Jodhpur, India 1751

(1)

In the city of Jodhpur there was once a great rivalry between two musicians. Ustad Azhar Sharan and Ustad Baasim-e Sharif were gurubhaisaheb — that is, disciples of the same guru. They grew up together, ate together, swam together in the Luni and learned together at their master’s feet. With great affection he called them both his sons. But only Azhar was the master’s son by blood.

Since Ustad Allauddin Sharan (historically the most esteemed musician in Rajasthan) only slept three hours a night he would sometimes walk, against his wife’s better judgment, through the winding night-time streets. One night, when an early cool wind was cutting across the desert and into the streets, stirring the debris in squares and alleys, Allauddin was knocked violently to the ground. The moon was luminous that night and just as the assailant was about to drag him into the shadows to slit his throat and strip his corpse of any value, he saw his face. “I know you,” he growled at Allauddin, pressing a blade against his neck, “come with me.” Forcing him to his feet, he ripped a length from his kutri and blindfolded him. Then with his knife to Allauddin’s back he forced the famous musician through the city. After a circuitous hour they both stood in the center of a room with heavy plastered walls and a packed dirt floor. Moist moonlight flooded through a single high window illuminating a boy of eight or nine standing before them. “This is my son,” the assailant said. Then after a pause he pushed the knife deeper into Allauddin’s back. “I am merciless, like a crocodile or a disease,” he said. “That I did not kill you tonight is the same as if I had saved your life, and therefore you are in my debt. To repay me I want you to teach my son music. If you do not, I will not be there to save your life a second time.”

Between a Dalit and a Brahmin it was a heavy price to ask. Outraged, Allauddin found the prospect absurd and he burned to say a few things, such as beasts cannot appreciate real music and only the pure of spirit could ever learn music — but he glanced at the wide blade glinting in the moonlight and the huge hand holding it, and, wisely, he kept his mouth shut. The boy looked up at him, blinking. “I will teach your son,” he sighed. That was how Baasim became his student.

At first Azhar was thrilled to have not only a new (only) friend, but someone to help divide his father’s meticulous and implacable attention. For the first several months together Allauddin made Azhar tutor Baasim in the rudiments, because he was too disgusted at the idea of instructing such a cur. Then in the mean time he called upon every favor owed him in order to seek out his insidious assailant, force him before the courts, string him up, and rid himself of his intolerable charge. But it was not to be. Though the man eluded all detection, Allauddin nevertheless feared his malignant omnipresence. Too terrified to kick Baasim into the street, he retreated into an idle depression, dwelt in his dim study, toyed with a violin a British admirer had given him, and plagued his pride with morbid thoughts about a legacy unjustly soiled.

Yet Azhar had never been happier. Free for the first time of his father’s tutelage, he and Baasim got up long after the sun, ate heavily, napped on the river banks and played with slum children (Baasim’s kind) in the city squares. Only when his mother could catch him would he give Baasim his lessons. Then for maybe an hour they would sing together a scale and its attendant exercises.

Baasim proved a capable student. He had a strong, honeyed voice and a sharp mind. Almost instantly he learned how to modulate notes and build microtones into the swaras. And though Azhar would warn him against bad habits, Baasim liked to take the old established inviolable melodies (Yaman, for example, or Behag) and build out of them strange and unconventional tunes. Clearly he would be a great musician. And this of course was where the trouble began.

Initially Azhar did not notice his friend’s talent, for he was gifted himself — and most importantly it shortened the time devoted to practice. Then one evening, remembering that if he did not at least continue training his son his legacy would indeed be in ruins, Allauddin searched from him throughout the house. He found Azhar in the courtyard. He sitting in the blue shade of the mango tree listening to Baasim practice a red white silver bandish in Bhairavi. Quickly he ducked behind a trestle overgrown with yellow jasmines and strained to listen. Though curious, he listened through the murk of his anger and irritation, through the mists of months of accumulated self-sorrow. But the rough beauty of that unshaped voice was undeniable. How is this possible? he wondered, astonished and almost offended. But when Baasim unexpectedly colored the bandish red white gold with a borrowed note, Allauddin dissolved. “Oh Lord,” he babbled to himself in bliss, “thy love expresses itself through the multiplicity of all things; Thou art all pervasive!” Thus praying he burst from behind the jasmines with a shout, lifted the startled child from the ground and cried, “touch my feet, Baasim; I am now your master.”

However, it was not childish envy or resentment that hardened Azhar and Baasim against each other (which is explosive and brief, and usually ignited by simple things like possessions and insults). It was their infinitely more insidious adult counterparts: honor and a good name. Isolated during their long years of training, they knew nothing of the world except discipline, music and friendship. Even at fifteen, when Allauddin began to teach them separately — claiming that he had to shape them according to their talents and that therefore their styles must diverge — not the slightest haze of suspicion crept between them. But when they became masters themselves and began giving public performances they suddenly became aware of public opinion. Comparisons were made and compromising rumors spread. Not even the intelligent and exalted nature of their art — actually of any art, for that matter — could forestall the bad behavior of its admirers. And amongst the nobles as in the streets there was gossip about who was the greater musician, about who sang the sweeter dhuns and the more solemn gats, and about who, ultimately, would be considered the leading proponent of the master’s gharana. Baasim’s mysterious origins helped make the gossip painfully personal.

Now in their twenties, past the initial hermetic period of rigorous study which consumed their childhood, they were free to pursue their own careers in the world — and also thoroughly prone to the world’s impurities. The rumors reached their ears. Somehow people knew that after a certain point they had been trained separately, which became a source of speculation — and the public doubts about their musicianship became intensely private. Azhar and Baasim wondered whether the other knew something: something more than mere stylistic differences, but an essential piece of knowledge. And each wondered if perhaps their master loved them less. When they met in the market place or at their father’s home formality began to replace their former warmth. Neither could quite understand his own sentiments and therefore both failed to say anything to the other. In this way, without one bit of unpleasantness having ever been exchanged, their friendship ended. A painful awkwardness replaced their formality, and eventually a blunt hostility reigned. They did not know that one word, any word, or even a grunt, so long as it addressed, however inarticulate, their true affection, would have immediately resolved the discord. But that word was never spoken, and love, as often happens, festered into irreversible hate.

Then Ustad Allauddin Sharan died, quietly in his bed; and was cremated, quietly on the Luni’s banks. He had never been aware of the hardened enmity between his beloved sons, but with him ended any possibility of a reconciliation. And without him also ended every reason for restraint. Like a damn had given way, Azhar and Baasim rushed to help feed the conflagrations of mystery, tension and scandal that surrounded their names. They criticized each other among colleagues and friends. And each claimed to be the sole possessor of the master’s genuine talim — the only real heir of his gharana. Swelling to fill the public images of themselves they began to declare openly how in private the great Ustad had given to them alone certain secrets without which one could not breath proper life into the notes.

Over the years the rivalry grew into legend. Without being able to deny the two stalwart’s talents, other musicians despised their bringing such petty divisiveness into their hallowed art. Azhar and Baasim lost many friends. But the spat captivated the people. No public performance given by either musician went without crowds spilling into the streets. And no matter how large the audience, the moment the first note was intoned the thousands would hush into an unreal silence. If both musicians were to perform on the same day the crowds would calmly move, in a mass, as though on pilgrimage, from one to the other. Then that evening in the bazaars and public houses the conversations would analyze the dual performances, searching for the rumored gaps in musicianship, deciding which gamaks and meends made the notes induce the blissful shivers, and which fell flat. People would take sides; disagreements would flare; fist fights would erupt.

Neither Azhar nor Baasim intended any subterfuge or showmanship in all of this. They were simple men, totally devoted to their art and therefore proud — and they honestly despised one another.

(2)

Once, in preparation for his important trade conference for the princes of Rajasthan, the British ambassador and heads of the Honourable East India Company, it was suggested to the Maharaja of Jodhpur that he could lend prestige to his gathering were he to persuade Azhar and Baasim to perform together. It seemed a good idea. That evening the envoys were separately dispatched with written requests and lavish gifts — and each had the door slammed peremptorily in his face. Not one to countenance such effrontery, the Maharaja made the requests again. The following morning when Azhar and Baasim left their respective homes they found the previously rejected missives stabbed unceremoniously into their front doors with fierce-looking daggers. So they made an arrangement to meet. In the bazaar — the tallow candles in the hanging censers not yet snubbed out, Mehrangarh Fort tinged fire-bright by the dawn looming distantly behind them — Azhar and Baasim sat to tea for the first time in almost two decades. They found the experience bitter. Neither could comprehend how he had ever felt love for the man opposite him. All the same, they decided it would be in their best interests to ignore their differences, for an evening.

The night of the conference, in the gardens and palace halls of Mehrangarh Fort, the mood was electric. For that reason as a business and policy maneuver the concert was a mistake. Men who typically savored the subdued war or negotiations found the proceedings that evening mortally tedious, in the face of what was awaiting them. In the end, the princes of Rajasthan made more concessions to the British than was prudent (reducing the price of chilies by several cents a pound, for example, and surrendering half the northern copper mines, breaking a contract with the French) in order to hasten the closing of business. — More than one historian has conjectured that that conference was a major factor leading to the Seven Years War.

A banquet was served in the Moti Mahal (pearl palace) where afterwards the Indians sipped at coffee and tea while the British took clandestine sips of cognac from flasks hidden in their coat pockets. Everyone smoked. The air grew hazy with incense and tobacco. Conversation, satisfied earlier with mercantile and political affairs, dwelt on the spiritual and the aesthetic. Azhar and Baasim were seated at opposite ends of a subordinate table. They had eaten and drank very little, and said nothing. They merely glared at each other across clatter of dishes. Finally, the Maharaja addressed them:

“Gentlemen,” the Maharaja began, “had we been speaking of prices, exchange rates, policies or war, I could understand your unwillingness to give an opinion. But while the men here undertake the earthbound business of maintaining society, we leave it to you to study the more transcendent matters of Beauty and God; and we happily give you our praise when you express to us what you have learned. So why are you quiet now, when what we discuss are the subjects of which you are the acknowledged masters?”

Those nearby hushed to listen. Those more distant hushed because the others had hushed, until the only thing audible in the wide hall was the rustle of the bored British squirming in their seats.

Finally Baasim spoke.

“I apologize for our reticence, sir. Azhar and I, in order to give a supreme performance tonight, have been conserving our voices. All we have had to eat or drink tonight was some weak green tea. Please pardon us for not participating in the conversation. But if you would like to address a certain question to either of us, we would be honored to give our opinion.”

The Maharaja was pleased with Baasim’s courtesy and took a moment to consider.

“Alright, here is something I have wanted to know for some time,” he said, having suddenly remembered. “I have heard other great artists — dancers, poets, even craftsmen — say that at their moments of greatest creativity they felt not themselves to be in control, but some higher power, God if you like, transmitting something beyond themselves. Has this been your experience?”

Azhar hastened to answer.

“Absolutely, sir,” he said, “speaking for myself, at least. At times it has been no more than me taking dictation — all praise be to God. I have sung melodies which I could never have conceived.”

Then Azhar grew thoughtful, dwelling cloyingly on each word like a man imparting some bit of controversial information. He continued. “The experience is painful, like being unable to draw a satisfying breath and fill some secret recess in your chest with air. Suddenly you feel yourself tiny against this broad beautiful expanse and you want nothing more than to dissolve into it, and yet you cannot, bound and limited by an inscrutable knot. Then a conviction grows within, you feel as if the solution is merely a matter of the correct combination of notes. As if salvation and moksha hinged upon hidden musical phrase. Ideas are fed to you from somewhere — you are too desperate to investigate their origin — and in a great anxiety you try them out, one by one, probing from all directions, searching for the essence of each raga, striving to sing that elusive phrase which will unbind you. Yet that combination can never be found. Even in the happiest ragas a sadness presides, a dissatisfaction distends. This as I understand it is the essence of invention.”

Azhar relaxed into his seat, folding his hands serenely, enjoying the effect his words had obviously had on his murmuring, ruminating audience.

“How about you, Baasim?” the Maharaja finally asked.

“I guess it is something like that,” he said, shrugging.

“Very good,” said the Maharaja. Joining his palms and smiling, he continued, “this might be a bitter question, but I ask it out of curiosity and respect. You both claim to have received a special talim from Ustad Allauddin — some particular secret that distinguishes the Jodhpur gharana. Is that correct?”

Again, Azhar was quick to respond.

“That is correct, sir. No doubt you know that it has always been the custom of every gharana to reserve the real gems and musical treasures of the lineage for blood relatives.”

“Do you agree, Baasim? Does the key to Sri Allauddin’s music lie in this secret talim?” asked the Maharaja.

“Sure,” said Baasim and took another sip of watery tea. “I you have to know which way to turn the notes.”

“And that is knowledge,” added Azhar, “which either takes several lifetimes to acquire, or the guidance of a real guru.”

“Thank you, gentlemen, for your generosity in answering my questions,” said the Maharaja. “I hope you will allow this one final question, which required the preceding answers in order to be asked.”

Baasim nodded and Azhar, with elaborate courtesy, said, “Please your Excellency, go ahead.”

“If your greatest performances — as you both admit — happen when you lose all sense of yourselves and fall, as it were, under the jurisdiction and control of God, or inspiration, or whatever, then how can you claim that the key to your musical greatness is some secret, particular piece of knowledge given to you, not by the God who inspires you, but by another human being?”

At first a murmur spread through the Moti Mahal, for the guests were shocked at the boldness and incisiveness of the question — but then laughter took its place, for they were delighted at how the Maharaja had skewered the musicians’ pretensions (which until that moment they themselves had somehow not noticed). The British looked up from their flasks and boredom to see what was happening, the returned to their private conversations. Azhar flushed, his dark skin darkening and his lips paling as he bit them. Baasim took another sip if tea, then casually wiped his mouth with the table cloth.

Azhar was not quick to respond.

“Ustad Allauddin was an enlightened guru,” Baasim finally said. “He taught his students to the level of their talents, even his son. But one cannot really go beyond that.” He looked at Azhar who was looking at his hands, and smiled. “Even God cannot make an inferior instrument sing beyond its abilities.”

A bit of muffled, derisive laughter was heard.

That pretty much marked the end of dinner. As servants cleared the tables and guests went to walk in the twilight gardens, Baasim took Azhar’s rigid arm. Together they went to wait in the Phool Mahal (palace of flowers) where in an hour they were to perform.

That evening and into the morning, those fortunate enough to attend — some of whom were great warriors — witnessed a battle such as they had never seen. Cigarettes burned out unsmoked in hands so still that the ash did not crumble; tea and coffee went cold in the cups; some, at times, even forgot to breath. No one even realized that they had sat for hours and hours in stiff chairs or on the hard floor, for in listening their minds had grown hypnotized and their bodies numb with bliss.

Common opinion suggests that only humility, goodness and compassion can convey one to artistic heights — that to be a great musician one must possess a pure soul (this was Sri Allauddin’s conviction, anyhow). But that is a poor reduction of human life. Love, sadness, devotion and peace do not complete the range of human emotions; there are also, fear, fury, envy and disgust. Although no one likes to believe that evil men can create beauty, everyone forgets how awe (that is, the sublime, the most intense aesthetic experience one may have) is both terrible and vertiginous. One must forget it as quickly as one forgets the particulars of a tremendous pain once ceased, in order to continue living.

They sang the raga Darbari Kanada that evening. Before that performance no one would have suspected how such a dignified melody could express such undertones of menace and dread. Each musician sang as if his swaras were swords and men could be slain with sound. Tears sprang to the listeners’ eyes, as much out of joy as out of terror. Everyone had the impression that before it was over one of them would surely shatter and be carried away in shame.

And yet, when the breeze which each morning comes across the desert began pushing dry cool air through the colonnades, when birdsongs and light broke through the open windows, when Azhar and Baasim stood and bowed and in a simulacrum of sincerity touched each other’s feet, when the audience began breathing again and whispering to their neighbors — nothing had been decided. No one could say who the greater artist was.

Azhar and Baasim accepted their praise, permitted garlands of orchids to be hung around their necks, allowed the Maharaja and other princes to kiss their cheeks (the British had by then taken their leave), received a few gifts and declined an offer to have the royal carriages carry them home. Then they departed. Still dazed, their bodies still burning with music, they descended arm in arm from Mehrangarh Fort, down its steep slope and through its seven gates into the bright blue city below. There they strolled aimlessly, wordlessly, through Jodhpur’s awakening streets.

Baasim eventually broke the silence.

“We should probably put an end to this,” he said. “I am growing too old and hatred is beginning to taste more bitter than sweet.”

“I agree,” said Azhar. “We should put an end to the dispute; declare once and for all who is the true successor. But that is all. I have no interest in being your friend.”

“Of course,” Baasim sighed. “It is too late for that anyhow.”

“Alright, then how do you suggest we end this thing? Twenty years of public opinion as well as last night have failed to conclude anything. Obviously we cannot rely on the judgment of others.”

“We resolve this simply and rationally. Tell me what Sri Allauddin taught you which you insist I do not know. If it is something he has not taught me, I will admit your legitimacy and leave Jodhpur.”

“Yes, very good,” snorted Azhar. “Then you will know everything I know. That would put an end to the dispute, but not to my dissatisfaction. Why don’t you offer your bit of knowledge first?”

“Not if you’re going to remain suspicious. It speaks badly of your intentions.”

They continued in silence through the narrow ways, between the white and blue walls. Vendors were opening their shops or unrolling their wares on thick blankets on the streets. The sharp morning freshness (part dew, damp stone and sand, part absence) was being replaced with cooking smells and incense. The uncollected piles of cow dung were beginning to warm. Walking past a certain vendor Baasim detached his arm from Azhar and walked over to him. He took a few coins out of a knot tied in the hem of his kutri and handed them to the vendor in exchange for a small gold chain with a jeweled pendant.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” Baasim said. “Look how it sparkles in the light.”

“Yes, it’s very nice.”

“But we both know it won’t stay this way forever, since it is only a skillful impostor. The gold will ware off and turn green; the diamond will scratch, because it is glass.”

“What a pity,” said Azhar. “I have never turned green or scratched, and you would make a terrible poet.”

“Probably,” Baasim shrugged. “No, you are a universally esteemed master and will no doubt die in good repute. But your students will be disasters, and your music will disappear.”

Baasim tossed the chain into a puddle. They turned a corner into a wide square filling with people and light. Off to the left was the way home, but just before he could bid him goodbye Azhar grabbed Baasim excitedly by the shoulders, turning him face to face.

“Then we shall decide thus,” he said. “As my father took you — an anonymous cur — from the streets and trained you, so shall I take any child from the street. When I am done with him he will be far greater than your greatest student. Even you will admit it. This is the only way.”

Permitting the unintended implication of the statement to pass, Baasim nodded and grinned.

“Then I will choose the child?” he asked.

“Of course,” said Azhar.

Baasim looked around. Men in silk kutris and thick woolen vests strolled past, arms folded squarishly behind their backs; groups of women in saris of rare colors (turquoise, tyrian, sapphire, saffron) crossed the bright square and paused like reflections before stands of fruits; half naked slum children as brown as kola nuts harassed the pigeons sipping from pools in the mellowed flagstones. These he surveyed carefully, but without satisfaction. Spite made him overlook the energetic boys running in and out of alleys; pride made him overlook the few miserable ones with soars and scabies swathed in greenish rags. He was about to suggest they move on, search the city some more, when a scrawny child near the steps of a small temple caught his eye.

It was a beggar child. Baasim studied him. His black hair was piled in enormous knots upon his head. Dozens of dingy beads hung around his neck (the only article of clothing on his naked torso) while a loose, torn, soiled robe of cotton was draped about his waist. He kept on running in front of men, hugging at their knees and moaning pathetically for money. When they inevitably walked on he would clutch at the hem of their garments until kicked away. One man, youthful and haughty, delivered the child such a smart kick to the face that he toppled backwards. The furious child jumped up cursing and, when the man walked away paying him no mind, he spat venomously at him. Then in a gesture of obscure derision he lifted his tattered robe up over his head. It was then that Baasim realized the child was a girl.

“Take that one,” he said.

“What!,” cried Azhar, his face twisted between two expressions (he had just been laughing at the child). “Do you want to make a mockery of my father’s music?”

“Why? Do you mean because the child is female? So is the goddess Saraswati — go ahead and accuse her of ruining the Saregam. Anyhow, you made the wager; now make it work.” So saying, Baasim folded his hands respectfully to breast-bone and brow, bowed and calmly went away.

Azhar was not happy. But what could he do? His own arrogance had ensnared him. He went to a vendor at the edge of the square; then, whistling and catching the girlchild’s attention, he flourished like a bouquet the bit of rose candy he had just purchased. She came running and snatched it from his hand. Azhar looked around. No one seemed at all interested in the dark girl, so he took her hand and led her home. She did not protest, lost in her red translucent sweetness.

(3)

Like his father, Azhar suffered an instantaneous onset of debilitating depression. (This was the synchronicity of vertical fate, dear reader, and not the lassitude of my horizontal narrative.) He came home that morning still clasping the girl’s grubby hand in his and called to his wife and son. Khawlah (wife) and Zohoor (son) appeared dutifully before him. They gaped in horror (wife) and curiosity (son) at the massive knots of ratty hair, piles of cracked bone and wooden beads, dirt, rags, red mouth and staring wide white eyes which composed the child.

“Do not ask how it has happened,” sighed Azhar, “but this child is now in our charge and I must train her. Please take her and make her a little less repulsive.” Then he retired to his study to rest.

Khawlah bent down to her. “What is your name?” she asked. The girl stopped sucking on her fingers for a moment. “Annapurna,” she chirped. Khawlah winced. “She is not Muslim,” she said.

Zohoor was fourteen. Although Khawlah asked several times she could not get Annapurna’s age, but Zohoor hoped she was not too many years younger than him. His mother took her into the courtyard, shedding rags and strings of beads as they went which Zohoor, trailing behind, collected. As Khawlah wrung out a cloth and wiped down the child Zohoor hid and watched, inly fluttering, inly perceiving through her skinny arms and legs, her visible ribs and pelvis, her dark dripping skin, some invisible, ineffable magic. He went and stashed Annapurna’s discarded things in a box in his room. He told his mother he had thrown them away.

A week passed before Azhar acknowledged Annapurna’s presence. Unsure of how to deal with the child — who spent all her time eating and playing with pebbles in the courtyard — Khawlah finally demanded her husband do something with her.

“Put her to work,” he said. “If she is serious about taking our music she must earn our respect and trust.”

So Khawlah handed her a broom.

“Do you like to eat? Do you like to sleep in a dry bed beneath a roof?” she asked when Annapurna gave the instrument a funny look.

At first Annapurna performed her chores with alacrity, for she did in fact appreciate the comfort and luck of her new situation. She swept the courtyard and walks, scrubbed laundry and hung it to dry, carried food from the markets, water from the well, helped to cook, and so on. She even did certain small things without being asked, like straightening furniture or smoothing out beds. But this did not last, for she had no talent for scrubbing or sweeping and generally left things filthier than when she began. And as if she had contrived it, every meal she helped to cook would somehow fail. Khawlah had patience, and Zohoor would often conceal her mistakes; but whenever Azhar observed her haphazard work he would beat her. And if she ruined a meal she would go the next day without food.

Despite that she grew healthier. After a month Khawlah had managed to comb the knots out of her thick bluish hair; her arms and legs grew shapely; a salutary rose-pink hue blushed beneath the nut-brown of her skin; and particularly conspicuous — to Zohoor, at least, when she brought him his meals; the food and company affording a brief respite between his arduous hours of musical study — were the budding hints of roundness beneath her loose linen frocks. Both Khawlah and Zohoor were becoming attached.

Azhar, however, was becoming more and more surly. After almost six months he had yet to teach Annapurna, had yet to even speak to her outside of curses and comminations. He had declined all major engagements to perform and had spent those months applying an exacting and meticulous tutelage to his son, waking him before sunrise with a cup of coffee which would then sit untouched as Zohoor sang scale after scale, or dwelt for hours perfecting a single passage. Azhar’s aim was obvious: he would not teach the girl, but instead would make his son so great that Baasim could not deny it. But Zohoor had no love for music. What he had learned he had imbibed through duress. An intelligent child, he grasped easily enough the concepts of raga and tala and could perceive and remember the shapes of compositions. The subtleties, however, escaped him. Rather, he lacked the basic interest necessary to discover the little emphases and tiny tonalities without which each raga is a dead collection of notes, instead of a distinct and vibrating thing. Previously Azhar had ignored this, expecting that as the child grew so would his appreciation — so long as his knowledge was sound. But that period of leniency had passed. Afflicted now with an insane urgency to prove himself, to make his son great, these absences in his son’s devotion frustrated him beyond measure. Yet since it was neither knowledge nor diligence that Zohoor lacked, but passion, Azhar had no idea how to remedy the situation. Terrified of driving his son even further from music, he never hit him. He would yell at him, accuse him, plead with him — but he would not touch him. Instead, he would stalk from his study into the courtyard or kitchen where Annapurna would be sweeping — her piles of dust being scattered again by a breeze before she remembered to collect them — and he would thrash her without mercy, relenting only when she was a tearful heap at his feet. Then Azhar would vanish for hours into the city while Zohoor would bring her flowers from the garden or bits of dried fruit to comfort her, and sit next to her on the floor, and burn to put his arm around her shoulders.

Annapurna’s whole life had been misery, but not an accumulation of miseries — for miseries are a phenomenon of the present. Strangely, once enough time has lapsed between us and a certain epoch its unhappinesses fade from memory while the joys (rare as they may be, and couched like weeds in the crevices of mountains) remain. For this reason we are often puzzled not only at what we remember, but that from a distance we look more fondly on the past. But it could not be otherwise — else how could we bear life? Thus this psychological curiosity, coupled with a sudden stimulus of memory, finally precipitated her running away. After a particular beating, when Zohoor had not immediately come to comfort her, Annapurna sought him out. Quietly peeking through his parted doorway she watched as Zohoor, on his knees before his bed, his back to her, spread out with his left hand her old rags and beads while his vigorous right hand was hidden awkwardly from her view. My things, she thought. With this abrupt, palpable reminder of her life of vagrancy and begging an odd bubble of warmth burst within her. Just as it had never occurred to her while homeless that there was any other way, so had she accepted Azhar’s abuse. But images were coming back to her of Jodhpur’s labyrinthine streets, the crowds of children with whom she ran, the folksongs at twilight, the pigeons in morning squares, the filched foods, the cold waters and warm sands of the Luni, the sunlit naps and open air — all with a charm transfigured by memory. She watched Zohoor replace everything carefully in a wooden box which he set on a shelf. That night she took back her things and left.

“Let her go,” Azhar said coldly when Zohoor brought him the news of her departure. “There are thousands like her. We will get another one.”

He said the same thing to Baasim a week later when they met by chance in the street.

“What happened?” he asked.

“She ran away. It has only been six months, friend. Pick a new child and we will start again. I will walk with you this moment while you find one.”

“No,” Baasim said gravely. “Get the same one, I insist. Get the same one or this thing will never be over.” As an enraged Azhar walked off he called after him, “The same one, mind you. I remember what she looks like. I saw that she was a darling beneath her rags!”

It was hard for Zohoor to mask his joy as his father ordered him to go find Annapurna. He asked first for money; then tying the coins into his sleeve he left. At the first opportunity he bought candy, silver bangles, a string of new beads, a patterned shawl and a ring with a little violet stone. He wandered the city all day, from the Siwanchi Gate to the Nagauri then to the Sojati and back again. But he did not find her. Nevertheless he was cheerful. Towards evening he passed the city walls in order to enjoy the river at sunset. The banks were crowded. Hundreds sat along the ghats or dangled their feet from the high walls or splashed and prayed in the brown water. Zohoor walked along the foot of the wall in the sand, taking his time, happy to be out of the house and away from his father — happy to be searching for Annapurna.

As it got late the crowds dispersed and one by one the lamps of the public houses above the wall were lit. He was beginning to get hungry. Up ahead he saw a huge tree growing sideways from the wall whose leaves, in the darkness, seemed long and droopy like a willow but not nearly half as slender. He decided to walk to that point then go home. Slowly as he approached it he noticed two things: that the tree was dead and what he thought were leaves were strips of cloth, or shawls, or tattered saris and other articles of clothing tied in abundance to its branches; and that there was a circle of children sitting on the sand beneath it playing. The lamps at the top of the wall cast a feeble light, but he had no trouble spotting Annapurna amongst them in her rags and beads. He was afraid she would flee and restrained the urge to rush to her. Slowly he removed his sandals and crept towards them pressing himself into the shadows along wall.

The game they played was a strange one. Someone would toss a small stone straight up in the air which would land either with a mute thud in the sand or with a sharp crack on a flat stone in the center of a ring of pebbles. If the small stone landed on the flat one without bouncing off (which it always did) every one would cheer and then a laughing Annapurna would remove a string of beads (once again they were all that adorned her torso), hand it to the boy next to her who would then hang it from a low branch of the tree. Observing this, stunned, Zohoor noticed with a sort of inward flutter of tender wings how in the diffused light an iridescence swam across her dark downy skin. — Then he noticed with horror that every one of her companions were boys, and that she had very few beads left. That was a new feeling. For the first time in his life his fists and teeth were not clenched in fear, but in unquenchable rage. So he flew at them. He kicked the boy closest to him in the back, and when a second turned to see he smashed his fist into his mouth. They all scattered, scampering in every direction like insects while one confused child even dove into the Luni and swam off. Somehow, between kicks and blows, Zohoor had managed to grab the screaming Annapurna by the wrist.

“It is me, dear Anna, it is me Zohoor” he said, trying to calm her. But she would not cease struggling. “Stop. Please do not run,” he begged. “I have been looking for you since this morning. Please stop. I brought you these.” He produced from his loose sleeve the packaged candy. She stopped struggling.

As she sat beneath the strange tree eating the singori from its leafy cone Zohoor collected her beads from the branches and hung them again around her neck; then he put the bangles on her wrists, the ring on her finger and tied the shawl around her chest. She accompanied him home.

“You cannot treat her as you have been,” he said to his father that night, “or she will leave again.”

“That girl will ruin me,” Azhar said detachedly, reclining in his study smoking — he rarely smoked.

“Give her to me,” Zohoor said. “Let me teach her, and when I am done with her you will be happy to accept her as your disciple.”

Azhar exhaled a dusky plume, tacitly resigned. The next morning Zohoor gave Annapurna her first lesson.

She was a terrible student. She would not practice any of the scales, modes or intervals. She found the technical exercises abhorrent. “Teach me Gorbandh,” she demanded, “teach me Lawarji.” She began to sing them but Zohoor stopped her.

“That is all wrong,” he said. “Anyhow, I cannot teach you the folksongs now. They encourage bad habits. First you do things the right way, and then you are free to do them the wrong way. Your voice must be supple before it can be rough. Learn these first things and then I can give you some melodies.”

But she would not learn. After many hours of pleadings and promises he persuaded her to sing at least the Saregam, then he called it a day. He felt relieved to retreat to his room and plunge into his own study, for at the minimum there was the satisfaction of control. He had expected to enjoy teaching her, even if she proved a bad student, simply because he would have an excuse to sit with her. Perhaps she would stumble through things (he imagined), but her eyes would be upon him as he demonstrated the right way. She would inquire and seek to please — he would encourage, and scold — and ultimately grateful, she would touch his feet in respect, or kiss his cheek. These fantasies thrilled him the night before. However, it did not transpire thus. She was totally implacable. Her eyes were not at all upon him but lingered on every other object in the room. She expressed almost less interest in him than the music. He was chagrined to discover he had to give her things before she would cooperate. He did not try to teach her the next day.

Annapurna did, however, like the tanpura. She fiddled with it a little during her lesson, but when no one else was around she took the instrument into the courtyard and sat beneath the mango tree (same tree, same house) plucking the open strings one at a time, following the hum of each from clamor to death. She had done this secretly before and secretly pursued the habit. The long, slow metaphysical ringing of the strings — half harsh, half sweet — soothed her.

For the next lesson Zohoor conceded and gave her some wordless phrases to sing: not yet a composition, but more than a tedious technique. She still ignored him. He had brought out a basket of dried figs and one of rose candy meant as rewards — but she took without asking and he was a worthless disciplinarian. When she had finally finished stuffing herself he sighed and gave her a phrase with words, hoping that one more component for her imagination to grasp would make the difference. He expected nothing. She repeated the passage back to him in a full feminine echo. “What was that?” he said. “Do it again.” She sang the passage again. He did not hear a single flaw. Her voice was clear and sweet as if transfigured by the crystalline rose petals she had just devoured. He gave her another passage, a simple, meaningless tarana — and she yawned. So he sang a complex thumri. She said, “oh, that one is nice,” and sang it exactly. Zohoor was on the brink of incredulity. She seemed lost in the almost visible drone of the tanpura, repeating from deep within the wilderness of a catatonia or a sudden autism down to the smallest fioriture the intricate thumri he had just given her. It did not lack for beauty. When she finished she opened her eyes and laughed, then crammed a handful of figs into her mouth.

In this way she learned. Although a marvel, Zohoor feared the method was mere mimesis and he tried to impose order upon her studies, to give her only compositions within a certain raga, or ones that conformed to a certain technical theme — and all in increasing difficulty. He wanted to build slowly within her mind the proper images of Kafi, Khammaj, Malhar, Bilawal, Chhaya, Desh and so on. But she would only sing what she wanted. He would intone something while she would pluck idly at the tanpura and stare out the window, silently rejecting one piece after another, until she heard something she liked. Then she would absorb it, repeat it and it would never leave her inscrutable mind. She retained everything.

“Music is like language,” he counseled her one day. “It is a useless thing if all you can do is repeat repeat repeat. You must be able to invent and respond to your listeners, you must be able to surprise them. You can learn everything and still have no understanding. After all we are not parrots. . . Please, are you paying attention to me?”

But Annapurna was not listening.

What Zohoor did not know was that the knowledge was already present within her mind, like the outline of an image where whether colored in from top to bottom, left to right, or at random all amounts to the same state of completion. Or like a photograph where the chemical bath reveals the already latent portrait. — As in the Platonic sense, where all learning is but a cosmic remembering. So it did not matter in what confused way Annapurna exposed herself to the music — in her head all was order and form.

Zohoor was eventually made to understand this.

(4)

Almost a year passed. It was not the happiest of years, but Zohoor still savored its minutia. He divided his days between teaching Annapurna and studying with Azhar — and in maintaining the divide between the two. He slept and ate when he could. Since Zohoor had brought her back Azhar had expressed very little interest in Annapurna, and Zohoor was eager to keep it that way. Domestic life for him was a tenuous dance on tightrope, finding ways to try and erase Annapurna’s presence from the house. He would guide her from room to room to avoid Azhar when he was home, or try to somehow keep her in her own room; and when Azhar was gone, and he let her run free, he would then clean up the inevitable messes in her wake. He was afraid Azhar would grow enraged at the haphazard state of her study and beat him, or her, or both — and that Annapurna would run away. Annapurna was growing daily more sightly, and Azhar forever more sullen.

It was true that Azhar had ceased to perform. Obsessed with his legacy he focused instead on teaching. Zohoor, of course, remained his principle student. But no matter how Zohoor perfected his craft Azhar remained frustrated by the sense of hollowness in his mastery, and was suspicious that perhaps music was not the whole of his life. So he looked for new disciples. Buoyed by his sonorous reputation, there was no lack of ardent applicants. However not one survived his severe tutelage for more than a month, and every one departed quietly, secretly, through a window in the dead of night. All the while his nemesis Baasim traveled, attended festivals, was honored at universities, performed for Maharajas in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Gujurat, and was even celebrated in England.

Azhar stalked everywhere like a thundercloud. He became impossible to live with. But things were rapidly coming to a close.

One sweltering night past midnight Zohoor awoke with a start. He looked towards the open window where the thin moondrenched curtains billowed, and then looked the other way and was surprised to find Annapurna standing there in her thin sweatdrenched pajamas.

“Watch what I can do,” she said.

She held a spent candle in her hand. Without hesitation she climbed onto the foot of his bed. Through a haze he glimpsed the loose neck of her garment yawn, and he remembered in an altogether different way that he still did not know her age, and he wondered what had happened to her beads. She sat there cross-legged. Keeping the sheets over him, he sat up too. Carefully she placed the unlit candle on a dish between them. She took a few long, slow breaths. Then she closed her eyes and began to sing.

Lowing at first, wordlessly, like a comfortable cow, her voice seemed to fill every crevice in the room, and fondle more thickly than the darkness the sparse furniture, and lap against the heavy walls. It was only a drone: the tonic note intoned deeply and fully. But after a minute she added another note, and waited another minute before she built a melody out of three. Only after many minutes had passed in the slow accumulation of notes did Zohoor finally recognize the raga. It was Deepak — the fire raga. He looked down at the squat candle and a shiver ran through him, and then a dawning sense of absurdity, but he did not laugh. There is no way, he thought, they are only stories. Then abruptly, without any transition, Annapurna broke from somnolent alap into bright bandish. She did so with such violence that Zohoor was shocked.

A grinning flame lept upon the candle’s dull wick and both their faces were throbbing in the shadows of the firelight. Annapurna stopped singing, smiled, licked her fingertips and snubbed out the flame. Only then did Zohoor realize he had ceased breathing, and that the two of them were dripping in sweat.

“I discovered you must start the bandish suddenly,” she said, flicking her hand, “like you are striking a match. Otherwise there will be no flame.”

“What?” was all he could manage to say. A single startled word in a sea of incomprehension.

He kept her there until dawn. He had her sing Malhar. First he began to cry, then things began shimmering under a fine layer of dew, and finally an impossible rain lightly drummed the banyan leaves outside the window. She sang Hansadhwani and the walls swayed, the legs of furniture tapped and before he realized it he was dancing in circles, truly dancing, shouting Vah! Vah! She sang Zilla Kafi and a balmy breeze pushed through the curtains like a bubble, scattering prismatic petals across the floor, some of which turned out to be dazed butterflies that recovered and fluttered around the room.

Zohoor thought of his own music and felt humiliated; he thought of his pretensions in trying to teach and was ashamed. He felt like a child; like a boy who tries to play with his father’s heavy sword; like a fool who blusters through a beautiful world. And yet, with childlike wonder, he felt like a thousand doors had just been unlocked and were ready to be thrown wide. What would happen if she sang Medhavi or Jhinjhoti or Hameer? Would dark vines cover the walls? Would flocks of pigeons thunder their wings like in a procession? Would enemies pass whole days peacefully in the gold-red garden of a perpetual sunset? It was ecstasy just to think.

He looked closely at Annapurna. He studied her unrestrainedly. He watched her sing, how she was sunk deeply in an inviolable catatonia, how her gazelle eyes were closed, how her dark hair poured over her shoulders like the rivers of Himavant — and finally, finally, that drop of poison which had been growing in him since the first day he saw her began to burn in his underbelly and drip unquenchable fire into his abyss. There was only one thing he wanted to hear now. He put his hand on her knee. She parted her matted lashes. Almost yelling, so anxious was he to get the words out before the thousand reasons not to gathered strength and good sense held his tongue, he cried, “Sing Khammaj!”

The spring things she had conjured with Zilla Kafi dissolved and a lotus on the writing desk drooped in its vase. He held his breath in expectation as she prepared to begin Khammaj — but it was not himself he hoped the raga would enthrall, for he already loved her. But as she began singing he could not ignore the sonorous morning chatter of birds outside, and hateful light was streaming through the gaping window. Deep within the house somewhere he heard his father calling to his mother. It was irrevocably day. Any moment his father would come through the door with the useless cup of coffee. Horrified, he imagined his father’s reaction finding the two of them, in their night gowns, wrecked and sweaty upon his disheveled bed.

“Annapurna, stop,” he said. “Quickly, you have to leave.” He pushed her towards the window and helped her climb into the courtyard. With her feet in the wildflowers he grabbed her before she could run off. “Say nothing nothing nothing,” he pleaded. Then he pressed his hopeless mouth against her indifferent mouth and tasted jasmines and ash and he felt invisible architecture crumbling all around him.

Zohoor did not have time to feel crushed as she departed, for Azhar was opening the door. He entered stooping over the steaming cup and looked up.

“Why are you standing at the window?” he asked.

Mornings were a good time for Azhar. The freshness of things impressed him with a sense of timelessness and relief before everything hardened into the old habits and he was obliged to remember who he was. So despite the fierceness of his features, Zohoor saw a softness in his father’s eyes and felt a sudden affection for him.

“It is a good morning, that’s all,” Zohoor said tenderly.

“I was thinking,” Azhar said as he handed him the cup, “I have been happy with you music these past months and I would like to know if you have a talent for teaching as well. Bring Annapurna to me today so I can judge her progress.”

“Why today?” Zohoor said. “You have not been very interested in her for the past year.”

Azhar’s eyes darkened. “I don’t have to explain myself to you,” he said, and left the room.

There would be no way to forestall it, but an ominous, awful spine ache convinced Zohoor that the interview would be a disaster.

That afternoon he found Annapurna sitting in the corner of the courtyard near the ash pile, chewing on jasmines. She had ripped completely apart a strange emerald beetle and was reassembling the pieces in relative order upon a flat stone on her lap — the legs were star-like, the wings crossed, the head in reverse.

“Come on,” he said, taking her hand, “Babuji wants to hear you sing.”

For half an hour (dilated by apprehension into a dim eternity) Zohoor sat outside his father’s study. The walls were heavy and the door was a solid plank, so he heard nothing. He had never felt such an unexplainable agony before. He did not fear his father’s judgment, for the beauty of the music and the miracles wrought the night before remained with him, to the smallest detail, unthreatened by doubt, uninfected by dream. Perhaps he had heard things which went beyond his learning, but the bliss was genuine. He should have been preparing himself for his father’s joy and congratulations. Instead, he was wringing his hands in nameless fear. Then the door swung wide and his father appeared before him. He was glaring, an invincible fury in his eyes.

“You are a fool!” Azhar bellowed. “You have taught her all wrong. What have you done? She sings like a fakir, walking on her hands, eating with her feet. It is all wrong. It cannot be fixed. She is ruined!” he cried, hurrying down the hall. “I am ruined!”

“Where are you going, father?” Zohoor cried, rushing after him.

Azhar paused awkwardly in mid step. He looked around, a confused expression on his face.

“What was I just saying?” he asked, a strange nervousness replacing his rage. “What did I forget?”

Zohoor did not care to remind him, but before he could say a word his father hitched up the hem of his kutri and ran down the hall and out of the house. That was not what Zohoor had expected. Tentatively he went to find Annapurna.

She was still in the study, plucking the strings of various instruments and humming.

“What did you sing?” he asked her.

“Marwa,” she replied without turning to him.

There it was. He listened to her pronounce the name of that chimerical raga with crippling remorse. He knew instantly why he had been afraid. Of all the ragas, he thought, she had to sing Marwa. I would have never guessed.

“Did — did anything happen, like what happened last night?” he stammered.

“You mean, did he kiss me?” she said tonelessly, plucking a tuneful veena. She skip-stepped to Azhar’s divan and stretched herself out, then looked at him over her shoulder. “I don’t know what he saw,” she said, “but with my eyes closed I saw a thousand stone rooms without windows, and each door led into a new room, and each room was nowhere. I think it was a labyrinth.”

Zohoor groaned.

“Do you realize what you have done?” he shouted. “You have driven my father insane!”

She continued to look at him aslant, lying on her back, one foot swaying off the side of the divan, her loose frock above her knees, her incredible hair splashing everywhere. It was too much. He knelt next to her and buried his face into the cushions and her hair.

“Come to my room tonight,” he begged, “and sing me Khammaj.”

He made her agree, then he went to look for his father. Whatever route he took was nightmarishly similar to one he had taken before (horizontal narrative or vertical fate, it does not matter anymore — both at this point are rushing towards the end).

He finally found his father at the Luni. He was where the sand was blackened with ash, the water frothed with suds, faded blossoms were scattered about and where on pyres of unsplit wood they burned the peaceful dead. Everyone stood or sat serenly. But azhar was on his hands and knees digging in the sand.

“Father, what are you doing?” Zohoor called. Azhar turned to him. His face was streaked with mud and tears.

“I want my Babu!” he wept. His voice was suddenly frail. “I broke what he gave to me and I need to be forgiven.”

With sobs shuddering his body, he resumed clawing at the river bank. Zohoor was overcome with grief and affection and fell to his father’s side. Together they dug furiously, vainly in the damp sand. The Luni kept washing into the holes and collapsing them, and they continued digging them out. Until panting, they had to finally cease for exhaustion. Azhar looked at his son with almost lucid eyes.

“Take me home,” he said.

Zohoor explained to his mother that his father had been smoking opium. She was livid, but that was preferable to the alternative. She did not need to know yet that her husband had lost his mind. Together they helped him into his pajamas and tucked him in, pulling the covers up to his bearded chin. He muttered sedately through the whole process, resigned but uncooperative. Then he fell asleep the moment he was in bed. Zohoor kissed his brow and left. Whatever might be done about his father could be done tomorrow. He would think no more about it tonight. With a happy heart — but nevertheless a heart aggrieved at its own happiness — he went to his room to await Annapurna. My god what feelings he had in the few hours before she arrived — the whole of the rasa does not express even a fraction of them.

A little past midnight he heard her say “Zohoor, I am here,” and he helped her in through the window. She wore the same frail, sweat stained pajamas. When they sat down on the bed she smiled without looking at him, without looking at anything in particular, and laughed.

“Khammaj?” she said. Zohoor nodded and she began singing.

He almost bid her stop, for he wanted some sort of ceremony or prelude to lead into what he hoped would be a great moment of joy, or maybe to delay what he suspected might not happen. But it was too late. It was clear to him that the music was already taking an effect.

Nothing marvelous or hallucinatory happened, like the night before. Objects were not transfigured. No new things were manifest. Zohoor did not feel the sense of miraculousness and possibility as before. He was neither giddy nor peaceful. Instead — it was strange, he could not explain it — there began growing within him the sudden realization of how much was at stake. Despite the powerful music issuing from her, Annapurna seemed to him to be vulnerable and weak, and infinitely adorable. He felt he had a responsibility towards her. It was true that, if nothing else was being brightened by the music, Annapurna was at least growing more and more beautiful. But he preceived this change in an odd way. For however much his happiness grew, so grew his fear of losing it — and he could only understood her beauty in terms of loss. His heart was hurting.

However he felt not the slightest speck of ambiguity. He wanted her to keep singing, he wanted her. It was simply a matter of resolving not to lose her. He did not have to lose her. Not ever.

“I knew it!” cried Azhar from the doorway. “I knew she would come into this house and corrupt everything. Say goodbye you filthy beggar. You will not pollute what is mine for a moment longer.”

Azhar grabbed a handful of hair and pulled her off the bed. Screaming, she sprawled onto the floor taking all the bedsheets with her. As she struggled to free herself he beat her and kicked her frantically, yelling, “Get up, Kali! You won’t fool me!” She wrapped herself in the sheets to hide from the blows.

“Wait!” Zohoor cried, trying to block his father’s attack with his body. “Please just listen to her sing Deepak. You will see. She is great.”

But he threw Zohoor aside. Then he dragged the whole tumultuous mess (white sheets, dark girl) into the courtyard while Zohoor went after him trying to shout reason, trying to loosen his grip on Annapurna — but not daring to hit him.

“What is going on? Zohoor, what is your father doing?” said Khawlah appearing behind them in the hall. She had wrapped herself in a blanket and hurried out to see what was happening.

“Go get help!” Zohoor said, “father has lost his mind.”

“Do not speak disrespectfully of your father!” she snapped. “What have you done?”

But it took her only a moment longer to perceive the manic aspect of the scene in front of her. Azhars face was twisted in rage and exertion, Zohoor’s in terror and helplessness. Annapurna’s face was concealed by the many sheets wrapped all around her. Without another word Khawlah rushed out of the house to find help.

In the courtyard they moved in a clamorous, writhing mass towards the mango tree. Zohoor was hanging on his fathers arm, still trying to make him release Annapurna. “Let go!” Azhar cried and with a closed fist smashed his son in the jaw. Zohoor reeled and fell to the ground. Then Azhar seized Annapurna by the neck and slammed her against the trunk of the tree. He used his free hand to tie her to the tree with the bedsheets, hitting her periodically to keep her still. Once she was bound tight he rushed back into the house into his study and began digging through a trunk in the corner of the room.

The moment Zohoor could shake the fog from his head he began untying the whimpering Annapurna. “We will run away,” he whispered to her soothingly, “I will go with you.” But before he could untie the first knot Azhar returned. He stepped purposefully from the house into the patches of moonlight, no more frenzy in his movements. He held a small, double barreled British pistol in his hand. Both flintlocks were cocked. He carefully leveled it at Annapurna as he approached.

“I am sorry I hit you, Zohoor,” he said. “But you do not yet understand. I am trying to secure our family’s future, your future. There is no special talim or secret teaching like everyone thinks. There is nothing but deception and rumor. Who will want to hear our music anymore if they know that? Move away from her.”

Inescapably faced with the prosect of irreparable loss, of his beloved crumbling into dead matter and finally ash, Zohoor no longer cared about anything else. The whole of the world, everything in it he had ever seen, heard, smelled, his family, his music, Jodhpur, the Luni, the sky and trees, tradition and God, were mere trivialities. He would gladly torch the universe to save Annapurna. He did not even care to wonder if what he felt was love or hatred, or if they were somehow the same thing. But it was a passion nonetheless, and he liked it. He flew at his father, fists clenched, neither one less mad than the other.

“You don’t understand, father,” he shouted as they struggled. “She sings miracles and will save us all.”

“Rubbish!” Azhar said between grunts and blows. “I have heard her sing. Her music merely clarifies what is already there. That is not art.”

Then the pistol went off. It did not matter what improbable dance, what impractical contortions had to take place in order for it to occur, but Azhar was shot. He fell to the ground with a groan, lifted his bloody hand from his belly to inspect, then collapsed. There were no last words. He dissipated in a puddle of gore, half in shadows, half in light.

Zohoor finished untying Annapurna. He pressed his mouth to her’s with enough force to ignore her indifference, to ignore the fact that she was squirming to get away. Then he picked up the pistol.

“That was one barrel,” he sighed, looking at the pistol. “This is the second.”

Then he placed the barrel in his mouth and fired.

For a long while Annapurna observed the dismal scene. Azhar had fallen with one leg folded behind him. Zohoor fell straight on his back, staring at the sky, the hole in the back of his skull hidden. Their pools of blood spread. They would eventually meet. She did not know what to do, but did not trouble herself too much about it. It was clear, however, that she would no longer be living in that house.

She went inside and spread a blanket in the hallway. For many minutes she went through the house taking things and placing them on the blanket. There was some money, a silver statue of a god, a few saris, strings of beads, and so on. She wrapped the blanket up and made for the street.

Khawlah was rushing in with two men behind her. Hugging the blanket to her chest, Annapurna stepped out of their way.

“Where is Azharji?” Khawlah demanded.

“In the courtyard, with Zohoor,” Annapurna said.

They pushed past her into the house. Annapurna looked after them for a moment, then turned into the street and was gone.

(1)

Not so long ago an unpleasant man named Mr. Lawrence was sitting on a park bench eating his lunch. He sat square in the center where his copious heft spilled well enough to the left and to the right of him to prevent another from taking a seat. He had departed for his break fifteen minutes early, planned to return to work fifteen minutes late and had lifted from the refrigerator someone else’s sandwich — since he had no one at home to make him his own. As he dealt with a mouthful of mealy peanut-butter, dully enjoying the sunshine and the cloudshade by turns, something struck him on the chest which he promptly brushed with fat fingers to the ground. His temper was incurious, but he looked anyhow. Near his foot a few blades of grass writhed, as if suddenly aware and horrified at their state. He poked past them with the toe of his tennis shoe, and there he found on its back a fat brown beetle struggling to upright itself. The legs groped in vain. Its thickly veined, translucent wings were unfolded and buzzing harshly in the dirt. Nevertheless it did not seem to betray much frustration, but went about its business calmly as if convinced resolution was merely a matter of time. Or as if uprighting itself was really of no concern. Mr. Lawrence nudged it with his toe. The beetle turned over. It did not seem grateful. Then without haste it tested its wings. Slowly it rose into the air with widening, counter-clockwise, besotted spirals, its body like a heavy drop about drip from the leaf of its wings until, at the apogee of one of its loops, with gathered speed, it bumped into Mr. Lawrence’s left shoulder, was brushed off, and fell back into its old predicament.

“How stupid you are,” Mr. Lawrence mused aloud. “I wonder how it is you manage to live in this world for more than a day?” With that, he placed his heel upon the squirming bug and pressed until he felt the satisfying pop! Then he wiped his shoe on the grass and returned to chewing his monotonous meal.

Resting thus, his wide jaws rhythmically circling, Mr. Lawrence would have resembled (both externally and internally) a dimly ruminating cow. Except, he suddenly felt delirious. Startled, he stopped chewing. In a sort of anxiety he spat out the unswallowed mouthful, afraid he would choke, and gasped. His throat constricted and his mouth filled with saliva. A liquid fire was expanding in his forehead and in his groin and spreading with slow and unendurable progress along his spine and through his limbs. Yet all over his body the skin went goosey, as if chilled. He gripped the bench near his thighs until his knuckles blanched and sweat beaded on his brow, viscousy and sparkling like treesap.

“Is this a coronary?” he wondered. But that seemed unlikely, for he could not say he was in pain. Nor did he perceive the conspicuous presence of foreboding. Furthermore there was no sense of contraction, as one would imagine, in the chest. But instead a universal sense of expansion and dissolution of boundaries — diastole instead of systole. In fact he felt intoxicated with a sudden influx of sensations. They were rushing in to fill his growing space. Everything within eyeshot was reeling, or more precisely, breathing, as if the upward slope of the park hill before him and all its massive oaks, the fountain and sky, were all a single image projected onto the surface of a rippling pond. Individual objects ceased as such and conformed to larger patterns pulsating beneath them.

Yet the more confused his vision grew, the calmer grew his hearing. The distant traffic, the birds, a couple’s hushed conversation on the lawn, a nearby cricket, the murmuring fountain, the wind picking up and shaking the leaves in waves — he could somehow focus on one sound without ignoring the others. It was the same with smells and touch, though he was increasingly unable to distinguish one sense from another. His consciousness was fracturing, for each sensation demanded and received his total focus simultaneously. Congenitally unaware, he was now abruptly and inexorably aware of everything — and he could not bear it.

With a groan, trembling, he stood up. Surprisingly nothing felt shaky. The ground was indeed quite solid against his feet. Nevertheless he managed only a few aimless steps before collapsing, having succumbed to an urge to lay supine on the lawn. The nearby couple broke in a panic from their hand-holding and rushed to him.

“What is the matter, mister?” they questioned, the girl touching his arm. “Are you alright?”

“Fuck off!” Mr. Lawrence growled, anxious to minimize sensations. The couple departed, deeply offended.

A number of thoughts were running through his head, the larger part of which he could not identify as his own. He gave those ones no credence. Had he been poisoned? Perhaps that sandwich had been a trap, planted to punish him for his habit of stealing lunches? Was a cancer exploding within him? Had an organ ruptured? His spleen? Still he could not say he was in pain, but having always considered any deviation from the status quo as a disaster he could only think of death. In reality, he was suffering from the throes of ecstasy. “I am not dying,” he was obliged to conclude. Then, as a last resort — he barely had the imagination for it — he wondered if her were going mad. The questioned went unanswered: he had no idea what madness was. So he began listening to the other voices clamoring in his mind, which had anyhow passed the threshold of being resisted.

Mr. Lawrence closed his eyes. Everything smoothed out. The oaks and lawns of the park felt worlds away. An incandescence burned behind his lids, and, as if it were the bottom half of an hourglass, his mind began to fill up with answers to questions he had never asked. With an unexplainable and terrifying familiarity he foundered on a tide of recollections. Names, faces, foreign cities, wars, wastelands and the sea came back to him like fragments of a thousand random films sewn together. When it finally all went white — for he was on the verge of mental exhaustion — there stood before him, without any recourse to distance or space, an almost endless file of figures, like the patient multitudes who crowd the banks of the Lethe. Each figure seemed to exude its history the way a dandelion puff, when touched, gives up its spores. He knew them all. Some were men, but some were also women, and various beasts, and fish, and trees.

Then the final unasked for answer, the last grain of sand, came tumbling down as peremptorily as the last nail in a coffin, and he understood: these were all his lives, he had been every one of them, and he was now upon his last.

(2)

Above all, one must keep in mind that Mr. Lawrence did nothing to deserve this. Whether or not standing in the midst of the cosmic fun-house and seeing totally and in an instant how time’s thousand mirrors have reflected you through out the ages can be considered a blessing . . . that sort of thing can be concluded only on an individual basis. Some people might find the experience irritating. But birth and rebirth and ultimate death — these are matters far beyond the mirth and moans of men. In fact, it is a grim distortion of reality to assume that basic cosmic principles have anything to do with human needs or values. The earth no longer centers the universe because neither do we; the coursing of the sun no longer depends upon our sacrifices sating its (our) blood-lust; bodies need not be properly buried in order for souls to pass on; and if one is born a miserable dust-mite, it is not because he was previously a monster. There is no cosmic morality. Fortunately, this is just beginning to dawn on us.

Siddhartha Gautama happened to be a good man; Mr. Lawrence decidedly was not. That they both dropped, like ripe fruit, out of life and into the ecstatic embrace of oblivion had as much to do with them as a roll of the dice does with a man not even playing, but merely walking past the alley.

(3)

By what principles does the phenomenon of metempsychosis work? . . By none whatsoever, but rather through a sort of error, as a knot perpetuates itself in a fishing net or a loose thread signals the destruction of a sweater. For the nature of everything is emptiness.

Ultimately, this error results in a personality, a soul. Take, for example, the most colossal explosions of energy: volcanos, seismic shifts, stormy seas, the fiery crash of meteorites or the collision of galaxies. Despite the sound and the fury of it, both before and after, and most importantly, beneath, nothing has changed. The fundamental emptiness remains untroubled, which, by circumscribing the singularity of each event within whole chains of causality, guarantees the continuity of all. Not that that matters. (I adore trees as an eloquent illustration of this: in space-time they are slow explosions: at their very centers they are dead.) — However, this is not the case with a soul.

Concerning what is “not-soul”, let us consider for instance the case of an insect. Once, as a boy, while weeding my mother’s flower beds as punishment for some not ungrievous infraction, I found myself face to face with the most spectacularly symmetrical web of a garden spider, spread between two errant branches of a rosebush. Her legs were paired, two forwards and to backwards on each side; her swollen abdomen displayed a brilliant yellow against shiny black. She presided calmly at the center of her net. At first I considered smashing her as a sacrificial victim to my angst. But then a more wicked idea occurred to me. I hunted through the bright perennials and dull moss and had to overturn a few stones before snatching a suitably plump bug as it tried to burrow into the dirt. What kind? It doesn’t matter. With mounting joy I tossed the handful (dirt, bug, twig with dead leaf) into the web. They stuck mid-fall as if frozen in time. The hapless creature flailed, ruining the web. The following moments were a tempest of activity. The spider, without really moving, seemed to come totally alive, then began vibrating so rapidly at her perch as to smudge her own outline. With a few graceful, certain and menacing strides she was atop her prey, winding it more deeply into the web. Arching her abdomen, spinning, she began twisting the bug like a spindle into its skein until it was utterly enfolded in dewy, silvery thread. Then the spindly assassin heaved softly, filling the bug with venom.

I suddenly felt sick, remembering how a spider’s venom was supposed to liquefy the intestines. The scene was gruesome. The impeccable loomwork was in tatters. I imagined myself in the bug’s position, in horrifying constraint, smothered, poked by stiff exo-skeletal legs, pierced with fangs, nauseous with poison. And yet, no specific emotion troubled me. Neither regret, fear, shame, sympathy nor outrage. Not because I was like all rough boys painting my face with crushed lightning bugs and playing baseball with frogs, but because I didn’t sense anything grim about the ordeal. Gruesome does not imply grim. Instead, I found it saturated with innocence. Although the bug struggled from the moment I ripped its snug den into the light until the moment the spider plunged it back into darkness, there was a numb ease about its movements, as if its vigorous limbs were just wind rustled branches, as if the whole thing were no more than pantomime. Equal, therefore, to a dislodged rock tumbling and crushing a smaller rock. Inconsequential.

In other words, here was an event once again circumscribed by the void. Within the bug there was no bug to grieve, and within the spider no spider to rejoice. Just sparkling purity, and emptiness.

Now, concerning what is “soul”, the trouble happens when something stirs beneath, like a current. Emptiness folds upon itself and is immediately crystallized — and this knot of void becomes something infinitely denser than a collapsing star, something which cannot be obliterated, not even by a supernova. It is as unreal and elusive as a hypochondriac’s aches, and yet as inexorable and deadly as a blood clot in the cosmos’ veins. It wanders (the vicious gallstone) kicking up eddies wherever it goes and assimilating the cataclysms of dust.

This is the soul. In time it will populate infinity and squash the void. It is dark matter indeed.

(4)

Mr. Lawrence — as we will call him for only a short while longer, since that name will change — came into being at the moment of his initial demise. This is the universal custom.

Until that point it would have been impossible to track him through the ages, from one incarnation to another. That error, that knot of emptiness (Mr. Lawrence’s soul) did not yet exist. The upheavals of ant hills and shoals of fish, the mad luxuriance of tropical forests, huge lumbering beasts and and all organic things might leave a temporary impression, sort of like a pillowfold leaves on the soft cheek of a sleeper, but basically they all partake of an undifferentiated existence. When they lapse, finally, no residue remains. They take nothing, they leave nothing, they are nothing. Thus they are all most intimately identical. When my fearsome spider devoured her bug, she devoured herself — like the Ouroboros, the serpent that swallows its own tail.

So, for mute millenniae, there was no Mr. Lawrence. Then, one scorching Mesozoic afternoon, a beetle whose species has long since vanished was belaboredly carrying along its fat body by means of its brittle wings, buzzing mindlessly, until it smacked into the broad flank of some other long since vanished beast. Then it fell to the ground. The beast swatted, but continued to pull up huge mouthfuls of vegetation and chew, its wide jaws circling rhythmically. On its back in the grass the beetle struggled to upright itself. It did not succeed, however, and was eventually crushed beneath the beast’s complacent grazing. At that very moment, just before the light flickered out, a brief lifetime of bumping into things (animals, trees, stones), falling, and writhing in the dust, was recalled and something more like an exclamation-point that a question-mark flashed. It wasn’t so much the beetle that recalled, since it was gone, but had the beetle been human it certainly would have felt a shudder, and took a whistling intake of breath — for at that moment an indelible “Ah!” had been scratched into the softness of the void. (These are sometimes called “insights”.) Corporeally, the beetle was a gooey smear; but spiritually, nothing could stamp out its diamond intuition. And so Mr. Lawrence was born.

What followed? . . Only an unceasing succession of comic/cosmic mistakes.

In a moment of retrograde science, purely for explanatory reasons which shall excuse the imprecise analogy, I will declare that reality is in fact composed of both material and spiritual components. How they interact, or the point at which they shake hands, will never be identified nor understood. Yet spirit and matter need not have any communion at all. One misconception however can be cleared up: spirit is not light, it is inconceivably dense. If spirit passes through matter it is not as a liquid seeping through a porous membrane, but as a stone falling through the air. The blunt corner that mangles our funnybone, the stiff rosethorn that pierces our flesh, are only airy spectres in comparison to the soul. So when error strikes and a particle of spirit is created it is set loose (there being nothing capable of containing it) and wanders without resistance through the universe.

Can this particle of spirit ever take up residence in a plant or a rock? . . Yes, for there is nothing that prevents this; although there is nothing that encourages this either. A sort of rule of magnetism presides over the transmigration of souls. Since it is the dawning of awareness that creates souls, it is the capability of awareness that attracts them. Awareness as opposed to the process of “succumbing to power” which defines all other cosmic interactions. The insentient dullness of the lichen and its rock does not provide the means for spirit to flourish. And to be clear, the only thing that can actually “contain” a soul is the possibility of growth. For unlike everything else in the universe which eventually bleeds out and decays, spirit (that is, souls) can only get more powerful. For a soul to perish, as with Siddhartha Gautama or Mr. Lawrence, is an anomaly.

Therefore, not long after a massive foot compressed the beetle into a diamond of spirit, Mr. Lawrence cropped up into his first true incarnation — as a nervous, tiny mammal.

This should not be marveled at. Nervousness — an ugly word for caution — is the principle quality of a nascent soul. Something forged in the sudden notion that things could be otherwise will naturally function on that continuous logical extreme, and second guess everything that it feels compelled to do. Probably akin to a rodent, legions of these diminutive, fuzzy animals cowered in narrow places, horded seeds and nuts, dashed from shadow to shadow, snatched insects when they felt brazen enough to pounce, and occasionally, in a long process of agonized fits and starts, would rob a nest of its souring eggs.

(5)

So why focus on Mr. Lawrence? . . That his series of incarnations ended as inexplicably as it began is neither interesting nor rare. In a universe defined by its emptiness one would think its errors would be the most interesting thing, but really, they are almost too common to be considered errors — for they are, to be sure, all of us. No, there was something else about Mr. Lawrence that set him apart and warrants an extensive treatment of his case: like ice crystals within a fire or a loose wheel within a perfectly accurate clock, he was an anomaly within an error.

Every soul, every inextricable knot of spirit, proceeds along a familiar course. Allow me to illustrate by analogy. Once, in a very lonely city after I failed to find a place to sleep, I sat all night in an abandoned square on a bench beneath a linden tree. In the center of the square was an old fountain. The pump had since quit and the water sat in it like glass, but its submerged lamps still shone. Above it veered a swarm of light-besotted gnats who could not help themselves from flying into the water. By morning the swarm had dispersed, leaving behind the corpses of their dead to twist peacefully on the surface. Observing them I noticed a curious thing. The drowned insects did not float apart, one from another, but one by one were collecting into clumps. They moved about in these little black piles, gathering into themselves any lone gnat or smaller pile of gnats that happened to drift past. Until a dozen heaps formed in the midst of the pepper of bodies, propelled either by a light breeze or the strugglings of the not yet drowned. And then a half a dozen heaps. And then three heaps, and so on. Finally one massive clump of dead gnats was floating smack in the center of the broad fountain. Except for one gnat, who still twisted peacefully near the edge. — Then a street sweeper came scraping by and with a bored familiarity scooped up all the bodies with a spade and slopped them into his trash pail. The one lone night described a vortex in the disturbed water. Mr. Lawrence was like that lone gnat.

Thus proceed all souls. At the very moment of their conception they are destined to grow, to solidify, to gather into themselves more and more, guaranteeing their own perpetuity. The effect of this however, far from creating, as one would suppose, the soul of a despot or a psychopath or a power-hungry freak, instead results in the soul of a very decent human being. How? Simply because a soul’s strength lies in its ability to falsify the world around it, to see itself as something essentially different. It has been noted that one who stands at the edge of the abyss threatens to have the abyss stand within him, and this injection of nothingness will drive him insane. Therefore the decent human being, first knocking his stick against the ground, declaring it solid and real, then knocking his stick against his own head, doing the same, finally knocks his stick against every notion, law, theory, doctrine and value to issue from that head and declares them, one by one, to be more substantial and eternal then the sun dipping nightly behind the horizon or the moon who monthly dies. Circumscribed by a world of meaning and form, cities rise, and souls go on forever. And instinctively respecting this world — their solid shell — everyone treats everyone else with a most delightful decorum.

In all honesty, Mr. Lawrence was never fit to be anything but a rat. I say this with admiration. Like the one lone gnat left twisting in the fountain, he never managed to amalgamate. Most souls, as mentioned above, are held in place by an appropriate capacity for awareness — which means the ability to falsify and shape the world around it. In this way — and let me emphasize again, the universe has no use for morals — the transmigration of souls functions. But Mr. Lawrence, for whatever obscure reason — simply fortuitous rolls of the dice or errant casts of the net — managed to be drawn again and again into human lives for which he was not prepared. He had pulled off a miraculous feat, verging on the impossible, and not only failed to ever learn anything from his experiences, but never once drew a conclusion either. I mean in a moral sense, the only sense that matters for the perpetuity of souls.

Naturally, this made for some high adventure. A solid soul, a decent human being, lives best when he lives a straight line and travels the deep channels and the well marked ways, for most keenly he has learned, and learned most keenly that trouble is not worth the trouble. And so . . . nothing happens. The balance, the foresight, the patience, the discretion and circumspection and, most importantly, the restraint necessary to live a decent life, were all things Mr. Lawrence lacked. Although he did not lack nervousness, cunning and suspicion. Mr. Lawrence, after all, was not a decent human being. Instead he was forever marked by the void from which he emerged and never really left behind, and sought nothing else but to discharge his energy at all times. He managed to persist so long without expanding. He was filthy, untrustworthy, violent, greedy — and yet, like my fearsome spider, thoroughly innocent.

It is an axiom of politics and physiology that certain problems are fixed only by hastening the crisis. The hope then is that the disease will perish before the organism does, whereas any measure of treatment would only protract the worsening process and allow it to gather force. No one looks back upon their youth without wondering how they survived it. Mine however had an additional element where the one instant which, more than any other, should have destroyed me was also the most important. This is why I refuse to regret my mistakes.

Suddenly the acid began to turn on me. For a long while I could not imagine what would constitute a bad hallucinogenic experience, and even doubted its possibility. And then in quick succession I had several. The difference was severe, like firecrackers and dynamite. Although it was more than just a matter of intensity. With certain cells in the body there is a phenomenon called the all-or-nothing response. Neurons, for example, create their electrical impulses through a switching of polarity: ion gates in their membranes allow oppositely charged molecules to flow in, without changing anything, until finally a certain threshold is reached called the action potential — then it snaps from positive to negative and a charge spurts out. There is no transitional state. My first horrific acid trip was like this: absolutely different, a glimpse into the real terrors of insanity for which I was unprepared. One can always find ways to disassociate oneself from physical pain, but madness is inescapable and complete.

For the first catastrophe I was spending the night with friends who I was not certain even liked me, and who before long did finally shun me in annoyance. I could not help what was happening. I wandered restlessly through the rooms, sat down only to stand up immediately, fetched glasses of water I couldn’t drink, sprawled on the floor, hugged my knees in the corner, looked at my watch every other moment and replied to simple questions with bewilderment. Thus the night passed. At four in the morning when things had reclaimed an aspect of normality I got in my car and left; the others were still asleep, blithely untroubled. I drove around in the dark until what I thought was an appropriate time to go home. Each house I went by concealed lives in which I could not participate, and that pained me because at that moment I wanted to be anything but myself — who had become hateful to me.

From whence came this abrupt self-loathing? It is now clear to me that it had always been there, but hidden. After all, who pauses in the midst of joy to investigate its origin? And who feels ridiculous (asked Rimbaud) when powerful? Yet I had just suffered my first real trauma, and that cleansed from me like a corrosive any illusion of security and sufficiency. Not only had the the acid thrown me into a living nightmare (where each moment dilated instead of hastening by) but I sensed only contempt from my friends. If their eyes were on me they were glaring; if they asked me “how are you?” it was a judgment; if they were patient with me it was only to diffuse a possible inconvenience. People are not fools — even distracted ones — and nothing is more conspicuous than a patronizing gesture. So at times I froze up with anxiety, ceased breathing even, because my corrupted logic convinced me only by turning to stone could I avoid accruing further condemnation from my friends. The thing worked, for with me eventually quiet and still, they carried on as if I were no longer present. From the corner I observed them. I watched them talk and joke with one another, play guitar, play cards and so on; and what soon occurred to me was the way each was in total control of this situation, this thing they were creating. Every comment embellished and expanded the preceding comment perfectly; insights and jokes always seemed at hand; if someone began picking at the guitar it never conflicted with another’s telling of a story, but somehow coalesced. It was awe inspiring. I could not understand how they achieved this ease and grace, since in my solitude I was a wreck of agitation. I imagined myself joining in like a bear lumbering into a meadow: trampling the wildflowers and chasing the butterflies away. They were right to shun me, I finally concluded, for they were noble whereas I was pathetic, stupid and inept. They were my betters.

In the following days all the unhappiness which had so long been seething now bubbled forth. I remember staring at the piano I had sought to master and feeling defeated; I held a dollar in my hand and wondering if I would ever hold a job. Neither melancholy nor depression were the proper words, for these conditions dim the world. And that was not my case. To the contrary, the world was deeper and more beautiful than ever — it was just that, I was not worthy of it. “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure . . .” Rilke has aptly elegized. Indeed, I realized that hell is not fire and brimstone, but an inability to cope with the majesty of God.

And then, contrapuntal to the unfortunate state I had fallen into, a wonderful thing happened. One Friday at the end of study hall a girl who I had had a crush on for many years gave me her phone number. The bell rang and while I walked towards the door she walked towards me, and had to call me several times because I kept walking: I could not imagine she was speaking to me. I don’t remember doing anything more than nodding my dumb head like an automaton as she put her number in my hand, told me of a concert that weekend and asked me to call her. I pocketed the piece of paper and hurried away.

For my present purpose I will call her Hellen. She was very beautiful and kind. We went to separate junior high schools and I used to spasm in joy whenever I espied her from afar at church or dances or school sporting events. Then freshman year of high school I sat next to her in English class — and I was never so well behaved as I was then. That winter we had confirmation classes together every Tuesday and Thursday night, and when we finished those sessions by kneeling in the church she was the perpetual subject of my prayers. I must decline to describe her, I would never succeed.

The concert she invited me to was already known to my friends and me: a few local bands were performing at the river park. We had planned to drop acid and attend. Although my friends warmly congratulated me on my date, none cautioned me against taking acid. So when I stood at the pavilion where we were to meet I was giddy and sweating and nervous for multiple reasons. Through the crowd I finally saw her walking towards me and I waved. She smiled and waved back and sort of half walked, half skipped towards me. I blessed the spring-time: she was wearing a light blue sundress with a purple and white phlox print, and through my odd hallucinogenic lens I watched her approach, observed the sublime perfection of her womanly frame and gasped, felt as so remote from me the greatness of femininity. LSD has this sort of neo-platonic way of emphasising the pure forms of things as if they were responsible for reality, instead of simply being inferred from it; and thus it was not Hellen coming towards me but the template of all woman-kind. I immediately panicked, remembering the fate of every goddess’s young consort. Those poor boys who chanced to stumble upon the divine in meadows, or dared lift her veil as she slept, always met gruesome ends.

“Hi,” she said brightly — and I replied with a timid and deferential “hello”. She stood very close to me and I had to take a step back. Already I glimpsed with fear how the rest of the evening would unfold, as she would talk and flirt I would recede further and further into myself. But I managed to salvage at least that first hour. For a while we sat on a picnic table and chatted, thankful I suppose that we knew one another so little and so were permitted to ask about silly things, like favorite movies and books. Soon I failed at the small talk and tried to ask larger questions, but she just shrugged and laughed. Then when a pause went too long unbroken she said, mercifully, “I think the band has started, let’s go listen”. We strolled across the wide lawn in silence with me sort of trailing behind. I followed her into the crowd.

Being amid so many people felt oppressive, but I could still endure it. The song rolled on clumsily and sweetly. Hellen grinned and began swaying. I stood still. She took advantage of the tight space to press her shoulder into me, and through the occasionally fortuitous gear-work of error her hand eventually fell into mine. She kept pulling my ear to her mouth to say things and I felt her breath on my cheek. I could understand none of this. What could possibly be the attraction? I felt foolish and sad. People danced around me, the leaves danced on the trees, cloudlets in the darkening sky, the gnats and mosquitoes around our heads — and I was like a dull fencepost sunk in the ground.

Allow me to say this in gratitude about women: they are far more forgiving than men. Men seek out weaknesses to exploit them; women seek out weaknesses to know where they may offer support. Hellen must have found something endearing in my timidity and awkwardness. Yet had I perceived even the slightest fissure in her grace or charm she would have ceased to be for me the Eternal Feminine — and thus, no longer an idea, would have been nothing.

In the space between two songs she took my arm and led me along through the crowds, stopping once to whisper in my terrified ear something about the traintracks, and laughing, began to pull me towards the woods. The acid was swelling in me and growing sinister. Strange geometries spread like inscrutable signatures along the lawn, and I tried in vain to read them. Shadows seemed to congregate and outline every shape with menace. I glanced at my watch: one hour in: I knew that very soon I would no longer be able to shape full sentences. But Hellen still held tightly to my arm, whereas I had no idea what to do with my hands.

On the way we passed groups of people whose eyes I kept catching, until one huge fellow I knew from school, who I had always considered a dimwit and a brute, came walking towards us. He looked at me, then at Hellen, then at me again and burst into a tantrum of obscene gestures, crying out, “Alright, little man!” and clapping me hard on the back. I turned as dry as a stone and my face flushed crimson. I was not naïve. There were precious few reasons why she would want to walk with me along the secluded traintracks. But to have this brute express it in such a way? . . Images began assailing me, of lathered cattle heaving, of squealing swine, of reeking dogs foaming at the mouth. Even on a good day I was sexually neurotic, and this was not a good day — I was nigh psychotic. I am in fact somewhat handsome: I think it is important to state this in order to make clear the extent of my timidity and neurosis. Women look at me often, young and old, and when despite myself I smile with a little insouciance and move with a measure of fluidity (although I am conscious of every tendon and joint in the process) the whole thing becomes clear to me, like morning or a fiery wheel in the sky. I mean, that I am basically empty. For a long time before I ever went on a date I had a recurring nightmare about how it would go: the girl and I sit in a sunroom, sodas on the table untouched, the cicadas screaming, the girl swinging her feet to the sound of tedium, her face too bored for disgust, and above it all the mantle clock tocking with ever insistent fury, reminding her that time vanishes forever. Then suddenly I burst like a soap-bubble, turning into a fizzle of iridescent nothingness. In dreams as in life I could touch, but I could not talk. And I wanted the latter. I studied books to fill me with things, so that when girls looked at me they would see philosophy, poetry, lepidopterology, instead of the actual void therein. Between classes, after school, in groups and pairs, I listened to boys and girls converse and was amazed to find they spoke of nothing, nothing. Not one intelligent idea. Yet it did not matter. I could see that that was beside the point, that there was a live wire throbbing beneath the banality of their words. Talk was merely incidental.

Talk, however, was not incidental for me: it was the whole thing. So many months of eating LSD had turned me hyper-cerebral. Other boys, in their fantasies, might imagine flowing hair and eyes framed by kohl, parted lips, the gasps, and hands disappearing in dark rooms. My fantasies, however, consisted of somehow uniting a girl’s thoughts with mine, walking her step by step through the subtleties of a poem or the intricacies of a symphony: and then my spirit would ejaculate beneath her gratitude for having opened her eyes to art and beauty. I regarded physical eroticism as a fetid cloud befouling everything. It was never sex I desired, but like a psychological justification. I could feel my personality vanishing and I scrambled to shore it up (or replace it) with words. Perhaps a rape victim, traumatized and abused, feels objectified by her attacker, feels that she was no more than an anonymous stimulus to his lust — but in her mind he remains equally objectified, a nameless brutal force like an earthquake or a flood. And this objectification was the thing I was anxious to avoid. The asylum was drawing near: physical sex was brutality and only that which went on within my skull had any significance.

So we cut into the woods. A small path hedged with blooming myrtle quickly faded into a less formal footpath which led down a hill towards the train-tracks. I walked flatly along the ties kicking at broken bottles while Hellen balanced delicately along the iron track. That was somehow emblematic. It occurred to me that, secluded thus from any other distraction, whether or not Hellen enjoyed herself really depended now upon me alone. The acid, of course, made this prospect seem vertiginous. I knew that she would just want to sit beneath one of the bridges and kiss, but that I could not bear. I began talking frantically. Almost slipping once she took my hand, which felt weak and sweaty clasped in hers. Any story I remembered, any joke or anecdote at hand now bubbled from my mouth garbled and incoherent. She hardly had a chance to say a word. I scrutinized her lovely face for boredom. “Let’s sit here,” she said, pulling me towards the bridge.

A spiderweb shimmered between grass stalks near where we sat. Naturally I began expatiating on how spiders’ legs function on a pneumatic principle and that the dew soaked gossamer covering fields in the morning are abandoned threads that spiders used to fly. She kissed me on the cheek. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said, “but calm down.” I could not calm down. “Why did you do that?” I asked. “Does it bother you?” she said, “it’s hardly a secret that you have a crush on me.” “Not a secret?” I said, astonished. She laughed. “Tell me, what am I supposed to think when every time I look at you I catch you looking at me?” That was true, there was no denying it. I had never felt more ridiculous and humiliated. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, “I’ll be back in a moment.” I went up the hill into the woods near the top of the bridge, but not before she kissed me once more on the cheek. Then when I was out of sight I ran away. I walked the four miles home, feeling free.

At the time I had no idea why I ran away. All I knew was that I was seething with anxiety; I felt perpetually on the brink of a disaster; I had to get away. But now I understand. Although I will always maintain one cannot take acid to escape reality, if by “reality” one means a person’s problems, insecurities and fears — the preceding episode should prove that — I cannot say escaping reality was never my intention. Certainly I was fooling myself. I kept telling myself that I was seeing the world as it truly was, with the “doors of perception” cleansed; that I was in possession of the root experience of all religions; that I had been breathed upon by the muse; that I understood how to resolve the contentions of the world; that I was nearer truth than most. But that was all rubbish. What had actually happened was that I had developed a taste for things only in so far as they were idealized, unreal, like in a dream. This proclivity afflicts me even today: it is the reason I keep this blog. After all, it was neither inspiration, nor peace, nor truth that I fervently prayed for those Tuesday and Thursday nights before God: it was Hellen. Neither did I ask for more acid. And whatever else I might have desired, in my heart of hearts I wanted nothing more than her — as it should be. For whatever else one seeks in life, whether as exalted as truth or as trifling as fame, in the end we measure ourselves by our relationships. Had I paused a moment to consider, I would have realized that my deepest wish had been granted, and granted lavishly. But that was the problem: my profound, very personal desire had somehow seeped from idealization into actuality. Therefore I could no longer tolerate it. Just as, this very day, if some publisher where to stumble upon my blog and offer me a book deal I would immediately reject it and never write again, from an abiding sense of being unworthy of my dreams, or because I simply prefer them as dreams. Thank you, LSD.

The next day Hellen called me. I think I would have expected to hear God’s voice on the other end (a thousand times over) before I would have ever expected to hear her’s. She asked what happened to me, but before I could begin to stammer an excuse she asked if I would like to meet her and her friends for lunch. What choice did I have? I reluctantly agreed.

There is no reason to go into any further detail on this subject. Every day I would spend some time with Hellen in timid and uncomfortable silence, and every day I expected that would be the last I would hear from her. Then the next day she would call me. As far as I was concerned the whole thing was doomed from the start and I could not understand why she allowed it to languish thus. I almost began to resent her for it. So after a couple months (sometime in June, I think) when Hellen finally put an end to it I felt nothing but relief.

That was my first girlfriend. She never once lowered in my estimation, which was why I could not tolerate her. In every gesture of the masquerade of dating — the hand holding, the sharing of drinks, showing affection and special consideration, charged glances hid by idle talk, shy smiles, private jokes — I felt ridiculous, utterly clownish. I was happy to be free of it. Free to abandon what the rest of the world considers good and real. Free to recede again into my foolish spiritual reveries. Nietzsche speaks of being free of God as being like a planet unchained from orbiting its star. I was that. I dove with vehemence back into hallucinogens and dissipated in the abyss.

The walls were papered a soft yellow with alternating blue and brown patterns of vines and flowers, running vertically. Through the window at his right and its lace curtain the small room filled with diffuse sunlight. In church once he counted to a thousand. He would have gone further but the preacher started speaking of the Tower of Babel and he imagined men climbing it to storm heaven with guns and knives. He started counting the flowers on the wall. But the bathroom was more interesting than church, so that soon grew boring. He decided to name everything he heard. There were crows in the tree outside; a car drove past; a lawn mower failed to start up, again and again; some kid was taunting another one in the street; his mother was banging things in the kitchen. Then the air-conditioning unit by the window kicked on drowning everything else out and ending his game. But he still did not feel like getting up.

Sometimes thoughts came to Simon and he could not identify their origin. Thus inexplicably he remembered it was bad to cross one’s eyes. He wondered why. So he crossed them to better understand. The world was immediately multiplied, but blurry. The garden-like rows of flowers on the wall turned profuse, like a jungle. A chill ran through him. He wanted to see exactly and clearly where the two images split apart. He crossed his eyes slowly and uncrossed them, over and over again, concentrating. Soon his eyes hurt, but he kept trying to understand.

Then a strange thing happened. As he uncrossed his eyes and the the columns of flowers and vines on the wall merged with their doubles, they didn’t quite meet. Everything else was clear and singular, but a transparent image of them hovered an inch from the wall. His eyes felt uncrossed. He blinked. It was still there. He dug his fists into his eyes. Then it was gone. Again he crossed and uncrossed his eyes slowly and, as the designs came back into focus, their ghosts floated above them. He put out his hand to touch it and his fingertips sank past the image to the wall. This was the greatest thing he had ever seen. He felt like his mother said he should feel while in church: his hair stood on end. He wondered if he wasn’t supposed to cross his eyes because if it was done right things’ spirits became visible. This was a real discovery.

Then his mother knocked at the door.

“Simon, what are you doing in there?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“Then come out before you leave behind more than you meant to.” As Simon was pulling his pants up his mother added, “it’s stinky out here, turn the fan on to clear it out.”

He flipped the wall switch and looked up at the vent in the ceiling. Then he looked down at the toilet bowl. Would it really clear out? How? He imagined his solid turd ascending from the murky water and vanishing into the ceiling through the vent. That would be incredible. This was turning into an afternoon of revelations. He took a seat on the floor to watch it happen.

Twenty minutes passed. His father knocked on the door.

“What are you doing, waiting until you have to go again?” he said. “Lunch is ready.”

Simon opened the door.

“I’m watching to see my poop disappear.”

“Well, the harder you watch for something the longer it takes to happen,” his father said. “Come and eat lunch. It will make more poop.”

He picked up the child and carried him into the kitchen.

Not until after dinner did Simon remember to look again. He peered in, diastole of hope in his heart — but it still rested there, quietly swathed in toilet paper like a corpse in a death-shroud ceramically entombed. He would have preferred that it was risen, but it was not to be.

He flushed it down.

Even if the rain had not fallen so suddenly and the river risen so fast, and even if God in a dream like daylight had forewarned her nightly, and for a month, and even had delivered by the National Post Service, Lobelia Branch, straight to our door, plans and lumber enough to build an ark, much less a skiff, as well as the labor to get it done, and furthermore commanded upon pain of everlasting damnation that she enter it, my Anna still would have never stirred, not even so much as a stalk of Indian paintbrush in the summer breezelessness. Such was the stubborness of the woman I had elected to live with. This is what I am telling myself, at least.

Once a storm gets going, I mean advances from an indolent afternoon drizzle to more of a general patter, you can forget about sleep in our house. The rain drums deafeningly on the tin roof, and by dawn, having lain awake all night, you begin to mistake your own skull for one of those pebble-filled cans the children rattle on parade days. And it’s a shame too because a summer storm is nothing to begrudge. Especially in those same days of outlandish muggy weather so that the humidity finally breaks, and then things can finally draw a good breath. Those times Anna knits by the open window and I smoke on the porch, and the murmur and the cool makes things restful. Fills up the silence anyhow.

But by the midnight of that night the roof had been thundering so unendingly that I felt my worser half arousing, so that every little sound had me cursing under my breath. Then a few heavy knocks sent me to curse aloud, “What, and now the blasted wind, too?” until I could not decide whether to pull the blanket over my head and weep or fling it from me in consternation. The knocking came again, and I guess it was neither regular nor disregular enough to be the wind, so Anna said, “I think you had better go see who’s calling on us, Hoyt.” So I swung my legs out and sat there thinking awhile about getting up, like I must always do. Then the knocking comes again and I go.

I don’t move so quick. I shuffled along and tugged the cord of that naked bulb above the door, but nothing. Except more dark. The knocking came again and I hollered, “Christ, hold up!” then stepped with mighty caution into the hall, with my hands outstretched most like I was asking alms. So I went along and got to the front door. When I opened it, however, nothing greeted me except a roaring darkness, which I imagined must have sounded like the sea, and no lights to speak of. I could not so much as espy the outline of a tree. Wind indeed, I thought, returning to my bed. But before I took more than a few steps I heard the knocks again and was certain they came from the kitchen, for there weren’t more than two doors in the house. So I made my way slow stepping, the knocks raining, to the rear of the house and unlatched the door and flung it open against another emptiness just screaming like you would expect in the caverns of hell. No one. “Son of a bitch,” I curse. For it’s always just when you think you have a thing figured. But it weren’t more than a moment after I shut out the storm again that I hear a vigorous tapping at some window or other. I listened hard against the protesting roof. At a second flurry of taps I located it as the living-room. Could just be a tree branch. I think that first. Yet I’m already invested in this thing, so I go. Nevertheless this is it, I said to myself, if I find no one there I ain’t looking again. I won’t be played by those hooligans. For my property had become a regular playground and shrine of vandalism to those town boys. You break up one unholy game of dice in back of the church on a Sunday and they keep at you like a horsefly in August, which is all they are anyhow, I suppose. Not a human fellow alive would have such disrespect as to scrawl the filth they have scrawled, and disrupt a man’s sleep, and such. I pulled back the curtains, but it was too dark to see through the glass, and by the time I hoisted the thing up anyhow I no longer cared and so was not disappointed with another absence.

Suddenly Anna started hollering for me like she was bit by an asp and I made for the bed-room as I could, which weren’t much, calling to her in a panic, “I’m coming, I’m coming.” Then when I get there gasping, “What is it, Anna?” I see Ridge Boggs half hanging in the open window, steam rising off his soaked shirt and him holding a flashlight to his misshapen face. “You got something against me, Hoyt?” he says. “So that was you been knocking all over,” I said, and was about to make my apologies, but he broke in. “Listen Hoyt, the river is lapping at my stoop, a full five foot beyond the bank. Radio says we got to clear out, since before long we’ll be casting for trout in our own kitchens, you understand? And your house ain’t more than a couple feet up slope from mine.” I said nothing, sort of digesting in a painful silence like after too big a meal. “You all need to clear out,” he said again. “My truck is full though. Ha ha, in fact we’re threating to strap Kylie to the roof. But I expect by the time we get up the mountain and back it’ll be too late, so you’ll have to make your own arrangements. I reckon the road will be washed out.” He stopped, then turned to Anna and said real mournfully, “I’m sorry, dear.” “It’s alright, Ridge,” she said, “thanks for checking in on us.” He ducked out, but a moment later stuck his head in again and said, smiling, “A five hundred year flood they’re calling it. How about that!” And then he was gone, swallowed into that yawning howl of rain. I could not believe our valley would wallow submerged five hundred years, if that is what he meant.

Anna slid the window to. I looked at her the best I could in the darkness, though she weren’t more than one shadow perched on the edge of another, and probably with that quilt all swathed around her too, as usual. For a moment we existed to one another as simply a cough and a sigh. Such is the isolating power of grief. Still, I could feel her frowning. I did not much care for it. So after a bit of that uncomfortableness I breached the pause and said, “Well?” By way of answer she grabbed my arm, with that obnoxious, awkward pawingness which I guess happens as one ages, and pulled herself up. She took her cane, which was leaning against the nightstand. Truth is I could have answered my own “Well?” and she knew it. The arrangements Ridge had suggested we make might as well have been for our own funerals, coffins lain out and nailed shut with encouraging words. What did he expect two aged folk to do without a truck and with spines bent like a torsion spring? I watched Anna as she shuffled out the room.

Almost like an hour later she eased herself into the stuffed armchair and took her needle-work from the basket beside it. “Open the window for me, Hoyt,” she said, “you know how I love to hear the rain.” But she was playing with me, for I had forgot to shut that window in my hurry to get, and the wet was blowing in. “I’ll open it,” I said, and going over I found her forehead and put my lips on it. Then I sat in the chair beside her and took my cigarettes from the table. “You go on the porch for that,” she said, but without meaning it. “What? There’s some mighty loud downpouring, Anna. I can’t but mishear you,” I said and I struck a match. It was a rare pleasure, let me tell you, smoking indoors without Anna saying a word, and imagining the little flowerettes of smoke twisting towards the ceiling. So relaxed was I, in fact, that it weren’t more than a minute after I snubbed out the smoke that the terrible outcry of the roof softened into a sort of sleepy lullaby-hum, and I was dreaming in my chair. Dreaming of cicadas, sands, leaves and faucets and anything I guess which makes a general monotonous sound. There have been windy days on Lake Loam, enough to push waves against my legs while casting a little off the rocky shore, and I dreamt of these with their slop and splash. And I guess my memory reached a little further back, for soon I was living that day again when as a boy I went to get crayfish from under the rocks to bait and I kept wading out one step further, one step further, because the water was irregular warm, and the air cool, which felt good, going on out, until I finally abandoned the whole thing without realizing it and found myself floating fully clothed on my back, thinking of nothing. My ears filled up with the soft whispering water and I discovered that the less effort I made the better I stood afloat, till I were as limp as a boiled cabbage. Then somehow I fell asleep that way. And somehow I woke up at the bottom among the weedy rocks, the sun a gold fleck distorted by the several foot of water above me. Somehow it took me a peaceful moment to waken to the terror that I weren’t yet dead. Under such recollections my sleep dilated.

That was how I wakened again. It weren’t only Anna tugging at my sleeve and going “Hoyt! Hoyt!” that was contributing to the unsettling nature of my dreams, but after digging my fists into my eyes I felt the whole room was sunk in water which was lapping against my ankles. It wasn’t a moment more before I saw it, too, since that was when the lightning began. One bright, thunderous sputter was enough to show me some of my possessions floating past, like they had somewhere better to be. “Lord, Anna,” I cried, getting up from the chair. “Did you just now wake yourself, too?” But she grabbed my hand and said, “Sit down, Hoyt. No, I’ve been up. I was feeling it rise over my feet inch by slathery inch.” That took me a moment. Then I said, “You’ve just been sitting there,” and she said, “Yes,” and I said, “Just feeling the water rise,” and she said, “Yes,” real matter-of-fact. Then by another flash of lightning I could see that she weren’t partaking in my anxiety and I muttered, “Nevermind.” She said, “Good, because you’re disturbing my knitting.” That angered me.“Then why’d you wake me,” I snapped. But she said nothing. I was still somewhat groggy from that bit of sleep and absently lit another cigarette, feeling disquieted. There are so many ways a man can miss the obvious. Here everything I owned was ready to wash out the door and I was trying to understand how such an old memory, reclaimed through the ghosts of a dream, could make a man feel like he had been thrust into a game of high stakes without being made to understand the rules. As if it were the memory. I was kind of stuck in that lurch for a while, just smoking, when I happened upon my foolishness. I turned to Anna and said, “We are really going to die tonight, ain’t we?” By the flickering of those clamorous flashes I could see that she had paused in her knitting. “We are going to die tonight,” she said. I snubbed out the cigarette and lit another.

Until then the fact of it had not occurred to me, don’t ask me to explain. But suddenly I was ready to get, for I weren’t yet ready to die. I felt every inch of me revolting against that fact like it was a putrid morsel no sensible man would swallow. That is to say, in an instant I had resolved to pull Anna from her chair, shake her, embrace her, and then perhaps see what could be done. “We can weather this yet,” I cried. I was rising from my chair with as much explosiveness as I could muster, which weren’t considerable. But Anna just sighed and took my hand again. There weren’t any use in arguing. It was a thin illumination those lightning strikes afforded, but I saw her well enough. She went along knitting with a wool completely soaked from the rain coming through the open window. Her hair hung like damp vines along her pale face with the moisture beading along her cheeks and dripping from the tip of her nose. One moment I could of mistook her for one of the waterman’s fairy daughters, calcified in their unending loveliness, which sing men to drowning, and the next moment she was uglier than I ever remembered. That was when I really become afraid, the way she sat there all impassive, her eyes black marbles, the rain spraying all around her, like looking into the eyes of them cotton-mouths you come upon near the creeks and springs. It was as if I had not know this woman for the majority of my years, and something like the Lord’s conviction was telling me she would see me drowned. So it occurred to me that this was why she woke me up, and I shivered head to toe. I reckoned she wanted me to absorb all of whatever fear and misery there was to be had. I tried to shake the thought, but it weren’t going anywhere. Yet it weren’t as though she were without reason.

I heard it said once that with women there ain’t a problem they got that can’t be solved by pregnancy. That might mostly be the case, but with Anna it was the other way around. It was all those pregnancies that robbed her her joy. By reason that not one of our children has out lived us. The first two I suppose weren’t nobodies fault. There was the miscarriaged one after three months, which has been forever unnamed, and the other one, Iona, she was a still born. The third we had almost half a year. He come out just fine and she called him Reston. I had never seen Anna so happy, as if this child had completely put to rest for her the darkness of the preceding years. That might be why she named him so. She was always coddling him and kissing him, knitted him whole drawers full of sweaters and socks. It made the house right sunny, with blankets everywhere and those new sort of sweet smells and the way Anna was always humming and singing. Things were fine. And then he got the whooping cough. We didn’t know what it was, and had we, we were still too poor to have something done. It was just the runny nose and the sneezing for a week. But then those terrible coughs, thunderous in my opinion for such a small creature, the force of which turned his face blotchy red and purple, like spoilt meat. Then in the ensuing calm there was that squealing “whoop” when he could finally draw a good breath. I could not accept that such a pathetic sound should signify relief. There were three ever worsening weeks of that. Sometimes he would vomit afterwards, and then just lay there whining, too tuckered out to cry. He nursed less and less and Anna, not drained of her milk, was drained again of her happiness. Until one day when she was bouncing the child a little and making faces, to solace the both of them, Reston laughed for the first time in days, a good little giggle. That giggle led to the worst fit of coughing yet, from which he could get no air and soon died. I watched the color bleed right out of Anna’s face, till the flesh could have been bleached bone. That was nobody’s fault as far as I could see, but it is not the nature of grief to let things pass, but rather to pin to something, anything, the principle fault, and then try to destroy it. Since it is hard to hold a disease accountable, I suspect she set the blame upon herself. And I watched her waste away. She would not let me touch her for years, though I tried to persuade her it could yet be a source of good. She insisted it were proved sin. But fortunately she took to drinking, and so at times forgot her grief. Thus after a while she found herself pregnant a fourth time. We called this one Mellie. And thank God but whatever spider there once was gnawing and sucking at Anna’s vitality was utter vanquished, like an impervious demarcation had concealed from her her past without perturbing the continuity of her being. So that the happiness did return to our home. And we had Mellie a little more than five years.

Forgive me, I can hardly speak of this much longer. But this is the point I been coming to. That is, where the first two weren’t nobody’s doing, nor could the third really be helped, Anna has forever held me accountable for the passing of our fourth, and she might indeed be right to see me drowned. She seemed almost relieved to finally have someone to blame, thus absolving herself of the looming notion she were cursed. I tried to defend myself the first couple years, though she never accused me with words. But finally I no longer bothered. For me, it was like those equations in school which always unsettled me. First there were the numbers which a man can reckon, and then there was the “=” sign which lets one know things are balanced and as they should be. Fine. But it was always that mysterious x or y, the variable, it was called. It never seemed to me to matter the promise of a resolution if a fellow lacks the power to bring it about, because I could never account for its identity. If a man cannot account for a single variable, a promised answer, on the page of book, when the methods to do so are learnable and tried, how must he account for the infinite variables of life? But for Anna, schooled at the University of Grief, every how or what concerning children must simply be reckoned. I had only turned my back for a minute, and when I looked again Mellie was floating face down in the water in the lake, her brown hair spread out, her blue dress buoying, her stillness like the visible aspect of a distant mourning dove’s cooing I was listening to hard, so as not to have to see. A leaf twisted on the surface at her side. I judged the ripple ringing outwards and away was carrying off her spirit. Or was her spirit, escaping. And I had never felt so without strength.

And now Anna was seeking the same demise, a lungful of liquid. Hell, I am right fucking sick of water. I called to her a few times, but there was nothing to be done. We were resolved, after almost sixty years of having elected to travel together, to take separate paths, she towards the shadows and I towards the light. “Well, I plan on being here tomorrow,” I murmured, not having the courage to speak at full voice. I figured it was not my place to remind her of what she well knew, I mean the severity of God’s judgment on the suicide. So I shifted my mind from the disturbing impressions which had been beclouding it in order to consider the turn things were taking. That is, the ever rising water and the unceasing rain. For there ain’t nothing like a real nightmare to wither up the ones that ain’t.

The water was cold for it being summer. I stretched my legs out onto the table to be free of it. Then I began to enumerate my options, which were few. Natural logic said to go up.What we had upstairs was a little more than an attic and a little less than a room. It was a sort of loft I had expanded and used as a workshop, a decoratory gable with a window. A wooden staircase led to it from the kitchen. It would do.

Next, of course, was to make some manner of preparations. Who knew how long the water would stay? And there was no one I could think of who would bother looking for us. I mean for me, since Anna would be drowned. I knew I had a few things up there already, my .22 with a box of shells, some knives and tools, various pieces of wood, blankets, a lantern and flashlights, a radio, batteries, other unknown and perhaps useful items, and under a tarp in the corner a gallon jug of whiskey which I sipped from now and then. I don’t know why I hid it beneath the tarp, Anna could not climb up those stairs. That all seemed sufficient. So the only thing lacking was some manner of remaining afloat a few days, in case the water rose that high. And a paddle, or something with which to navigate. Though I never expected it to come to that. There was always the window to climb out and the roof to rest on. But at the very worst there was the big plastic trashbin which I expected I could sit in and use a plank to paddle along. Though at the time I never did consider how I would get it through the window. In the pantry were dozens of cans of food, beans and soups and things, as well as some jugs for drinking water. The jugs were useless though, for the pipes were already flooded with muck. Still, it was enough. I don’t eat much, like a bird pecking. I reckoned I would drink whatever fluids were in the cans.

I was still sitting next to Anna as I ran through all this in my mind. I spent considerable time imagining myself in that plastic trashbin, going along among the treetops and the chimneys, pushing through the flotsam and the wreckage of the world. Finally the water was lapping at my feet again, though they were on the table, and I decided it was about time to get. So I trudged to the kitchen, sloshing and kicking past things. I could find no bag to help me, so I piled onto the table all the things I would need. The can opener and about twenty cans of stuff, even one of olives. Then I took the ends of the tablecloth, wrapped it all up, slung it over my back and struggled up the stairs. And that was about all I planned on doing. The attic was dark. By feel I grabbed the matches off my workbench and lit the lantern. I kept it lit long enough to check for the things I figured I would find, and finding them I snuffed it out, then collapsed into a rocking chair near the window, feeling uncommonly fatigued. I drew back the curtain to let the lightning in. My head was in a state.

All my life I have enjoyed difficult decisions, for the pleasure one gets in thinking a thing through. And in this way I have managed to remove myself from many painful things by reducing them to a series of small considerations to which I only need say “yes” or “no”, and thus proceeding, willy-nilly arrive at my conclusion with a sense of finality, as if it were someone else who done it. But I was then deciding whether to stay in the attic, or to return downstairs and stay with Anna as long as I dared. It all hinged on what might be a measure of selfishness, which I worded in my mind as such: would it be less painful to have a last goodbye, or to begin at once insulating myself? Though I weren’t so much that selfish, doing all this while the dim water rose up around her and she sat there combining those saturated strings into a sweater or a cap no babe would ever wear. She weren’t no insentient rock and could come if she wanted. But I had eyes to see that she had every intention of letting the water surmount her as if she was one. Lord knows there are warmer ways to part. But calmly surveying the situation, one could see there weren’t but her sentiments and mine, and neither one was worth the trumping. If a soul makes peace and chooses death I suppose it ain’t another’s business to tell it otherwise. And if there was pleasure in it for her, to watch the water drown out the rats and recollections which had harassed her so long, well then it might not have been the solace I sought to give her, but it was at least a solace I did not have to rob from her. Realizing this, I reckoned the real selfishness would be to try and change her mind and that it would be best to just stay put, that no more goodbye was necessary. But I wanted to kiss her once more.

West Virginia is the same all over, Lobelia being a fine example. Everything is built in the hollers and narrow valleys, going very little up the hill slopes. The necessary elements are, in this order, a river, a railway, a road and a row or two of houses, or maybe three depending on the steepness of the slope. Then in the hills above there are the huge caverns hollowed out by coal mining that, once abandoned, fill up with rain. Of course they can only hold so much before they burst and the water comes rushing down. That, combined with the river rising, makes the towns like a chute or a trough to guide the floods right on top of us.

I had only taken a few steps down the stairs, setting my foot careful at each awful sputter of lightning, when I heard a rumbling. It weren’t a moment more before I felt it, too. I thought there might yet be time. “I’m coming, I’m coming!” I cried out and tried to hurry down, but I had misjudged. Once again I was too late. The first wall of water slammed into the house. If I had not been holding on to the railing with such tenacity I would have tumbled down the stairs in a heap. I felt the whole house shift a foot off the foundation. Below me I heard wood cracking and glass shattering and a rushing as loud and furious as at the Winston Falls, which was the inundation of the house. Water began boiling up the stairs like it was after me. I hesitated a moment, for I wanted yet to snatch my kiss. Then I turned back up the stairs.

I am a fool for not anticipating such an event. Here I thought the water would just calmly rise and calmly sink again, like a tide or leavened dough. So when I scrambled back into the attic, on hands and knees panting in the center of the room, the provisions for my plan seemed right childish. I knew the next wall of water would strike any minute, for flash floods always come in twos. I did not think the house could take it. Already the sighs and screeches and moans of stressing wood sounded all around me, while the whole structure was rattling like the coal trains were chugging through the kitchen. There weren’t much to be done. And it was total dark, without trace of lightning nor thunder in the general tumult. I figured the best I could do was hold on to something sturdy, lest when the next bunch of water strike I fall and get hurt. So I managed to take hold of my heavy work bench, built of Englemann Oak, a thing of beauty. But that proved a mistake. Even its solid components were quaking. Like the whinnying and gallop of a thousand apocalyptic stallions rid by angry angels was the hiss of rushing waters and the rumbling. I went to my knees and held tight. I did not bother to pray, but I did beg Anna to forgive me. Her soaked shade was no doubt rising past me that moment, instantly enlightened by death as to the things I had done. The things I could not tell her living. Then the flood wall struck like a thunderclap. The house pushed immediately loose of its moorings. The work bench, which was resting against the wall the waters struck, slammed into my face and knocked me backwards flat. My head swum. I only had a stunned moment to taste the iron in my mouth and run my tongue along where a few of my teeth had got knocked loose. I spat them out. Everything around me hissed with the whistling intake of breath, like before a plunge. Then the back end of the house slipped down the slope. The supports, broke from their bases, ceased to bear. I felt the whole thing crumbling beneath me like a house of cards. The attic angled downward, sinking atop its failed stanchions. And yet it weren’t like there was endless space beneath me, for the work bench toppled over and there was solid enough beneath me to crush my legs against all that plummeting oak. If the mark of a clever man is the discovery of new things, at that moment I could rightly be called a genius of pain. It was as if it had no location, and it were so severe it almost didn’t hurt, like I was simply standing in awe of it, going, “Wow!”. In my slobbering, toothless mouth, defeated and whimpering, I mumbled Anna’s name on my lips. Then something like an invitation come out of the darkness and struck my skull. The door opened and I entered in. Dark.

During the fifth grade I realized the importance of distinguishing oneself. Whenever a class poster needed to be made I volunteered, to be known as the one who could draw. On the playground, among those who did not like soccer or kickball, I was the one who invented the games: narratives of morbid fantasy which often spawned more than simulated violence. And when a teacher intervened because our games grew too wild it was usually I who talked our way out of trouble. Precocious as far as vanity was concerned, I made certain everyone regarded me as the class expert on whatever subject momentarily interested me.

I found it difficult to keep friends, for anyone who lacked my interests bored me, and anyone who shared them I regarded as my rival.

Then in the fall this kid Eric transferred to our class. He did everything that I did. He made drawings of animals and battle scenes and imaginary planets. He expostulated on infinitely fascinating subjects like comicbooks and horseshoe crabs — and sometimes he called my specious statements into question. On the playground his imaginative wargames seduced kids away from mine. What pained me however was neither envy nor a sense of injust usurpation, but a feeling of trivialization. What sort of unique value could I possess when another resembled me so closely? He was a hateful mirror. An image so exact as to be worse than parody.

Perversely, I was very kind towards him — for if he was to hate me as I hated him that would only rob me of one more particularity. But he knew, and so we tacitly despised one another.

Thus the year trudged on. Then, at the height of our mutual rancor, the teacher divided the class into pairs for a project and Eric and I found ourselves saddled with a partnership. We had to give a presentation on a foreign culture. From the list of options we rejected the cultures that did not interest us, and then the ones that did from a revulsion to agree. Finally we wandered off separately around the library. As I sat at a table flipping through a picture book of ancient weapons Eric walked up behind me. I was dwelling on a page of Japanese katanas. “I like that sword,” he said. I frowned, but felt it would be too great a betrayal of my interests to disagree and said, quietly, “So do I.” He seemed puzzled. After a while he said:

“You know that kid Luke? He’s got one of those at his house. It’s hanging above the fireplace.”

“Why were you at Luke’s house?” I asked. Luke was diminutive, weak, asthmatic and unequivocally ugly. Everyone ridiculed him with good conscience because no one ever saw an insult register on his face, like flogging a stone. He was the kid you could persuade to pick up dead rats and birds with his hands, drink the putrid lunchroom concoctions, give you his things, fall for embarrassing pranks. Somehow, despite good intentions, he defeated any attempt one made to give him sympathy and kindness.

“He lives in my neighborhood,” Eric said. “I had to stay at his house once until my mom got home.”

“Would he lend it to us?” I asked.

“He’ll probably do whatever we tell him to do,” Eric shrugged.

“Then we should do our presentation on Japan.”

We found Luke sitting on the periphery of a group of kids, picking at a piece of gum mashed into the carpet. He looked startled when I said his name. While I asked him if we could come over that weekend he kept pushing his tongue against the inside of his bottom lip and sniffling loudly. When a rill of saliva began to run from the corner of his mouth Eric snapped at him: “Cut that out!” He looked at him blankly, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Saturday afternoon Luke’s mousy mother greeted us at the door and kept saying, as she led us in, “Thank you, thank you boys so much for coming,” with a tone of desperation, like she was anxious we might turn around and leave. We found Luke in the family room in the back of the house, which was wainscotted with a vaulted, slanting ceiling. Columns of sunlight streamed through the windows and cast gold where they fell, yet everywhere else remained in shadow. Several chairs wrapped semi-circle before a big brick fireplace. The katana rested on the mantle. Luke was sitting at the hub of a vast city of card houses — some squarish, some pyramidal — spread out spoke-like along the floor. He must have been at it for days. Eric turned to me and said, “If you’re anything like me you probably want to kick the whole thing down.” I laughed, but said nothing.

Luke smiled up at us from his fragile city, genuinely happy. He said, “Wait, wait for me,” with the same tone as his mother as he tip-toed through the card houses. Then he cleared the edge and hopped towards us halting a foot away, and stood grinning, saying nothing for a very long time, just sniffling his snotty nose.

After a while I pointed at his creation and said, “what is that?”

“I am building a city,” he said, “to be its king.”

Eric was looking elsewhere and pointed to a strange wooden instrument hanging on the wall and said, “what is that?”

Luke beamed and said, “my father plays that; it’s called a hurdy gurdy.”

“Well what is that?” I asked, pointing to a statue in the corner.

“That is the god Shiva dancing,” said Luke. He seemed very happy to answer our questions, so we shrugged and went on.

“What is that?” I asked, pointing at a bookshelf.

“What is that?” Eric asked, pointing at a chair.

“What is that?” I asked, pointing at my foot.

And Luke answer every one, no matter how ridiculous, almost frantically like he was on the verge of crippling laughter.

“What is that?” Eric said finally, pointing at the katana. Luke stopped grinning instantly.

“We’re not supposed to touch that,” he cautioned.

“We just want to look at it,” Eric said and took the sword from the mantle. Luke did not look at either of us, but kept shaking his head and going, “No no, no no,” until I thought would cry. He insisted his mother would come in and find us.

“Put a blanket over it,” I said, “and we’ll take it into the woods to look at.” I turned to Luke and said, sort of consolingly, “she won’t find us there.”

With the sword wrapped up and tucked beneath Eric’s arm we ran across the long backyard and into the woods. Luke gasped asthmatically, trailing behind us. The woods were like the family room: patches of sunlight splashing in certain places — the rest was shadow. By the time Luke caught up with us Eric had already unsheathed the sword and was slicing through the low leafy boughs reaching towards us. He cut a path for us as we went along until we reached a small clearing where rocks sort of cropped up like rustic seats.

“The Japanese swordmakers used to test the quality of their swords by tossing a leaf in the air and cutting through it,” Eric said. “If it was a jagged cut they threw the sword away.”

“That’s not true,” said Luke, who was bent over, hands on knees, breathing heavily. “They tested them on a piece of bamboo wrapped in a straw mat, which felt just like cutting through flesh and bone.”

“Just throw a leaf in the air,” Eric said. Luke plucked one and tossed it which Eric cut through instantly. “Beautiful,” he said. “Throw another one.”

“I don’t think Luke’s parents will let us take the sword into class,” I said. “What are we going to do?”

“We’ll hide it here,” said Eric, slicing through another leaf as it fluttered down like a wounded sparrow. “I’ll pick it up on my way to the bus stop on Monday.”

“What if Luke’s parents find that it’s missing between now and then?”

“I don’t know; ask him.” Eric now had Luke throwing two leaves, one in front of him and one behind, so that he could spin and cut both in succession. “Whack, whack!” he cried.

“They won’t be happy,” Luke sniveled. “I don’t know what they will do.” He kept wiping his nose on the back of his hand.

“Now throw four leaves; front back, front back, like that,” Eric said, pivoting back and forth on the balls of his feet like a mechanical toy, the sword held rigid in his hands.

“We should come up with some excuse,” I said. “They might know it was us who took it.”

“Luke wouldn’t tell, would you Luke?”

“When I was a little boy my mom pressed my hand onto the hot stove,” he said anxiously, his face more expressive than I had ever seen it, “so that I would never want to touch it again. I remember nothing ever hurt so much. And now I’m touching my father’s sword . . .” He had a handful of leaves now which he was tossing at random, the greengold flakes describing awkward circuits in the sunlit air as Eric flailed about without method, yelling, “Whack, whack!” and multiplying their number. “I don’t know what they’ll do, I don’t know what they’ll do,” he kept repeating.

“He would never tell on us,” Eric assured me.

“All the same,” I said, “maybe we should come up with an excuse to help him out. It would only be fair.”

I was hopping from rock to rock and not really paying attention, pretending the earth beneath me was fire and I could not touch it. Then someone screamed horribly. I turned to see Luke curled in a ball in the dirt, gurgling with pain; Eric held the sword absently at his side. He bent over and picked something from the ground then showed it to me. It was a finger. “I . . . I didn’t mean to,” he stammered.

I ran over to Luke who was sitting up now gripping his left hand with his right. Both were such a bloody mess the wound could have been on either. “Let me see,” I said. He held out his left hand: the index and middle fingers were gone at the first knuckle. “Where is the other one,” I said to Eric. He picked it up and held both in his palm.

“What do we do?” he said. His face was white. “You won’t tell on us, will you, will you, will you? You won’t tell on us Luke, will you?”

Luke would not look at either of us, but kept shaking his head and going, “No no, no no.” His face glistened with snot and tears and when he wiped at them with his hand a long smear of blood spread across his livid cheek.

“What happened?” I asked, but it was obvious and no one answered. I looked in turn from Luke (who was sitting in the dirt, blubbering and holding his hand) to Eric (who held the limp sword in his right hand and the severed fingers in his left). “This is what happened,” I said, “We were moving those heavy rocks, trying to pile them together to make a wall or something. Then one slipped and took off Luke’s fingers.”

Eric looked at the pale loose stubs in his palm. “Wouldn’t they be smashed then, instead of cut cleanly off?”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said shrugging.

“We should smash them then.”

“Ha, perfect!” I cried. “I was just thinking that; let me go grab a rock.”

Really, it was incredible how much Eric and I were alike.

There is this fellow I know named Henry.

The 6 fell loose on Henry’s watch. Not only was it loose and rattling around beneath the crystal, but eventually it managed to snag both the second-hand and the minute-hand so that the two were tied together in the 6′s tiny loop and had to move, if they moved at all, as one, and thus make a mess of time. The probability of this happening unaided is something like 3,600 to 1 — except it is probably more like a number broaching infinity given the large number of 3 dimensional events which would have also had to conspire to occur all at once for this to happen (since our world is manifold). And so it is safe to say that this sort of thing could only ever happen to Henry, who is, so far as I have observed, a favorite in Misfortune’s harem.

I asked him to see the watch, which he was banging noisily against the table during a sensitive work meeting, and saying to himself, bemusedly, “How about that”, and, “I can’t believe it” (he couldn’t believe it!). Finally he handed me the watch and said, “Careful now, Peter, that’s a 9 dollar watch!” I saw that, with all the banging to dislodge the 6, he had also knocked loose the 2. That is the sort of thing that usually happens when Henry tries to solve his problems.

For example, in college he impregnated a girl, whose name he did not know, after a drunken one-night stand. Not without honor he chose to remedy this by marrying the girl; yet the malevolence and ingenuity of his stars managed to twist this noble gesture and make of it the broad matrix from which all following disasters were engendered. In order to mitigate the financial damage of medical school Henry organized crews during weekends, breaks and summers to paint apartments and campus buildings, making for himself a fair amount of money. But when a second child followed hard on the heels of the first his wife reasoned they would all starve before the long-term payoff of med-school, and that he should therefore expand the short-term payoff of painting.

Initially, things went well. Then one Sunday, his crew painting a church in order acquire tax breaks, Henry fell from the steeple scaffolding four stories. Though he landed on his neck he did not break it, and six weeks later when he finally emerged from the grey mists of his coma his doctor commented, with unintended irony, that he was a very lucky young man. Nevertheless there was residual brain damage: a connection had been severed destroying his ability to taste and smell, as well as a certain dimming of intelligence. Seeing as after this fall misfortunes befell him with an even quicker pace, I often wonder to what extent his diminished ability to reason is responsible, and to what extent the machinations of his evil fate.

Henry spent three months in rehabilitation, where he had to relearn the finer points of writing, speaking and walking — and where at night his unhinged roommate, when left unchained, would sometimes attack him with fists and teeth. Henry required sedatives to sleep, so he had to infer these beatings from cuts and bruises he discovered in the mornings. In the meantime his wife began to drink. Then, just short of one year after being discharged, was born a third child. All three were daughters.

Eventually his wife persuaded him to move away from his family in Indiana and near her family in Florida. Henry was deep in debt; he had no luck organizing another painting crew; his wife would not permit him to return to med school; his wife ceased to conceal her drunkenness and grew irritable; the kids wanted to play soccer, go to birthday parties, take dance lessons, have pretty clothes. There were no resources for any of this. So Henry’s wife left him. It was not an amicable separation.

These are simply some of the broad strokes of Henry’s bad luck. As such, they are not much different from anyone else’s — the real interest lies within the details. There was, for example, the time in class he tried to break up a fight between two female students who subsequently turned their attack on him, which resulted in him having to contact the union lawyer to defend him against charges of assault. Or the time the school principle, aware of his financial destitution, personally delivered a ham to his door on Christmas Eve and, looking over his shoulder, espied in horror the truly squalid state of his apartment. Three days later he received a call from Child Services, resulting in another protracted legal battle. And these on top of the endless divorce proceedings with his wife.

Since Henry knows I am considering law school he often calls me for free legal advice, despite my vigorous protestations that I am in no position to give it. He has asked me whether evidence gathered by slipping a tape-recorder into his daughter’s coat pocket during a visit to her mother’s would be valid in a libel suit. And since he also knows I do a little work in finance and accounting he has asked me if I am aware of any ways to conceal earning statements because of an approaching alimony hearing. I generally counsel him to do the exact opposite of whatever he is thinking.

One day my phone rang and I answered to hear Henry’s undefeated, perpetually cheery voice. I should mention I have never once found him in a bad mood, and often wonder how this is possible. I cannot yet account for it. He was calling to ask me if I knew how to get a phone number.

“There is the phone book, or 411 information,” I said. “Do you have the person’s name?”

“No,” he said, “and anyhow this is an out-of-state number.”

“Do you even know the person you want to call?”

“Yes, but not by name. But I don’t want to call him, I want to call his wife.”

“Do you have his wife’s name? Do you have any information of theirs?”

“I have his license plate number.”

“Did you try the DMV?”

“Yes, they said they are not authorized to issue me anyone’s personal information. I also tried the police department, but they said the same thing.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you.” There was a long pause on his end, then I heard him draw a deep breath.

“This is the thing,” he began, “I drove past my ex-wife’s house and saw this cop-car parked out front with Chicago lisence plates. What would a cop-car with Chicago lisence plates be doing all the way in south Florida? Then I remembered my ex-wife used to date this guy named David who eventually became a cop, and she admitted to having cheated on me with him when we were still living up there. It has to be him. And I know he’s married, so I want to call his wife and let her know what he is up to.”

“Of course, I don’t blame you, and if that’s the case I agree he deserves it. But are you sure it is him?”

“I’m sure enough. Who else would it be? And furthermore, if he drove state property all they way down here I’m sure that is some sort of offence his precinct should be informed of.”

“Probably. Nevertheless, I don’t see any way of getting his home number short of asking him for it.”

“Alright well listen, this is what I was thinking. First of all he’s never seen me. So if I wait outside the house in my car until he leaves I can follow him and at some point run my car into his. Not hard, just enough to do a little damage. Then we’ll have to switch phone numbers and insurance information. Then I’ll go call his wife.” He finished and there was a long pause on my end.

“Let me clarify this,” I said, “you, who have no car insurance, want to purposely damage your car and his in order to deceive him into giving you his information so that you can call his wife and accuse him of adultery? And in addition to this it is a police car you want to intentionally damage, which might be for all we know something like a federal offence?”

“That’s right,” Henry said with conviction. “What do you think?”

I kept waiting for him to say, “Ha, just kidding!” But he never did.

The sun and moon hung opposite this morning
from one another across a blood orange sky
like weights in scales balanced against the earth:
the great Triumvriate! . . . urged me to die.

Then trees and fenceposts and a straying bull
thrust through a haze that overspread the ground
impressed me more than metaphorically
that worlds behind worlds manifold abound.

If mists and fogs are veils we cannot lift
with unaccustomed hands to vaporous tasks
nevertheless conception does not cease,
but minds the pause, then gnaws and wrecks its masks.

Yet this is vain. Why forsake shores for seas?
You’ll find nothing but poison seeking peace.

For several weeks the weather was fine and every evening after dinner I sat on my back stoop to smoke and finish my beer. Before me stretching westward was a space of wetlands — full of palmettos, leatherferns and other low scrubbrush — which finally ended in a thicket of loblolly pines. Here and there the bleached skeletons of dead trees rose high above the brush, upon which perched the herons and crows.

Relaxing, I liked to watch the horizon shift through the spectrum in reverse: indigo, then violet, azure, the green of a dying leaf, the flesh of a peach. On cloudy eveings all was fire. Then when darkness finally put an end to it I would return inside. Except once, just before the sun dipped, I watched a web darken in a little tree with lacquered leaves and purple flowers adjacent to my stoop. A minute later when the sun had gone so had the web, and the spider appeared to be suspended in the air.

I went closer to examine it. She was a spindly, colorless, freakish kind, with a thorax almost as long and narrow as her legs. The legs were paired, two front and two back on either side. Spread out as she was in the center of her web she resembled a five pointed star. Her myriad eyes were two globular glass beads. Poised on her strands she billowed slightly with a breeze, and I knew that every movement and flutter of the pulsating, permutating world was registering unerringly through her web as through every hair upon her body.

Every evening thereafter I watched the spider instead of the sky. I watched her meditating, motionless in her web. I often wondered if she ever ate. Not once did I see a catch mar her threads’ numinous symmetry, through which the sky (flickering dead in shy pastels) was like seeing the stained glass clerestory at Chartres. And yet she seemed to persist upon her airy diet, silent and detached, her heart evidently beating away within, her few pale blood cells stirring.

Soon she started to mean something to me. Some cultures think the universe is a loom — but it was nothing like that. If anything it was the opposite. In the same way I know the sun and earth are huge spherical extensions of myself, I knew that this spider in its web was like a blackhole, a loose speck in space, which hangs and hangs tirelessly in the atmosphere, apart. The hem of her silk was her event horizon. Anything which fell within it ceased to be a part of our world and became a part of hers, like a final declaration against the unity of life, for the triumph of the holy, that this is in no way that — nor ever will be.

One night my friends and I sat on the stoop smoking and drinking, a pall of smoke and laughter hanging in the air. The concrete pad was strewn with ash and the grass was strewn with bottles. As was gossiped and carried on I could not shake the weight of the spider’s stillness and silence, like a judgment staying the scales against our joy and vulgarity. I went to her with an unlit cigarette in my mouth. I struck a match with a pop; the blue bud paused an instant before yawning into a yellow flame. First I lit the lowest corners of her web. The filaments vanished instantly, a few writhing life-like before curling into sticky beads. Slowly I consumed her whole web, drawing the match closer to her as the flame drew closer to my fingertips. Yet she kept so still, like an impeccable painting, that I fully expected her to remain so when the flame finally reached her, like a martyr yielding to self-immolation, like an ember happy in its own glow. Thus the violence of her reaction shocked me. Her elegent legs scrambled madly all about to find a purchase in her disappearing web, and in an instant she was fleeing into the leaves. But it was too late, the fire had taken hold and she curled into a ball of ash. Then I quick lit my cigarette and shook out the match.

I did not laugh as I thought I would. Instead I quietly bore a sudden, infinite remorse: here I thought, in her magisterial stillness, she would be beyond pain.