and surprisingly pliable. And no doubt any memory of your wayward son dried up along with his hangover. When he hears I want him back he'll forget anything I tell him to forget.

DR. GREENE: But what about Doris? The baby? Your home-life?

CYRIL: Doris! Doris is strong enough and canny enough to know that she can live with or without me and that I am not so cruel as to depart her side at her hour of need. She will be an excellent caregiver, too, with or without me. Maybe I'm delusional in that way all we boy-lovers are, but I can keep one foot in the twilight and the other in the sun—it quite possibly could be my ability to adapt like a chameleon that I admire most about myself. It's amusing, but even the kindest critics say much the same thing about my art—how _fluid_ it is, _ambiguous_ , neither this nor that, and yet that is its appeal. _(Waving his handkerchief like a victorious banner—_ not _like a flag of defeat.)_ Oh, why ever have to choose? Why not just _be_?

DR. GREENE: I am sorry I never really had you for a patient, Cyril. It would have been a privilege, I see now. We might have gone on a remarkable odyssey together, if I'm not sounding overly lyrical.

CYRIL: Ah, yes, like those goatish Argonauts of old. Seeking some rosy illusion.

DR. GREENE: Oh, we all are, Cyril, we all are! But, say, to be honest, I really _must_ be going to see my attorney at the Drake for dinner. _He_ charges by the quadrant, you know. _(Pauses as he ejects himself from his chair one last time.)_ Wait—do you remember when you asked me out for dinner the last time we met, to meet the famous Montgomery?

CYRIL: One never truly forgets such a _camouflet au visage_ , even with the kindest of kid gloves. _(He rises for the last time, ironing the knees of his suit-pants with his palms.)_

DR. GREENE: I've often regretted that, due to professional reasons, I had to decline, but I should have been more tactful about it. Perhaps one day we can make another date?

CYRIL: A date with a debonair older man? I like that—as long as _he's_ paying! But somehow I doubt we'll cross paths again, Dr. Greene. Chicago is _such_ a large city.

DR. GREENE: And yet you've often told me how small and provincial it is.

CYRIL: It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it? That's what Uccello said! But I suppose I must run, too, before all the State Street stores close like steel traps on procrastinating lovers.

DR. GREENE: Of course. But do tell me—will you be buying one card or two? Oh, forgive me, do!

CYRIL _(as they cross the room toward the oddly ominous hall tree together)_ : You should know a _gallant_ never kisses and tells! Oh, God, the clichés I can spout when I haven't had anything to drink since lunch... One second—my handkerchief! _(Without warning he has turned to go back and retrieve the item from the chair; once he has picked it up he comes face-to-face with the Van Gogh in the center of the room again and inspects it yet again.)_ The yellow chair, the _yellow_ chair—like a misplaced stage prop, a metaphor out of Maeterlinck, but why and what for? You psychologists say every dream and artistic gesture hides some truth. Here, something bright in a dull, dark room. _Rather blatant_. But, tell me, does it have to be something as plebeian as _that_? _(Bows reverently, nevertheless, to the reproduction and returns to Dr. Greene's side.)_ Goodbye, my dear Dr. Greene. It has been a most _entertaining_ afternoon. And I am truly sorry for any... _misunderstandings_. _(Both men mumble apologies and simultaneously fumble for their coats and hats—a bit of unexpected slapstick—accidentally donning one another's garments or putting them on backwards, et cetera. Cyril's outer clothing, like the rest of his apparel, is of course considerably more voguish and refined than the doctor's.)_

DR. GREENE: As am I. And my occasional _unfortunate_ choice of words. _(Their respective hats on, he shoves open the door. Cyril follows close by, coat over his arm.)_ But please, call me Edmund from now on, won't you? If we ever do meet again, which we're bound to. No more false formalities... Will you accompany me down the elevator?

CYRIL: _Edmund?_ No, sorry, it doesn't sound quite right. I bet you're Ed to your _real_ friends. _(Perhaps impulsively Dr. Greene at last takes Cyril's coat with its contrasting silk lining from him and holds it open for Cyril to insert himself into.)_ You should be a Ludwig or Horace, maybe—but _never_ an Edmund... _(Smiling as he buttons and pats down his overcoat.)_ As for the elevator—I never told you about this little _phobia_ of mine, did I? Thank God Doris and I only live three storeys up. Why, now that I think of it, _that_ 's what we should have been working on! So, no thanks—taking twenty-five flights of stairs down will act as the other half of my calisthenics for the day. _(Stepping over threshold as Dr. Greene holds the door.)_ And the descent will give me time to think of what to say on my valentine card—or cards. _(Winks—or did he?)_

DR. GREENE: Then I suppose I must bid farewell to you here.

CYRIL: Yes, it seems you must.

DR. GREENE _(standing in doorway)_ : Cyril... ( _weighty pause_ ) ...I do wish you happiness.

CYRIL _(looking back as he exits, tilting his chapeau)_ : Oh, I know you still consider me a sick, confused man, doctor. Maybe some day, far in the future, it won't always be so, your seeing me as your inferior. Maybe science will discover that what we both have perceived to be a weakness is actually a strength... Though I doubt things will ever change _that_ much... _Tant pis_! In the meantime, I won't fret about it. _Adieu_ , Eddie my man! _(He starts to walk off slowly, more than a little regretfully, while his voice echoes and gradually fades down the hallway.)_ You've been a true gentleman, even if I can't say a single doctor has ever _really_ been able to help me—except maybe that man with his happy pills—nonetheless, I don't and can't blame you. We are all limited by what we can empirically perceive. You too are a product of your conditioning and society's expectations, and no doubt you probably clung to your mother, and your father held... _(He can no longer be heard as we hear elevators chime in the distance and, like as not, a little celestial music. Dr. Greene walks off alone with his long woolen winter scarf trailing behind, looking somewhat like a distracted oracle as the lights fade out.)_
 I, Symond, a Soldier

A Novella

 Symond's  Preface

Sometimes I have imagined a planet quite unlike ours, divided by not just two territorial forces locked as they are in eternal combat, but a planet consisting of many nations, of many different governments and cultures and beliefs, spread across the thousands of mountainous islands that span our unifying ocean: countries where histories are not borrowed and legends are not common property, where there are spoken and written many vocabularies and alphabets—not just this one overburdened, inadequate language we share with our avaricious and vengeful rival. Think of more than a piddling handful of homegrown words or idioms to depict an object or emotion, unworn alternatives that might bemuse, yet tantalize the tongue and revive the senses! As that great philosopher Socristotus (who, currently, neither side wants to claim) once said, "If I had ten times as many ways to say 'I love you,' then you'd be tenfold more lovely to me." (And if this humble tale set before the reader were ever rendered into the demotic discourse of a future society, what would be lost in the translation? Would I make more or less sense?) Perhaps, too, I should propose not innumerable, half-forgotten gods still vaguely believed to be ruling and guiding everything that exists, from the core of the sun to the singularity of my soul, but only one solitary omnipotent and omniscient entity—or even more to my liking, now that I have experienced that supernal fall from Elysia to Perditium, _no gods at all_. Then none of us mortals would have to invoke the appropriate deity should we happen to stub a toe, light a fuse, bed a beauty, or bless a child. No wrath but our mortal enemy's to contend with, no hollow praising of painted idols, no imploring of pleading choirs against an empty empyrean... ah, but I probably hope for too much. It might be easier to picture a world as polytheistic and monocultural as ours, yet so different that textbooks would have no need to anthologize the major battles of an interminable war that knows neither decisive wins nor lasting truces; if that were indeed so, however, then I suppose there would be nothing much to recount to anyone, no storytelling at all, for where the harmony of many voices and ideas reigns and humans live in uninterrupted happiness, as they did in our mythical Golden Age, only trite love poetry might be written. Truth is, I cannot _really_ imagine what a more peaceable world like this one I have presently conjectured would entail, with all those unknown phrases describing things I've never seen and all those unforeseen possibilities: Faces and races and places, whole civilizations, that might look so different from our own, might vary as do the flowers in the field. They say we went to war because as fraternal twins we had grown too much alike, too jealous of one another and too predictably uniform, from the color of our eyes to the received wisdom of our fore-mothers and fathers. Maybe we only went to war because we were bored with one another.

Then again, I can with a little more effort hypothesize a world even more dissimilar to our own, not simply parallel but complexly contradictory, one where none of us would ever be able to set foot, where indeed _we_ (our people or theirs) cannot be imagined at all. All our buildings, all our art and all our vanities, vanished, never were, never will be. Every one of our frivolous grandeurs just a smoke-ring, a soap bubble, engendered by a consciousness that does not and could not exist—perfect _nothingness_. Very well, if any of you should insist, let there be _some_ thing, for they do say something is better than nothing. But make that elementary substance static and benign. Here then, perhaps, would reign genuine, irrevocable peace. At last. It's true, I do dream this! Lately I have had every reason to doubt the possibility that we could actually be the product of the contemplation of numerous sentient deities, or even one all-powerful uni-god—an hilarious idea, if you think about it—but if variform life begets life, then only creatures as blameless as birds (multiply their magnitudes to that extent magpies or mallards achieve in our present domain) should soar across a sky that likewise has never known our armed forces' balloonists or bombardiers, while simple-minded quadrupeds like the now-extinct badger-bear and wolf-fox would be among the most fitting tenants of these archipelagos, burrowing as they might under the laurel oaks where our temples and museums and tenements presently crowd the land. I would happily allow further complications in my tentative universal scheme: say, wisents and wolverines dozing upon swards of buttercups, where there would otherwise be railyards and coalmines; elk and eland grazing meadows that we have made battlefields and cemeteries; anthills and termite mounds where today so many mansions of our masters proliferate... Wouldn't that be better? Some day all of us will be dead—you and you and you (and me) and all our friends and your children and their children, too—so in time, given time, there will be not a trace of us left upon this blessed planet. Will that at last be the paradise of which we have only dreamt?

 Symond's Tale

If our eyes are to cameras as cameras are to eyes, postulated the much-respected metaphysician Erasto early in the last century (he who also, on a more practical level, pioneered research into telekinetic waves), then it stands to reason that whatever vision was beheld at the moment of death would be flashed permanently upon the expiring party's still viable optical membranes—and if by some intricate and almost magical process that ultimate image could be extracted from the cellular walls and transferred to a light-sensitive medium, then we might gain a better idea of what happens to the human soul when all bodily functions cease. One might obtain a glimpse of the life to come, perchance—a blurred fury of wings or a flare of cold fires, to name but two possibilities, thus proving or disproving any number of long-abandoned spiritual theories; at the very least, one might detect the face of an attendant nurse or discover who was indeed the murderer. As is well documented, Dr. Erasto did in fact experiment for a duration with enemy prisoners condemned to death, but (as one might expect) the techniques were crude, if not downright sloppy, and the results appeared less than promising in the specimen slides he sporadically exhibited—even if the victim were forced to focus on a simple symbol or color field right before the execution, close assessment provided no conclusive evidence of any sort of retinal imprinting, beyond certain patterns alleged to be made discernible by applications of cyanine dye or silver nitrate to the dilated pupils (still no more verifiable than those profiles children and poets pretend they see in the moon). Later, less whimsical researchers might have taken Dr. Erasto's clumsy methodology to task and discredited his wilder hypotheses, but I can say with some conviction that his basic claim must be true: for I have a vivid and inextirpable image in my memory of the very last thing I saw before I died, and were I provided the technological means, I could no doubt print a maximally detailed sort of photograph, dilating every atom that vibrated my opthalmic axis; lacking any such means of biomechanical reproduction, I have only the words of our undernourished language to describe what I saw.

Before I died _for the first time_ , I should have said earlier—and by stating that, I realize that I am also refuting myself, for how could outside observers call it death, that most permanent of all phenomena, perhaps the only _permanent_ phenomenon, if it did not mean the actual demise of my corporeality, if not my conscious being? Furthermore, when what I call "death" would be an experience that has, despite the trauma and irreversibility, borne repetition? Well, I haven't the time or skill to pursue redundant ontological arguments here; I merely wish to describe what it is I believe I _know_ I saw. It was, you see, a face—his face, or my face, maybe our merged faces, even if it was only my own reflection effaced by his in the crystalline current where I had come to slake my thirst, after quite a long and arduous journey.

Upon further consideration, I might well hold that it was his face alone that remains captive to that moment, although he was as alike to me, I can see now, as a double, or at least a conjoined brother. Yes, anyone would say we have close to the same nose, lips, ears, hair, eyes, and so on, all the way to the thorax. He is or was probably the better-looking, an improved ideal of what I might in a good light detect within a looking glass. (Nay, I insist I am not retelling the tale of that personage named Narcis in our decayed mythos.) Just before I was splintered to smithereens, this Other-Self, as it were, had come to the opposite side of the rippling brook, I remember, and I swear without reservation that he stopped and heartily hallooed to me, as I lay there prostrate upon rough pebbles and scalding sand—and so though we were a good fifteen feet separate, I saw him quite clearly, enough to discern the concentrated curiosity in his eyes and notice that like my own they were an ordinary blue, or else that they conventionally reflected the paler blue of an autumnal sky. For several minutes prior, I had been watching my Other, unnoticed from behind a rocky outcrop, as he went about his tasks, not knowing if I should dare to expose myself at first, just for a cooling drink of water, or if I should run from what was most likely an enemy combatant. Combatant! He was not in uniform, and he was engaged in anything but belligerent behavior. Instead, he was dressed in a smutty vest and rough twill trousers, unbuttoned braces hanging down his sinewy backside like draggled pendants, and he was shod in heavy lead-soled lumberjack's boots, with a lumberjack's broad-beamed shanks and withers; his thick yolk-yellow close-cropped hair looked as if it had been sheared as roughly as a ram's; his athletic breathing was audible even at a distance. And I—I, had already stripped myself of everything from overheated boots to burning beret, those items of clothing that had become no better to me than clinging burial cerements reeking of war and death, and had been ready to plunge naked into the stream before I caught sight of him.

Before he caught sight of me, my mirror-self had been carrying armfuls of kindling from the edge of the dense coppice to a campfire in a well-raked clearing; with each deposit of tinder onto the heap next to the fire, he would often grunt and wipe his dripping brow, then repeat the process. A tin-metal tramp's kettle bubbled above the flames, and the handfuls of chestnuts he now and then tossed onto the living ashes below gave off a powerfully masculine odor reminiscent of saddles and the sawdust-strewn dance halls I had known in another life. Something about the balletic way he strode across the turf and that contented look in his eyes (even from afar I was sure of his gaze) transfixed me to my rockbound hiding place, and I watched him as one watches a wild animal who is doing something rare and graceful, although his actions and demeanor were happily caught up in the almost musical meters of undisturbed domesticity. To be sure, he was blissfully unaware of himself or his silent eloquence, of his perfect clean-limbed tawny-skinned physique, of that essence both muscular and ethereal; he seemed alert only to the involuntary rhythm of his movements and the hemodynamic pulsing of blood-red flames burning up the coals. There was no reason to collect such an excessive amount of wood for such small purpose or to fuss so over the tedium of boiling water, but he was obviously enjoying how he had abandoned himself body and soul to the greater whole of this fine late September afternoon. Maybe he was a cadet on leave or a wounded officer who had almost completed his recovery in the revitalizing air of his homeland.

On the farther end of the clearing, within the gray-green shadows of mature fir trees and consequently harder to perceive, there might have been purplish smoke exhaled from the chimney of a little roughhewn cabin, nestled among briar-bush and shedding laburnum, so let's put there as well a tomcat arching its back on the front stoop, and close on by a bright canary chirping its solo from a wicker cage swinging from a linden bough—parts of the picture that could have been just my second-rate artist's imagination completing the homey scene, inspired by a postcard sent to me from a neighboring island by a schoolmate years ago or a tourist agent's travel poster glanced at from a passing tram. "Picturesque rural life," that advertisement's caption might have read. To an urbanite such as myself, growing up swallowed within the squalor and strife of a deteriorating city under constant siege, those words were sweetly evocative of a time and place I could never really experience. Gladly would I have lost myself within that idealized advertisement. In my hallucinatory trajectory away from the barracks, I had already begun to wonder if I had stumbled into a piece of the dreamy and bucolic doggerel I had once tried to compose. Nothing here was to be believed, and yet this all seemed more _solid_ , more _real_ , if you will, than anything I had ever thought possible before. Over the course of that short time I had been watching this stranger from within the shadow of the boulders, I started to doubt what I had considered my battlefront-hardened objectivity, that recently acquired insensitivity to circumstances; I felt akin to a man falling quite by chance in love, not so much with another person, as with a degree of peace I had never known and he had somehow managed to obtain in this little out-of-the-way valley, heeding not the catastrophe of warfare on all sides. Here was an unclouded calm somehow won from a violent and bloody world. It was in pursuit of such a well-nigh forgotten dream that I had made my escape from camp; I wanted to possess this dream in his stead, or rather, I wanted to possess his life—not to kill him with bayonet and bullets as I had been trained to kill my enemies, but to _become_ him. Was it because I was dazed from the sun, hungry, thirsty, exhausted? In my delirium, I would have sworn that the youth and I were not on opposing sides of the conflict, but were the oldest and dearest of friends, inseparable as sun and shadow, gallant as brother heroes, and as openly accepting of one another as lovers can be. This unnamed young man so much like myself and yet all in all so different, seen as he was now, alternately sun-bronzed and then shade-dappled as he moved into the clearing and back out from between curtains of overhanging willow leaves, this being who was the image of a minor god in an alcove, was perfect in his symmetry and simplicity, while I had known nothing at all for an incalculable time but ugly and deadening martial complexity. Take my own life, I would have shouted to him—I offer up my flesh and soul: thrust your blade in, slit my throat, drain my life-fluids, do anything, so long as I can stay here forever with you.

The surprisingly strong sun of this land seemed to be searing my sensitive umbrella-loving epidermis. I had a near-hysterical need of water to refresh me and sustenance to fuel me, but just as much, I now wanted the beautiful strange one at his everyday duties to halt and to heed and hearken unto this intruder, my small meek self, into his kingdom. I longed to touch his tenderly callused hand and feel his husky aspirations close upon my auditory canals. Let him pity and welcome me; both of us were lonely, he in his lost corner of the map and I among thousands of fellow soldiers subject to the whims of our savage commandants. And now, like old friends meeting by chance in a park, even a little like a newly awakened lover who for the first time has spotted his own face miniaturized within the eye of his beloved, we had found by accident a real contentment and, for me at least, fulfillment. How utterly unreal were my thoughts that afternoon! Lately I suppose I had been reading too many romantic adventure stories for grownup boys, the only things besides venereal health pamphlets available in the camp library. (In every one of those books, from cliff-hanger to cliff-hanger, the characters shared a love far nobler than that weak-willed love reserved for the nether sex, a love that would outlast even death.) In my two decades upon this planet, had I ever known a more instantaneous and all-consuming passion as that I felt then for the unknown youth, my enemy who should be my friend? He, or his happiness, tempted me as did the cooling waters at my feet. At last he wandered along the bank opposite to where I skulked among stones and tree-stumps, cocking his head as if he sensed the presence of another human. His placid, quite expressionless face—expressionless as people have said my own is, bearing a look that like an unfinished portrait never tells you enough—seemed very near, there across the stream; in the clear September air I could make out, as if through binoculars, every drop of perspiration on his brow and every blond hair curling under the sweat-soaked scoop of his string vest. When he turned his head, I could see the freshly shaven scruff of his neck, a scabby nick or two upon it and a few missed hairs, see the discolored undershirt sticking to the small of his back and the tendons tensing along those wide shoulder blades that seemed more fit for bearing the weight of an oaken yoke. At last, though I had become well-accustomed to lie in wait for hours, I could take it no longer. I straggled out from my seclusion and to the water's boundary, not caring what might happen next, and with a shuddering mulish moan fell to my knees to dunk my head into the life-giving stream; the last thing I saw, as I have stated to the authorities (or, to be more precise, anyone who will listen), was my new acquaintance gesturing to me, a look of genuine interest or at least animal arousal overtaking that almost unnaturally innocent face. "Hi!" he shouted, or "Ho!" and it was then I realized that the sun in its zenith had burned its negative image upon the inside of my eyelids; and that my head was pulsating with an explosive, incandescent cadence. But by then I suppose my heart had already stopped beating.

Do not doubt my words! Later they would tell me I must have been dead for a good forty-five minutes to an hour. An hour; three-million, six-hundred thousand milliseconds.... what are such fantastic figures, when one is suspended in such a timeless state? What is time, when numbers mean nothing? I have long concluded that mathematics is only another sort of mysticism. For what surpassed several trillion millennia, I was therefore, by my own subjective observation, dead, indeed—anything but fully alive—a trifling speck of defenseless auto-awareness oscillating weakly within an illimitable starless firmament. In school we are taught that space is triangular, and the area of that triangle is fixed by time. Accordingly _I_ , that is, the one infinitely reducible point I choose to call myself, spun and bobbed for a numerical eternity, spinning and bobbing while buoyed and bounced by cosmic rays like a careless dust-mote in a sunbeam, or feather in a whirlwind, from one indifferent angle of the universe to the other. Since I have previously cited the famous Erasto, I might as well also introduce his misremembered predecessor Mandellu, that medical magician of artificial smoke and simulated mirrors, who thought that the departing spirit might best be captured by pressing a vial against the dying person's lips and encapsulating the ultimate breath, stopping it with a cork, then subjecting it in the laboratory to an illogical array of arcane tests. (One of his colleagues, I might add, even went so far as to place expiring patients upon scales to determine the exact weight of the soul, though in my own afterlife I was the very definition of weightlessness.) In my free-floating incorporeal state I would have vouched for Mandellu's theories and affirmed his methodology. Having traversed time from first uncertain tick to last tremulous tock and back again—that is, all the breadth and depth and height of space—and when I had been contracted into an immeasurable nothingness, I felt myself being drawn from the void as if into a vast transparent vessel of blinding light, its contents un-creatable and indestructible; my soul sucked up, as it were, into another dimension and analytical system of subjective reasoning—what I will defer rationalizing as "reality," but only (being now experienced in a more expansive form of consciousness) with the same sort of patient condescension a parent might regard his or her child's fairytale kingdoms.

Gradually, so gradually it must have taken most of that hour of quasi-existence I had been allotted to achieve results, energetic yet nearly painless jabs of primal physical sensation (most certainly steel surgical appliances guided by hands in surgical gloves) stirred me enough to begin to decant myself from my prison of bottled photons; above me I saw, or rather felt, the cruel force of a sort of ethereal eminence (forgive me for all these grand abstractions, but there is simply no other way to describe the godlike power that drew me forth again into everyday life) radiating out of a hitherto unseen galaxy impossibly far away, unstoppable and irresistible, and yet, when all is said and done, just an afterthought of the cosmos, as if to say "might as well summon him back." .... And then, in less than an instant, that which the authorities had classified as "Subset A.1, a young and able-bodied private of the first class" traveled on a conduit of electronically viridescent plasma, a glowing green current where there were no other colors, to rejoin my immobile and dismembered body upon the surgery slab. Everything—every touch, every sound, every luminous memory—came hurtling back into my open brain: the untold history of my short unheralded life, its sweet-then-soured pageant of hours and eras, nights with no coke in the furnace and joyless schooldays and rainy weekends and the occasional cruelly sunny afternoon and always the entropy of tea-time; a rubber hot-water bladder that had been the best of bedmates as a child, a mongrel I had fed in the back-alley, the punch of a fat bully, a homely girl who shared her meager lunchbox, government-required dance lessons, a gaudy floral tie I had bought with the first of my earnings, the deathlike rictus of my grandmam's dentures, my granddad's yawning coffin, a mandatory cotillion or two, Myrmia and schoolmates and teachers and books and the cistern behind the classroom, as well... While delicate needles and scalpels deftly wielded by the same multitudinous fingers palpated my flesh, accompanied by close camphor-scented exhalations and an intense need to urinate, aroused my nerves and consumed all of my senses for who knows how long, before someone brought me a bedpan and my guardians abruptly receded, leaving me cold but alert in the bright aura cast by acetylene lamps burning behind jade-glass shades. Listening to the hiss of the gas rise and fall with the monotonous cadence of summertime cicadas, I at last fell into a deep recuperative slumber. It turned out, patient witnesses of my distress, that your narrator would "make it" after all, but only if he could lie motionless (chin up, arms folded like a figure on a sarcophagus lid) as long as possible in a semi-anesthetic state on an abradant canvas cot within a canvas-roofed enclosure that smelled faintly of merbromine and more strongly of cab horses or their aftermath. At some point the lamps sputtered out, and with their slow extinction an orchestra of snorers began their practice runs for the long nocturnal performance ahead. Thus tortured all night, I slept through the entirety of the next day, maybe for several days more. Once in a great while water was siphoned into me or an oatmeal-like paste funneled down my throat. Twelve hours of lying flat upon my back inert as a mollusk, twelve hours of itchy restlessness: this process was repeated I don't know how many iterations. I was also never quite sure if I were hearing the violent onrush of an approaching thunderstorm or just the restless sleepers around me—certainly the raindrops would soon never cease their constant bastinado upon the tenting overhead. In my brain, when I was conscious and my ears were full of water and wind, I shuffled and reshuffled the calendar pages of all my months of existence, putting them in order, from birth to what seemed to be the present, until I was fairly sure I had the dates and sequence of events correct. Alas, I remained Symond Smones, first-year soldier—I knew that now without having to fetch up my dog tag—and I was a native and resident of our economically important but still sadly provincial city; I lived at home with dear old Mams (whose late and only child I was; no one knew if my sire was a defector or had died in a balloon battle), I was a good child who did what he was told, through sheer happenstance and not much concern on my own behalf I had won from the public funds a scholarship that paid for two years at a local technical college where besides the usual maths and sciences is also taught (in a vestigial way, for culture abandoned this outpost long ago) a general survey of the arts, I read all those profligate dreamers called poets, I drifted into my own continuum of dreaminess and profligacy, I had sometimes even written "free" verse (too free, for it went flying, as this account certainly must, in too many directions at once), upon being expelled for "lack of volition" at the end of my first year I was taken on as a junior clerk at a pharmacy (that supposed "career" brought to a halt by what amounts to a press-gang), like a good many young people of my dubious age and education I retained even outside the classroom an amateur's interest in demi-scientifical esoterica and other "refined" arts, I was pledged to be married to an obliging girl who I once (and only once) told "I love you," as well as I remembered I had been conscripted into the army soon after I neglected to celebrate my twentieth birthday, I did my duty, I was generally not unhappy. Not happy, but not totally unhappy, either. _Here_ , here in the present tense that is now the past, bound to my bed, I still had no clear indication of exactly where I was or who exactly these other beings breathing around me were. It wasn't until early one morning (it could have been any morning), when the drumming and the thundering inside and outside of me retreated, and after I had neared the end of sorting out my unwritten self-biography, that the ever-questing sun found me at last through a rent in the worn material and my parched lips felt moist again, as if freshly kissed. But all _this_ that I had woken into, I soon saw, was not just another of my heightened and eroticized versions of reality.

At first, when I saw and remembered everything about the past few weeks of my life, before and after the accident (if you could call it that), I was infuriated at whatever deities or mortals had pulled me down from that storied afterlife of misremembered repute (those fields where fallen heroes are resurrected), just to force me to contend with a body which I innately understood to be no longer whole or fully functional. Secondly, and more surprisingly, after having watched the hypnotic dance of dust particles in that wavering shaft of sunlight for several minutes (reminiscent of my own brief existence as a carefree cluster of atoms adrift upon sidereal wavelengths, now that I have mulled it over), I grew furious with myself for having acquiesced so readily to such a premature demise—for I had wandered into that simple and spurious stage-set of pasteboard cottages and stuffed canaries depicted here a few orthogonal apostrophes back without any idea of my function or even the premise, without any consideration of what I was giving up in this world I had always known and still could learn to love. Symond, you indolent daydreamer, you needn't have given up like that, I tell myself. I should have been braver, battling for my soul and every small but cherished delicacy of this small (if rather circumscribed) life I had once known so well: from the lofty lines I had memorized just to please myself (liking the sound, ignorant of the intent) to the homely taste of maternal cookery, or the vinegary scent of boiled laundry in the breeze and the sound of a violin from an upper story across the courtyard (both sensations forever commingled in my memory), or a penny found king's-crown-up on the pavement (almost worthless but enough to purchase a sprig of taffy), or new shoes for a new year, or the unexpected flowers of that rare "second spring" that sometimes comes with a heatwave after an October frost, or new stockings, new underlinens, not to forget to mention a flock of chimney-storks turned pink by the setting sun, or a good night's sleep in a clean well-made bed, or even the anatomically instructive playing-cards we underclassmen had once riffled and divided lustfully among ourselves. Until I wear this new pencil to a nub I could name favorite upon favorite, but I won't bore others any more with them. Cavalier me; once I forsook my troop, I should have headed for home, not heaven. Lastly, when the final dose of the anesthetic had worn off, I forgot all that I had dreamed, forgot the sun-soaked clearing and the bracing smell of burnt chestnuts and the smiling forester with my face, and merely wondered where I was and what would be required of me now, probably again, again and again.

This war, _the_ war, or the latest war, the war to end all wars, I tried to ascertain within my aching head, had been going on for over a thousand days and nights, or ten-thousand days and nights, or a hundred-thousand, it wasn't quite clear to me now; at any rate, it must have been going on for a very very long time. Hadn't it? Hadn't our two insanely insular kingdoms _always_ been at war with one another? Yes—that was right—there had always and ever been just this one unwinnable, undefeatable war. You could no more estimate when the conflict began or when it might end any more than you could compute the birth and death of the universe. And so I, I must have _always_ been a soldier: a zero, if you like. Zero times one: there was no way out of this empty equation.

Except when I was dead, the clock in my head has never stopped ticking, and I have this uncanny ability—likely my only exceptional talent—to tell people the exact time, even without consulting my pocket watch (just ask any of my erstwhile pharmaceutical workfellows). So I will state that, give or take a minute or two, it was a quarter past eight in the morning when I became Symond Smones again. Since being woken by the sun, I had been lying there on my back, eyes closed because I refused to accept the horrible circumstances now evident to me, ruminating dourly on the war and the world, when for the first time since I had been brought to this place I actually heard not just the sound of voices, but understood what was being said. "Mussed you up right smart, didn't they, kiddle?" came a voice from somewhere to my left, though I could not as yet turn my head (or for that matter, tell left from right). It was a well-grown man's voice, of course, though its timbre was strangely artificial, modulated as it was half-way betwixt a whisper and a wheeze. "Saw yer when they brung yer in, I did, saw what them bastards done to yer," the voice continued, rising and falling as if from the bourdon of the ancient swineherd's whining sac-pipes. Not only was the timbre odd, but so was the parodic accent, a sort I hadn't heard since my early childhood, at bioscope shows starring "rough and ready" idols like handsome Ned Twick or rugged Biggo Needum. "Nasty kinda scene out there, ain't it, all them dibbils and us," the man rasped, his words amounting to little more than the sound of wind whipping at the walls of this infirm infirmary. "Yep, saw yer dragged in by the forelock of that purty yallowy hair. Stinkin' like boilin' oil an' as bled of blood as a hog hung in a smokehouse. Would've bet a week's rations yer were dead, ol' sport."

Mustering all my strength, I was able to raise my head two or three inches, and, feeling as if my neck were pivoting on a rusty axle, I slowly turned toward the possessor of such an unlikely voice. He was lying on a bunk the same as mine, a barrel-chested behemoth two or three decades older than myself, with thinning strawberry-roan hair riddled with gray and a great unkempt beard of various contrasting shades (if it were not for our predicament, I would have been sure it was as fake as a carnival fortune-teller's). At first sight, his face appeared to be painfully sunburned, not simply dusted with a coppery powder like cinnamon, which might have been applied on purpose or might have drifted in between the flaps of the tent. When lying fully stretched out as he was, his feet stuck out over the edge of his mattress ticking and exposed to all onlookers his horny toenails and toes, yellowed and malformed as an orangutan's. The last but most remarkable features of this man were his broad, fin-like hands, which had only five fingers distributed between them. Still, he handled them adroitly and was even then whittling a knob of wood into what seemed to have the front side of a man and the backside of a horse. (Appropriate, because there was still a definite whiff in the locality of beasts of burden not long gone.)

"A tin turnip it were," he explained, keen to what I had been staring at. "Soddin' thing went off too soon. Picture it. Dibbils coming out of the ground like termites. One-two-three we was pickin' 'em off, but they was quick. Someone handed me a grenade an' told me to throw. 'Round these parts someone's always passing you a grenade like 'twas a peppermill, am I right? Lucky it didn't take the soddin' rest of me with it."

Up until this moment, I had scarcely been aware of what part or parts of my own body might be misplaced, since I had only just begun to realize _where_ my body was, in general. Now I took a quick inventory and was relieved to find every visible limb and digit accounted for, a full set, although there was a vague itchiness along my right leg which I could not scratch, as it was bandaged like a mummy's from calf to thigh.

"Oh, yer all there, don't yer worry," the bewhiskered man said knowingly, and put down his jackknife and the half-formed centaurine. "Only a bit fagged, I reckon. Or fragged! No wonder, when you've been mown down by your own side and gurneyed back here. Not that anyone meant t' hurt you in the first place, as I figger it..." Something about his voice or accent had changed for a moment, but before I could blink he was back in character again. "Uh, 'twere some sort of retaliation, weren't it? For that trick they pulled on your mates in yon valley." I didn't comprehend, but allotted him the time to go on—what choice had I? "Don't yer give it any more mind—they pieced ya back t'gether right fine an' you'll be whistle-worthy again in no time." He leaned toward me on his right side and swept back the stained sheet, revealing a bloodied bandage taped mid-abdomen. "Got this here beaut," he said with the air of a lady showing off a new diamond, "coupla weeks ago, I did. For a spell, they was feeding me through a tube stuck smack down in the middle of t' hole. I could look right in and watch m'self churning up the slurry mess. Most fun I've had since the damn draft-board caught up with me."

I felt the remnants of my last meal rising in my throat, a meal I could at present remember no more of than where I had been and what I was doing before the hour of my great getaway. Most likely, it was porridge in my gorge, since all our breakfasts for nearly a year had been porridge. Beating back the porridgy sensation, I asked where exactly we were.

"Can't yer smell the manure, you runty reject?" was the answer I got. "Up t' recent, this gods-abandoned place was nothin' but a big ol' barn! If I'm not mistaken, we're right about where the stables was."

"I—I thought we must be in the wilderness or maybe even that sort of red-dirt barren where all the copper-mines are played out. Isn't this—this an army tent?"

"Ha! That's just where part of the roof done tore off and they replaced it with any scraps they could find, all flung t'gether. Ain't no wide-open wilderness roundabouts here, boy. Ain't no real hospitals, neither. Should know, I grew up just down t' road a piece."

Wider awake now, I pulled myself up against the damp wall behind me (there was no pillow) and saw that this apparent farmer was nothing less than correct, though of course the premises had been given a hasty transformation and equipped with examination tables, trays, medical trunks, and rows and rows of portable cots, each of the cots occupied with a groaning or snoring soldier, none of whom I recognized. Everything was coated with a layer of fine red dust, except where it had been wiped away haphazardly here and there. Obviously, hygiene was of no real concern. An overturned watering trough lay down the aisle from us, atop which an orderly in a long-unwashed green scrub-suit sat cross-legged, a stubby pencil poised above a pulp-paper digest. I was at the end of the fifth phalanx of cots, against the cold stone wall of the old building, upon which there were still lesions of moss and mold that had not been scraped or scrubbed away. Above me to the left were half the remains of a hayloft, through which the sunlight shone through slats partly patched with canvas and from which there occasionally blew a musty draft of air, which would precipitate tiny gusts of wheat-chaff and that eye-watering coppery dust upon us all. Opposite, through the big double doors of the barn, I could see chickens scratching out their sums in the red dirt and hear the army mules laughing scornfully now and then, as if enraged to see humans in what was _their_ rightful home. Flashes of hard white light beyond promised an approaching storm.

"Yes-siree," the farmer said, after a hearty intake of the tainted air, "they made this here place overnight. We tain't but half a stone's throw from the trenches yonder."

My heart sank to hear that. Although I did not believe, or care to believe him—I had been temporarily comforted by the impression that, since it was not deep in the woods or out on the desert sands, this barn must be at the edge of a city whose hospitals were too full to accept any more reservations—I soon came to realize that those low rumblings which I had assumed to be originating from amid my empty bowels were in fact the aftershocks of bombs striking the earth in the near distance. What I had presumed to be bolts of lightning out beyond the barnyard must then be rockets being set off on the unseen horizon. The shock of this new information naturally distressed me a considerable deal, and so I sulked down under the piss-stained coverlet of my cot with a very vocal and drawn-out sigh. I wanted only an everyday goose-down mattress and pillows, and I longed for steaming cocoa and creamy scones brought in on a tray by my creaking old Mams (neither neuralgia nor bunions could stop her), along with a lending-library novel to read during this term of recovery (which would of course be as rapid as the novel was long), read while listening to popular arias on the viviogram, and between writing inept but endearing doggerel dedicated to the fair maiden Myrmia, when I felt up to the task—by any means available, I refused to acknowledge as real this dust and itchiness and stink within and without my person, yet alone accept the imminent ruination outside. I squeezed shut my prickling eyes again on the scene around me, surrendering myself to what now seemed like an incomparably superior past—I could smell the ammoniac scent of lilies my girl had sent me to cheer the sickroom, feel the familiar sun-warmed fleece of pajamas just unpinned from the clothesline. I could almost see the view outside my bedroom window: the dazzling uppermost arc of the elevated tramway, the forest of kinephone towers and telectric poles with all the life humming within their wires, the panoramic pictorial advertisements for straight razors and tooth-powder (a giant's jaw, a giantess's smile), the pale green silk-sheathed surveillance balloon like a suspended teardrop falling upward above the heights of the crenelated skyline. The view our king and queen see from their winter palace in the capital can't be any grander.

Probably sensing that I was drifting away into reminiscence, this improbable patient cleared his throat in an effort to regain my attention. "Say, it's a loverly day, innit? Makes you want to sail a kite right into the upper ionosphere! By the way, me matey," he said with an amiability more often found in pub or club, his newly altered voice reaching me from the foggy borderland of sleep (for I had indeed almost put myself out again with those cozy recollections of bed and book and beauty), "the name's Lyrald. By way of Dundersea. And Mounthatten. Doctor of philosophy. Formerly. Hedonist. Always! Pleased to make the acquaintance. Now, if you don't mind... Ta-rah!" Then it was he, not myself, who dropped into instantaneous slumber before I was able to ask whether Lyrald was his first or last or possibly both names. Could he really be some sort of gone-to-seed professor, like the ones I knew back at the local poly-t? It did not matter, for his interruption had spoiled my soporific oneirism (not a dirty habit at all!); I lay fully awake now staring out across the other occupied cots, toward the garrulous fowl in the kitchen garden, pitying my present circumstances, but nonetheless optimistic that in my honorably wounded condition I would be home soon. Watching Lyrald sleep, I noticed a torn recruitment poster tacked between our beds: a brawny, bare-chested young brute in jodhpurs and puttees brandishing a bayonet, daring all onlookers to "Do You're Duty! Shut Up and Fight!" That abominable misprint of a homophone offended my half-educated sensibilities almost as much as the implied exhortation against pacifists. Besides, the poster was superfluous, since conscription had within my lifetime become universal, and the enemy increasingly, in this decade, on all sides of us meant even housewives and schoolgirls were launching bombs from their barricaded balconies and porches. In her last aeropost, which had been sent I could no longer guess how many weeks ago, Myrmia had written that at her office even the sound of the typewriters made visitors flinch.

As I was contemplating the vagaries of punctuation and politics, a high-ranking officer in a commander's gold-braided cap and surgical smock, a man remarkably well-groomed for his advanced age, neither smack of smut nor dot of dust upon him, with wavy silver hair and wavy silver mustache and sideburns ( _silver_ is a word I regretfully must use often to describe him), and graceful but rather long and simian arms, bared to the hairy elbows as if just scrubbed, approached my bedstead, swaggering like a cadet, clipboard held high and forward like a shield. He wore a pair of small silver-rimmed lenses attached to a slender silver strap threaded through a buttonhole; I would learn soon that half the time these eyeglasses were pinched across his nose and half the time they would be swinging freely and often strike me in my own nose. Without having to move his imperious lips, this man announced that he had been assigned to be my doctor.

"Will I be all right, sir?" I immediately begged of him, for lack of anything more conversational to say.

The doctor acted as if his new patient had said nothing and, once he had adjusted his glasses, began percussing my bandaged leg with a metal prong (nothing but a horseshoe substituting for a medical device, I could have sworn). "Feel this?" he said, jabbing the iron into the underside of my bandaged knee. "Not much," I replied, grimacing. Allow me: It is commanded that a good soldier must not feel pain for himself—only for others, or so they had told us all in our earliest days in the infantry.

"Feel this?" he asked again.

"Possibly, possibly not."

"And _this_?" His tone was growing more accusatory than interrogatory and his thrusts more insistent.

"Well, a tiny bit, I have to admit."

"This..."

"Y-yes. Yes, sir! Yes, damn it!" It did not matter at this point; I was only a private and couldn't care less about promotion, anyhow. When they shipped me back home I would not demand any medals for bravery.

"Let me try here." The doctor leaned over my lower extremities, and I could smell that equine and very male odor even more upon his spotless smock. Could be he was a member of the cavalry, maybe he played polo. "Do you feel this? _Do..._ you... _feel..._ this?!"

I could not contain myself any more than I used to when told my bibliographic sources were questionable, during those bygone days of upper levels and blue book comps. "Excusing your lordship, but could you possibly expect me _not_ to feel a great jab like that?" (Asymmetric taxonomy: all doctors are lords, but not all lords are doctors. Or so I had learned in the infantry.)

He gave me an interested but not very surprised look. "That time I didn't come close to touching you."

"I beg to disagree, sir, but I saw you raise your arm. No lie, I did absolutely feel it that time."

"I was only feinting, private." He dashed off a few lines onto his ledger, his stone-gray mustache smirking. His brow was high and broad; it should have supported horns or a pair of antlers, his was such a feral, bestial presence. "I'm afraid it'll have to come off," he said, as nonchalantly as if he had said, "I'm crazy for some good hock." Which was, in fact, what I at first convinced myself I had heard.

"I'd love a good stiff drink, too," I agreed.

The man gave me a look and officiously flicked the glasses from his face, as if they had grown to annoy him as much as I had. "I _said_ ," he said, "the leg will have to go. Or else that infection fermenting in your bloodstream will spread to all your extremities."

I nearly bit through my tongue but spoke coherently, nonetheless. "No, you must be wrong, your lordship, sir," I pleaded. "It'll be all right. Nothing that can't mend itself, given a little time. Look! Watch me wiggle my toes." Though under the layers of gauze, there was no way to make such a motion.

"Reflex actions." He flipped through his papers and I saw him ticking off several boxes on what appeared to be an unusually lengthy yellow form.

"But look here, sir, I can even raise my ankle a bit." And this I was able to demonstrate, or nearly. "So, you see, I'll be fine as soon as I'm rested and at home. Only surface wounds, like they always say. I'll be walking in no time at all, just you wait and see." At which point I thought, "How do I know I can't walk now?"

The doctor resumed his amused expression and shoved the clipboard up under his arm like a rifle. "That limb," he coolly explained, taking my slack hand in his soft but powerful hand, "has twenty-seven separate particles of shrapnel in it. We have some beautiful X-rays to corroborate my diagnosis. Report says you got in the way of our fire, boy, when our scouts went out to look for any survivors in that nasty onion gas episode. Let's blame the heathen foe once again! The knee-cap is fractured and the tibia is dissevered right down to your tarsals. Even if there were no incipient gangrene, you'd never be able to walk on two feet again." He dropped my hand as if it were contaminated, straightened his back, and stared superciliously down at me, scratching at his mustache as if it were a small animal that wanted consoling. "Unless we amputate it very soon, private, your whole body will be lost. As you may not as yet have realized, we are not in the most sanitary situation here..." He left off his mustache and placed his fingertips tenderly on the swaddled leg. "Now, what you feel are merely neural irradiations in the cortex that are—"

"But the pain is very real! And I _can_ move my leg!"

"—are quite common in these cases. The pain you feel is illusory, a specious pain, as it were, issuing forth from your brain and not your limb, where the nerves have been severed. That is why we must negate the appendage: because it is dead already and unless abstracted, it will atrophy. If it doesn't putrefy first."

"Why?" I repined, holding onto the leg as if the good doctor were trying to tear it from its socket there and then. I was doing something else the intrepid soldier should never do: sobbing. "It's a good leg! It has always been of superb service to me. In fact, it _is_ me!"

The doctor ruffled the back of my oily overgrown hair. "Rest, rest, my darling duckie," he cooed, as if remembering a line of an old lullaby, and maybe he was. "There's no reason to worry. What they used to call a 'peg leg' is nowadays a real wonder. They're marvels of up-to-date technology. Very lightweight and streamlined, they are. Sturdy and really quite reliable." He was counting off on his well-manicured fingers, a salesman. "Why, one of the newest models is ten times as efficient as the muscle and tendon kind, and with regular lubrication, guaranteed to outlast the one the gods gave you." He smiled and showed all his big hard white choppers, his fingers once again playing amongst my curls. "So, relax, dear lad, and welcome your new leg as a gift to you from the twin arts of engineering and medicine. Damn me if I wouldn't enjoy such a fine simulacrum myself."

Just then, a hot gust blew so many fragments of straw and so much of the rusty grit into my face that my surroundings took on the carmine cast of the storied land of Haddees, that archaic hell we all know from the apocalyptic visions of fanatical painters like Ruthan or Zorono. If I crossed my eyes, I could make my tormenter into nothing but a red shadow and the farmyard an empty stage swelled with winds. Whirlwinds. Dust devils. But no gods here. Not even an actor wearing the mask of a god, in this fugitives' holdout across what is named the River Sticks, nobody to name or curse. (Not one of our gods has had a name for centuries, of course; that would be against all the current laws of our state religion.) The doctor brushed my face with a horsy-smelling handkerchief, lingering on my cheek, and I thought of biting into one of his well-scrubbed baboon arms. I knew they must have mixed up my X-rays with another soldier's, the way they always mixed our laundry or our mail. But for some reason I could not bring this far more important matter to his lordship the doctor's attention. Instead, I merely stated, "I haven't any choice, I suppose, sir?"

The audacious man lifted incredulous snowy-browed eyes from his clipboard. Then he clipped his glasses back upon the bridge of his nose to give me one last good look-over. "Of course you have a choice, soldier. Either watch your leg degrade or let us amputate it. Either obey a command from a superior officer and hereditary lord of this blessed monarchy, or do not obey it."

I was too rubber-jointed, too slack-jawed to hold out any further. I knew deep within my soul that I had no choice. Comrades, the army has done us an appreciable favor by lifting the burden of decision from our bent and obedient backs.

So I submitted, with all pretense of willingness, to their surgery, the gleaming vision of a sparkling, spanking-new chrome and stainless-steel leg the only thing I had left with which to buoy my dismal disposition. I had also hoped to be pleasantly gassed, only to awaken some time later already equipped with a marvelously machined artificial appendage, but the operation, alas and alack, did not go so nicey-nice, as Myrmia used to say. The field hospital had predictably run short of anesthetic; I fought so much they had to strap me down with leather cinches, and when I cried out in pain they shoved a horse's bit into my mouth to clench. And I would have snapped the bit in two if I had not cracked two incisors on it first. (I am certain I heard the liveried nurses, armed with curry-combs and a hacksaw, laughing at that.) With no replacement for my former leg in sight, I was lifted from the operating table—in truth a stable door supported by bales of hay—and carried back to my bunk, where I was given a sponge bath by an adolescent orderly who thought it amusing to squeeze pints of merbromine over my head until my scabby scalp may as well have been in flames. Though I double-damned him at the time, I should have blessed him for taking my attention away from the much sharper pain I felt south of my equator. Late into that first night, so abysmally atramental (twenty points for that word!) at first I could not even see if Lyrald was still in the cot next to me, when I finally dared to place my right palm where my right knee had been and felt nothing, the rest of my body seemed to vanish into that inky nullity, as well—bodiless and brainless again, I floated away toward the dusty hayloft, and, with newly sensitive night-vision, watched myself writhing on the cot below, watched a half-hundred other sick or injured men writhing on their cots... and it was not until I regained consciousness the next morning that I realized I still had the bit in my mouth.

I awoke slowly then, once I had yanked the bit out—woke into the humming, thrumming, buzzing macrocosm that had burst forth from within my skull and filled the sentient sphere without. The stone wall I propped myself against pulsated with anarchic energy, all those atoms crashing inside all those molecules inside all those elements we had learned about in first-year physics, somehow keeping intact something as solid and hard as granite and mortar. And the floor hummed, cot and coverlet hummed, the air hummed, everything hummed–especially my invisible leg, which I had already almost come to accept, resonating in the vacant space like a tuning fork rapped against a tomb. The hammer jostled the anvil which jiggled the stirrup of my inner ear, ever so faintly and subliminal, but ever so insistently. All this resonance told me I was still alive, insisted I was alive, alive but monopedal (fifteen points!). Oh well, oh well, oh well... I contented myself a bit by slurping my porridge and thinking of my new superhuman supernatural leg, wondering where it was and how soon it might be delivered up and affixed to me; maybe they were off polishing it and adjusting it for my own special size. Anyhow, I had plenty of time to wait...

Lyrald, the farmer or philosopher, his back to me, was humming, too: perhaps that was where the humming of the entire planet originated. Watching swifts or swallows dart in and out of the loft overhead, I found myself joining in wordlessly after a few bars–it was the hero's lilting theme from a popular comic opera, one of Idiver's, which I had seen at the Odeolon back home, a few weeks before leaving for active duty. That had been well over a year ago, I suppose. I was transported back to my scratchy velvet theater seat, sedated by the sibilance of gaslight and eucalyptus-scented sussurations, and I again shyly took Myrmia's lavender-linimented hand in my own. I then dared to kiss its warm, moist, aromatic palm; embarrassed, she repossessed her hand, and so, as the hulking protagonist tragically ended his life with ruby-hilted sword and choral requiem, I contented myself with fondling the fair hairs, silky as milkweed flax, on the nape of her neck. Somehow, in my present revery, I now imagined the baritone to look very much like the lumberjack or woodsman from my dying dream–or maybe it was the other way around. I could well picture the burly youth unbuckling his cuirass and driving the naked blade deep between his bared ribs... When my new friend Lyrald coughed, the vision, regrettably, vanished like a ghost at dawn. The hero's death had been a farce, all along, the prop-dagger had stealthily withdrawn into its scabbord; he would come back to life in an ironic epilogue (cue the woodwinds!). Come back to life, if I may, much as I had. After a good yawn and a stretch of what I could stretch, I queried the figure in the next bed. "Where in creation did you pick up that little ditty?" I was expecting to hear that the parochial crofter or unworldly philosopher had tuned into it by accident on the biokinetic airwaves.

Lyrald turned in his cot to face me, though it was not Lyrald at all, but an imposter. This personage was newly washed and clean-shaven, and looked considerably younger and maybe even a bit smaller than Lyrald had. I was envious of his speckless sheets and pillowslip, not to mention the contraband girlie magazine spread across his lap. "No need to worry, you're neither dead nor dreaming," an entirely unfamiliar voice informed me. "Welcome back from wherever it is you've been. We've been missing you. Oh, but lookie there—it's plain for all to see that the irresistibly iridaceous goddess of dawn's been tickling your fancy fine, eh?" this substitute Lyrald rabbited on, eyes brightening, words tumbling. "That's right, you've got some fettle in your mettle at last—I might could espy a new obelisk erected in your county called Middlesex. Ha, that's showing some real bottle, you rascal you!" His very loud and raucous halloa, my embarrassed horror. In an instant I had dived under my bedclothes again. "Now, see here, no need to frown and fumble betwixt your sheets like that. You're amongst the fortunate survivors again! So buck up, me bucko, thou buck-toothed buck private–it's another splendorous day in our infelicitous lifespans." Even the timbre of this plummy new voice bore little resemblance to the farmer-philosopher's—at that instant I would have used qualifiers such as _polite_ , _polished_ , _patriarchal,_ perhaps even _pretentious_ to describe it. As the eagle-eyed observer has already noticed, it's a bad habit of mine, this cataloging of alliterative adjectives in my head.

"How _do_ you know that tune?" I repeated myself, adjusting the bedding as best I could to avoid any further embarrassment, and then added, "And _who_ are you, anyhow? Where's Lyrald gone to?"

"Why, it _is_ Lyrald, still Lyrald, alas," he answered, ignoring the former question. "Don't you recognize me without the phoenix's nest? Lovely to look upon, am I not?"

It was the former Lyrald all right, and I would have felt confirmed in my suspicion that the beard had been an histrionic ploy if I did not see the shaver and wash-basin on the upended fruit-crates between our beds. His huge hands, which he now withdrew from behind his head and spread over last year's nubile Nymph of November, turned out, indeed, to be incomplete.

"Have they done some sort of operation on your larynx, too?" I inquired.

"Ah, look no farther than my very public indices for an explanation," Lyrald said. "You must mean the hick shtick. Sometimes it is in the nature of my profession to absorb the quality of my surroundings. _Mimesis_ , a survival tactic. Curiously chameleonic, you could call me. You see, I've played so many roles, I've just about forgotten who I am. Today I have clean sheets and a clean colon for the first time in weeks, so I feel and talk like a poet or a prince."

"I had thought you were some sort of professor emeritus," I ventured.

"Impersonating that rustic rube of a PhD I blame on temporary exuberance. Must have been the ether-gas in the air. Forgive me, please. I never lied about what you might call my hedonistic tendencies, however. One does enjoy a blood-soaked steak and a ripe juicy tart. I lie here consulting celibately with my topless muses but drool over the ads for cheap whiskey."

"You must be an _actor_ , then," I concluded, gratified that an early intuition of mine must have been correct. "Am I wrong?"

"Oh," he said, moving his shoulders up and down as if they were balancing scales and he were weighing the question, "of sorts. I did all right. Used to warble with the night-owls a bit, sing for my supper, that kind of thing."

"In one of those big-city music halls? Nice, I say _nice_! I've sussed you out, you great kidder. Would I have ever seen your name spelled out in telectric lights, then?" I boldly asked, suddenly emulating this breezy speech of his. I had never met anyone in what I believe is called the "entertainment field." To get a better view of him, I hoisted myself up against the wall as far as I could. Lyrald could always manage to look cool and unruffled, even belly-up in this hellacious place. With his suave self-assured gestures and etiquette, I could easily imagine him in a showman's pleated pantaloons and swallowtail coat, abdominal bandage replaced by a ceremonial cummerbund. "You fronted, I would bet, one of those boisterous orchestrettes. Let me guess—you crooned your smarmy tunes and the birds fell at your feet, very swank, very sweet." I felt a little giddy glibly rhyming like this, as if I were his sidekick in a comedy duo.

Lyrald pointed his chin loft-ward and cast his eyes disdainfully away, like a suitor spurned. "You naïve young pup," he said with a great groan of disgust, "you should have guessed that entire symphony orchestras accompanied _my_ birdsong. For you see, it is Grand Opera which is my bitch-goddess, Mother of my Madness, Love of my Life. I was a disciple of the composer Anderton and an understudy of Osurac, the famous one-eyed belter, you know."

"Oh, pardon me," I said hastily. "I didn't mean to imply–"

"I was called up just as I was closing my run in something _you_ would never have heard of," he amended his declarations, pumping himself up with sham haughtiness that he expelled with one long catarrhal exhalation. "Ho! You wouldn't know it not because I doubt your cultural acumen, but because it was trash. And we closed in _Serutan_ , of all places." The name of my not overly insignificant hometown fell over us both like a shroud.

" _You_!" I exclaimed, seeing him transformed, imperial in the vermillion armor of the Scarlet Knight, who of course turned out to be the Hero. It was based on one of those tireless (not tiresome!) legends of armies who rode on horseback to protect the honor of The Gods from The Enemy. Would that modern military life had such an air of swashbuckling derring-do! Myrmia and I had thought that, for Serutan, _Garter and Grail_ was high-class entertainment, for there is little difference to any of us in Serutan between opera and operetta—or art and artifice, now I've mentioned it.

"Yes, _me_ ," he said sorrowfully. "Just as I was on the verge of getting out of the provinces and joining a permanent rep-co, repertory company, I mean, one that did _real_ music." Lyrald, who had been so cheery in the little time I had known him, fell back against his newly laundered pillow—and it was not hard to tell he was thinking of stentorian declarations of love and stunning leaps across the stage and the silky swish of a diva's ballgown. (Diluted and impoverished imagery here admittedly all mine.) "But," he said, snapping out of his fever-dream as if the footlights had fizzled out and the fireproof curtain had fallen down, "I'll be back again, as long as I can hold me guts in." My companion struck his abdomen to prove he was on the mend, but the tooth-grinding grimace on that mask he always wore told me otherwise. "By the way, everyone here knows me as the great... Lyrald... Elswaine," he said, interrupting his own gestures. (It seemed he paused to alter his pronunciation momentarily—or possibly he was merely repeating one or the other names for effect, to penetrate my thick skull. I didn't remember such a surname or forename on the program.) "Did I tell you that already? It seems I'm _forever_ introducing myself."

Something in this Lyrald's thespian effusiveness had infected me, and though I am often as not (as my teachers used to warn me) on the wordy and expository side, I was now a veritable lexicon of myself. I began by introducing Symond Smones to Lyrald Elswaine for the first time and mentioned that I had seen him in that final–that is, his last–performance that I was aware of (wasn't it odd that I couldn't recall any of the other singers' names) and how my fiancée Myrmia and I had simply adored it, next revealing, like a magician drawing cheap bandannas from his breast pocket, an exaggerated string of other useless facts or half-truths about myself: such as growing up an only child and reasonably content (an outright lie) but more than a little annoyed sometimes with my widowed mother, how we had grown poorer and poorer as the years went by while trying our best to "keep up appearances," my thoroughly uneventful schooldays, the flattering couplets I would write in a tiny hand on the backs of my prettier waltz partners' dance-cards, my beloved sixteen-speed Swifte velocipede and all the races I had won, the rhetoric club where I enjoyed making extemporaneous perorations no matter what topic, my irrational hatred of celluloid collars and cabbage stew, my addiction to bioscope serials and the misadventures of dog-detectives Hartzell and Spince in the comic strips, the metaphysical theorems that excited me, my boredom on the gaming fields, the surreptitious life-sketches of my workmates that I did when their backs were turned, the literary journals that rejected my offerings and the literary journals I sometimes stole from newsstands—just to laugh at and burn in the hearth. I also told Lyrald more about Myrmia than I should have, much about her personal history and habits, and then, thinking better of it, summarized how I had become junior clerk in a corner chemist's after all the islands' institutions of higher education were shuttered and before I had quite fully graduated (again, truths not truly true!), with not enough hope then for me to become even an actual apothecary, and how I probably would have been married by now were it not for this bothersome war. Everything nowadays was, had all my life been, _if not for the war_. "I can play the toy piano passably well," I added, soon overtaken by my own high-flying rhetoric, "but that's the limit of _my_ musical talents. It could be that I'm too young to know if I have _any_ real talents, though I had once hoped to become, as you might have guessed, what do you call them, a _man of the arts_. Well, actually, my chief talent I suppose is in not becoming bored by my own boring life. I'm very seldom bored, although there's plenty to be bored about in Serutan. We haven't much but old-style temple bazaars and public hangings in Serutan." If only I could have fully articulated then what I won't attempt to now, even given the free dimensions of this testament, in a way that only a native-born son can when railing against the close-mindedness of his citizen siblings: for instance (just a few brief instances, please), that in Serutan, variations in clouds provide the only reliable esthetic distraction; and that the censorious librarians of Serutan think books, like virgins male or female, look best kept on the shelf, uncut and fully intact; or that in Serutan poets are considered the next thing to traitors and painters seditious. I must have read other writers saying much the same sort of things about their own birthplaces. At the time, I noticed Lyrald growing less attentive as I rambled on. "But..." I asked, "am _I_ boring you?"

"Well," said my fellow shut-in as he pried open a pack of Laughing Lad cigarettes, "I tend to enjoy listening to people so long as they listen to me a little better than I do to them." With that, he smiled and offered me a stale cigarette. We puffed and talked on and off all that day, until the wan autumn light dimmed and the orderlies confiscated our smokes, when we were too tired to protest. Later in the night, when I awoke kicking my surprisingly energetic phantom limb, I saw a group of orderlies sitting in the moonlit barnyard, passing cigarettes and a jug of alcoholic amnesia from one to another.

Before sunrise had chased away all my drab dreams, the silver-locked doctor, whose name I had learned from Lyrald was Lord Howaburt, for the doctors and surgeons here are always shipped special express from the nation's House of Lords, came huffing to my bunkside, cap reversed, twinkling spectacles swinging from their tether, carrying a long object wrapped in greasy butcher's paper tied with twine. There was an obtusely ovine look on the doctor's face, with its wooly white mustache and mutton chops, that promised disappointment but would not own up to it. I wondered why I was always perceiving one or the other of the beastly aspects of his features. Sheep, ape, roebuck or workhorse: he really was a menagerie in himself.

"Beautiful day, private!" Lord Howaburt bugled at me, narrowing his now-silver, now-gray eyes in the dust, not meeting my own eyes (whose color I have just forgotten). A bomb burst not too far away as he spoke. "Ho, ho! The chrysanthemums are scattering their gold in the ha-has." Silver-tongued, you might say he was, as well.

Neither horticulture nor agriculture was on my mind. I wanted to sink back into the peat bog of sleep, where it made no matter if I could run like an ordinary person on an ordinary pair of legs.

"Sorry I haven't popped 'round since our little, you know, _operation_ ," the doctor continued in this implausibly conversational register as he set the package before me. Choice morsels for the kitties? ( _Of course_ , I reminded myself, _it's my new leg!_ ) "We've all been terribly busy with the wounded, as you can see for yourself... Ah, in the name of king and country, I do miss those quietly exasperating days of negotiating estate taxes for quibbling siblings! If it's true we've killed ten of those bogeys for every one of us they've shot down from their fancy new dirigibles, it's a wonder this war isn't over by now. These things _do_ get in the way of our studies, don't they, boy? Sorry if this seems like a downright annoying imposition." He talked, I thought, as if the war were a mere fracas over billiards at a fraternal order, which had gotten out of control and lasted too long. "Be that as it may, I've finally brought your new artificial appendage, and you'll kindly consent to my mission to affix and adjust. Before I give it to you, however, you must accept my sincerest regrets, on behalf of myself and my shamefully deficient, badly under-supplied staff." He face grew even more sheepish when he popped his little round eye-lenses back onto his nose, before loosening the last of the knots that secured his prize.

"You must not get me wrong," he went on apologetically, tossing the twine aside, "because in these trying times, we make do with what we have. And sometimes what we have is, like that horsemeat steak I ate last night, not always the best." In one swift motion he tore away the last of the paper and held aloft the most miserable mechanical contraption I had ever set eyes upon. It looked somewhat like a corroded typewriter carriage married to an antique carriage's axletree—but it was meant to be, every woeful ounce of it, my new leg.

When Lord Howaburt saw my unguarded look of dismay, his face regained its usual expression of smug composure. "It really is quite a dandy specimen," he argued in his tight-lipped way, though the optimism was forced. "The best of its kind in–ahem–the _last_ phase of our war. In fact, that's when it was most recently utilized. I found it at the very back of an old supply closet in a roosting-shed we've been utilizing. A tag was attached to it. I believe it belonged to a hero who died on the front. You may be proud of that. Now nearly one-fourth of you will be heroic. Like that idea, private?"

"Then I must deserve at least a quarter of a medal," I said, controlling my temper by keeping a tight rein on my vocal cords.

My attending medical officer took this remark of mine in good stride. "Cheer up, soldier. Be thankful for what you have. It's a good leg... only a trifle used." He danced his expert monkey fingers lovingly down the oxidated monstrosity. "But, here, let me fasten it onto you. A little lubricant, a little spit and polish, and you'll look dashing. Fair-haired fillies succumb to syncopes over warriors with battle scars every bit as dashing as yours, they do."

I shrank from the doctor. "I don't want that hunk of scrap metal on me," I stated firmly. "I'd rather be in a wheelchair the rest of my life than go hobble-de-hobbing and bob-bob-bobbing with that stuck on me."

"What the deuce are you going on about? It's for your own good, son. Bless the Lairds of Limpus, you'll look smashing! Waltz the night away, one could on this lovely little item. Da da da _dee_ , da _dee_... Now, you will dutifully allow me take off the last of your bandages and slip your new helpmeet on..."

I beat him back as best I could, until the doctor's attitude suddenly changed. "As an outranking officer," he said, dropping his avuncular pose and turning his cap around to the front, "and servant of our royal majesties, I command you to put this on or face court-martial." Frightened by what I was doing, but doing it instinctively, I swatted the doctor with the clipboard he'd left lying on the fruit-packing box. At this, the doctor's face darkened and loured, silver sullied black, like a nimbus cloud about to burst. A junior orderly was summoned. The pasty, pimpled dolt came trotting up and gave me an indelicate poke in the hip with a hypodermic needle.

After a moment's flailing, my arms lost their will and fell loose at my sides. "You promised me a shiny new one!" I cried like a spoiled child, before wilting down into the cot and drowning in the mythical Leetha, river of oblivion. When I awoke (who knows how much later?), feeling an urgent need to "make water" like a fountain, the artificial limb was securely strapped to the stump of my scabrous thigh and locked with a tiny fob-like padlock. (Lyrald, who should have been my protector, must have slumbered on his narcotics through the entire ordeal.)

At the bottom of that warm and limpid river, I—or my ignominious Under-Self—met without astonishment the curiously beguiling youth I had seen in the clearing, seaweed crowning his head like a merman, arms akimbo, legs casually crossed, sitting regally on a carved-out throne of briny rock. He looked less like me this time than he had before. Much handsomer than I ever could be. His eyes were as blue as they were bright, and his robust lips had a beneficently amused frown on them; his eyes were merry, his mouth was rosy: I speak in clichés because sometimes clichés, like the primary colors they are painted in, are the truest. This time we talked.

"You—stranger sent from the surface! Come into the dream you've never dared dream!" he announced with phoney and facetious plangency, and his inverted smile broke apart with jolly rollicking laughter that welled up from within his broad sun-freckled chest. I realized then that we were both quite naked, but I was the only bashful one. "This is not your usual rash fantasy, my friend. It's different. Quite, quite different. As you can plainly see!" A school of large glassy goldfish slithered past us at that moment, and he caught one up by its tail.

"Beautiful," I said, unclear myself as to whether I meant the river, the carp, or my bold new blood brother himself.

"It's _all_ beautiful, of course, you ninny," he said, giving his capture a kiss on its snout before setting it free. "Because it's all ours—no other people here. Just my friends the fish and the occasional meddlesome muskrat or cormorant. Mind the mudpuppies, however—they nip!" My friend seized me by the hand and with gentle tugs pulled me down into even deeper depths, into a grotto far beneath the waters that was like—that _was_ —the pink interior chamber of some sort of massive mollusk's shell. For some reason we had no trouble breathing; such is the nature of dream-craft. "Well, then, let us do talk about dreams, if you like," he said, having set me upon his lap to read my mind. "Do you remember, if you remember anything at all, what that long-ago prewar, I mean pre-anything, the great pedagogue Hummames once dictated to his scribe?" he asked. His well-mannered and full-bodied voice, call it mellow or call it mature, was, now that I have thought about it, a voice that bore more than a passing resemblance to Lyrald's; while his words lacked so many blatant jibes of japery or jest, in its upward inflections I could still detect in my querier's voice that double-edge of self-satire I had already heard so often from my bunkmate. In other words, I liked his demeanor and thought I might like what he had to say. It seemed to me that the prince of these waters would be as good a mentor as a friend or consort, not just someone to blindly worship or envy from a distance—so I will refrain from further comment while he continues: "He, Hummames, said that so-called dreams are not the bare backside of reality, but in fact the _sole_ reality; therefore we can observe the world only through a thin tissue of our own limited-by-intelligence illusions. _But_ , his chief antagonist, the logician Desafer, would argue in another century, if that is the case and we take his mentor's core tenet for granted, consequently nothing can ever be that simplistic—if what we perceive as real is in fact a dream, but dreams are real, that makes our perception of dreams false, so they can't be real, and therefore truth lies only in what we believe is false, while within the false exists the true, and so forth—the universal construct is a timeless and never-ending spiral, similar to the one within this conch, and that spiral is within another spiral still, whorl upon whorl, world within world, infinitely and not indefinitely."

I wanted to cry out that he was making no more sense than those learned gentlemen had made in any of my textbooks! But my words became only iridescent bubbles that tickled us into childish laughter. He smiled and kissed me on the forehead, in that sunlit abyss, and I felt my body positively ablaze with delight. Of course, all my limbs were present and accounted for. There in the depths, my two legs looked pale as an eel's underbelly and felt powerful as a sea-stallion's; and the water, though cold, revitalized me like the hot stun of that notorious fish called the torpedo ray. I embraced the laughing merman as if he were the person I had always loved the most. It follows that naturally he had always loved me. We left the grotto and floated, arm in arm, downstream...

Initially, I had no intention of ever using the leg. As soon as the doctor left, I covered it with an excrement-smirched sheet and resigned myself to an immobile existence. Thus I faced life the next few days. Sometimes I would awaken and reach down to scratch my right leg, only to recoil when my fingers struck metal instead of the flesh I had expected. It was as if I were feeling the very bones that were no longer there: I could fight back the scream, but could not hold back the tears. It was, as any amputee might tell you, as if I had lost someone unspeakably dear whose very absence still haunted me.

At any rate, I thought in moments less melancholic, I'll be heading home soon. There would be Mams and also Myrmia for consolation, so bring on the cocoa and lilies; I would be an object of sympathy—and our sad, simple wedding would be an especially sobering yet uplifting sight, something that would elicit tears from the most stoic soul. Maybe, if he were better by then and not off singing on another marginally more civilized island, I could ask Lyrald to be best man. Afterwards, Myrmia and I would Make Do and Eke Out a Living (would Thomester's Apothecary even hire me back? would Myrmia stand for an impotent, para-incapacitated husband?). It all sounded terribly, morbidly, heartbreakingly romantic in a mawk-awful, melodramatic, mock-operatic way. (And who dared say I would be impotent? Since the surgery, this had yet to be fully tested.) Why, I could even get a new leg back in Serutan! In my misery I had not thought of that, obvious as it was. There was no sense then in not walking now; I might as well get into practice. So, in the course of a day I decided to change from an object of pity into a paradigm of fortitude and perseverance. I was actually beginning to feel pleased with myself, as if I had won another intramural oratorical contest back at the old school—whose only judge and jurors and competitors were my various separate selves. Likely the chief reason I changed my attitude, to get a little quicker to my point, was because Lyrald had contrived a really first-class walking stick for me, whittled out of a stinkberry tree's straight and sturdy branch that an orderly had brought him from the orchard outside; he had rubbed the fine-grained wood to a high shine with boot blacking and even attached to its top a jaunty swatch of pink paper petunias on a leather lash, a loop I could easily slip my wrist through. It looked almost like such an accessory a gentleman of means might take with him on one of those oft-illustrated riparian promenades of the previous reign, where would be depicted at his side a tittering mistress wearing a broad veiled hat with a salad of cherries and berries heaped upon its brim. With such a cane, even with a game leg, I would cut a dashing figure among the chawbacon clods of Serutan.

Lyrald, who had listened to me whining for days over the idea of becoming an invalid, declared full approval of my change of mind and heart. "I once knew a wooden-legged countertenor," he professed, "who could execute such feats of acrobatics beneath the proscenium that you would have wondered if he had _three_ legs. All it takes is getting over your performance anxieties, as it were. Breathe deep, go steady. Summon the vital forces. Seize the moment. Simple determination is the soul of—cripes, ain't I full of aphorisms?" He shot up from his sickbed—I saw then a still surprisingly tall man—and he helped me to my feet, or foot—no, _feet_ , curse it. My first attempted step sent me caroming off a rations cart into a stall and ended up somehow with both Lyrald and me entangling ourselves in the serpentine constrictions of a passing orderly's roll of sterile gauze. Then I remembered the walking stick—and even so landed helpless as an upturned terrapin at the feet of another annoyed orderly, who condescended to lift me up. After such a start, it would be difficult to get any worse.

The stupid stopgap device had become locked with red rust at its joint, making it impossible for me to ambulate in any naturalistic manner, but I perfected a hopping sort of quarter-stride after a few days of practice, whereby I would balance my weight upon the leg I had obtained at birth and kick out a pace ahead with my fancy new staff and the stiff, metallic leg that had been thrust upon me. After getting the basic movements down, it was like music all a matter of timing and rhythmic tempo. One-and-two-and step, one-and-two-and step, as in a couples-only dance. Progress was rapid, for I had stayed young and strong despite my traumas, and soon I was cantering up and down the aisles and the stable-yards as quickly if not so gracefully as a spastic ostrich.

It was during one of these rehearsal jaunts on a dark and overcast morning that I ran up against the eternally vernal yet age-silvered Lord Howaburt, who was vociferously pleased, in his usual self-congratulatory way, to see me up and about. That assumptive person gave me a hearty slap between the shoulder blades and shouted to the room that I was looking shiny as a new watch and fit as the first fiddlehead of spring.

"Not exactly coiled for action, sir," I said, succumbing to his similes and juvenile humor, which were in equal parts affected.

"No flap now, you're top form, private, top form," the medical man said in his grinning, lockjawed way, and commenced to tell me how he would promptly start preparing the paperwork which would send me to the eastern archipelago, which could use a lad with my guts and unsurpassed gumption. He leaned in close above me, eyeglasses dangling from his jacket and grazing my chest; I wanted to seize that thin silver lanyard, wrap it around the man's wizened wattles, and strangle him. He didn't notice my rancor and carried on with his brazen monologue. "The Army needs more lionhearted death-defiers like yours in the trenches, dear boy." In fact, they could ship me out to the front-line in a fortnight or less if I liked. Before I could react, the doctor gave me another apish lung-bursting back-slap and a pinch on my buttocks for good measure before striding off to the officer's mess, located, as I had learned, in the old dairy shed across the yard.

All my hopes for a return to the warm enveloping bosom of my loved ones disintegrated, and I again fell into the sort of dire depression that positively devours one's soul. Never again did I want to walk, nor did I want to be reduced to being rolled about in some kind of overgrown perambulator or wheeled chair. Henceforth, until the end of my days, I would make that six-by-two single bed a kingdom consisting of twelve square feet; I would live a horizontal existence, as all the sick and dying do. My only consolation was in deep uninterrupted sleep, a coward's substitute for that truly restful quietus of death, I know. In my dreams, I was often visited by Mams and Myrmia, but they both pretended as if nothing were wrong–they did not even realize I was asleep, yet alone minus a limb–so they bothered me with tiresome trivialities, such as asking me to pass the suet pudding or begging me to mend that embarrassing tear in my trousers. Sometimes Mams squawked angrily at me, shook out the crow-feathers of her shawl, and flew away. In my most repetitive nocturnal programs, Myrmia would appear again and again, twirling like a music-box dancer so I could appraise her new bonnet or frock. It was not a particularly lovely sight. Once she pirouetted and lo and behold, it was not my betrothed's face that turned to me, but the face of the by-now familiar crop-haired lumberjack straddling his trout-brook, all shining skin and luminous teeth, beaming like a winning throw of the dice. I could no more mistake him for anyone else than my own face in the shaving mirror. By all things holy, there he turned to me in his sweat-soaked singlet and mud-splashed boots, arms heavy with a bouquet of leeks and beets, fresh and slug-infested from his kitchen garden, and his eyes pleaded for an answer from my eyes. "Never leave me again!" he cried—or maybe I cried, it makes small difference. In another second he was running to meet and clutch my elbows as a long-lost friend might, vegetables falling all around our feet. He was such a surprise that he jarred me from my medicated slumber—how could I ever have forgotten someone I had surely known all my life? The blast from so-called friendly fire that had felled me must have been too much of a shock for so ephemeral a vision to subsist as part of my conscious memory for long, but now it all came back, photographically clear: the effervescent stream, the emerald-green patch of lawn-grass on the other side, the chestnut grove and the trailing willow-branches, not to neglect the cozy woodland cabin with its cat and canary. In a wild rush of remembrance, I also recalled how we, He and I, had met at the bottom of the brook, where we cavorted like otter offspring, and another time, not recounted here, when we floated, as is the convention, amidst white and pillowy cumuli, observing the painterly panorama below us as if from an observation balloon. These scenes that left my thought processes unalterably discombobulated, staggeringly metagrobolised (a task for my translator, those adjectives, but there are no shorter descriptors for my confusion) had, I incisively reasoned with the less logical side of myself, resurfaced with a purpose. Out there, somewhere, was someone who really and truly cared. For that friend I would walk again. I would cut and run to the distant blue forests beyond the nearby battleground and its trampled flower-fields, cross the foothills and ford the stream, and at last enter His sanctum. He might indeed be one of the enemy—much of this island was or had always been their part of their claim, after all—but He would hide me out until the war was over (hadn't His eyes told me as much?), and when it was over, if it were ever over... well, later We would have much time to think. Even if the entire scene were only an empire built on clouds and wishes, as my pragmatic Mams used to phrase it (though it all seemed much more solid than the very slop we soldiers ate daily), it was better to risk failure to re-enter it once more than stay where I was in this half-forgotten ward, among cripples and terminal cases who knew the shame of the chamberpot and the dread of waking to cold damp sheets.

"You look entranced," Lyrald said to me not long after I had woken from one of my newly favorite fantasies. "What did you dream of? Going home? Becoming fat and rich? Writing squibs for the ladies' pages that will change the course of civilization?" He was looking me up and down the length of my cot, where it would have been difficult, as before, to hide any sort of secret. "Ah, _I see_ , once again it's a pretty girl."

"Something like that," I admitted, gathering my rags about me. "How did you know?" Lyrald gave me one of his theatrical looks, but this time I was undaunted. There and then I decided that I might as well tell this poor blighter at my bedside the whole story. I would have asked where to begin, but I knew exactly where to begin; my confession tumbled unguarded from my lips, for I was overjoyed to have at long last such a sympathetic auditor.

The last morning I had been in active combat (as far as I was able to recollect from the jigsaw pieces I had only begun to fit together in my memory), the leafy hills and canyons around our campground had become oddly becalmed, not a bird atwitter or bug abuzz, and our division had been able to walk several miles into enemy territory without so much as one sniper sniping at us. The only sound to be heard was the solemn _muck muck_ of our boots in the red mud. After an eternity we began our descent into a low-lying valley, where a yellow-green mist, like streams of diluted celery soup, could be seen roiling up out of the surrounding pinewoods. Curious. Something suggestive of the smell and sting of ripe shallots assaulted our nostrils and eyes. Very strange. Fortunately for myself, I had lagged behind the rest of the troop, discussing the ethics and epics of our forefathers with a grammar school teacher (who until recently had been discussing the same hallowed passages with bright orphan boys), and so, from a rise above the valley we had not yet entered, we witnessed our friends dropping like mosquitoes doused with insecticide. The history teacher insisted on forging ahead into the deathtrap to help save what men he could, but, not feeling so duty-bound, I elected to run. In the opposite direction, that is. "I'm afraid I was afraid," I conceded to Lyrald, not until that moment realizing the full import of what I had or had not done. "You could I guess call me a right regular coward. Maybe even a deserter, like my father before me."

"Oh, I could call you any number of things," Lyrald said. " _Lucky_ is one. That must have been the regiment that vanished into thin air nearly a month ago. You are probably the only survivor."

"I hadn't realized that... No one has told me a thing, and I question whether any of the doctors here has ever guessed what happened to me. I'll miss some of those men, though I can't quite remember their names..."

"So, then, aren't you glad you ran? Must have had all your wits about you, sonny boy. In my opinion, better to be a live coward than a dead hero. Does it sound like I'm quoting someone again? I don't always mean to. It's my damn all-encompassing repertoire." Lyrald folded his arms. But that was not the end of my story.

Although the deadly onion fumes did not kill me, more and more of the stuff did get up under my eyelids, so I was running half-blind. For a few thousand feet, I stumbled through the briars and brambles, and by the time my peepers cleared I was in a recently burned-out meadow on the other side of the valley; gunfire echoed off the hills behind me. At one point I remember falling and retching within a field of tar-flowers, those invasive weeds so purple they are black and that stink so strongly of hot coal pitch. Almost as noxious as the onion spray itself. When I regained my senses again, I followed a broken fence-row until I found a fallen log to sit upon whilst I raided the few remaining rations in my rucksack. A little mistake, there: red fire ants came swarming out of the log when they smelled my lard-soaked crumbs and set to attacking my backside right through my summer uniform. I took off running down a steep hillock across a boulder-strewn moraine, toward a clear and crystal-blue stream to wash away my predators, and–but Lyrald no longer appeared to be listening to my tale, which was just about to reach its sentimental climax (at this point I was not sure how much of my memory I was inventing or reinventing just then). No, he was not paying attention at all—instead, my neighbor was staring up at the mildewed poster of the weapon-wielding barbarian on an intersecting wall near us. When my voice trailed off, Lyrald explained, without apologizing for having interrupted my account, his sudden preoccupation with the picture.

"What a horrifyingly unnecessary thing to have on the wall. I actually never even noticed it before this instant. More than merely banal. 'Shut up!' indeed. I suppose one of these cretin subalterns around here pinned it up."

"It's been here all the time," I said, miffed that I had not been able to finish my adventure, knowing that if I tried to now it would lose its full dramatic impact. And knowing, too, that I could not be sure how much more of my tale was even half-true. In any event, I did not see a single thing unique about the poster; the subject, or others very much like it, was replicated a hundred-thousand times across the islands.

"Child, I remember posing for that ages and _ages_ ago," Lyrald began to lecture me in an offended and well-nigh bilious manner, his quizzical eyebrows inching upwards, "when I was just about as unseasoned as you. For the _last_ war. Last part of this same war, I mean. It was between short stints hustling in the Merchant Marines. _Ahoy, sailor!_ and all that, don't you know. Didn't recognize me, did you? Oh, yes, we _entertainers_ , as you term us, sometimes have to do a bit of modeling for artists, to get by in this cruel world. And sometimes the artists try to get a bit of the model, as well, if you know what I mean. All in a day's work!"

" _Ahhh_ ," was all I was able to say in the face of these continuing coincidences.

Lyrald scratched his chin, which was once again being conquered by thick mismatched stubble. "They try to make us look like gods in those pictures," he said with some disgust. "Heroic and omnipotent. As if any one god could actually persuade one man to so much as change his socks if the pattern were offensive. _Gods_! They're weak as worms. It takes a weakling god to spawn something as execrable as man. Truth be told, soldier boy, I don't care a fig for gods no matter what overbearing forms they take, could be I never have!.... Shocked you, didn't I? Afraid someone might hear me?" Purple-veined eyelids drooping and voice husky with conspiratorial ardor, he added, leaning across the inviolate space between us: "The gods are all dead, you know. We killed them with our constant warring ways. Our kings conspired with _their_ kings to kill, or at least render powerless, every one of them. We _all_ conspired, of course." With every word, the volume of his voice had decreased, for a single sentence overheard by the wrong person might cause us to be separated, put at opposite ends of the building, so that we might never confer with each other again. Presently Lyrald was barely audible, as he committed the ultimate blasphemy. "It's time to admit we don't really believe in them anymore at all. Not a one of us, really. The Enemy doesn't believe in them, either. But in its heart of hearts the Enemy has made that admission. That's the Enemy's advantage. _That's_ why the Enemy is winning." As Lyrald was speaking, an orderly was distributing that evening's dinner: hard tack and rancid beans. We stifled our scandalous conversation by filling our mouths, which had been empty since the spot of porridge we'd had early that morning. When I bit into an earwig secreted inside my biscuit, I vowed then and there that I would make my second and final breakout that very night. I would pray to any number of gods for deliverance (wouldn't Lyrald like that!), and delivered I hoped to be. Even so, I recognized that I was probably praying in vain, for Lyrald hadn't even addressed what was in my opinion the chief sticking point of existence: Do the gods believe in _us_?

When the orderlies had once more overindulged in their bootleg cigarettes and horse-trough hootch, and they were all dead asleep in the smallest hours of the morning, I made my unheralded exit, stage right, noises softly off. Out the stable doors I slewed in my awkward creaking way, shying between canteen and latrine, guided by a charitable moon that had discarded all of its dark mask, hardly believing I was so fortuitous as not to have awoken one gossipy gander in the farmyard. Happening by on her way to more important abodes, the good goddess of fate and fortune (the last god I would give up worshiping) smiled at me for just one more moment: On a clothesline near the half-bombed farmhouse that billeted titled doctors and others of the higher ranks, I found a full suit of khakis—from singlet to tieback breeches and from tunic to topi—which I readily exchanged for my dingy hospital gown. Perfect fit. The spiffy high-heeled riding boots I found swinging by their laces from a fence-post were a bit more problematic—a few pebbles and a bit of clay soil wedged against my fake foot, however, and the pair was made serviceable. I gimped on, slowly but steadily, testing the trodden path before me with my trusty walking stick, really rather pleased with myself. No eastern front for me! Not far from the farmhouse began the miry road I recognized, which would lead me away from the killing grounds over that ridgeline _there_ , and toward the fatal valley, beyond those humpbacked hills over _there_ , where my regiment had perished; with me in a chicken-feed pillow-slip I had a well-creased map of the local terrain that I had with canny foresight stolen from a distracted officer's pocketbook during one of my practice turns about the hospital grounds and then hidden, along with a few scraps from various meals, within my straw-stuffed mattress. I needn't even have brought along the map, for I had its maze of arteries memorized. Neither was I very hungry or thirsty, in my excited and energized state. Around the bend I encountered again the ocher-colored mud I recalled from that final outing with my now-deceased comrades, the surface of the track still caked like blood, although it had dried considerably during my convalescence; and so I was able to advance relatively easily on down the road—a sort of mincing mechanical man who would not, could not wind down until first light. On I went clop-tap-clunk clop-tap-clank... By the time the chill morning vapors first swept my brow, I had lost my course, or my course had lost me, and I was upon the summit of a wind-whipped tor which overlooked the tar-flower fields, across which my long-awaited sanctuary lay. Not a living being was in sight, other than a flock of carrion-crows circling over the poisoned valley, whose opposite rim I must now assail. I funneled a little dew from a cluster of leaves and broke my fast with half a biscuit, which I had saved in spite of half the usual worm, and prepared for a perilous descent through the woody scrub below. The only sound was that of King Zeffyreus and His celebratory dawn chorale; the bombardments, I had duly noted the previous morning, had shifted toward the north. I imagined Lyrald snoring mellifluously away back in the casualties barn, dreaming of rose-smothered curtain-calls and about to be thrust onto quite another stage by a rooster's alarm. Poor Lyrald, poor fallen soldiers one and all! Not one actually a real friend I could totally trust. After a bit of bushwhacking I found a deer-trail that was more than willing to lead me through the wind-knotted pines and down a steep slate-rock escarpment. Though naturally enough my muscles were spent, and I was aching in joints both real and phantom from the long hike (the leather straps of my new leg cut mercilessly into my flesh, and the steel rods gouged into the stump, partially reopening the wound), with the full light of day balanced on my shoulders I surged ahead as best I could through the stunted trees and toward the open fields, certain that on their far side, across the stream and into the sheltering chestnuts, true friendship and salvation were near at hand. The trail ended in an open meadow, where sheep-shorn grass prickled my skin-and-bone ankle; I was positive this must be the place I had crossed not many long weeks before. A gang of jewel-blue parakeets, like no birds I had ever seen in my own more or less temperate homeland, harassed me from a grove of moss-strewn live oaks at the edge of the meadow. "Halt! Halt!" they seemed to scream at me. For a moment I hesitated—this was such a wide-open area I could set off in almost any direction. I chose one at random and hoisted myself up to the top of a nettle-overgrown hillock. A smallish antelope or largish hare rocketed off down the slope below and before me. Afar amongst the thistledown of scattered cirrus clouds silently floated an airship done up in the enemy's colors, like the inflamed eye of a wandering god. At my feet appeared a late crop of tar-flowers, flowing in a slick and odoriferous stream toward what I guessed was the southeast, and above it another chittering passel of parakeets, this time all crying as one, "On! On!"

At last I was close. To which god should I offer up a prayer of thanks? Being a fairly modern person of the type even Serutan is not unacquainted with, I did not often think of the gods, nor bear them any tributes, though I had as yet to fully forswear them the way Lyrald apparently had. On holidays I would visit a temple or two with the Old Dear (that being Mams) out of a certain sense of duty or nostalgia, and sometimes we would lay a laurel wreath upon an oracle's long-abandoned dais, that was all. No one really remembered the gods in any detail, but since the royal family paid allegiance to them, so did we. Now I simply promised some indeterminate abstraction in the pantheon above that I would make an appropriate sacrifice of some sort in the near future, even if it had little more significance than a cat leaving a vole or mole on its master's doorstep. There were other, more immediate, matters to consider—how, for instance, would I explain myself to my intended rescuer, the handsome forester? And would he really take pity upon me?—but of course, once I had shown him how I had been so severely physically impaired, that should be easy! I followed the parakeets across the tar-flower fields and down a crimped hedgerow to a broader pasture where matted black sheep grazed. The sun was inconsiderate despite the season; I was tired. All my old and new joints and junctures were aching. No, I would not suffer myself to falter or fail... More meadows, more fields of nauseating tar-flowers. The smell and the heat rising from the soil promised to end all life on earth. Maybe it was just the wrenching thirst I suddenly felt. And just as suddenly—relief ahead. Breathlessly, I hitched toward the stream I heard prattling madly to itself on the other side of one last stony field. The current had been replenished by recent rains up in the mountains, and here the stream flowed wide as a river. I came to the water's sandy edge at last, dropped to the ground with a clacking of metal and wood, dunked my head in to swallow up as much of its soul-saving liqueur as I could, and, once sated, rested as best I could against one of the lichen-blotched boulders whose every fleck and fissure it seemed I had inspected before. On the opposing rock-strewn bank, another, wilder woodland began, and there beyond was a clearing indeed, and that was where the forester's homestead should have been, should have been... but was not. My torn and frayed map may have suggested otherwise, but who is to trust maps when the mind is so certain—for I knew I had to be near the correct location, knew because I recalled so indelibly an unusual forking in the stream at that point, with its stand of birches along the bend like pale, quaking sentinels. Once, not too long ago, I had stood in exactly this same picturesque spot, avid then as I was now to secure my freedom. All the same, regarding not my personal conviction, I could perceive no cabin, no campfire, not a trace of the lumberman's former presence—neither were there ashes, and not one particle of a wood-shaving, nary a snapped twig, the only chestnuts but a windfall under the trees like scattered game-pieces. Could I or the military map possibly be mistaken, was his little house further up- or down- stream? Or maybe it was sequestered deeper in the evergreens than I had remembered; smoldering clouds were crowding out the humid morning sun and nothing seemed as clear to me now as five minutes before; I was beginning to wonder if this were even the right field with the right waterway. For a few minutes I tried backtracking toward where I had left the sheep, but they and the rest of the world had rolled away from me, so I had to return to where I left off, ever more dejected, in order to orient myself once again between the boulders and the birches across the way. Now that I had regained the brook-bank, I paused upon the quaggy edge a few moments, considering my options or lack thereof, and then chose to wade the rapids to go resolutely in search of my dearest friend and savior, wherever his ramshackle haven might be. My boots sank in the cold yellow sands of the deeply carved channel. Soon I was in freezing water up to my waist; I felt my false limb buckling and my real one numbing, but knew I could not turn back. The stream might be wide, but it could not possibly be bottomless. I used my craftily constructed walking staff to gauge depth, and it told me my course was still—just barely—negotiable. Did I see something ahead, beyond an outcropping, something wavering, a broad pale palm waving, a red-cheeked and smiling face? Above the din rock and water made, I thought I heard a voice calling out to me–a human cry, not a bird–and then there was a sun-shot break in the blue-bruised stratus, and I saw something of a wink and glint of brass or bronze between the distant boughs, perhaps indeed an arm upraised in a gesture of welcome or warning, as a sudden rain began to fall upon me like bullets and my chin hit the rocks. It belatedly occurred to me that I had done much this same thing before.

The weather-warped book I'd found on the wonky three-wheeled tea-server that had been converted like almost everything around this jerry-built sanatorium into something else (in this case, a mobile library) was one of those overly ornate, deckle-edged volumes, no doubt part of a matching series, that were popular near the turn of the last century, some fifteen or twenty years ago. Having long explored the dusty lost corners of the Serutan Atheneum in search of illicit thrills, I knew its sort upon sight: it would be profusely adorned with tarted-up tricolor ectoprints in the "old style;" a transparent sheet of vellum paper would cover the title plate, made to seem it was concealing something so precious or scandalous that taking a peek under it would be like lifting a girl's petticoat; and it would be printed in a needlessly whimsical typeface, with some letters of the alphabet sporting little curlicues or ratty tails. The hardboard cover, faded maroon and missing its original paper jacket, naturally, and consequently all the more nakedly obscene, was deeply embossed in imperishable gold—a lubricious cartoon of a laughing faun whose hirsute hindquarters barely disguised his sex—and an attached red sateenite ribbon extended from its innards like the long and slick tongue of a viper. Even in my present state, which was despicable, I was fascinated by this forgotten relic of another era that now seemed so hopelessly outmoded, while strangely sad. The book was slender and decadent as an adolescent aesthete, and under the grime I'd rubbed off, it revealed its proud title, tattooed down the length of its scoliotic spine: _The Great Panjandrum's Pyjamas, A Pastoral Satyre in Two Disrupted Acts by Q. R. Limpness_. I had never heard of author or title in any of my short-lived literature classes, and I eagerly opened it to a scene at random, anything to take me away from the nightmare of this time and place:

"ENTER PANJANDRUM, trilling upon a little tinker's hornpipe, dressed in the attire of a mercantile mariner, cap masking his horns. He capers gamely across the stage, swaying back and forth to the rhythm of his mad melody, bees or flies aswarm about him, and halts only when he descries—

"MILLIFLIA ( _doffing the milk-pails from the yoke across her shoulders and insinuating herself picturesquely amongst the branchings of a big bent-birch bench_ ): Hark! It is some wandering sailor, no doubt lost, far as he is from the sea here in lonely Arkadee.

"PAN.: Pardon, beggin' your pleasure, fair miss, hail ye from these parts?

"MILL.: Which parts might you be speaking of, good sir?

"PAN. ( _moving closer_ ): Those parts I look down upon appear quite comely to me.

"MILL. ( _drawing up her lace collar_ ): Sir, I am but a simple milk-a-maid. My father is a poor cobbler who lives in yon vale, and that I call home, too.

"PAN.: Blessed is that vale, to find you within its folds. But see here, I am lost at sea though I am seasick on land, and my legs grow unsteady before your marmoreal form.

"MILL.: No wonder you coggle so, most good sir, for now I see that your feet are cloven!

"PAN. ( _somewhat chastened and tugging at his chin-whiskers_ ): A birth-defect, only, miss, and not one to shame me with, for elsewhere I am—"

Lyrald, half-risen from his bed, had seized the curious book from me. "In what dunghill did they dig up such garbage?" he cried, clapping the book shut with the sound of thunder.

"I was finding it rather amusing," I said, thrashing in vain with my one good arm to take the book back from him. "In an archaic, outdated way, I mean."

Lyrald pouted behind his newly groomed goatee. "Curses, I haven't aged well, have I?"

"You? You look even younger than before. As for me—"

He thrust the book back onto my lap, looking totally crestfallen. "No, I mean the _play_ , son. But forgive me my juvenilia; I had published only unforgivably bad poetry in very limited private editions before I executed _that_ randy little romp. All of us art-school dropouts down at the Gilded Lily were much too heavily influenced by Aubrile or Wearifere and the rest of that dandyish school of cafe-crawlers with their monocles and waxed mustaches. At least no one ever read that particular effort of mine—I expect you'll find half the pages still stuck together."

I scrutinized again the narrower-than-high volume's gold-lettered backbone. "But," I said, "the author purports to be someone named Q. R. Limpness."

"Well, I had the wisdom even back then to use a pseudonym, you overread undereducated whippersnapper. Let me spare you the dastardly details: the Great God Panjandrum has his way with any pretty young thing he meets upon his picaresque peregrinations, upending skirts and lowering drawers whenever he gets or gives a chance. In the first 'disruption,' he loses the titular pajamas in an especially stomach-churning bit of ribaldry involving two vestal virgins of whatever sex and a duchess who hiccups whenever she feels something stirring way deep down in her fat jiggling loins. There's a good passage, though, when they're all behind a myrtle-bush and the bush is shaking and hiccuping and through a convenient back-lit scrim you can only see a sequence of disconnected appendages thrust through the foliage at pertinent moments. No one could ever have been able to stage that quite right—it would take, excuse the impertinence, a bit of prosthetic magic and a bearded merkin or two. In the second 'interruption'—oh, never mind, it's all more of the same higgledy-piggledy moil-and-muggery..."

I picked up the book in my pincer, so to speak, and looked at it a little amazed and a little more amused. "So you're a playwright, as well? I might have guessed! Maybe you can put me under your tutelage and demonstrate some of the finer points of style and substance, since it now looks as if I might live here forever."

Lyrald reached across that yawning chasm between our beds and took my good hand in his much larger, almost monstrous right hand and squeezed it so I nearly cried out—but I was glad he had done so. We had no more cigarettes to split between us, or we might have smoked then and been truly happy.

My left arm, I might have explained already, was severed by the impact of the underwater mine, or so the good Lord Howaburt would tell me later—that was why while I was in my coma he had taken the liberty of equipping me with this hateful makeshift device of dowels and springs he called an arm and a hand, something that looked more like the marriage of an obscure carpenter's tool and a deformed crustacean than any imitation human limb I had ever seen. Lyrald, bless him, had helped by planing and carving a humerus out of a pine plank, and someone else (likely a ward-walker who possessed either extreme adeptness or a sick sense of humor) had attached a rooster's foot to its terminus, the toe-bones ingeniously connected by wire filaments to the pulley-like elbow joint, thereby enabling me, with a little practice utilizing agile gyroscopic movements not unlike those of an angler casting out a line, to pick up the smallest and lightest of objects. I suppose someone might call it surpassing ingenious, given that it was the best one might devise out of the sort of things one might find in a handyman's upper desk-drawer, and that in this far removed spot, by this point in the war, apparatuses for the handicapped were all but nonexistent—but that someone would not be me. In other words, I was not too enamored with this new extension of myself, but bang as I might I could not break or even bend it, and besides any such behavior would only bring another overaged or underaged orderly running up brandishing another "naughty, naughty!" needle. With this thing attached to me that seemed even less human than my parody of a leg, I soon enough told Lyrald, or anyone else who might be listening, more than once, with as much world-weary resignation as I could muster, that now I could justifiably say what it meant to feel "half a person." And I would have told the doctor, too, if his visits had not become rarer and rarer. Where was he—out riding the ponies and golfing with grenades?

Rather unpredictable, then, that I did come to find this altogether skeletal arm to be somewhat more mobile and flexible than my second-hand leg, and not just because that truly bizarre rooster's foot could adequately substitute for a third-rate hand. At times I could handle it so smoothly it might have been designed by someone who makes spring-wound dummies out of scrap metal and table-legs. Lyrald made lewd suggestions about the advantages of fleshless limbs when it comes to self-abuse, better than the frustrated cadet's method of sitting on a hand until it went numb and substituted for the unattainable lover's, while I discovered on my own that when adjusted by my good right arm into proper position, it was a handy and tireless backscratcher, coffee-stirrer, and page-turner. It could also still hold a full "hand" of cards; for weeks on end Lyrald and I played that game we soldiers call "Jack-or-the-Ass," whereby you try to wheedle and win enough of the five animal subsections in their separate suits from your opponent to assemble an entire donkey without somehow making a deadly chimera by mistake and losing the game—and any money you might have wagered. Lyrald had two healthy arms but no more fingers than I did, and so he was more often fumbling and creating unclassifiable monsters on the floor than I was.

This is not to say I was any happier than I was before I made my second aborted escape. Indeed, I was much more despondent than I have so far made it seem, and this is predominantly why: For days, while I lay helpless like the target of a sorcerer's curse in my comatose state, unable to see or speak or move or feel but able to hear everything from the sound a mucilaginous snail makes inching up a damp wall to the surging ocean-tide of blood in my veins, I listened to the doctors and orderlies revolving around me, listened as to an incomprehensible ear-play on the wireless biogram, the most prominent actor among them Lord Howaburt, of course, who had memorized his lines with argentine clarity and repeated them daily to anyone within earshot: "Good lad! Brave lad! Look at him sleeping like the pretty prince in a nurse's bedtime story, all porcelain-white and pink as a love-note you'd send to your sweetheart, isn't he—wouldn't you? You see, he'd gone back to rescue his squadron from that onion-gassed valley you've heard of, not wanting to believe they really could all still be dead. If only he had asked, we could have chauffeured him there to verify for him that it was true! But the poor chap wanted to remain an unsung paladin, I suppose, and went hightailing back there in the dead of night to search and rescue whatever starvelings he could find. If a couple of our scouts hadn't happened to be reconnoitering in that quadrant that very morning, this boy might have drowned, lying in those rising waters the way he was discovered. That arm never did turn up, or who knows, I might have been able to reattach it—but the rest of him is good as new, especially that leg we gave him, just a tad more rust on it, so I don't know how we'll keep him down long enough until he recovers sufficiently to ship out again. He's obviously got what it takes to be an exemplary soldier. I'm going to see that he is promoted just as soon as I can. Such loyalty to his king, queen, and their empire! This is what the war is all about, lads." All of this spoken, naturally, without an iota of sincerity, all of it for show, to showcase what a miracle-worker he was, someone who could raise the dead... if the medals were valuable and bonuses ample.

It was during one of our chronic card games, when I had once again collected all but the tail of the ass, that I finally decided to confide in Lyrald that I was no would-be hero and I would only try to abscond again just as soon as I had regathered what strength I could. By any magic means necessary, I would force myself through a keyhole or down a drainpipe before I was given another worthless stripe and sent even further afield, to those farthest-flung and most primitive isles—where, it was rumored, the enemy now had resorted to eating our brains and making leather jerkins out of our skins.

"But this time," I said in a very small voice, although that was not necessary–none of the other nearby soldiers could have cared, they were so damaged, and the orderlies at the opposite end were clogging atop an upturned trough as someone's banjonium caterwauled and the powdery dust flew about—"This time, we should go the both of us together."

Lyrald crooked a bushy eyebrow and cocked his chin toward me. "Say what?" he said. "First you have this dotty idea of escaping again–and why they haven't thrown you in the brig yet is beyond me, withal our doctor's flocculent-headed reckoning–and next you want me to come with you? Haven't you lost enough of yourself yet? Really, Symond, you have a mind as puddled as a pudding."

"You can't want to pine away in here until your dying day," I protested.

Lyrald's eyes were lost under the shrubbery of his heavy brows while he stroked his new gray-streaked goat's-beard. "I happen to be waiting out my time," he pronounced at last, "with this hole in my side being just interesting enough to our doctors to keep me away from the playing fields. My, how it galls me! Very well, maybe by the time they _do_ think I'm hale and hearty again, there will be a lull in the battles."

I made all sorts of expressions of disbelief.
"You may scoff at me, waving that cumbersome claw about, but as far as I can tell entropy is the only thing I have going for me here. Things must wind down eventually, you know, and when they do, I will slip into some other life far from these twill-draped fright-mares. I might even take up cooking, start a pastry-shop, do a thousand things with treacle and butterfat."

In all honesty, I wanted to expatiate at last upon the enigma of the forest cabin and the athletic youth, who I figured would willingly hide us both away until either this war or all time ceased (guess which would come first), but this time in my mind I could already hear Lyrald's donkey bray, see his brass-capped molars flashing in that mouth open wide enough to swallow all but the biggest lie, his tongue wagging like a buffoon's, and his uvula ringing with jollity. "Oh, la, I say! An airy-fairy fantasia for such a fancy-nancy boy!" I could imagine him exclaiming, fluttering his lashes. "I know all your niminy-piminy tunes anyhow. Would you be wanting cream and honey in your tea and lacy knickers under your shorty short-pants? Red, red ribbons for your prettified pigtails?"

Instead I told Lyrald of Myrmia's marriage plans, which must continue apace without any regard to heightened strife and scarcity. At this very moment she might be filling out all the expected legal forms—telestats, kinotypes, carbonized copies—or carving out a little love-bower in a corner of that government-allotted fourth-floor flat I had shared so long with my doting Mams. I remembered her few long and somewhat tedious letters to me. My bride-to-be would find bargains in chintz slipcovers and color-coordinated curtains she insisted must have "gauffered" trimmings, set off upon the mantel by the nice "olden" bowl of glazed wooden grapes she'd found at a gypsy market, not to mention a banquette with room for only two, a satin coverlet done up in quilted poppies and peonies she'd always had an eye on, one of those bulbous ebonite audio-viviograms with all the dials and meters (if we saved up enough), and a pasteboard palace to house her three calico kittens. My Mams would be busy stitching and purling matching mittens and mufflers for the two of us, occasionally dipping into her little embossed tin of patented "kinectric" pills. For her bad liver, of course. Now I was really pulling things out of the air: the old lady did not knit and my Sweet Young Thing, despite being very proper, had no great interest or skill in domestic economics. Myrmia's nearest living relative, a distant aunt, would have already made an old-style burnt offering in our honor at one of the neighborhood temples, to a matrimonial god of whom I'd never heard much. Another relative (here I grossly inflated my family's former position in society) might have been so presumptuous as to send an invitation to the royal court, hoping to receive well-wishes and maybe even a glossy teleprint in return. Again, none of this was true or likely to become true, because I had received no mail from anyone in such a very long time; indeed, nearly all communication from the home-front, even kinegrams, had ceased months before, and neither Mams nor Myrmia had ever been very reliable correspondents, anyway (hadn't they?), busy as they had often enough repeated they would be with their own lives and labors to survive in a new era when a loaf of bread now was said to cost as much as a two-seater automobile had when I first left my birthplace. With no recent news, I told Lyrald, it was urgent that I get home as soon as I could—well, because if I didn't, we would have three besides my mother and the requisite officer at our perfunctory civil ceremony. Lyrald did not know exactly how long it had been since my last leave, so I did not tell him that such a thing was not even chronologically possible, and that besides, Myrmia and I had never ventured further than holding hands and kissing as innocently as identical twins—that even the conjugal state itself was something we had only dreamed about in the way two inexperienced lovers relate their own lives to the idealized lovers they have just witnessed upon the stage. There had never been any banns proclaimed or rings exchanged, and only Mams had insisted that I begin to think of such things as far as my best girl was concerned. But for Lyrald, my elaborations only brought derision of another sort than I had expected from him previously—derision and more.

"You, with an heir!" Lyrald cajoled me, pulling up his sheet in a kind of delirium and wrapping it around his head as if it were a wedding veil or a baby's swaddling clothes. "So the lamb is a ram and the colt a stud-horse!"

"Disrespecting all antonymous appearances," I insisted, in my embarrassed anxiety contorting the precision of my words, "virility once ran through these shriveled veins." At that, his laughter only redoubled. "Oh, do please stop barking like that, or they'll be injecting _you_ next." But I could not help but absorb some of his mirth and giggled at my own pretensions.

Lyrald only collapsed into deeper folds of the sheet and further convulsions. "You know as well as I that you've got a wooden funny bone, me boy," he told me. "I hope for your sake a tenth of what you say is truthful and Myrmia is pricing bassinets as well as banquettes even as we speak, for I've decided I _am_ going with you this time, after all." And with that, he had set in place a deadly serious look upon me, with his chin and chin-fungus jutting, dead-on japing at me—inculpating me, insinuating me into his bargain, as well, all those things a prognathic jaw and a sharp bobbing beard can convey. It was just the same look he would sometimes give me when playing cards, and now as then I countered him with, "You must be bluffing."

But his beard was adamant. "Symond, Symond!" he said, characteristically combing a finger or two through those beloved hoary hairs. "I _do_ like you! And I can't have you doing anything dangerous again like blindly hunting moths into the twilight. Or thinking you have to go rescue a fair damsel from her own damned fate. You simply can't leave here alone, even if they make so little real attempt to guard this place against truants and undercover agents coming or going. Furthermore, all the seriously injured might just as well be dead to them—unless they somehow prove useful again. We're science experiments at best. And out there, our protectors—or the enemy—may no longer have enough bullets to go around, but even farmer-soldiers can still attack with pitchforks and rakes. Think these things through! You are too, too untutored. So don't argue. I have already decided that we must depart hand-in-hand from this place—and in this case, I'll be glad to lend you a hand."

I came over a little silly in my gratitude. "Bravo, bravo!" I exclaimed as I had long ago at the opera house, and, immediately bewaring spies all around, continued under my breath: "That's marvelous news, Lyrald, my friend. To be frank, I was a little worried I might not be able to make it alone this time, or convince you. But with a mate at my back to keep me going..." To stop my effusions, Lyrald reached across the gap between our cots as he had before, and so did I, realizing too late that I had offered the chicken leg. I started to switch arms, but Lyrald's already exuberant smile widened and he took my talons in his own mangled palm, anyhow, and gave me a manly handshake, or a close approximation. We swore partnership, but I caught his brows bristling once again and meeting across the bridge of his broad nose.

"Just don't trust me without any reservations," he warned, not entirely as if in jest.

I could think of nothing to counter such words, if that was what I was meant to do, and so he too lowered his voice even further to a mere mussitation and made his own confession: "Listen, young man, I must level with you," he said, leaning into me so close I could smell the sour porridge upon his breath and see the wax inside his shaggy ears, "I'm everything I told you I was and more, or none of it all, it doesn't matter what you choose to believe, but here's another tale for you: I'm here all because of a minor mistake."

"Brother, aren't we all," I chaffed him, and next in several painful motions unbent my knees to lie straight-legged across my mattress, while angling my improvised arm outward from my breast, as if to fend off whatever else he had to say. These days whenever I had to move it was like adjusting the limbs of a half-stuffed scarecrow.

"A mistaken identity," Lyrald explained. "You see, I'm more than I seem and not quite that in total. For I was born one of the enemy."

Even in the close warmth of that dusty barn I must have shivered. "Impossible," I said. "You're just as human as I am."

"You pitiable pip. Of course the enemy is just like you, or us, whatever—you know what they used to preach in the temples every weekend. We are one, of course, born of the same earth, these islands, and bound to it as one, too. All the rest, you ought to know, is—is merely a plot device. To keep us from dwindling away into sheer boredom with our too similar selves. One invariably abhors one's own reflection, in the end."

I had turned to my mossy wall and was trying not to hear what else he had to say, having pulled the many-times-patched pillow they'd given me over my head. But Lyrald went on:

"Back in the final stages of the last war, which was the beginning stage of this same war, because nothing ever really stops, we know, I was in a professional troupe in your enemy's imperial city—what did you use to call it over here? You would have been little more than an infant. Ah, Her Majesty's Royal Theater, that's it—I was a regular trouper, too, thought it was the way I would eventually get my plays produced, so I would take any role, do any bit of slapstick or song-and-dance that might get me noticed. In time I liked the acting better than the writing, anyway. How nice to have someone else come up with all your wittiest lines. And with a little training I found I could really sing, too. By the way, I was from a wealthy land-owning family, that's how I had the means to publish my work in deluxe editions, but reputable directors are inclined to discount that sort of privilege, I regret to say..." He paused and expectorated on the floor. "Now, I know you want to know what the country of the enemy is really like—but I tell you, it's exactly the same as here. We drink and eat the same offal, excrete and copulate with all the same proprieties, and generally make just as big of fools of ourselves as your countrymen do. You really can't tell us or our houses apart. Come, you must have known that already."

I was no longer looking at him, but could picture Lyrald as he was a minute before, sitting on the edge of his cot, arms folded across his broad-beamed chest, back yardstick-straight in his nightshirt, assuming the rigid persona of a royal personage in a children's matinee, a make-believe make-believer. "But none of that matters," he continued, pummeling his pillow with an ill-formed fist, perhaps both fists. "It's just that once, not in your wretched capital, but in the county seat of an outlying prefecture, during a radical play about the war in a little cabaret that had none of the licenses and only an underground reputation, we were bombed from above, from one of your damned kiddie balloons, I suppose, and what was left of the cast and audience went scattering in every direction like milkweed-fluff. Naturally I flew out of there, too, still dressed in the current uniform of the enemy, right down to the frog-toggles on my boots, and I ran right into the foe's—that is, your side's—approaching troops. They had their rifles raised and cannons poised, and I assumed I would die very quickly, minus any retort from the trumpets that I had grown used to hearing upon the boards whenever a fraudulent tetrarch or monomaniacal monarch met his fate. But once my assailants got a good look at me in that clown suit, rank of corporal, they welcomed me with open arms, and I tell you I was such a good actor and I had practiced your accent—pshaw, you all have an accent—with such precision and knew so much about your ways and the protocol of your armed forces from various roles that it was quite easy for me to pretend to be only a bit combat-addled, and so they sent me over here in gift wrapping, as it were; I even had a very realistic identification card that was an important prop in our sadly unfinished play!" Another pause, which Lyrald would call a "beat." "Soon enough I was out of one of your finest health-and-wellness facilities with an extra twenty pounds around my waist and ready to join a performing arts academy on this side, for, you see, actors have no real allegiances except to their muse, and you should know that our sides share many of the same old scripts and playwrights. From the point of my hospice-dismissal on, fame came easily to me—or something like it, and so you must forgive me if you have assumed things about Lyrald Elswaine that are not true, but then again that is the actor's lot..."

Oh, diabolical horror within the horror-show where I had already made my home! Lyrald, my best friend here—one of _them_? How could I trust him with anything now? How could I trust anyone ever again? And yet, now that I had opened my heart and disclosed my plans to this man, how could I not tell him everything else? I understood by then that I would not be going directly back to that forester who my detractors would sardonically maintain I would make my love-substitute. (Oh, but I knew that no matter their twitting I must eventually seek him out, if I did not meet him first by chance—it would be in another place far from here, though, for with the incessant bombing he must have had to leave his isolated haven at last.) Like it or not I would have to take Lyrald, who might be the enemy but was also my friend, with me, for we had already made a pact, even if half that pact had been unspoken. Not that I came to these conclusions immediately—it would take me several agonizing intervals of soul-searching before I could see Lyrald again as not quite a demi-devil born of Tartarius, but as simply another human being who wanted out of here as much as I did. Be that as it may, believe or not this newfound liberality of mine, but it would take many bungled apologies over the next series of days before I was able to meet Lyrald's eyes again, see they were still the same eyes I had entrusted with my secrets before, and convey to him my wish to take him with me when we left this place—for being half the person I was, or feeling like it, I knew I would need his strength and his wisdom in negotiating the alien landscape outside those doors, I would need his constant encouragement in order to trace the long-diminished footprints of my dearly loved woodsman.

There came an hour very late in the day when the ward was particularly quiet and we seemed more alone with ourselves than ever. Lyrald occasionally shot me glances, as if to say, "Go on, then!" So, at last, now that he was waiting patiently for me to speak at length, I told him of my encounter that fateful afternoon in the woods when I had been diverted on my way with my company to that toxic intervale—so many weeks, even months ago, it might be now—and yet it was still not quite winter, never seemed it would be winter, and the days remained balmy and dry. I told Lyrald in more words than I've already used, if in a more tempered tone, tuned to just the right key, about how I felt certain the youth had recognized me as a friend, maybe a friend he'd never seen, but a friend all the same, one who would willingly succor and shelter me. Or, now that Lyrald insisted on including himself— _us_. Soon enough I felt a deep-breathing doubt surfacing from the cot so close beside me. Details—I knew I must have details to convince him, so at last I described the bounty of chestnuts and their almost carnal odor, the crackling campfire, the striped tiger-cat curled around itself in the sun, and (with as much overripe poetry as I could muster, imitating a ballad from days of yore while pretending to be quoting someone else) I fear I also spoke of the young woodsman's "heroical stance and ever-questing eyes." A kindred soul so very alone yet not so lonely in his providential protectorate, I asserted; leastwise, once the young man took all of my naked self in, he had been very desirous to welcome me into his kingdom. Liming the twig even further, I concluded by telling Lyrald of the canary snared within its wickerwork cage, and how its wistful tune to an unseen mate was akin to rising arpeggios upon harp-strings breaking one by one—it went like this, for I could never forget it: _dee-deedle-dee-dee, dee-deedle-dee_...

"Whistle that again, please do, but this time a mite less off-key," Lyrald submitted his almost disdainful request, across the gulf between our cots, in what was now the black of night—when at least _I_ can believe anything.

I reset the scene with better made props and more vibrant colors, and with closed lips I tried to approximate the melody, perhaps improvising more than I should have.

The whole length of the bedframe next to mine seemed to erupt with his muffled laughter, for he must have buried his mighty head beneath his pillow, but could not stop his outsized body from pitching and tossing within its narrow dinghy; I feared someone around us might awake or one of those disorderly orderlies might order us to shut our traps, although no one seemed to have noticed or cared, and gradually he began to speak: "A canary—a coloratura—Clerysta! You are far too immature and overly persuadable, me boy-o. Don't you see, don't you hear what you are mimicking in your inexact, amateurish way? How I wish I believed in the gods again so I could laugh with them, as they must at you! Oh, Clerysta, you hellcat, you temptress!"

Sensing no response from me, for I gave him none, the comic bass in the dark continued: "Don't you see how we transpose scenes from our dreams into reality, or the other way around? An insidious little worm, a mere maggot of an idea, has pricked your impoverished brain-pan, boy—and this tale you tell is not very original, is it? A typical delusion resulting from battle trauma or combat fatigue. Some of these more forward-thinking telegnostic ratiocinators find the whole matter very interesting. Believe me, I've played enough doctors medical and academical in my day and done no small amount of research. I'm sorry to say so, but the whole subject is tiresome, and your version is a plagiarism, to say the least." He was not saying this with his usual mordacious arrogance, but matter-of-factly, the way an examining physician might say, "Response normal—good. Eyes, good, ears, good..."

"It was neither dream nor fabrication," I said, "or I would not be here. One doesn't nearly die chasing the fugitive light of a daylight specter. That youth was as bone and blood as I used to be."

The cot continued to shimmy as if bolted to it was a piston-powered engine shutting down or starting up. "He _was_ there," was all I would answer such jeering with. "He was there."

"And so was Clerysta, or Miss Gurtinna Langgersyn, which is her real name, in _Garter and Grail_ , if you can remember." Lyrald's voice had now assumed the gruffly chiding delivery of an exams-proctor, the razzing bassoon in his orchestra of assumed personalities. "Gurt, Gurtie. Our pulchritudinous junior histrio with the strictly cloistral attitude, that is."

Something, some memory was awakening within me. "Oh, it was she, your Miss Langgersyn or Clerysta, wasn't it," I recollected, speaking in slow measures, trying to summon up the scene within my head, "who played the magic maiden that rises out of the sacred font of the moon-goddess? Myrmia said she had never heard such a lovely, pure voice—every bit like a wild thrush's, she avowed it was, having never heard the bird, I might add."

"Lovely! Pure, you say! _Polluted_ , I'd say. Oh, yes, I had a bite of that tart after our very first rehearsal. There should have been a swinging door for ol' Gurt's, that is, Clerysta's dressing room—but mind it doesn't swing back on you as the next trusting suitor enters! But all of that is by the by. The tune you so ineptly rendered is a transposition of the last few bars of the swansong she sings before she is betrayed by the False Knight. A short but striking turn; she always consumed too many inches in the reviews, in my opinion. But don't you see now how your imagination has merely borrowed too heavily from other sources?"

I was not convinced, for I might have mixed up the tunes, and anyway, I probably couldn't have heard that distant yellow bird, anyway, above the rushing waters—although I knew the sun-spangled glade and that friend I'd never said a word to were as real as the pain in my backside from pressing into a prickly mattress for far too long. "How do you explain the rest, then?" I begged Lyrald.

He appeared to be turning and mulling the matter over in his own bed, and eventually I could just about see his muzzy form rising to sit up and pronounce the rest: "The rough-timbered cabin you borrowed from the scene where bides the hermit who thinks he had once drunk from the jewel-smothered mazer of the gods and thus achieved life everlasting, even though he is about to die along with his solo. The cat and chestnuts I cannot account for and are inconsequential, maybe only provoked by stimuli in the operating chamber, but I am sure that timber feller, if you comprehend my pun, is one of the living oaks in the Forest of the Dead, that choice chorus of bassos and baritones who sing the 'O Wayward Sawyer' song. You recall how by a trick of the lighting they metamorphose into stalwart and strapping young men, strong as oaks and nude but for modestly placed leaves, who do their circle-dance around the sleeping enchantress. Oh, I had one of _them_ , too—we all did, that's the acting life."

"I must have been drowsing myself during that act," I argued, half-certain he was making up most of what he had just told me. I would not, could not be persuaded I was guilty of any folly but a too-literary loquaciousness. Neither did I want Lyrald to go on and compare me to some courageous yet feckless tenor in another of his farcical music-theater gambols. If he thought I was leading him into the wilderness in pursuit of a schoolboy's fancy, all my plans would fall through. So I reminded him of our pact and why our jailbreak was necessary. "You can believe I'm deceiving only my abject self if you like," I also told him, seeking but not finding the whites of his eyes in that night that lacked a moon, then looking up between and past the rafters to find instead random stars dislocated from their constellations and blithely blinking above all life below, instead. "I may be an imbecile or a child or both, but you know as well as I that as soon as we're on our feet, they'll send us off to whatever front's brooked the most casualties. You've heard the orderlies young and old talk about what they've heard from the upper-ups. East, west, north, south, they need men everywhere." In the dark I was senselessly pointing directions with my old and new arms, until I knocked over my water tumbler, dashing it to the floor, which roused an orderly at the night-desk from his half-sleep. He reflexively fired up the emergency carbon arc lamps all down the length of the barn, consequently inspiring a volley of curses from other soldiers on their cots. Whether Lyrald had listened to any of what I had just told him before the glass had splintered into a million pieces, I do not know, for he was such a good actor his snores might have been real or they might have been falsified.

Two or three mornings later I had another brief interview with Lord Howaburt, who had come striding out of nowhere, "swinging his shiny new valise like some strumpet flaunting a new purse," as Lyrald put it to me after the doctor had left. "He fondles that stethoscope around his neck the way one would an amulet. Superstitious twit!" Lyrald was right; now that I was so disfigured, Lord Howaburt at first treated me as if I were diseased, not merely broken. Opposed to the way he had consistently behaved before, he kept his physical distance this time, stethoscope and the things he pulled from that just-polished patent-leather valise kept always well between us. He tapped at me with small implements and sounded my depths and read my meters. After some preliminary inquiries whose answers the man ignored, he informed me he was immediately being shipped to a more substantial garrison on an island far distant from this one; wise or otherwise of him to have agreed to the transfer, it was nevertheless a precarious place where he was needed more than here, "where my work is just about done," as he put it, eyes flashing silver like the silver in his hair and voice; and it was as if counterfeit coins were tumbling down upon me. "Look at you, a regular strongman ready to strike twenty enemy dead with one blow. Your prosthetical devices have only made you the more powerful, a sort of super-being, and it is with genuine pleasure that I can inform you that a handsomely forged badge of honor and an extra pair of stripes may be coming your way soon after I'm gone." I was glad that Lyrald had hurried off to visit the lav and would not witness this terrible scene or the wet and salty anguish in my eyes. "Look around you! All my little lambies are doing splendidly," the doctor glibly pronounced, perhaps noting my discomfort, "and somehow none has struck a note with me as you have. You are a model soldier. Healthy or near-healthy and very willing troops have I here, one and all, products of my expertise and the army's unrelenting scrupulousness, but those other footsloggers sometimes scarcely seem to appreciate the advantages we have given them... and sometimes I think they would probably have been more satisfied with those dry-rotted wooden appendages we used to provide, as if men were nothing more than machines that need a part replaced now and then! But everything in life takes some getting used to... Don't cry, son, I know you are proud to serve your country, just as I have been proud to serve you. I pray the gods, such as those that remain, look down upon you with their boundless grace and humor but all the same don't transform you into a black peacock or white bullock or something similarly magisterial before you have done all you can for us mere mortals. I thank you, my winningly winsome boy, and depart from you with a particularly sweet-bitter joy." With that prepared address, he was instantly and piously on his knees; overcome with emotion and forgetting my appearance for the moment, he pressed my cold bloodless hand between his hot hands—and I swear I felt his trim mustache graze my lips as he kissed my cheek or thereabouts with antiseptically drooling lips. And then he was gone, leaving only a slight scent of sour oats and saddle-oil in his aftermath.

No—for once I am partially embellishing the truth, though at this late date I am not certain where veracity in the vignette above was replaced with what even I recognize as a kind of idle velleity or even wishful vanity. Perhaps the doctor did not eulogize me nearly so enthusiastically as I have indicated, and he and I merely shook hands goodbye, if that. Well, well. At any rate, I would not see him again.

That very night we, Lyrald and I, were given, quite out of the blue, an opportunity to run away, or one of those opportunities that seems unlikely only at the time (hindsight and the grand schemes of Fate can make such events seem inevitable), for things happened thus: Even though the always-lazy orderlies had been put on special alert since the night I had demolished my water-glass, assuming I was up to my old tricks, and an alert guard had recently been posted in the hayloft above, all of our attendants had rushed into a nearby pasture to help put out a mounting fire that likely had been festering for some time in a sheep-shearing shed next the toilets. Upon first hearing the uproar, I suspected Lyrald of having struck the incendiary match earlier, when Lord Howaburt had visited, or else he had bribed one of the most otiose orderlies into doing him the favor, and for what I could readily guess–a pack of black-market ciggies or a skin-trade booklet? No matter, because Lyrald had already clinched my shoulder in a viselike grip and was guiding me (shoving me, actually) through the smoky gloom toward the wide-open barn doors. A few other patients looked on, but none of them was robust or foolhardy enough to follow our example. (I suppose I myself no longer noticed how badly off most of these men were). Outside, a few hundred paces off, we saw the shed aflame in the field, surrounded by half-dressed men shouting inefficaciously at each other because the water from the pump had run dry. Two draft-horses, bone-white and as colossal as the ones you might see on a public memorial, galloped right past us, fire and fear in their huge eyes and their breaths fogging the November night. We paused just a moment to catch our own breaths and then sloped quickly and quietly (being barefoot) out of the barnyard into what was another chill moonless night, Lyrald still leading the way, pulling me along by the wrist as if I were a minor in his charge. Near the washhouse he grabbed a laundry bag, and after we had gone a little farther into the bushes we opened it to find not socks-to-scarves uniforms, but just enough garments to suit a couple of half-respectable vagrants. Lyrald donned a pair of long woolen undergarments like leotards, with some type of grubby doublet belted over them (making him look something like an extra from _Garter and Grail_ ), and I threw together a random assortment of khaki items, sufficient to give me a soldierly guise so long as one didn't look too close. Footwear was another challenge; for the present we would have to go on barefoot, or partially so—Lyrald with his huge horny feet and I with my tripod of wooden walking stick, invincible steel foot, and another foot painfully aware of every pebble and prickle. It was getting colder, and a very light rain was teasing our faces. For obvious reasons I thought of the dithering Old Dear then, and how she would admonish me to always carry an umbrella and wear my rubbers and dress warmly, even in the summer because there still might be drafts—and I also thought of those monkey fur-lined gloves Myrmia always wore when we went out walking in the park and how I wished I had them in this climate more than Myrmia's ameliorating hands themselves. Seeing me there diddering all over, for a moment unable to face the dark and threatening countryside ahead, Lyrald pounded my upper dorsal area and next took me in a bearlike body-lock to ensure me that the Sun's shy daughter Auronnia would be visiting us soon, bringing in her warm wake another balmy and beauteous day. O, ye graverobbers disperse; O, ye sparrowlings arise! I suppose he was reciting some half-remembered soliloquy. Soon enough I rallied and followed him down the starlit path, though I mean to say it wasn't really lit at all except by occasional distant missile-flare and a certain pearlescent phosphorescence in the rainclouds.

"Whither are we bound?" Lyrald demanded without turning for an answer, being that he was the one leading the way. With my stiff leg and shuffling gait I could barely keep up with his steady martial pace, although thankfully the road we had found was smooth and fairly flat. The woodsman, if he did exist—and I knew he did as surely as I knew I had five fingers and five toes remaining—must have retreated in this direction, away from the battle-fires, through the thickly forested uplands, traveling north at night, through these scourged and scorched farmlands. Was that charred ring on the ground where he had struck camp? Were those crescent-shaped depressions in the mud the worn imprints of his boot-heels? The war-wasted hills and fields all around me became nothing but a sort of natural tapestry whose cleverly camouflaged threads, if observed from the correct angle, would reveal the concealed pattern of his journey. It was this new-found resolve to read and interpret all these clues in the scenery that gave me the incentive to press ever onward, even if I need must crawl.

The rainfall was increasing somewhat, but we were in too much of a hurry to stop for shelter. My hair was soon soaked, and so were my clothes. Despite several minutes of silence having elapsed as we ventured down the diminishing road in the rain, Lyrald repeated the question he had asked several expository sentences back in this retelling of my tale.

"We're going nowhere," I answered. "I mean, anywhere. _Away_. My mind is an atlas. I have all these routes memorized. The river wends that way, and the unspoiled wilderness is beyond. There we'll be safe, I know we will." I couldn't have said, no longer can say, if I were lying or simply expressing my freewheeling aspirations.

And I did feel safe already, in a way, though my listener might insist I was merely cozening myself as well as Lyrald: This was a land that _seemed_ familiar to me, at least from "naturalist" or "realist" novels I had scoured, detailing the popularly acknowledged agrestic life in late autumn—grouse roosting beneath the thorny gorse, bronzy-husked barley combed westward or southward by the breezes, bulrushes and leaf-stripped willow-limbs stippling the waters of meandering brooks, the rye stubble and winter wheat and flattened flax and stooks of corn, those checkered fields alternately new-mown or straw-strewn, lately harvested—now that it was, in the higher elevations, this land's sere season, "best left to crow and huntsman," as the proverb has it. Only the "simple country folk," as we city-dwellers like to think of them, were absent, buried in my second-hand description of this rainy midnight hour. In the rain, in the dark, there was not much actually to see. But I did see everything as it should have been! Not like a crowd-pleasing novelist, but like one of those rustic poets of old, I wanted to relate to Lyrald in proper meter and shapely stanzas how I felt all of life again invisibly humming and _pullulating_ (I guess that's the best word) around us, contained in elements of earth and fire and water, like the correct combinations the alchemist blends together for his alkahest; it was only an intangible essence in the chill air—that which moves, the very flavor of life, so tantalizingly alien to me in this countryside, something I could reach for but not quite grasp or inhale myself. Perhaps for the first time since my supposed "death," I took it as an airtight surety that I was not dead any more than Lyrald was, and I _wanted_ to live; never mind that the land itself was dead or dying at the end of another wearisome year. It could well be, as Lyrald might say, that the gods _have_ given up on us humans; or more precisely, they have abandoned their most finely wrought creations in that bilgy cesspit we call the universe, which they had also made. Let that old guy Hummames say we are damned, ensarled in a webbing of self-deception, for such is in all likelihood true; I must however honestly asseverate that first and foremost we have been left spellbound and quiescent by our creators, they are only waiting for us to truly awaken. So what if all is a dream of shadows, a shadow of a dream. It is up to us to unwind the shroud of illusions we have been wrapped in. We have only to kindle that spark of life always present within us and our eyes _will_ open. None of this perspicacious speculation, however, did I attempt to explain to my colleague, who would probably only say I was sounding like a sophomoric sophist at best, influenced by the puerile and empurpled thinking of too many mush-minded mystics I had come across in my haphazard reading; at that moment, as we passed a ruined mill I felt I had seen before, maybe even earlier that night, I realized with a start that we hadn't gone far yet at all, maybe we were even traveling in circles, or figure-eights and no time at all may have passed. Yet the pelter had stopped, the sky had gone black but bright, untarnished as new plate, with all those stars glistering on its firmament, for the gods were indeed at home; and our clothes were mostly dry again—so it was clear that we had been walking already for hours, for miles.

Another nineteen or twenty minutes on, having scaled another tree-topped hummock, I was suddenly held back when Lyrald clamped one of his mammoth maimed mitts over my face, so that I too could pick up on that forlorn sound coming from the roadside ahead. It was a noise as painful as a human infant's first vocal spasms, and seemed to be produced by a being as large as a full-grown woman, though once it thrashed out of the weeds to our feet we saw it was only a woodland warbler—or possibly a wren (try as I might, I'm no good as an ornithologist)—that went spinning into the middle of the track, beak agape, one wing outspread, blindly beating the dust. Touched by some emotion I had long forgotten, I watched as Lyrald cupped the tiny bird in his ogreish hands, bloodying himself–it appeared to have been shot only minutes before. "Can they be so hungry as to shoot songbirds?" I asked Lyrald, who jerked rearwards, as if he had not realized I was still next to him. It was possibly the first either of us had spoken in hours. The bird, its grass-green feathers so green and its yellowy eyes so very yellow even in this nearly nonexistent light, this bird so perfect and fragile, an easy emblem of everything I felt I had lost in this war, had, I saw, expired in his cradled palms. Lyrald uttered something appropriate (an apostate's benediction) and put it to rest atop a fencepost, for the kites or shrikes to find. I wanted to cry again but did not want Lyrald to see me blubber like the softhearted boy they all thought I was. Since we had left the barnyard he had not looked me in the eyes once, even when he had hugged me so close, and he kept fidgeting with his pitiful short-changed hands, as if he were badly in need of something better to do with them—hold a shotgun? hold his own pizzle to piss?

"No!" I cried when intuition struck, and I limped back to the bird on the fencepost—as I had somehow guessed, it had only been grazed by the shot, it wasn't dead at all, merely in shock, but would be dead if left exposed to the cruel elements like that. I scooped the still living thing up in my right hand and held it to my bosom between the brass buttons of my parade-drill shirt, feeling the warbler's fragile heartbeat competing with my own more fearful one. Confident now that it would survive, I put the bird into my left shirt-pocket, where it twitched a few times and then went to sleep. And so we walked on. Lyrald seemed not to have even noticed what I had done—but then again, maybe he had been the one who was crying. And silently we walked on.

"If you did have faith again in the gods, do you think praying to them would do any good?" I asked my friend after we had passed yet another derelict farmstead and its sterile, scorched fields. "I mean, to ensure us a safe passage."

"No," Lyrald stated. "Even if I did believe, which I never will again. Therefore, _no_."

"And why must that be so?"

"Because it _is_ so."

"But _why_ so?"

"Just _so_ , you so-and-so!"

I tried out a laugh, but it sounded too hollow and cheerless in this wasteland. "Tau-tol-o-gy," I thought might be what I meant to say and then said it aloud like an instructor, syllable by syllable. "An odd word we learned at school. Arithmetical, arrhythmical. True because it is always true? Senseless, really. Lyrald, why do we have only _these_ words? Why don't we have many more? Or others less inadequate?"

Lyrald stopped walking ahead of me for a moment. "Whatever are you piffling on about, silly boy?"

Having assured myself that the animal was breathing slowly inside my shirt, I leaned for a moment against a conveniently placed tree-trunk—both to rest my aching joints and to try to put my thoughts into words I knew: "I mean, other languages. Why have we got just this maddening _one_?"

Lyrald was obviously fed up with me, but sat willingly by my side to rub his swollen, blistered feet. "Because," he explained as to a simpleton, "we are all of the same contaminated semen, as I've told you. A long, long time ago, before our histories were written, who knows, maybe there were more. Languages, I mean. It must have been terrible, no one understanding each other. How could you ask to borrow your neighbor's plow, when he might have been thinking you were asking for something else entirely—his winter cloak, or his daughter?" I could see his hot breath rising from his beard in the night air.

"To go back to my first argument, wouldn't it be better if the gods existed, and we didn't?" I said, helping to pull him up from the frost-rimed grass, though I fell over doing so and tumbled into his ample lap, my warbler luckily unharmed. In another moment I had dusted him off and he, me. "Sorry, but these are just the sort of things I ponder all those unending hours I've spent on my back in bed," I concluded, as if nothing had happened, and taking up my swell-dressed dude's promenading stick again.

I could sense, even in the darkest hour of this aphotic night, miles beneath the sea of stars, that Lyrald must be brooding again—almost could see again those actorly eyebrows greeting each other in the grooves graved so deeply above his nose! "I sometimes think it would be better," he growled, "if this entire world had never existed at all." But now I could see he was looking around, to his sides and behind him, as if he had lost something along the way, and his voice had fallen into not a stage whisper but a real one. "And you must know that I trust only in devils, for only devils have ever bred the likes of you and me."

"But why is that? And why are you mouthing your words like that? There's no one else about but the hedgehogs, safe in their hedgerows."

"Would you please stop talking so much, you nattering ninny? It's incredible. You sometimes have even myself consonating far too ar-fen." Lyrald, contrary to having always been the leg-puller and rib-tickler, had never been so touchy with me before, but, allowing for the early hour, I guessed it was just his nerves and the dying bird and this foreign land that had once been his own that got to him—no, that was wrong, I forgot, I forget; he had never been a farmer, never even been one of us.

We were now approaching a shell-blasted granary connected to a silo which hulked monolithically before us like an ancient astronomer's observatory. Searching the farthest reaches of the black sky, like a stargazer of olden days myself, I could connect the points of all the brightest constellations I had loved even as a city child under intrusive streetlights: the Wheelbarrow, the Three Star-Crossed Lovers, the Manticore, the Executioner, the Urn of Memory. I tried to pay little real attention to my foot that was freezing and bleeding, the only foot that could freeze and bleed, I mean, and I was breathing warmth down onto the tiny trembling nestling, which I had drawn again from my pocket and which now pecked testily at my fingers whenever I petted its head. In that cold clear air just before sunrise, lost in this uninhabited countryside as I felt we were, I might have been dreaming as I walked—something assuasive had come to rest inside me as an image of love does in sleep, and staring into the vault of stars I no longer was afraid of anything.

My fragile sense of security was short-lived, of course. "Symond, there's something I really must tell you," Lyrald announced, looking right and left before moving his chin close to my ear like a courtroom conspirator. His actions, at once sinister and risible, seemed no more realistic to me than a scene from one of his own plays. "Symond, I have to tell you the truth," Lyrald said just loudly enough to stimulate my typanum. "I can't go through with this, I simply can't... Look at me, damn you! I'm giving you your one and only chance to run now, or at least scuttle off, because beyond that next shuttered farmhouse patrolmen are waiting to arrest you and goosestep you back into the sickbay."

I laughed like one incognizantly drugged, while ruffling the bird's pretty green and yellow feathers. "Lyrald, this isn't just another half-baked scene out of one of your fabulous librettos," I stated, not having given too much heed to what my bumbling chum had actually said, anxious to return to the always beckoning sidereal light of my own dreams.

"Listen, Symond, listen," Lyrald pleaded, a little louder this time. "This afternoon I went to Lord Howaburt while you were sleeping, after your inharmonious goodbyes, and informed him of your plans, in exchange for his agreeing to accord me an honorable discharge–otherwise, you were right, I had already been informed that they were planning to send me back to the field of battle within a fortnight. I didn't really think we could go on the lam before then, but tonight with the fire and all—dear boy, I was selfish, and I'm sorry that I betrayed you—it was a moment of weakness and cowardice, and that's why I'm giving you this one last chance to break free."

"For a stage professional, you cannot tell a good joke," I said, refusing to be unnerved, too happy to be free under those giddy configurations of stars to think straight. Perhaps after all I was condemned to dream, to dream forever... Like windup toys we continued advancing slowly toward the silo, slaves to our own inner momentum. This gave me time to think along other lines. "Or could it be you truly are trying to frighten me, Lyrald?"

"Don't believe me, then!" roared Lyrald; almost simultaneously there was a rifle report and the bird fluttered miraculously out of my hands.

 Symond Interrupts Himself

Long, long, long ago, we have all been told uncounted times, there may (or may not) have lived a very beautiful people with beautiful ideas and beautiful arts, who were called the Adalandans, for they lived among the blessed isles of Adalandis. It was from these just and sagacious folk that our lingering if faulty ideas of gods and anti-gods have come; unlike our inscrutable and ineffectual deities, however, theirs bore proper epithets and honorary titles, and they interfered on a day-to-day and face-to-face basis with mortals, controlling their subjects' destinies as mercilessly as weather and warfare do ours. Walking above and alongside men, they had the temperaments ordinary men and women possess, the same virtues and vices, only acting them out on a grander scale. I like to think they had also attained a better sense of humor than we ever did. We have forgotten our ancestors' own names and most of their pantheon's attributes and personalities, for after the great fires and after the great waves, after their cities and islands disappeared from the maps—maps that might have offered a distorted reflection of our own rotten civilization—a lot of other history happened; true, books were written in an attempt to remember it all, but many centuries after the waters fell and rose again, only a few inauthentic memories survive along with these shabby divinities to whom we most often only pay passing tribute. That contradictory chronicler and all-purpose mastermind Alwyn Alberway has suggested that our forefathers created the gods, and not the other way around, although being no real atheist, he opined that such a thing should make no difference at all when we burn our offerings or make our sacrifices. (In Alberway's guise as a proto-physicist, he also avows that man is made up of particles so small they cannot actually exist—hence, if we follow that logic, neither can mankind!) I wish I had the sort of faith that was supposedly habitual to Andalandans, who never seemed to question their spiritual ontogeny or infallible purpose in the world. Even though their era was so very long ago it might have been on another planet or parallel world, I sometimes like to idly make conjectures about those same Adalandans who historians and theologians quarrel over, but on a perhaps more simplistic level, such as considering how they actually managed the human economics of their peace and prosperity. Did they love as we love, desire as we desire? And if so, how did they not all kill one another, as we perpetually seem driven to do? They must have found a way to be unerringly happy both as individuals and as a social organization. Others too, it goes without saying, have written poems and plays and novels about that pre-holocaustal and antediluvian culture, but it is not art I am trying to weave from my woolgathering—just another _possibility_. Another way to live. Myrmia, being a modish Modernist, or so she thought, used to laugh at me when I rambled on about such things around her—for that _was_ all just a pretty myth, _wasn't_ it? Our island nations are unquestionably the only significant cultures ever to have arisen on this earth, she was taught at her allegedly "progressive" school. All right, we may indeed have only storytellers to blame for carelessly excogitating, partially or not, and summoning up a long-past paradisaical era—but at least, I argue, those tales make us feel somehow more worthy of trying to devise our own in that utopia's absence.

Nowadays our temples are mostly underused, empty, or even in ruins, I don't have to be reminded, but as much as anyone else I still fear the deities and demons who survived flames or flood, and I wish there were not as many as we have islets in our archipelagos; how much easier, as I have said before, to have just one of each—one god, one devil—or even _neither_ , as Lyrald would have it, and thereafter and forevermore be truly free to chart our own destinies. Maybe it was Lyrald who helped instill such unstable ideas in me, but in all truth, I have privately been contemplating such things for years. (Forgive me please, my friends, the interposition of these paragraphs that might have found a better home in a pseudoscientifical quarterly—for that may well have been these words' fate, had I not been dragooned out of the mainstream of life and into a uniform. Once I pursued knowledge; now I recognize the risks of knowing too much.)

After the destruction of the Andalandans, but still in a far-off epoch, some storybooks say our islands used to be ruled by a parliament of august men and women, who were elected by the general populace and whose laws had to follow the peoples' will. Citizens were not subject as we are to despots who call themselves kings and queens and who reign for life (but whose lifespans are so often shortened by jealous relatives or rivals). Hard to believe. Our foe likewise instituted a similar system of democratic equity. No class was considered better than any other, no one lacked a voice in the country's governance. Naturally such things could not last. But for a long while, for centuries, our antecedents were united in their sense of equality, and they prayed with much ingenuity and not a little pomp to just one celestial presence, instead of many. Just one? Impossible, you say, but true. Naturally, our demonic half-brothers imitated our customs, as well. To say so may be heresy, but how such a political and theological arrangement appeals to me—an Ideal of Unity—especially now, in my present disjointed condition! In fact, even further back, say some oppositionists I have lately disinterred from heretofore unseen repositories, there may have been, as Lyrald also indicated, only one nation, instead of two, which is why we share the same language, the same customs, the same bellicose and timeworn rituals. Both of our states used to commission ships to explore and exploit the more backward islands afloat upon the hemispheres. We raced each other to seize lands and resources and then fought amongst ourselves for the spoils. Millions died, but what of truly lasting value we actually discovered or preserved remains a mystery. No god or gods seemed to particularly favor either side, at least not for long. Yet who is to say what _really_ happened? All that was eons and eons ago. The generations who succeeded those gore-begrimed days seldom liked to talk about such an unpleasant past. After much study and not a few tears I have concluded no one ever really forgot or wanted to forget, and for some reason that is why we continue to repeat all the same mistakes. But I am often wrong.

 * * *

When the mighty steam whistle filled my soul, bursting the world wide open, deafening us travelers one and all, and the ensuing silence swiftly reassembled a new world in its place—then, and only then, did I dare to open my eye: I saw the measureless unbroken plain that stretched from horizon to horizon, burnt brown by the summer and with not a hayrick or donkey-cart in sight, the only movement the ripe wheat bowing before the unheard wind outside the well-sealed windows. Sunrise, ah, sunrise—time to re-enter this merciless world of ours. I felt for the warm and work-vesicated palm of my brother soldier, remembering sleepily the enveloping fingers that had reached over to encircle, to hold tight and fast, to blindly caress all five digits of my right hand—but his hand had vanished; and I knew then that what I thought I had been experiencing for the last several hours, what I had thought I possessed, must of course have been nothing but another damn dream, and so I had not really woken in the middle of the night to find my kind woodcutter alongside me, deeply drowsing, his hefty shoulder close against mine, his left hand quite by accident balanced upon my right knee (which I couldn't feel, of course, for it was no longer really my right knee). Notwithstanding the odds against something like this happening, it had all felt so very real, and I had so badly wanted to speak to him. When had he boarded this railway train, and would he be going where I was going? For those hours we sat next to each other, ribs snug against ribs, I was deliriously happy at last, or could have sworn that I was. My friend, my dearest friend! (At first I had thought it might be Lyrald, come to join me on the way home, but then in this dream within a nightmare I remembered what had happened, and I inhaled the pine forest in his hair and on his breath and knew it could not be Lyrald.) Two soldiers facing us across the aisle and another curled oddly in a corner of the floor were all snoring away and would not have seen a thing, had I dared to draw my friend even closer—though I did not want to wake him, either. Even in the inconstant light that came and went from the corridor outside our compartment, I could see that my friend was dressed in an old worn suit of charcoal-gray gabardine, the rough fabric offset with incongruous black velvet pocket flaps and black velvet buds that fastened onto little velvet loops all the way up the neck like a nightporter's jacket. His buttonhole held a black carnation, and looking closer I saw that around the bulging upper portion of his left arm was a tightly knotted ribbon of black velvet—ready for a funeral, dressed for death. (Whose? Where? And why does Mr. Death always demand we change into formal wear for Him?) Death, indeed! That must be why he was taking this train and leaving his happy home. His sunburned face, eclipsed by the dark—with its upper eyelid tinged pink, and his fine white-blond eyelashes trembling against his lower eyelid, in rhythm with his gentle snores, and his ruddy right cheek, just sprouting its first golden-red hairs, as well as half his lips, pinker than his eyelid and palpitating even more noticeably—rested so close to mine against the abrasive upholstered seat I could have kissed it; but then I would only have awakened him into the horror of wartime death and despair. I sat there dumbly, smelling his warm breathing body that, beneath the coarse gabardine and the odor of balsam-sap soap, still seemed to also hold the smoky scent of chestnuts; and I could not sleep, yet did sleep, and I did awake, and of course he was not there and most likely—certainly—had never been there. Whether the whistle had blown only in his dream or mine, I could not tell, although we were not approaching a crossing or station. I yawned and stretched as best I could. Outside the window of this small room I shared so intimately with these men I did not know, through the mirage of the unwashed window-glass, I saw a landscape bereft of perspective, when viewed with only one eye: the flat grasslands flat as a sheet of molten metal; and above in the flat, metallic sky, a dirigible—as I had learned the newest models of aircraft are called—hovering several moments there like a fat lumbering bumblebee and then moving on (to pollinate other, more distant, fields with destruction, you can be sure). As I grew wider awake, the semiconscious recollection of my nocturnal comrade faded as quickly as the dawn itself had, even if physically he persisted as a certain untraceable pressure against my right side. We were all of us on this train ride bored out of our wits, waiting for something to happen. I felt blindly under the seat for my stick, thinking I would next buzz for the conductor or a porter, as a rich man might for the meal-car's menu to be brought to him, then remembered the stick handmade by Lyrald was lost somewhere near that old observatory—or rather, grain silo—and that the orderlies had presented me with a cripple's cane, crafted from a bleached and polished elk's antler, as a parting present. (Though the "cane" would not have taken long to produce, I was surprised to be treated so generously, especially after my previous failed flights—most likely they did it only because they knew I had been their favorite Lyrald's special project back in that snake pit.) No, on second or third thought, I would not call for anyone—I knew it would be useless, anyway. Nobody would have answered my queries even if anyone had come. Maybe there was engine trouble, maybe we were waiting for another train to pass. Maybe they (we could all guess who) were just torturing us further. There remained the three other soldiers in this space; two of them—the one with his head swathed entirely in bandages except for his opaque eyeglasses and the other with the steel clamp holding his broken mouth shut—were still playing their game of cards with a mismatched deck. The third man, the one who sat in a little wheeled box like a mechanic's dolly because he had no legs, was droning without a pause in his nook. He had left his crossword puzzle unfinished on the dusty floor, and for some reason I hated the idea of all those unanswered clues; I would have finished it for him but would not dare risk rousing him. The periodical, I had already seen, was two years old, and still so oddly crisp and fresh I had wondered when I first borrowed it if the past years had really been just a kind of trick played on me by the god of memory, that I was on my way _to_ the battlefront instead of returning _from_ it. But every time I looked down at the stiff leg jutting before me or at the black glove masking the gnarled fowl's foot, or felt the wires strangling my chest and the spasmodic pain in my ears and in my dead eye, I knew it could not be so.

However, I did remember well how it all had been, over a year and a half before: At that time, whole and healthy, I had been in the crowded cattle car of a very different sort of train, and it had been speeding the other direction, instead of stranded on the rails in the middle of nowhere like this. That car had been filled with the earnest boyish chatter from dozens of recent draftees like myself, still optimistic that the end, if not exactly within sight, was at least conceivable (contradistinctive to all appearances), for we were inflated with the sense of power our newly pressed uniforms and polished boots gave us. True, I had hated being pulled away from my real life, unfulfilling as it was, when I was called up, and I had formerly held no belief in our ever winning the war, but the induction process had had its effect on me, at least temporarily. For a brainless and breathless triple-fortnight I forgot about my job in the pharmacy and my plans to apply to night-school someday, should the campuses be unbarred. As if I had been poisoned by a secret supplement in the chow they fed us, a latent fraternal feeling seized hold of me when I was around my similarly unfledged inmates. We had all grown to think alike, as well as look alike, with close-cropped heads and smooth-shaven jaws and boot-camp physiques (we would look all the same not much later, too: lousy and unbarbered and rail-thin every one), and we were each of us not wondering for the nonce what it was like to kill and be killed, since every chance we got we distracted ourselves instead with more important matters—such as what the weather would be like at the firing line and whether or not our girlfriends would remain faithful until we returned. "I told my Margabel," the cherub-cheeked enlistee next to me had said as soon as we took our assigned places, "that no matter how hard she scrubs, I'd be able to smell the sputum or spunk of another man on her when I get home, you bet I did." A rawboned recruit leaned across the aisle to concur: "I'm with you, buddy. But if we happen to come across a couple of loose lassies whilst we're sandbagging the streets or sweeping up the villages, ain't nothing need stop us, am I right?" He poked his seatmate in the ribcage and we all cawed like jackdaws. A third and even younger private, just then kicking his overstuffed duffel under his seat, joined in, rather meekly at that: "Do you suppose the misses we left back home ever get up to the same kind of capers?" I did not have such worries about my future wife, for unlike these Margabels and Marisyllas I heard so frequently about, my modest Myrmia was not the racy sort of girl who would smoke or drink or wear lipstick, and she preferred to stay in nights, as I would often repeat to people. She was so trusting of me that she would often dismiss me from her presence with complete license to go off on a coed tandem-bike outing or birdwatching tour without her, or during her lunch hour tell me quite firmly across the kinephone line not to hesitate in joining the rest of the clerks after five down at the nearest taproom. Myrmia had few needs or hobbies. She would go willingly to whatever entertainments I suggested, and yet she acquiesced with such force, it always seemed that somehow in the end it was she who had made the final decision as to what we saw or did. Unlike many jealous mothers, mine liked how the girl cunningly guided my actions and kept the receipts of courtship, as it were, in order, without asking for too much in interest. Together they deceived themselves into thinking they were making me into a marriageable man. My mother's future daughter-in-law was respectable and, let us admit it, rather on the side of boring. She liked cats and her weekend war work, which consisted of making bouquets of paper petunias for the graves of the dead soldiers listed weekly in the papers (long columns, no pictures, tiny type). She frivoled away no money on cosmetics or finery. Few things she did could rightfully trouble me. I always assumed that although Myrmia was a whiz of a stenographer and an indefatigable presence in the office, she was not the sort whose boss would ever test the patella of her knee. Why, indeed, had I myself never asked more of her?

_Myrmia_ , ah, Myrmia! How long had it been since I had last heard from Myrmia, since postal services had been curtailed even far from the combat zone? I added up how many letters she must have written to me by now, each one shorter and more frustrated, I conjectured, her handwriting growing ever more angular and uneven as the nib wore down, and I wondered what she must be imagining of my fate: that I was dead, a prisoner of war, or too sick to answer. The dear Old Dear, in addition, must be thinking these same things. So many letters I had begun composing to mother and sweetheart both–but only in my head, for lack of inclination, and later, for lack of actual pen and paper. Again and again, I could never think of the right way to begin to tell them of all the things that I had undergone: "Dear Myrmia, Don't worry, I am still alive, or at least part of me is..." "Dearest Mams, Would you love half a son? A third? Because there's not so much left of me to love..." Dear Myrmia, Dear Mams, dear me...

The train hadn't always been idling out here in the depths of these wheat-fields; for two days before we had been making good time as we crossed the empty countryside with its bridges and causeways connecting island to island. It was a good smooth commercial track, or had been until recently. I almost grew to like my compartment and my companions, as well, even if they never spoke. In all my years I had never traveled first-class anything before, although these railcars were no longer in first-class condition: the leather banquettes ripped and scarred, the plush armrests and headrests worn and leaking grains of sand along the seams, the etched glass in the many-paneled doors and windows fractured or missing mullions, the telectrical lighting constantly sputtering and going out or simply nonexistent, the unmopped corridors pestiferous and overflowing with garbage. I won't even mention what passed for a water closet. When I first boarded, the conductor had said something to a departing officer with an arm in a sling about all the inferior passenger trains being out of commission or in use elsewhere; this one, posh as it had once been, should have been retired with the last century. Walking up and down these five or six cars linked together, I soon saw each one of us here was a military man, all alone in the crowd, wounded beyond repair—so much so that I began to feel I must be one of the luckier of the demobbed masses. There were men with no eyes, no ears, no mouths; and others who seemed to have even the entire tops or one side or other of their heads removed. Many of the bandages were red and bleeding or yellowed and suppurating, and there seemed to be no nurses or medics mixed in with us to tend to even our most superficial needs. I saw one prematurely aged former combatant who lay twisted in his berth like a discarded marionette, a pool of something black and glutinous dripping beneath him—and I was certain he had expired during our trip, or at any rate would soon be dead. No one sitting or standing would acknowledge my presence; I suppose my one-eyed gap-toothed smile is repellent or the other men simply preferred being ignored as much as possible. Considering not all the horrific physiognomies I caught sight of through carriage-doors, I still felt some relief in knowing that I was on my way home at last—and all these returning men, too, would find their own beds and caretakers and at worst an existence less fraught than that of the barracks and killing fields. There was nothing to be heard (if one could hear) upon this voyage but the ceaseless clanging of the engine and the bone-rattling rhythm of the iron wheels revolving on their twin iron tracks. Barely a soul whimpered or so much as whispered, and we were all the better for it, not to try to converse or commiserate. All these sad ex-soldiers, whether highly decorated or dishonorably discharged, all these faceless khaki-brown somebodies up and down these once-luxuriant saloon cars, seemed lost in their own sorrows and miseries—unbraid your epaulettes, mateys, I thought to myself, nod your heads _no no no_ until you are dizzy, bite at the unblinking buttons of your shirt-cuffs, read a blank page over and over, squeeze your eyes shut and stifle your screams and cries. Were we cured, were we mad, we were both and neither. And eventually not one of us made a single sound.

Still, however, even so... The night before (or was it a hundred nights before?) I had been wakened by what I first thought was merely a new, slower counter-rhythm within the mechanical monotony of the many synchronized wheels, a sound that gradually detached itself from those wheels and began to bear semblance to a haunting if maudlin melody of a sort I had once known and shunned—cupping my ear and inclining myself into the corridor, I found it was indeed music, someone's inebriated viviophone playing a sentimental recording from my mother's unsentimental youth, far and away down at the other end of the train. The tinkling music, as these things do, seemed to trickle down the dark aisles and beckon me toward it. There was no room for resistance. Although it would take an astounding amount of effort with the swaying and shifting of the cars, and with most of the useless "emergency" lights switched off to save energy during the night, I struck out like a woodlands wanderer with my new antler-cane—knocking its firm cork tip against slumbering boots and kitbags—and set off in the direction of the unlikely sound. My fellow travelers seemed to be deeply lost in sleep, even the roly-poly conductor who had nothing to do on this journey but eat from a bottomless bag of pastries and warn us not to flush while standing at a station. I must have walked through every car, each of them full or mostly full of mute and mutilated men. Opening and closing the heavy double-doors to cross each succeeding vestibule taxed my every muscle, and I nearly tripped and fell over numberless real and imagined frights in the dark, but by this point the auger-sharp waltz was drilling a hole right between my aching eyes, and I had no option but to proceed. Outside I could see nothing but nothingness, not a star or even a distant depot light.

At last I approached the end of the train, where the music was loud and the lights brighter. I moved across the grating metal space between cars and pressed my face up to the warm glass of the inner door. Within I could see an extravagantly appointed coach, filled with officers in starched dress uniforms, escorting elegantly anorexic ladies in shimmering gowns, a few of them dancing triple-steps to the song I could hear quite clearly now, another nameless nostalgic number pouring from a viviophone's upraised pair of enameled trumpet-horns. The narrow space was illusively lit by telectrified sconces, their soft effulgent light playing upon the dark folds of the window-dressings and the ironed linen mantling the tables, as well as a few high-backed club chairs and a gentlemen's wet-bar—whereas in other coaches there were only well-worn booths or berths, with not a hint of drapery or napery. Red-jacketed porters stood at attention with tea towels over their arms, or else they were busy decanting bubbling liqueurs into little lily-like glasses held aloft by all these pretty smiling and laughing people. No one would have noticed me with my nose pressed up against the pane, even if they had bothered to look my way. Only occasionally would an imperfection in the tracks beneath our feet cause the scene before me to sway or become imbalanced. I saw pyramids of waxy white grapes wobbling on platters and snowy tiers of frosted cakes in danger of collapsing upon themselves and bucket after sweating bucket crackling with crushed ice, each of these tin pails containing a half-empty bottle of wine or cider poised atop its own miniature snowdrift. I saw stacks of triangular sandwiches and heaps of sliced meat and cheeses and mounds of fruit, the likes of food I hadn't seen since I'd left home, if ever. There too was the figurative representation of our country, a flying pangolin ("Armed and Free"), sculpted from a chunk of bluish ice, rising from a sea of plum-colored punch. Already one of its absurd wings had melted off its back and fallen into the bowl. A trio of intriguingly veiled women, presumably too beautiful for a full public viewing, lounged on padded stools in one far corner of that slowly rocking carriage, while a cluster of stouthearted young officers bent shoulder-to-shoulder over their bleached and pleached coiffures, inhaling the feminine beauties as if they were the prime perennials in a show-garden, which I suppose in a way they were. For a moment I was certain I saw the svelte form of Lord Howaburt, sleek silver-white hair brushed toward his nape like wings, mustache waxed and glittering glasses screwed down over his eyes, an expensive-looking woman floating between his arms—but he or his double whirled away in an instant and was replaced by a podgy general bedecked with ropes of gold braiding and his equally podgy and gold-bedecked wife. They in turn were replaced by two half-grown children with supremely bored expressions, the boy in a second-ranking plebe's sea-blue costume and the girl in beaded lace—but at that point another face, the scowling pockmarked face of one of the porters, met mine on the other side of the glass, and he flung down the green oilcloth shade over the window with a conclusive snap.

Our long journey afforded me much time, especially in the dead of night, to reflect upon the occurrences of the past few months. Once I even thought I heard a hoarse and nearly pubescent voice address me from the seat opposite, which at that moment was unoccupied. But it was merely another disjointed memory interrupting the long continuity of my travels. "So, you've stopped raving at last, I see," that insolent upstart of an orderly had accosted me with a pronounced sniff as he came for my bedpan, back there in the field hospital, when I had sufficiently recovered from my last encounter with firearms to recognize and greet him; and, with a great deal of overacting involved, the stripling had gone on to describe how I had thrashed and moaned day after day on my blood-blotted bed, torn away and apart (though he wouldn't know it) as I had been from my dream of a new life safe from the old, equipped with this new opening in my head that seemed to admit of all sorts of dangerous ideas and fallacious phobias: fears that had no rhyme or reason, yet served to distract me, I guess, from the constant pain. Then, with the orderly's reenactment, it all started to come back to me. The world around me, it appeared, had acquired the distorted and disconnected proportions of the multiple reflections within a fractured mirror. Nothing could be taken at face value. That scorpion on the wall, I remembered wanting to cry out, squash it! It has the face of a far-famed beauty and it wants to coil itself into my ear and lisp a death-song. Those turkey-fowl I hear squabbling in the backyard—they are hexed maidservants who have come to ferry me to the afterlife. A coal-black cloud wrung between the barn's rafters—a dripping banner unfurled by an angry, neglected god! This stinging dust—poison spewed from on high! When my fever had reached its peak, I fell back against the pillow (which always felt as if it were filled with thumbtacks and thorns) and succumbed to the ministrations of my elusive woodsman, who had materialized out of the shadows to moisten my brow and then lay his prodigious body at my side; I could feel the heat the muscles of his chest made heaving against me, feel the breath and beat of him, the pulsing and burning within him, then within me like a fiercely fanned gas-jet... but when I rolled over to bosom him in return, he fell and vanished into a heap of malodorous manure and louse-infested feathers. Lyrald next appeared from nowhere to box me on the ears and tell me I was a stupendous buffoon, I should never have done what I did, should never have thought what I thought. He had hoary ram's horns half-hidden within his frizzy grizzled hair. His yawping laughter deafened me. He trounced me all over with willow-whips and birch-switches like an irate schoolmaster. He was a devil, then a thousand devils! All this and worse, but in time I did actually get better, the medicines strengthened me, the opiates deadened the pain, the lacerations healed, or nearly so, and I found moments of true joy, however fleeting and tenuous, in the whirling shafts of sunlight on my blanket or in the miracle of timeless birdsong on a winter's day.

From the moment I had stepped onto this homeward-bound train, I knew no one from then on need know of my dishonorable leave-taking from the army—and why would anyone ever have reason to doubt me, since, once I left my sickbed, I was documented as no longer insane, only slightly shell-shocked? Mine was only a temporarily debilitating condition of the war-zone, after all, brought on by the bullet that had grazed my left temple and the bullet that had taken out my right eye and the bullet in my guts, all of which had left me, the medics had said, writhing like a squashed bug upon the ground. The ambulance's headlights had nearly overlooked me, blown flat out as I was in the high grass. Someone nudged someone else. Subsequently my rescuers had carried me all the way back to the bivouac on a stretcher, like huntsmen bringing in a fallen deer, and there they had operated on me to remove the ammunition and sew up my eye, which would never again open in this world, and there and later they had given me the drugs that would calm and subdue and suppress me. The new surgeon who attended me, Lord Staniway, had not been at all like Lord Howaburt. He was younger and smarter and even crueler. He did not reassuringly pat my back or tousle my hair, and when it came time to finally be rid of me, he had said only, in his officious way, as if talking to his clipboard and not me, "We're all terribly disappointed in you, soldier, and so we must let you go." I shrank back in my covers as if he were going to brand me like a sheep with the long steel pen he jabbed into the air between us. " _Before_ ," he explicated, biting down hard on his words, "when you marched back into the enemy's dominion and came back here robbed of another limb, your previous medical officer had unwittingly thought you were a fine model of a warrior who would not let a minor physical setback keep him from doing his duty, from valorously revisiting hell to save a comrade or two... This time, however, you came back from the demilitarized frontier, shot to bits and half-blinded and expecting us to put you back together with a little paste and a lot of pity." The doctor scribbled something briskly and violently on his form. "Well, this time we're not going to allow you the privilege of going back to where the shrapnel flies, private–we are sending you home, certified mentally sound—I _suppose_ —but physically disabled." He snapped his clipboard at me and about-faced, stirring a cloud of that nefarious dust up into my remaining eye. It had apparently not rained again for who knew how long, and the dust was thick once more on our blankets and food-tins. (I would be kept up half that night, if not by my own sneezes, then by the sneezes of many other patients.)

"Crazy rotten geezer, ain't he?" the first new occupant of Lyrald's cot in weeks (a walleyed lad, it turned out, who could not be more than sixteen) had asked of me once the dust had sufficiently settled. I turned over as much as I could and saw that the boy had found another couple of the pictorial booklets Lyrald had kept stashed within his flour-sack mattress, and the rumpled centerfolds with all their brown and pink flesh were arrayed like an art-gallery exhibition down the length of the soiled blanket. This boy looked as healthy and lusty as any other child his age, if it were not for the fact that the bottom half of his cot was empty. "Blimey, what in the king's holy name happened to you, anyway?" he asked, as if seeing all of me for the first time, though we must have been situated next to one another for days by that point. "Looks like they crammed you into a birdcage and hacked away at you like a jack-o'-lantern."

I had by then recovered sufficiently to talk about my accident; I might have even seen the suitable irony in Lyrald's last words: "They promised not to shoot!" I cleared my throat and spoke. "I walked into a machine gun," I told the boy. "But that's all right, it was one of ours."

The boy, who was obviously new to this business, did not comprehend or appreciate my sense of humor. He smirked and returned open-mouthed to his Queen of the May, one of Lyrald's favorite fornicatrices, who was straddling a cannon, flaunting a mutinous pennant.

Another heat-hazy afternoon, its minutes melting drip by salty drip down my forehead, for time during this voyage had turned liquid and viscous; everything within my vision, from these castaways just like me to the walls of this mobile prison that encased us all, had blurred and become semitransparent as the seconds slowed to a standstill; everything both outside and inside of me lacked either solidity or permanence. Even the elements of my body absent from the whole felt no more insubstantial than the elements remaining. Pressed on all sides by others, yet feeling more terribly alone than anyone else could amidst these wind-racked wheat-fields, I had never before felt so strongly that what I experienced of life was not what truly mattered, while what did actually exist and have an import would always continue to elude me. Contrariwise, I had recently grown reconciled to another irrefutable speculation: that there is ever preeminent in life the nauseating possibility (if not a probability) that what one sees is _all_ there is to see or know. At that point in my reasoning I stopped myself. Why should I care any longer? This blind and geriatric train, though stalled again and again, had surely been shoved and pointed in the right direction. After these fields there would be ones of flax and then of barley and then of nothing but infertile mud, and soon we would be nearing my native county and Serutan, my not-so-dearly beloved hometown. I knew we had to be getting very close now: a few leagues ago we had passed by the ruins of my old apprentices' college, a rambling one built out in the hills, for it served half the island—the campus had evidently been cratered in a recent air-attack, and two or three partially combusted towers rose up out of the still-smoking dust and debris, like wounded arms raised in surrender. The seven-arched bridge, where we used to watch the rowing squads sweep by in a blaze of sweat and color and swears, now ended halfway across the river, like a question someone had begun to ask but could not go on with. A thousand trite memories, akin and not quite akin to those valedictory words spoken at graduation dinners (though of course I myself had never graduated), came rushing back to me as the engine chugged spasmodically through those once-flowery and sheltered ravines: the thrill of arriving at one's hallowed quarters and thrusting up the blinds onto the sunny quad, breathing in the heady clove-oil scent that rose from an arsenal of newly opened trunks, likewise the hand-me-down textbooks with their aroma of dry autumn leaves; later came the braggadocio of assembly-hall debates concerning the future of pata-algebraics or the demise of catoptical research, the tiring days of nearsighted note-taking and rote memorization, intoxicated nights when one was caught between barbwire and gatepost, the curious appeal of cross-dressing masques with their flurry of false eyelashes and rouged lips, bracing winter comprehensives in the old gymnasia, freezing shower-stalls and harshly exfoliating flannel-cloths, getting lost in the beloved Protagonist's Maze without so much as a sandwich or compass, Old Fools' Weekend when we greeted alums with obscene cheers and catcalls, the hooding of the Errant Knights of Applied Science, that annual debauch when freshmen burned their short-pants, the ceremonial racing of our clutch of pangolin mascots, and any number of jumped-up "traditions" lately instituted to flatter the pride of the student body (who for the most part were your usual technical-school enrollees of just-average-enough intelligence). All that, sublime or silly, was part of an irrecoverable but just as irrevocable past, now. The clock-tower that lab-partners once climbed to kiss the lucky copestone (or each other) now lay a broken titan on the commons below, and watching the gardens and greens unfurling beyond my window as the train inched onward, I considered for the first time in ages those cloistered classrooms I had never really cherished and yet had been missing for so long, with their grassy smell of athletes just in from the fields, mixed with the funk of unhygienic young scholars, and their air thick with chalk-dust and rhetoric; and I thought of the elderly instructors (all of forty, some of them!) in their sacramental robes, who in our respectful opinion seemed to float above the houses like those legendary birds who never touch the earth, for they possessed such arcane knowledge of chemistry or hydraulics or mechanical engineering or whatever; and of those demigods, our exam crammers, who might invite special "pets" back to their domicile for tea and a salubrious wrestling with the workbooks; and I tried to think of my friends and schoolmates—but oddly enough, I couldn't remember a solitary one.

In time, not too brief a time, the engine did start once more, once more the fields began unrolling beyond the smutty windows, and once more I fell back to sleep, as it appeared everyone on the train already had, and so, oblivious to one another as well as to the landscape without, the lot of us passed the remaining inconsequential hours of this long day. When I opened my eye again, I saw that the horizon was dusk-dark and the once-familiar rural and then suburban stations, only half-lit when they were lit at all, were speeding past at an increasing clip until we were flying along between towns. The train, having rested so long, seemed to have accumulated a renewed if erratic energy. Several fairly rapid stops in a row, a few more soldiers getting off each time. Nervous small talk and the stubbing of cigarettes. Collars done up and laces tied. Hair slicked back, smiles set. Down the passageway I saw other passengers reluctantly rise from their seats, sling their canvas carryalls over their shoulders, and queue for the doors. And then they were gone. With every departure my curious heart sank a little lower, though it should have been flying as we approached my own destination. I had noticed few if any people waiting on the platforms to welcome their sons and admirers back from the front, but this of course did not surprise me. The packed compartment I had sat in for so long emptied much faster than I had expected, or maybe for the past hour I hadn't been paying enough attention, lost as I was, as usual, in my obscure reflections. When the train entered the old main terminal in Serutan—as I knew it must very soon—I expected that I too would be met by no one, since I had been unable to inform anyone of my return. Is there nothing lonelier than a cold and vacant depot at night? Putting those morose thoughts aside for the moment, I cheered myself with the prospect of calling home on a public 'phone and then hailing a ride; in a few thrilling minutes I could be beneath the balconies of the old homestead. Better yet, I would surprise Mams and then go with her in the waiting cab to find Myrmia, who would no doubt still be up and about in her primly wallpapered suite, listening through an open window to a neighbor practicing his doleful sixteen-stringed pandoura across the courtyard, whilst crocheting a little formless scrap before the telectric fire. As soon as tomorrow we could go to the authorities and sign all the forms and be united forever. I was already cured of, or at least well-abstracted, from certain incomprehensible yearnings and would learn to love my one true love again.

The train lurched, halted, and began to crawl forward once again as the sights outside the window became more and more familiar to me. A small part of me would have liked to whistle something merry. But I was not to be left alone with my ambivalence. "Hey, mate, could you help me here?" the legless one-armed man—really, not much more than a torso with a head, inside his little wheeled box—enquired from that nearby corner—the first of only a few words he would utter the entire trip, though we had been a few feet apart most of that time and now were the only two occupants of our little world. "Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean to interrupt your advanced case of catalepsy," he said with a note of mild sarcasm, "but I can't get this confounded clue and it's driving me batty. You wouldn't know what an eleven-letter word for 'an elementary reductive mathematical function' is?" He poked at the racing-daily puzzle before him with a racing-form pencil.

I thought. "Forgive me, sir, but I can't really make my mind work that way since, since... but as long as we're both awake now and talking, do you have any news of the war, so I know what to expect when I get home?"

"Only that we're winning," the man, who wore the tinplate Badge of Fearlessness on his chest and a stripe or two more on his sleeve than I did, smiled and said. "Only that we're winning." But his smile was not to be believed.

I was determined to sound the truth. "So, you mean to say we haven't actually _won_ any significant battles lately?"

"Listen, chump," the little boxed man said through clenched dentures, "isn't it enough to thank the gods, whichever they are, that we _are_ going to round off this war?"

By then I had noticed that the train was not decelerating as we approached within blocks of the depot in downtown Serutan, where surely the conductor knew at least one passenger was scheduled to disembark. "Excuse me," I said to my newly talkative confidant, "but there's something wrong—I should be getting out here." With mounting anxiety I watched Serutan's central buildings hurrying away from me, as if in a panic. "Wait a minute!" I cried aloud to no one or nothing in particular as I hoisted myself up with my cane, before stumbling to the half-curtained door of our mobile chamber. Was there no emergency brake lever on this train? The little legless man looked up from his puzzle with only passing interest. "Please!" I begged of that soulless thing, the locomotive machine we were solidly encased within. "You're forgetting me!"

More buildings rushed gleefully by. Eventually the man chose to speak: "You've miscalculated, private, we won't be stopping here. Don't you know we're still a few towns from the asylum? That's our final stop. Genius, ain't it? They'll build a sweet little nest for us there, they will! No more bayonets and beans for us!" And with that he began to laugh so hysterically his ill-fitting dental plate fell from his mouth and he nearly fell out of his box, and I was keeling down the aisle, from compartment to compartment. So now it all made sense! They would be sending all the remaining soldiers aboard this train, the ones sub-officially deemed "insane," temporarily or not, whatever our visas and documents of dismissal said, to just another sort of penal institution. How long to remain there—the rest of our lives? I realized then that I was on the Madman's Express and that I might never see Mams or Myrmia again except through the lowered grille of a visitor's booth. And yet I was saner than I ever was! I had no more visions of saviors among the trees or a life apart from the war and this world. Indeed, indeed, I was willing to live in the bare gray reality that had been granted me, and I would be grateful for that. Yes, I would even—as I had long ago hoped—have proper artificial limbs fitted in Serutan, and I would have this wound in my head and the other wound in my bowels tended to with civilian care and expertise. Maybe even obtain a glass eye! The conductor looked up and with a mouth full of poppyseed cake shouted out something to me as I shoved past him, but he was too fat to run far or fast, and I flew past with my trusty stick and steel leg; I was nearing the end of the train. There, I would reach the serene opulence of that last car, find Lord Howaburt cocking a wine-glass to his snoot, force him to reason with me, get out of this magnificent mess. I thrust aside door after door of the open passages between cars until I came to the last—and I flung myself upon its heavy handles. Though the rust-frozen door would not budge and the shade was still fastened down, and there was neither sound nor light within, I pounded on the glass for admittance. No one answered, no one called, no one came. I was ready to break the glass with my cane when I heard the obese conductor trudging determinedly down the corridor behind me, so there was no more time. With all my might I shouldered open the screeching side-doors between the carriages and threw myself from the racing train, threw myself like a piece of tossed rubbish out into the black night and the cold air.

But I did not end myself there. I was more than lucky—all the gods of creation or cruelty had conspired to ensure that I would live for at least a bit longer. For I had landed lightly as a cotton boll on a big burlap mailbag—a full sack of undelivered or undeliverable mail atop a small mountain of other such sacks, tossed down upon the sidings for who knows how many moons. Several of the bags had burst, and letters and postcards and packages and periodicals spilled all over me. In the insufficient light from the nearby depot I thrashed and grasped at these hopeless messages that would never reach their destinations—I held one pasteboard envelope up to my eye and thought I could see that it was postmarked ten months before. The price of postage, I also saw, had tripled since I had last received a letter of my own. Had our civilization declined so far that even the once-reliable mails no longer got through? I feared to see what other changes might have been wrought in my happy if homely hometown, but I found my beret and found my blindman's antenna among the scattered correspondence, somersaulted down the heap to a side-track, and got up just a bit rattled and only a trace more stupefied than I had been five minutes before. There were no other freights rumbling down the rails; I rapped my cane in the obscurity before me like a totally sightless and virtually disabled pensioner, only just managing to get to the nearest service steps, climb them, and haul myself up onto the cracked and unpopulated platform. Somewhere in the night, above the artist's vantage point, where all the lines of the train-tracks merged into one dead dot, I saw the amber lanterns of a distant crossing-light salute me as if now, at last, I was in on the tired hoax this mischief-making universe had played upon me.

The station was altogether deserted but also unlocked, and within the unheated, under-lit interior, my tap-and-step, step-and-tap resounded against the high, once proudly municipal walls as if I were in nothing so much as the bowels of a drafty mausoleum, like one of those described as a wonder of the ancient world in those flights of fancy we know as history books—and here was I, a trespasser in this subterranean necropolis. There was a myth, I think, about an old truth-seeker on a burning boat who crossed a river into a forbidden place like this—but where was the dog-headed dragon barring my passage, and, indeed, were there no longer any regular passenger routes, no more ticket sales or news vendors or even nightwatchmen? On the other side of the building I wondered if I would find a public 'phone or a private horse cab, if cabs ever came to this crime-ridden district this late at night. If there remained cabs operating anywhere within the urban area at all.

Like a ragged-winged moth I gravitated toward the few remaining lights of the downtown area's shops and offices, trying to imagine the look of joy traveling from the Old Dear's raddled but beatific old face to my faithful Myrmia's office-wan but always clean-scrubbed face when they each saw me again. What would or could either say—was it possible that both might merely stand there, tear-ducts dry as their throats, words all misplaced? Give them a minute or two, then, a minute or two to collect their wits and summon up new mercies to bestow upon me, along with sobs and laments that would end in relieved laughter, for there would be reawakened much happiness, if the careless Fates allowed. How I would rejoice when soon after the ceremony Myrmia helped me to check into the county hospital to have these cursed wires, straps, and oil-starved joints exchanged for those long-awaited, attractive, sterile, and up-to-date prostheses! Predictably, my pulse was racing at this idea, so I placed my one real hand over the wire mesh wrapped around my chest, to calm the uncertain heart within—but the touch of sickeningly cold metal against the flesh of my palm merely repulsed me.

The final toll of doom must have been struck months or even years ago (all shades of forever) in this desolate city of the undead. On the streets and on the sidewalks there was none of that invigorating traffic of yore, only a few battered or abandoned automobiles and tradesmen's buggies with their half-starved donkeys hitched for the night, a zinc-sided ice-wagon reflected upside-down in the pool of melted ice beneath it, no window-shoppers, not a streetwalker in sight, nor even a single stray cat; and I saw that those squares and plazas formerly devoted to business and finance, as I often feared, had almost entirely been shelled or burned; a few hollowed-out buildings remained smoking amid their coals, the smoke increasingly ghost-white against a blackening sky. I suppose I should have been made more depressed or enraged by all that I witnessed, all that I had lost, but I could no longer remember exactly what had been where or why I should be mourning such inevitable destruction when I myself might not be whole but was still among the living, still so very young. Myrmia and I would formulate some sort of a future together, I pledged to the empty streets. We would make of my dreary old digs an oasis of love and cheer. Or maybe we would emigrate with Mams to one of the farthest-outlying colonies, if that were possible at this point, and start afresh. Yes! So what if this plot were as half-baked as those antic "oper-ettes" or costume dramas we had paid to see back in the old days? And so onward yet again... I prodded and pitched my body down the sidewalks for another quarter-league or so, unable to find a hack-driver, though that, too, did not bother me overmuch—for I soon enough saw an old telectric streetcar approaching at a lumbering but steady pace, and knew this must be the metro line that would take me almost directly to my future little family's front stoop.

At first the driver did not want to let me in, as I had no money, or at least not enough forgotten change I could fish fast enough from my many buttoned-down pockets. I had not even considered money, it had been so long since I had last handled it. My life, it seemed, had subsisted on a peculiar kind of charity for many, many months. There were no other people either waiting at the stop or already on the car, but still the driver refused me and threatened to move on. Then I reluctantly showed her my recently issued discharge papers—she took one look and saw the big red stamp like the brand of a sinner and begrudgingly ordered me to hop aboard and be quick about it. The streetcar was littered with candy wrappers and broken bottles and other trash, and the seats were so vandalized as to be almost nonfunctional. What a shame. Our public transport system had once been a source of pride to the community. Now this car's only merry feature was the colorful row of old "Shut Up and Fight" posters plastered above the windows, a host of smooth-browed and beardless Lyralds looking down on me and snarling. I crouched near the driver, who I now saw was hardly more than a harelipped hatchling, yet who seemed to have hatred seared into her soul. She told me not to lean so brother-hugging close and to mind where I spat and not to expect any more special favors from her or anybody else. We rumbled on alone through a blue-gray-green miasma that was smoke and a sulfurous fog mixed, and I saw (not, sadly, to any disbelief) that whole neighborhoods of the town were now dilapidated brick-heaps and stage facades with no buildings behind them; burnt remains of schools and museums and stores once familiar to me now stood out blacker than black against the nocturnal mist, making this whole new otherworld all that much more foreign to me. My stitched-up eye throbbed and my other eye itched and watered from the cinder-filled air. The streetcar skirted tumbledown office-towers and just managed to squeeze though the newly interrupted arches I had once known so well, above which the old limestone aqueduct no longer completes its elevated course to the suburbs. The only human beings I saw in these infernal decentralized regions were sad solitary waifs standing under decapitated lampposts and, once, a gang of shaven-headed hooligans kicking what looked like a purulent head—let us hope it was a football—through the ash and rubble of an alley that detoured into utter blindness. I remembered what Myrmia had last written about barricades or blockades and saw now that she probably hadn't been exaggerating about the homemade bombs, either. There were few lights shining anywhere, even in the tallest apartment complexes—perhaps a partial blackout was in effect, for those were as likely enemy dirigibles I heard puttering in the distance as they were ours. "This _is_ still Serutan, right, we haven't traveled too far?" I asked the driver, though of course I knew better.

"We've had our share of recent _incidents_ ," the surly young woman replied, if you could call it a proper reply, her cap slouched so low over her forehead I could not check her eyes to see how she felt about what she was telling me. "But ain't so bad as some. Now, I'm not telling you again to get back or I kick you back."

The streetcar wheezed to a haphazard halt some six blocks from my mother's tenement house, alongside a park where most of the trees were dead and the flower-beds withered or tramped down into the gravel. "End of the line!" the maiden in charge shouted, quite unnecessarily, as I could see that an elm had hurled itself over the tracks beyond like a suicide. "I said, everybody out now, you mudsuckers!" Although of course there was only me.

"I'm going! Wait up!" I shouted back, not entirely off the running board before the streetcar began to begrudgingly reverse, nearly taking me along with it. I smacked my cane soundly against the retreating vehicle's side as it went past, to no avail, of course. Once again I was alone on the walkway, here in the humble but once-respectable vicinity where I had been born and raised. All was eerily still and had more the atmosphere of a crematorium than the once-bustling neighborhood it had been. Like the rest of town, block after block showed barely any evidence of light or life. Few if any of the houses I passed had their lamps lit; those that did had their shades drawn and only the dumb show of shadows admitted to any life within. Overhead I saw the damaged utility poles propped against each other like drinking partners, their lethal power-lines intertwined and dangling in clusters. Some of their wires trailed nearly to the ground, alive with green fire, and with a few careful hop-skips I dodged them as you would a tangle of asps. Half the way to that old stack of flats we had called our own, that lowly place which I prayed to no particular eminence would still be standing, I saw our long-disused local temple, choked in thick black ivy at a backstreet intersection. Oddly enough, there was fulgid if hesitant torchlight reflecting off the pallid stucco interior of its tiny chapel—coming closer I saw that the porch without was filled with shriveled backyard marigolds, the cheapest flower and the stinkiest, and the smoking offerings left by a score or more of the devout. The war come home had also evidently made many newly pious citizens of its populace. Useless; whatever self-conceived divine being had once visited here had long ago forsaken this site. This custom of votive candles and gifts for the gods was one even my own rightfully proper mother would once have decried as an almost uncivilized custom, and certainly one the contemporary world considered in poor taste. Those orange and red flowers, even though their flames had almost all gone out, still smelled worse than piss.

But sometimes I surprise even myself. Inside the chapel I found myself kneeling, after a fashion, in the warming glow of the candles, which I was only able to do with my pretend leg twisted to one side, like the limb of a disarrayed storefront mannikin. Why was I kneeling—which sanctified impostor was I supposed to be praying to? The god of missing things, the god that will put torn pieces back together the way a child might reassemble a broken doll? Lately I had been thinking of my absent limbs more frequently (actually, had I ever neglected brooding upon them?), childishly picturing my lost arm and leg frolicking in verdant pastures far beyond these walls, watched over by a bloodshot and disembodied eyeball, awaiting the day when the rest of my body would rejoin them. That depended, naturally, on a belief that every part of one's body claims a corresponding fraction of one's soul. Most people, I conceded, would probably say the soul exists independently of the body–but most of them have never had an amputation, and hence do not feel the resultant loss of completion, not just physically and mentally, but soul-wise. It disturbed me to think that I would only be put back together again in death, but there was nothing I could do about it except to hope that I would be able to dig up my own body parts amongst the millions of components of disconnected human flesh patient in perpetuity, waiting for reunion and a kind of belated solace.

Staring with stinging eyes into the little lard-oil candles so gemlike within their crimson and cobalt glasses, I pondered all the hopes and wishes, perhaps crackbrained, perhaps not, that those miniscule filaments of fire represented, of all the prayers there were in the universe that needed—demanded—fulfillment. The gods, if they existed, never were ones to answer any of my prayers, let alone honor any of my casual invocations—or, if they had, always did so in a way much different than I ever could have predicted. The gods! Up their divine behinds! as Lyrald used to say. Well, I would relight one of those malnourished candles that had gone out, anyway. I was no longer allowed to smoke and had no pocket-igniter upon what was left of my person, though I soon saw there was an open tin of flint-tips affixed to the base of a beheaded statue of some generic wing-sandaled divinity. In reaching for a match, I inadvertently tripped over a previously unseen scrapheap, carelessly tossed right in the middle of the nave, and so fell back against the base of the altar, knocking over and extinguishing a smattering of candles that had been artlessly arranged there. My walking-antler, that detestable thing, went spinning across the coldly perspiring pavement-stones.

"Eh, what do you think you're doing, fella?" the bundle of rubbish spoke before collecting itself rag by rag into a very old man who scattered marigold blossoms around him and seized me by the shoulder in a clawlike grip. Sprawled there before him, I understood then that he must be a warden of the chapel, one of those usually homeless and senile men who beg for coins or crumbs. This one was particularly hideous, with eyes that were mere bleeding holes and wild white hair hanging in sebaceous knots over his forehead, in addition to that offensive urinary smell which I had formerly blamed on the flowers. "Trying to steal the offerings, hey?" he cried, crawling across the floor to bite at my ear and tug my living elbow, digging his long nails into the tendons there that were still attached to the rest of me.

With one or two well-placed parries, I managed to fling the vermin off me and drag myself up to my full height, propped as I was against the scabrous stucco wall. The old man staggered back a pace, then folded himself up and withdrew like a frightened spider into a cobwebby corner, sobbing and blabbering. He was probably deranged; these gatekeepers of arcane religious rites always are. I shoved him aside with a gentle kick from the toe of my boot, the way one does with a rodent to ensure it is indeed dead. I didn't want the wretched codger to die, but I did want him to speak to me, and at length he did: "Hear, hear, be you one of those godless delinquents in our very midst?" he besought me with a rattling gasp. "If so, you can splifficate me like a dog if you like and steal my alms, you rascal, but touch not this temple, enemy mine!"

At that sort of grandiosity I had to laugh, no matter how extreme my exhaustion. "All a matter of perspective," I countered, turning to set a few of the candles back in a row on the perimeter of the altar, "for the question should be, are you _my_ enemy? Is everyone here my enemy, now?"

He glowered at me with haunted eyes, oozing eyes like those sores left in a boiled hagfish. "Truth is, you're stinking sozzled!" he hissed from his corner, pawing along the mopboard for my feet. He might have been the drunken one, instead, drunk on votive wine, like the lowly beggar he was.

"Nay, nay," I said, "but I might as well be. Look at you, extorting alms all day and living off the futile hopes of the poor. Miserly bloodsucker. Whose temple is this, anyway, I demand to know!" I had regained my antler—that is, my walking stick—and was searching for what might be vatical warnings writ in the fissures of the painted ceiling that roofed this pitiable little chapel.

The old man remained petulant, standing there in his reeking rags. "Why, a god's, of course."

"Yes—but which god? _Which_ god, you tell me!" No reply. "Why, you don't even know, do you, you old charlatan? You can't really believe in them any more than I can, can you?"

"It matters not. The gods are watching us all and they'll strike you down, you sacrilegious trouble-maker! Now, get thee hence, flee this holy place!"

"With all due speed. Good sir, my mother is waiting for me at home." And I left that hellish place that stunk with the smell of death—burnt animal fat and human depravity and rotting marigolds and worse.

The last two or three lengths of uneven blacktop paving, lit only here and there with the spasmodic fires of coal-oil torches upon their bent iron stalks, were the hardest to walk, provoked as I was with my experience in the temple and feeling the pain of every joint, real, imagined, and artificial. I felt my empty stomach clench itself when I saw, darker amid the general darkness, the cadaverous row of crumbling edifices along the way. There was a fair chance that Mams would have had to move from here along with all her neighbors, into safer habitations farther from the general devastation, but up ahead there was our one-time first-rate public-housing settlement, singed by nearby fires and defaced by smashed windows and the angrily scrawled slogans of enemy sympathizers (a new faction born from the old home turf, but a growing one, so I had been told), the big building somehow still standing whole and strong like an indomitable fortress. Just as I might have dreamt, the windows of the fourth story, where the Dear Old One and I had once lived together in harmony with one another's every quirk and quibble, shone with anticipatory light, and so I knew without any further doubt that she must be home and awake—always waiting, surely, waiting nightly since I had left—even as late as this hour was. Having first tightened my bootlaces and taken in several lungfuls of soot-defiled air, ready as a mountaineer about to assault his final and steepest series of summits, I felt sufficiently braced to reckon with the high and wide front steps. The lobby of the building was, like every corner of town I had seen, filled with bursting bags and bins of garbage, and I soon discovered that both occupant and service lifts no longer worked. That was no particular surprise, though now of course I would have to climb yet more stairs—those five last nearly insurmountable flights between myself and my goal. After my long and arduous journey I feared that even though now I was so near, I might not make it to the end. My legs were not equipped to tackle any but the broadest and lowest stair-steps, and so I almost immediately slumped to the floor of the landing above the ground floor. Something furtive and furry, with soft paws—only a cat, I hoped, but more likely an overgrown rat, hopped over me in that lightless passageway. "Mams!" I cried to myself, and then I think I slept a little.

When I awoke I felt the warm wetness under me—a mistake of mine or someone who had come through here not much earlier—yet sleep had repaired me enough to enable me to pick up my cane, call forth my remaining strength (such as it was), and begin the ascent once again. Up above me a little glancing light penetrated the abyss from on high. The staircase was jammed with rubbish of all sorts, comprised of abandoned cribs and knocked-out picture frames and bicycle bones and discarded piles of toys and baby clothing, but I jostled my way past or over them, knocking this and that down the stairs to great reverberant effect, and dragged myself up toward the next landing, and the next. And the next. Mams was still a half-flight above when I heard the far-off sound of a lock turning, a chain pulling, a door unlatching, and soon an enraged voice calling out. "Damn it all, who's out there making a rail of a racket at this hour?" The voice carried down the hall in such a way that, although obviously not meant to awaken anyone in close proximity, it was more earsplitting than a scream to me, because it was a voice that was definitely not my mother's, but another woman's.

I was crawling up the steps now on turned-out knees and splayed elbows, trying to steady myself and see into the murky heights. The steps were bare and rough, and one sliver in particular drove itself into my blessed knee like a needle. "Who's there, I say?" the voice demanded from around one last corner, and I raised myself over the final step and above the clouds, to make out the form of my adversary. It was a wonder the other neighbors hadn't been aroused; I counted the doors—one, two, three—down this floor of the building, my way barely lit by a solitary lamp burning behind a half-open door at the other end, which would be my mother's entrance. The door opened further and the indistinct silhouette of a being in a drab grayish nightgown appeared there in the deceptive light, holding the door ajar with one hand, a cigarette in the other. On all fours like an infant or beast I crept toward the woman, but she came out a few feet beyond the door to stop my progress. It was Myrmia.

It was Myrmia, but a Myrmia who looked a good ten years older than when I had last seen her. There were stern new lines graved deeply on her brow and a deep discoloration around her once-lovely eyes, and her hair, formerly kept in virginal volutes, was teased up high and haphazardly as a scrubwoman's. Her low-bodiced bedtime attire was ripped and covered with cigarette burns or moth-holes, the hems of her threadbare hose rolled down just below her scabby and contused kneecaps, her skin sallow and cheekbones hollow in the unsteady blue-flamed glow of the gaslight above her. She stood there dropping ashes on the floor, blowing exasperated puffs of smoke from her nostrils. Maybe it was just the phantasmal ethylene flame, but I had some trouble convincing myself it was Myrmia after all, in spite of knowing better at this distance. My Myrmia, plain as she was, had never looked so hardened and unsympathetic. And she had never smoked like the so-called "fast" girls she had once derided. "Oh," she said softly as I turned my face upwards toward hers, " _you_. You! Almost couldn't tell. Well, we might've known..." She continued staring at me, as at a dog who has returned home, having run away after doing something disgraceful years before. "Still, a kinegram or just a card to let me know you were on your way would've been nice, you lazy lout. Water under the bridge to you, is all I am or ever will be, know what I mean? But no bother, now. After a time, I just gave up, too, you see, gave right up on you, Symond..."

I was too sapped of energy to shout any more, and if I were to speak, my voice would have been too reduced to express what I truly felt, anyway. Instead I just lay there, panting, wet down there, and sweating in my torn and mud-mottled army uniform, which only a few days before had been cleaned and neatly pressed (a kindly custom provided to even the lowliest soldiers taking their leave from the department of armed forces). Now I had torn elbows, unraveled hems, and was missing a variety of buttons. I hadn't shaved in several days, either, since just before I had boarded the train, and my last haircut had been asymmetrical, to accommodate the bandage still plastered to my right temple... and then there was my broken and misshapen body, still twenty feet from her in the dark—how, indeed, had she recognized _me_?

" _Symond_ ," Myrmia repeated my name, as if pronouncing a word she had never heard before or didn't like the taste of in her mouth. "Symond, honey, your mother—I thought you—" At least she had thrown down the burnt-out butt of her cigarette. Still, she had not come any closer and she may have been crying—or not. Her eyes, I noticed, narrowed as they were to focalize, were cloudy but dry, too dry for tears to spill out of them.

"My mother? Mams? Our Dear Old One?" I rasped.

"Oh, Symond, Symond, Symond, it's been so long, how can I? I, _we_ needed a place to live, and your mother, she—and what ever has happened to _you_?"

It was then that I heard a whimpering and a muffled mewling, and I remembered. "Myrmia," I whispered, "your cats—they'll get out the door."

"Bloody cats! Ha! Bloody, bloody cats. As if we could afford to feed them, too!" It was then that she banged down abruptly upon the bare tiles, too, and sat there against the water-stained wall, legs thrust out straight before her like a doll's in her short, torn shift. She shoved one of her stockings a bit farther down and found another cigarette and a tiny container of matches beneath her ankle seam. Myrmia shook the box to test its contents, broke the cigarette in two, and tossed the other end to me. "My last match, my last smoke," she said with a smile too weary to be called sarcastic, looking cross-eyed at the cigarette between her lopsided lips as she lit it. In the flare of the match I saw the worn impasto of makeup on her once untainted and untouched face; ugly beads of sweat had erupted through the ghoulish gray powder on her forehead, and her lipstick had been smeared downwards as if she had been rubbing her mouth; even when she grinned, it looked more like a clownish frown. What is strangest is that she looked somehow prettier and more girlishly innocent this way than I had ever remembered her, when she was all business and no play.

I reached for the stub, automatically planted it in my mouth, and, remembering I had no matches of my own and no longer was allowed to smoke, spat it out.

"Why," I said—not a question—watching her sitting there dejectedly puffing. It was obvious that she, too, had given up on this thing we shared called life. "Sorry, but I can't... can't think... of anything else at all to say."

"It's this wonderful war," she said, for once gently, as if consoling one of her kittens, turning toward me with something like hate in her eyes—a look I had never seen on her face before, except when she had smelled something nasty. "Things are different, people are... things have changed, gotten harder. One gets used to it, you know." She blew some smoke violently from her lungs and addressed the remains of her bisected cigarette. "Oh, darling, you're a blundering idiot to come back here," she said softly again, you might say almost gently this time.

"But surely, you or Mams could have–"

"You don't even _know_ , do you? Ha! Really never got even one of my letters, this past year? Or maybe you did and chose not to answer me? Too busy living it up with your boyfriends in the army." She leaned back against the peeling plaster wall and blew another arabesque of white smoke out toward me . "Your mother, your dear mother... well, things change—things happen..."

I heard the mewling again, closer, and she squinted up through the swirling smoke and shouted, pounding on the wall behind her, "Aldex! It wants its bottle! Aldex, damn it!"

Instantly a tall, stoop-shouldered chap appeared in the opening in the doorway; I could not make out much of him, since he blocked most of the light from the entryway within, but he seemed much older than I; he wore a curled-up mustache as men had so often done in the previous era, and he was in his shirtsleeves—one of his suspenders had come half-unbuttoned in the front and his dingy collar was undone, but these small evidences of accidental slovenliness made me have the utmost compassion for him. Though I could not see much of his eyes or mouth at all in the blue gaslit shadows, just that fair blond or white mustache floating above the rest of his features, I was sure his face must hold the most benevolent and caring expression. I wanted him to stay and talk, but Myrmia shooed him like an escaping pet back into the flat, the way I had seen her do something similar many times before. "An old acquaintance who's lost his way, Al, that's all he is, just so you know. Nothing a-matter. Now you go fetch the brat's dummy and the bottle I left out. Symond here will be moving on soon. Right, Sy?" The older man had already retreated without a word, drawing the door behind him further shut, so now there was even less light than before. I looked toward Myrmia, all interrogation in my eyebrows. She still had something of a ghoulish gape fixed on her tired and whitened face. Then she cautiously approached me and, still retaining maximum distance, took hold of my wrist as if she were attempting to take my pulse. But she must have felt how cold the metal was under the glove, and dropped my man-made extremity almost as soon as she had obtained it. "Don't you see I _had_ to," she moaned, stepping away before crushing the rest of her cigarette into the flooring. _This_ , I felt with that one last ounce of irony held within me, was like the denouement of too many mediocre parlor dramas we had once witnessed upon the town's less than illustrious stages. I looked down as though from the ceiling upon our ravaged bodies with something like revulsion. There we were, two utter fools, two magnificent failures. A bit of theater only suitable for a puppet act.

But I watched, suspended in space outside myself, in cool detachment for another moment longer. At that point a substance or essence brittle as it was bitter broke apart within me—whatever hard, frozen emotion I had carried so carefully these two years and hundreds of miles and several flights of stairs; it simply shattered like an ice crystal, piercing my heart, and I realized I was silently crying and beating my head so hard against the wall my wound was reopened and an ichorous fluid trickled into my eye. " _Don't_ ," Myrmia commanded. "Don't, Symond, or, or..." and she began to grovel toward me down the hall—but I backed away, flinging my blood-spattered beret at her, then tearing my spongy bandage from my forehead and flinging that at her, too. "You're getting married," I cried at her. "Married, I said!"

"Yes," she said, "but not to you, to, to—"

"Liar! Cheater! Whore!" I shouted with all my energy, not caring if all the building heard me.

"Symond, give me a chance..." She was still crawling toward me, a pathetic caricature in her tatterdemalion stockings and all the rest of her slatternly garb.

"I've already given all I have to give, damn it." I backed away further down the hall, toward the stairs, and with numb fingers started to unclasp the belt of my tunic. Myrmia continued following me on her grubby hands and knees to the edge of the stairwell, which I had begun to half-slide and half-stumble down, all the way undoing fasteners and loosening stays and unsnapping snaps and popping pins. I let go my trusty cane, and it bounced and echoed down the steps, all the way to the bottom, apparently. As Myrmia watched from the top step, I unlaced my boots and tossed them after the cane. Next came my belt and my befouled twill trousers and socks and the rest, as best I could. Subsequently I tore off my private's one-striped shirt, and it was practically in shreds before I managed to get it off my grotesque arm. "Look at me!" I shouted up toward Myrmia, almost fully exposed in the shredded remnants of singlet and under-drawers; I could no longer quite see her face, but I hoped it was crying at long last, and crying hard as I was. With my uniform gone, I shook and broke the little rusted lock holding the band that held my artificial leg to its stump, and tossed that freakish limb down the pit, as well. My left arm I struck over and over against the wall as I descended in fits and starts, until it detached and went skittering downwards, the black leather glove still affixed to the end. With my right hand and then my teeth (my false teeth, that is, which, after they had served me this one last time, I extracted in a flash from my mouth), I tore madly at that chicken-wire girdle holding in my sewn-up abdomen, but it was too tight and I could not sufficiently unknot it or pull it all the way off. The unhooked metal strands gouged into my skin, hurting me further, and I fell back at last, sprawled on the steps, sweaty, grimy, grumous, teeth and bits of my body scattered up and down the staircase. It was then that Myrmia came to me—though in that moment of my delirium I thought it was perhaps the woodsman I had never really met but once had loved—and he, or rather, she, knelt beside me, my friends, took my head in her arms and speechlessly embraced me, pressing with all her might against my heart, which was beating so strongly it felt as if it might burst from its wire cage.

 Symond's  Farewell

Far down there, if one could still see, are the burning barrens; high up here is nothing but a frozen waste of snow. Miles below these glacier-capped cliffs, through veils of mist and smoke, I had left at last the infinite black sands and black seas it took me a lifetime to cross, only to be struck sightless by the furious dazzle of sun on snow, white on white—for this world is colorless, it could be that no color has ever been scattered by either sunlight or moonlight upon these heights. And like the midsummer sun at the poles, that orb above never moves, never stops blazing; there is no nightfall and also none of that gauzy dayspring preferred by poets. Any traveler would founder upon the ice, disoriented—but fortunately there are no other travelers. Only me.

Old books call this the Forbidden Land of Limpus, although that no longer means anything in the shuttered libraries and emptied, bomb-shelled schoolrooms of my homeland. I'm not sure what such a grandiose name ever meant to me, but here I am, and I could not look back even if there were anything remaining behind. I have journeyed countless miles and my thirst is terrible, but I know the snow is poison; I must never taste or swallow it. For some reason I am not hungry, though I can see that I am very thin, so thin these freezing winds seem to blow right through me—no wonder, dressed as I am only in flimsy muslin nightclothes. I feel there must be icicles growing right inside my skull, even if the ticklish thought of that almost makes me laugh. Here, you see, one is above the clouds and close to the constellations, and you can somehow regard them not in the sky but reflected in the snows like the wandering shadows of stars, their immemorial patterns all torn apart and scattered and lost. I walk on, I have been walking forever, I walk toward nothing.

But—look, up ahead!—there is something, something that seems to radiate light even more powerfully than sun on snow, luring me onward... and after many weeks, days, or hours (time collapses into itself here) it slowly takes shape and form within the shifting, inexorable drifts. It is a building... a castle made of ice... no, a house only, but a tremendous one and very solid. It stands there amidst its acres of snow, alone, immense, _real_. Now there are indeed colors. The surfaces of the walls are turning pale yellow, see, the high-peaked windows an equally pale blue, filled with sky, making this impossible, unknown architecture seem strangely weightless despite the immensurably heavy stone of which I can now see it has been constructed. This altogether exceptional and wondrously awesome dwelling cannot and should not be described, but I will try nonetheless, from top to bottom: The sharply peaked roof, of mossy black slate, is supported beneath by gables and between them sharply arched attic dormers; while narrow railings like a defense of bronze spears, with no practical purpose, surmount and surround these upper fenestrations. Spindly turrets pierced by lancet windows camber to astonishing heights at either end, and between the red-bricked steeples of its chimneys, along a sort of parapet, stretch deeply crenelated battlements with rock-crystal masonry. From the summits where squat copper-green gargoyles and rainspouts with the faces of dragons, what I think are called flying buttresses swoop out from under the eaves to support the opposing wings of the house; emerging from the swift midday clouds I think I can see still other towers, other galleries, other arcades, in addition to pergolas and pillars atop pediments atop entablatures; nearer at hand are lofty sunlit porticoes, the vaultings of which are supported by mesomorphic colossi hewn from shafts of solid rose-quartz. All this splendor, and much more. Oh, such a sight makes me dizzy! I must rest...

A long while, a very long while, elapses before I have managed to forge a path through the wind-whipped snowbanks to the front door: a mighty portal such as I have seen only in the largest and oldest temples, made of a wood as dark and impervious as iron, with iron bands and studs binding it across and strong iron hinges and a gorgon's-head knocker I can barely reach even standing at my tallest. The sound might be like that of a clang of a buoy heard from the bottom of the ocean; I can hear the echo repeated and multiplied down what sounds like many bifurcating and trifurcating concourses and corridors. After several minutes no one answers, but then the door suddenly and silently swings open under my fingertips, and I enter.

The entry-hall is cavernous, bigger in itself than most houses I have ever known, and its walls ring again and again with the sound of my salutation; a triple-sized staircase lies directly ahead, thickly carpeted and lined with stone statuary between fearsomely huge paintings (panoramic portrayals of the rampageous climaxes of foxhunts, their slavering horses and hounds cracked and melanized with age, these are the first and perhaps only things that will frighten me here), and the stairs go only one way—up and up—while opposite, a dimly beckoning passageway goes the other way, inward. No one answers me; no prompt butler or footman comes hieing down the tessellated flooring, even after several minutes. Seen from below, from its axis, the yawning stairway above me looks as tortuously unnavigable as the interior of a gigantic chambered nautilus—so many steps and so steep, I must not attempt to climb them now, but instead go out under the filigreed arches into what seems at first something like a torch-lit tunnel. Mirrors stretch from floor to ceiling along the oak-paneled passage, but in their dim watery glass I am no more than a silvern, spectral trick of the light. The floor before me is cushioned with patterned rugs, richly woven and thickly padded, and I make no more sound than a ghost, indeed. Between the many highly polished fumed-oak doors are oak columns supporting tarnished ferns with pictorial tapestries behind, which, like so many of the paintings, are too infuscated by hearth-smoke and time to interpret in full. A warm draft of air has touched me through my thin apparel, so I follow its invisible course to the one door far down along this hallway from which a very welcome light pours. I go there, shielding my eyes, wary of seeming the intruder. Inside this room that seems to have no beginning or end, that oddly subtle lunar light flickers over the furnishings, then softens as I grow accustomed to it; above is the source of illumination: huge gaslit globes like twin moons, affixed to each side of a mantel so wide and long it might do for a river-bridge, and on that mantel is set a whole garden of silk flowers, interspersed with branches of redolent cedar; a little more luminescence is obtained from the remnants of gargantuan logs aglow upon the spacious grate beneath. This is a dining hall fit for the kings of old, and down at the other end of the fireplace is the highly polished mahogany table, as broad as a barn-door, set with silver and crystal and linen for dinner, though there is no food—yet—on the shining plates, and the wineglasses are dry. Above and along the ivory-inset wainscoting runs the narrow shelf that holds the glazed serving dishes and complicated meat-carving tools, waiting to be utilized. But there before the hearth on a glass-topped tea trolley large and heavy enough to be pulled by four workhorses, I see myself and the whole room mirrored obliquely in a big bronze coffee-maker still hot to the touch, while a shining black teardrop waits to fall from its spigot onto an oversized saucer beneath. In the reflection of that suspended driblet, I can see, upside-down, my face again, as well as close to the entirety of the room. I watch for many moments, but the drop never falls. At last I turn away. On a sideboard close by I see a nutcracker I at first mistake for a real man, it is so tall, a few melon-sized nuts, and one enormous but exquisitely painted cup (willow tree, milkmaid, lamb) that has overturned; there is a moist sepia stain slowly spreading across the linen napkin that hangs half over the edge of the oaken counter. Other cups are dispersed this way or that way nearby, some empty, others half-full. A few giant sweet-biscuits lie scattered about, some of them bearing the bite-marks of elephantine teeth. It is just past tea-time in this house of the gods, but the gods have all fled.

Cautiously I take hold of and lift one porcelain cup like a party punchbowl to my lips and sip its leafy dregs; it tastes of honey from bees fed upon the plumpest roses, and one sip substantially revives me. Next to the cup there is a thick slice of brown bread glistening with butter on a pretty saucer big as a steak-platter; I take one bite and it too is ambrosial; another bite and I am more than sated. I see a milk-white tureen of very long purplish-black plums there on the table, too—they may be real or made out of glass, yet I have no hunger for even one, now that I have so thoroughly nourished myself.

Then a tingling runs down my back as if someone has traced my spine with a goose-feather; I turn around and see that the many-mullioned window opposite is half-open and a quantity of powdery snow has already collected upon the sill. The window itself, like most of the others here, is robed and roped with billowing layers of damask and sarcenet, voluminous as theater curtains, and yet fastidiously shirred along fluted brass rods to permit more than enough light and air. (I only make mention of all these and various other furnishings—who was I to ever care about crockery or drapery before?—because everything about this titanic house astonishes me, the way things magnified many times will, whereas in another place and time, in smaller dimensions, I might have overlooked such articles.) For a moment I freeze in place—was that someone laughing, crying, singing? No, only the relentless arctic blasts against the frosted upper panes, of course. I go to the window, which, like all the others, looks out on only white sky, but the casement-edge is too high and probably the sashes too weighty for me to pull down, even if they were not unreachable. For the first time I accept that I am no more than it would seem a small child's height here, and I know once again what it is like to be a child and see under tables and stands, see the complications of their sinuous legs and struts and their other homely undersides, without being able to see across their surfaces. Not one chair here could I climb up onto without a footstool. Even the napkins, once unfolded, could serve me as half a bed-sheet. Each stair riser, I can now conclude, will take the skills of an alpinist. For the first time I am truly frightened, but not for long. There is too much exploring left to do.

I leave the apparently recently-vacated dining room and go back down the dimly lit passage with its glaucous mirrors and gas-flame torches (torches reproduced many times over, and each time more murkily, as if retreating into subaqueous depths, in the face-to-face glass), back to the entry hall and the plushly carpeted staircase like the mossy slopes of a steep mountain range, and begin my ascent. There are too many floors and wings and too many rooms to describe them all, though I am here for a long, long time—searching for what I cannot tell you or myself. Down the corridors my passage is made easier by the prismatic light from painted glass lanterns that exhale aromatic, prismatic smoke; and in almost every room there is a more starry light from tapers afire in staghorn candelabra or towering ormolu candlesticks. The bedrooms are legion, and they fascinate me maybe the most—those high beds with their posts like ship masts, their canopies like nomadic tents wide as the sky itself, the embroidered spreads so huge and so finely wrought they must have taken years to weave and knot; and the looming wardrobes like temples, filled with my unseen hosts' clothes—the beaded gowns, the frock coats, the morning wrappers and evening jackets, the riding habits and hunting tweeds, the night-shirts, shirtwaists, waistcoats, and also their majestic uniforms topped off with frivolous aigrettes, striped ribands, corded epaulets, and so on. Hat boxes, shoe boxes, jewelry boxes, glove boxes, cuff and collar boxes, button boxes, snuff boxes... In one bedroom I find a tortoiseshell cosmetics case open on a dresser and a pearly white dressing robe casually tossed upon the foot of an unmade bed, and I find that the cloth, when pressed to my cheek is both cool as silk and warm as skin to the touch, as if it had an instant before been shed from the body it had sheathed. In the adjoining bathroom the water in the basin is still running from the zinc taps, and the air is steamier than a tropical hothouse. In another bathroom, the tub is a marble pool equipped with clockwork swans floating upon it, and mechanical carp are swimming within it. In another, half a bride's trousseau lies scattered across the onyx-faceted sinks and cabinets and glossy marble-inlaid floor.

Somewhere there is a ballroom suitable for a hippodrome and somewhere else a private playhouse where the grandest of operas might seem puny, and elsewhere a music room with a long, funereally black piano as monumental as the sarcophagus of a prehistoric potentate. The incredible size and sumptuousness of everything I see and touch overawes me again and again. In the basement, the expansive kitchen is reminiscent of a roundhouse, and its cast iron boiler-stove is as long and radiant with heat as a locomotive engine. The pantries are resplendent with light, lined with row upon row upon row of brilliant silver dishes and utensils, and the limitless larders are overflowing with an empire's worth of foodstuffs. Cellar after cellar is overflowing with casks of wine and oils and cheeses, bushels of figs and olives and almonds; and, beyond those, lockers, bunkers, storehouses, stockrooms, warehouses filled with wonders I could not name or number. (Perhaps a future transcriber could cross-index a few for me.) And it would be simply impossible as well to enumerate the myriad merely ornamental things with which they stock their stately rooms above: stuffed phoenixes under bell-jars, terrariums with living basilisks and winged serpents trapped inside, lustrous blue morpho butterflies impaled on jewel-tipped hat-pins and arranged into vases like bouquets of everlasting flowers, narwhal tusks and whalebone spears with scrimshander inscriptions, enameled fans glazed with foamy blossoms and frothy seascapes, intricately carved clocks that are like miniaturized factories or town halls with their multiple campaniles and spring-activated bell-ringers and gingerbread facades, a hundred other clocks constructed of ormolu or chrysolite or topaz or lapis lazuli, and molting moa feathers and peacock plumes in heavy crematory urns, incestuous families of libidinous terracotta figurines, cheap chalkware circus clowns (incongruous souvenirs), minstrels and damsels made of moon-white bisque, lacquered screens and watercolored lampshades, tassels and ribbons and fringes and fretwork and netting and lacework and bibelots and baubles and other things I have run out of appellations for. (Here as elsewhere my translator is free to add or subtract representative items.) I mention all this just to exemplify how overly full and replete with objects and evidences of quotidian habits this house is, and why I am compelled to explore every chamber, every stairwell and recess and inglenook and dumb-waiter and water-closet.

Surprisingly, though I have searched from sub-basements and wine-cellars to ateliers and garrets and lofts in the highest attics, I have still not come upon any of those much-talked-about troves of diamonds and bullion or any other legendary fortunes fit to burst from massive coffers—though there are so many rooms, I still might. The House of Limpus is a wealthy one, indeed, but the wealth is in its decor and furnishings and in the untroubled domestic disorder of all those appurtenances and accouterments of daily life. Real life indeed is met and cherished here, I can easily tell—ordinary life made extraordinary because it is wholly beloved and rigorously sustained.

One entire wing of the house is given over to the sprawling library, a gasolier-lit and multi-tiered forest of graven columns shooting straight up from the shining bottle-glass floor, with helical staircases diverging between rows of horseshoe archways, and, pushed here and there, ladders on rollers that cling to the towering ironwork shelves and climb into the vaults, past illusional murals depicting puzzling legends, past the embossed architraves and opalescent glass oriels, past the high transom grilles, all the way to the vertiginous tracery of the ceiling, where is depicted a vivid fresco of the violent creation of life on this planet. The armored angels up there look down angrily upon rows of alabaster-shaded lamps bent over the manuscript-strewn tables like the heads of nodding scholars, and beyond the attendant stools and chairs, almost past my vision, are countless carrels and folio bureaus, curio cabinets and magazine racks, cartography drawers like stacked coffins, reading cubicles like little lattice-screened chancels—but I have discovered that the books themselves, lovely as they are in their sharkskin shagreen and silk-clad casings, buckram-bound or pebble-grain leathered, or in a rainbow of lovely glassine wrappers, are, one and all, in a language I cannot comprehend; alas, their alphabet is neither yours nor mine.

Even the warren of servants' rooms, far up a narrowly turbinated stairway, like that within the tallest of lighthouses, and under the highest eaves, so high they might as well have been in another aerial realm, amazes me. I see where the seamstress has dropped her pleated gussets to the floor, where the butler has just lowered the trouser-press from the wall, where his pantry boys or stewards have left their harlequin socks and sleeve garters half in and half out of their drawers, where a bevy of maids has scattered their love letters and knitting and stockings and stays across their row of badly unkempt yet entirely maidenlike beds. In one corner, before a ceramic-walled stove still tepid to the touch, stands a tambour in its frame, upon its drum a needlework belvedere and a lake with a sky promising to be filled in soon—and I wonder: will it be blue or threaded with a sunset's flaming nebula? Above the stove is an oleograph of a harbor enlivened with fishing scows and racing punts and boating parties; it is curious how up here in Limpus they cannot forget those misbegotten islands and their insignificant inhabitants below. I walk through these tidy, whitewashed rooms, thinking of the mysterious lives of their occupants—what must it be like, to serve the gods? Do they cower and quake, or do they happily go their way, for they are gods, too? It is all quite puzzling.

But only the children's nursery, up atop another side of the house, truly saddens me: the unstrung marionettes, the painted dolls dozing with their eyes wide open, the wreckage of toy trains and woodblock towns, the illegible slate-boards, the incomplete tea set, the old pram littered with game pieces and butterscotch drops, the gyroscopes and whirligigs and tops, the tinker's monkey on a string, the jigsaw pictures lacking parts of faces and flowers, the picture books left open-mouthed upon the worn woven floor-mats. Under a low dormer, resting against a slanting wall, there is a child's hoop, and it and an oblong twin, the shadow it meets on the floor, seem to me the very image of despair and emptiness: ever and forever, evermore, an elongated figure-eight. There is a croquet set useless upon its racks, in this land of ice, and there are badminton rackets and cricket bats and golf clubs scattered here and there like weapons lost and abandoned after a fatal skirmish. Here there is also a hoodless bassinet like a daybed, just my size, overflowing with stuffed animals and velveteen pillows, and, last to catch my attention, a good-sized net sachet of aromatic valerian buds tossed atop the jumble. I hold the heart-shaped object in my hands and take just one whiff that sends me instantly into deep and dreamless sleep.

I awaken to what feels like a harmonious vibration in the water-pipes, but it is too persistent to be a mere transitory temblor within the house's distant drains; with some concentration the sensation becomes more clearly auricular, and there is indeed a musical quality to it. So I arise from my bedding, surprised to find I have tossed all the toys and blankets aside in my sleep, and without further delay follow the sound out the door and down the angled hall-passage that connects two of the perpendicular wings of the house. I cut across a dusty long-forgotten gallery lined with glass-fronted cases that contain relics of another history—beneath the dust and dirt, I can make out the coruscation of old and dented helmets and shields, and the dulled graphite polish of swords and sabers and scimitars; there are illegible engraved trophies made of chromium alloy and standing taller than I am, and slews of other objects that look somehow mercenary or sacramental, which would be too difficult for me to describe, after all that I have described—and I climb a spiraling flight of cockle stairs such as only servants would use, and pass into an even higher corridor, one with glass-green sunlight cast through louvers high overhead, so that I feel as if I am treading beneath an enchanted forest's canopy. And still I can hear the sound, just a little louder with every step, just a little higher, and it has shaped itself into half a refrain, though it is not a tune I know or remember. It is a humming, a somewhat vibratory, melodious humming that might be male or female. The sound one might make while sitting up late at night in a chair, reading a book by a lamp brought low and near, rocking, rocking. Lit by that sylvan light from above, I can now see another door, a comparatively smallish one far down at the end of the long interior walkway—it is narrow and high-peaked like so many of the windows in this great house, and it is covered with gold leaf, though even from here I can see that the leaf is veined and peeling and the long iron hinges are thickly corroded, as if no one has entered or tended to this entryway in many years. The softly insistent humming is so near now it might be right at my ear, inside my ear, and it is a whole song now; I must know it, I have to know it. I walk down the hall, closer, closer. There is the door. Open it.

Si Dieu existait, dit-il un jour, et si c'était moi, je ne serais pas assez bête pour ne pas me prouver que je ne suis pas.

—Jean Richepin, "Deshoulières," _Les mortes bizarres_
