Shadow

1.
If blame must be lodged (and, in the discipline of art criticism laus et vituperatio remain very much relevant), then, one might say Elise’s faculty advisor, Dr. Alexander Kemenworth was at fault for our heroine’s misfortunes.  Elise had returned from her two-semester internship at the Wallace Collection, exchanging London’s rainy chill for southern California’s cloudless skies and brilliant sunshine, an overly analytical light that seared shadows into the landscape and confounded observation with the sheer brightness of things, particularly on the day that she conferred with her advisor at his mountaintop offices at the Getty Research Fellowship.  In the courtyard below his office, tourists strolled between galleries, pausing on the terrace for tea and coffee, and, for a passing moment, Elise was nostalgic for England and everything that was vague, misty, and indirect about the place.  Dr. Kemenworth seemed busy and it was obvious that he wanted her to get to the point, that is, to make a “pitch” as the term is used in the film industry, a brutally succinct capsule summary of the doctoral dissertation that she intended to write, a verbal outline sufficient to the subject that could be delivered in the space between several floors on an elevator. But her conception was nuanced, a bit pastel with the indefinite, perfumed haze of the paintings by Fragonard, Chardin, and Boucher that she had studied at the Wallace, and Elise doubted, even as she spoke, that the subtleties of her plan would be evident to her advisor.  He was handsome with features cast for the part he played – in Hollywood’s environs, everyone seems to be auditioning for a role – and, as his character required, he listened politely, even asked a few noncommittal questions, and, then, let his eyes stray, wandering a bit from Elise’s slim form and pleasing features to the books on his shelf and his computer’s screensaver, an image of Poussin’s shepherds scrutinizing a tomb in Arcadia, and, then, raising a very slightly monitory finger implied that it was his turn to speak and that speak he would.

The subject was too broad, Dr. Kemenworth opined, too uncertain.  The role of shadows, veils, and shrouds in rococo art was simply too vast, particularly when aligned with concepts involving feminine modesty and gender roles, an element of the dissertation that Dr. Kemenworth thought very fertile, very productive of interesting ideas but, perhaps, overly ambitious.  “You have outlined the narrative or discourse, as it were, of not just a book but a series of books... – and I know you’ll write them some day,” he told Elise.  “But we need something that you can compose in nine-months, the gestation period of human infant,” Dr. Kemenworth said, “A more finite task.  Easier to supervise.”  Elise said that she had written a draft of her first introductory chapter and that she thought the subject was viable.  “ But I don’t want you to bite off more than you can chew,” he replied.   He lifted a mechanical pencil from within a ceramic vessel on the edge of his desk.  The mug was a souvenir from Greece, inscribed with an image of a dancing satyr, red figure against black glaze.  Elise told him that she could email the draft as a pdf.  Dr. Kemenworth was chewed on the whiskers under his lower lip.  He had a full grey beard.  Then, he scribbled a few notes on a small pad of white note-paper.

“Consider this,” he said.  He slid the paper toward her.  Written in pencil were words: Shadows and silhouettes – concealment, disclosure, and Rococo intimacy.  “It’s got the kernel of your idea, the living inspiration,” Dr. Kemenworth said.  “You should look at a writing like LaClos’ Le Liaisons Dangereuses, maybe de Sade – the idea that a silhouette both reveals the profile of a person, but also can be a kind of disguise.  It’s an element of libertinism in the 18th century, intimacy that both conceals and reveals.”  Dr. Kemenworth paused.  His eyes searched her face.  “Do you approve?” he asked.  Elise shrugged.  “It’s a very interesting topic to be sure...” she said hesitantly.  “Very rich,” Dr. Kemenworth replied.  “I have a colleague at Stanford,” he said, “works in the psychology of perception – he’s done some studies: you know it’s amazing what people can read from a silhouette.  You know those things were instruments and, always, connected with love affairs, scandalous liaisons, tokens of affection – the profile shows enough detail so you can guess the identity of the woman (or man for that matter) but the silhouette doesn’t name, it harbors some degree of anonymity.  It turns love-making into a game of blindfolds, peeping, voyeurism.  Reveals and doesn’t reveal.  Everyone has to know about the love affair, but, at the same time, no one can really know.”

Dr. Kemenworth was excited by this thesis and, now, was improvising.  He licked his lips.  Elise looked over to see that the door to his office remained open – it seemed that his rhetoric was on the verge of causing him to rise, wink at her, and draw shut the door so that they would be together alone in the sun-flooded office among the books and framed postcards and the satyr on the mug showing a slight corkscrew of an erection while the shepherds on the computer peered disconsolately at the inscription on the tomb.  Elise thought to herself that if Dr. Kemenworth was so excited about the idea, then, he should write the book himself.  But she smiled and blushed a little and recalled to him that the very origins of representation were involved in lovemaking.  Pliny the Elder, she said, traced the beginnings of art to Butades, the potter of Sicyon, who made a ceramic relief of the profile of his daughter’s lover after he observed her using a stylus to inscribe the outline of the young man’s shadow on a plaster wall.  “Yes, indeed,” Dr. Kemenworth said.  “The origin of black figure pottery.”   Elise gestured with the back of her hand to the mug with the rampant satyr portrayed on its side.  There was no point arguing with him.  Some things are best accomplished by ostensible agreement and, then, a slight adjustment, a little revision, as it were, triangulating good intentions in one direction with inclinations toward another outcome.  Everything is imprecise in Academia (and Hollywood) until the work is done and published and, even, then, outcomes may be a bit blurry.

“These are excellent ideas,” Elise said.  “I will think about this and adapt my thesis.”

“Very good,” Dr. Kemenworth said, preening a little and clearly pleased with himself.  He was pretty enough to be in movies himself.  Was he, perhaps, gay?

But he rose and moved toward the door opening into the white corridor and, so, Elise also rose and moved even more quickly, cutting him off at the threshold of his office before he could shut the door.  She thanked him and shook his hand – it was more than a little moist and made her hand feel unclean.

2.
Actually, Dr. Kemenworth’s idea was productive and Elise found that it was not difficult to research the subject.  The publication by the perceptual psychologist at Stanford was particularly helpful and, after Dr. Kemenworth had made appropriate internet introductions (something that he had insisted upon), Elise communicated with the researcher by email, now and then, sending him inquiries that the psychologist seemed please to answer.  On a couple occasions, Dr. Kemenworth suggested that they drive up the coast together to meet with Dr. Mrose at Stanford.  Elise rejected these invitations but continued to communicate with Dr. Mrose. 

One of Mrose’s research interests was the use of silhouettes as diagnostic tools.  He emailed Elise that the manufacturers of corsets, for instance, made much use of silhouettes both as advertising and in the design of their products.  A corset, after all, was intended to stylize and beautify the female body, contouring it to match an idealized silhouetted form.  Notions of fitness prevalent in the 19th century frequently invoked the notion of the silhouette and some physicians thought that they could diagnose illness, particularly maladies such as consumption, from the shadow-graph of the afflicted person.  Dr. Mrose emailed Elise that he had pursued the notion of health, fitness, and the shadow-graph to rare printed sources in the 18th century, volumes, perhaps, apposite to her doctoral dissertation.  After some hesitation, she decided to invest in a flight to San Jose, arranging to meet Dr. Mrose at his office near the Stanford Medical Center. 

Dr. Mrose offered to pick her up at the airport but Elise opted for a rental car, an unwieldy SUV encircled by blind spots that made driving on the congested highways problematic.  The psychologist’s office was inside a bleached-white one-story structure that looked a bit like military barracks – in fact, after World War One, the building had been relocated to the edge of the campus from Camp Fremont in Menlo Park.  There was a veranda and a pitched shingled roof and the wooden floors, smooth with a starched aspect, creaked underfoot.  A redwood handicap-access ramp flanked the building and a big eucalyptus tree made the shade fragrant.  Taller, modern structures loomed overhead linked by the lanes of pale white sidewalks. 

“Welcome to my bungalow,” Dr. Mrose said to Elise, shaking her hand.  It was airy inside, scented medicinally by the eucalyptus.  Dr. Mrose explained the building’s history.  “It’s a relic,” he said. “Left over from the days of Ken Kesey.”  Elise smiled.  She didn’t recognize the name.  “The cuckoo’s nest,” Dr. Mrose said helpfully.  She flashed her ingratiating smile at him again.  The reference didn’t mean anything to her – perhaps, he was alluding to an old Jack Nicholson movie.

Dr. Mrose kept fit with a stand-up desk, tilted like a workplace for a mechanical draftsman.  He stood, seeming to hover anxiously over her, while she sat on a kind of wooden pew, hard but not uncomfortable, cradling her bottle of water in her lap.  They talked about her project and Dr. Mrose offered her some advice, annotating, as it were, a bibliography that he dictated.  Elise took notes.  It was quiet in the outer office where several work-study students were reading in their text-books while manning phones that didn’t ring.  Dr. Mrose voice was high-pitched with a faint drawl that she couldn’t place.  His skin had an olive tint, although, perhaps, this was just the diffuse light in his office -- a jalousie window was half-closed so that it’s slats made a lattice shadow on his carpet, an old, threadbare Persian rug.  Everything about the psychologist was a little blurry, soft focus: Elise couldn’t fix his age (he was probably younger than he looked).  He was wearing a polo shirt stretched tight across his broad chest and his hands had long, tapering fingers with nails obviously manicured.  He was probably a short man although this didn’t register exactly with Elise – Dr. Mrose just seemed compact to her.  His hair was short-cropped but very curly, fashioned into a tight bonnet of ringlets and spiral locks, that Elise found both striking and attractive – it gave him something of the aspect of a faun, an archaic figure sculpted from old, polished marble.

After a while, they walked to a nearby building a sort of hospital commissary, but with an elegant café overlooking a cantilevered metal balcony overlooking the tables below where nurses and doctors and a few pajama-clad patients were eating.  Wine was available and Dr. Mrose tempted her to a glass of locally made Chardonnay. Then, they walked back to the bungalow-cottage under the big eucalyptus tree.

“I have something I want to show you,” Dr. Mrose said.  He led her down a hallway to a porch that had been enclosed and boarded to make a storage room.  It was a little dusty and the psychologist sneezed once or twice.  He pointed to an old easel, an upright frame mounted atop a wooden tripod. 

“Do you know what this is?” he asked.

Elise shook her head.

“It’s an apparatus for making silhouettes, quite old, in fact – it was once owned by the Winchester family,” Dr. Mrose said.  “But I think it was made in Nice... Nice, France.”

He moved the easel into the middle of the floor and, then, spread the tripod legs hinged below the open wooden frame.  Wood pieces were jointed together to make a rectangular opening, that was, in turn, edged inside with thin, enameled pieces of fine, laminated mahogany around an open oval aperture.  The oval opening set within the square frame was about two feet long and eighteen-inches wide.  Some  brass brackets on hinges outlined the aperture.

“You put a light source, a candle let’s say, over in this direction,” Dr. Mrose said, pointing to a place about five feet from where he had opened the tripod.  “The subject sits between the light and this frame and casts her shadow onto translucent paper stretched between these brackets.  The operator stands behind and traces the shadow...the profile cast on the paper.  I’ve tried it myself.  It’s works wonderfully.  That’s how silhouette profiles were made in the late 18th century and, apparently, thereafter around here.”

“Is it rare?”

“Not really.  A lot of older art institutes have these things.  No one uses them anymore, of course, and most people don’t know what they are.  Can’t identify them.  I happened on this one at an auction.  I don’t think the auctioneer knew what it was.”

“It’s wonderful,” Elise said.

Dr. Mrose folded the tripod again and slid the apparatus back into it’s place between a mannequin and a portable basketball hoop mounted on wheels.

In his office, Dr. Mrose showed her sheets photocopied from rare books – silhouette images of corseted women and bustle-dresses.  The bustles looked like bells and the corsets constricted waists into tight hourglass profiles. 

“That looks punitive,” Elise observed.

“Not healthy,” Dr. Mrose agreed.

“You should look at the materials in the pathology library,” Dr. Mrose told her.  He shuffled papers on his credenza.  “I thought I had copies here,” he said.  “But apparently no longer.”

“What do they show?”

“Silhouettes of people with some really ghastly ailments.  You need to review Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente – it’s a book published in London, but the edition here is printed in German.  You’ll see how the scientific silhouette was deployed for diagnostic purposes.  It’s sort of ...haunting, I guess.  There’s one book in particular.”  (He turned to his computer and flipped through some tightly printed pages.)  “I can print this for you.”

The printer behind him hissed and, then, a tongue of paper appeared.

“You see,” he said.  “De Boilly – Recueil Silhouette: Physiognomy de la Maladie.  They have a copy at the pathology library.  You should take a look – it’s quite remarkable to see how silhouettes were made to characterize all sorts of illnesses.”

Elise nodded.

“I can take you,” he said.  “It’s about a ten-fifteen blocks away.”

“Oh, no,” Elise said.  “I don’t want to be an imposition.”

“Not at all,” Dr. Mrose said.

“I will walk over there tomorrow morning,” Elise said.  Dr. Mrose rummaged in his desk for a campus map.  He found one, circled the library and slid it to her.

“I’ll call and get you reading privileges,” Dr. Mrose said.  “They can be a little touchy about the collection.  But one condition –“ he paused.

“Yes?” Elise asked.

“You report back to me as to your findings,” Dr. Mrose said.

“It will be my pleasure,” Elise told him. 

3.
The medical center parking was buried underground and the concrete ramps smelled of exhaust and spilled gasoline.  The ceilings were high enough that Elise didn’t sense any danger to the top of the big SUV that she had rented, but there were many cars and the spaces were tight and she had to spiral to follow the ramp down several levels before she found a place to park.  Nearer the surface, there were vacant spaces but they were assigned to physicians or patients requiring particularly sinister kinds of treatment.

Square buildings with windows the color of a big plasma Tv shut down for the night hovered over leafy plazas.  Fountains with stucco basins splashed and all elevated level surfaces had been studded with metal rivets to repel skateboarders.  The pathology library was an old building, built Mission Revival style so that it looked a bit like the Alamo.  A skyway between higher levels of the adjacent hospital buildings spanned the space over the library so that mustard-colored building seemed framed by a big, gleaming lintel, translucent so that Elise could see patients there, some of them pulling intravenous bags slung on stanchions, moving slowly as if sleep-walking.  Some flowers flared around the base of the library like tentative flames.  The facade was a terra-cotta fantasia of columns adorned with carved ivy surmounted by an arched bell-gable.  Elise entered the library through an arch gaping like the mouth of a corpse. 

The place smelled of old books and disinfectant.  At the service kiosk, Elise stated her name and learned that the reliable Dr. Mrose had secured reading privileges for her.  Except for staff, no one was around.  Research of this kind, Elise thought, is now mostly performed on-line and the library, an enfilade of dim rooms, lit mostly by lamps at the oak tables, seemed obsolete, hushed as if to conceal itself from the technology that had made it an anachronism.  Another work-study student, chastened by the gloom in the library, sulked behind a desk.  She seemed to regard Elise’s presence as a personal affront but, nonetheless, brought her the volumes recommended by Dr. Mrose.  The books were rare and delivered with blue surgical gloves, very sheer and tight-fitting, and Elise was instructed to wear them when she turned the pages.

First, she looked at Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente, a large folio in which some of the pages were detached.  She didn’t know German but could use her cell-phone to decipher some of the descriptions of the plates.  Most of the explanatory text eluded her.  The silhouettes were life-sized and printed in velvety-dark ink.  Each image was like a cistern into which you looked, straining your eyes.  Elise typed some notes into her lap top.  Because the library was next to the hospitals, sirens intermittently wailed outside.

Recuil Silhouette: Physiognomie de la Maladie was a smaller book bound in unpleasant-looking yellowish leather.  The binding had a mummified aspect, brittle at the front- and back-board edges, and was surprisingly slippery.  The end-papers were elaborately marbled with gem-colored designs that would have been hypnotic if Elise had lingered over them.  The silhouettes depicted all sorts of hideous conditions, profiles melted by leprosy and syphilis.  The marks impressed into the cream-colored pages glistened like spilt oil and seemed almost iridescent.  Several of the prints tipped-into the book made Elise gasp with horror.  She looked away to see if anyone had heard her, but the table where she sat, turning the book’s pages with her blue surgically gloved fingers was at the center of a room that was empty and, through the cloister-arch into adjacent rooms, Elise saw that those places were unpeopled as well.  She seemed entirely alone.  The gloves interfered with her ability to type on her lap-top.  The words that she tried to record were gibberish, strings of meaningless letters.  Her heart was racing.

Some of the silhouettes depicted whole bodies, bent almost double, hoop-shaped, or with grotesquely elongated limbs or throats like stems on which hideous heads sprouted.  The images were an affliction to Elise and she considered closing the book and sending it back into the depths of the library.  But she was working, had come here for a purpose and not mere prurient curiosity, and so thought it best to soldier forward.  Taking a deep breath, she focused on making notes, objective descriptions or, at least, aids to the memory, and, because her touch was disrupted by the gloves, she typed on her laptop very slowly and deliberately.  The alarming aspect of the engravings was that they had the aspect of photographs – light had haloed a specific person with a particular disfiguring malady and that same light, as real as the beams from the desk-lamp, had participated in taking the picture of the unfortunate patient.  Accordingly, the silhouettes had a presence very different from a sketch or lithograph, indeed, possessed an aura even more powerful than a photograph.  Of course, a photograph warranted the truth but these silhouettes displayed something that more alarming – they were the precise fingerprints of horror pressed into the pages of the book.

Near the end of the volume, she encountered a silhouette that was very hard to interpret. The caption, printed in italic type, said: Dame de visage du Cafard.  Elise didn’t know the word Cafard.  She took out her cell-phone and removed her surgical gloves to access the internet.  The data connections in the library seemed very slow.  She looked back to the profile, a sort of chaos blotted onto the page.  The image seemed to show a microcephalic skull, oddly crowned with some black filament, and an inhuman jaw like a rasp half concealed under a protuberance that might have been an eye half-expelled from its socket.   It didn’t seem to Elise that anyone could live with that sort of disfigurement and she wondered whether the profile didn’t depict some kind of horribly mutilated corpse.  Cafard meant “cockroach.”

Elise used her cell-phone to photograph the page.  The phone flashed, something that she thought must be strictly forbidden among these rare books.  She half-expected someone to rush to her table to reprimand her, and, in fact, would not have felt offended, but rather relieved if a staff member had appeared.  But no one came.  Outside a siren wailed.  Elise flipped through the rest of the book without wearing the gloves.  It didn’t matter and, perhaps, the horrible thing was best destroyed, eaten away by the oils and acids in her fingertips.     

4.
The restaurant was Italian.  But it was neither charming nor romantic.  Elise appreciated Dr. Mrose’s tact in selecting a place with a post-modern design – bare butcher-block tables without white linen, iron girders overhead exposing HVAC ducting, the kitchen’s stainless steel counters and coolers where chefs were working in flashes of fire and puffs of steam also open to the dining room.  Dr. Mrose said that the place was always “eerily empty” and told Elise that he suspected that it was some kind of money-laundering operation for the mob, a declaration made tongue-in-cheek, although the psychologist’s wit was so dry that she wasn’t entirely sure whether he was teasing her or serious.   And, in fact, only a few tables were occupied when they entered – there were more waiters and kitchen staff than customers.

After some wine, they talked about Elise’s work at the Wallace Collection.  She traced connections between Impressionists like Renoir and Degas and the paintings of Boucher and Fragonard.  The conversation became a bit rococo itself – Elise spoke of the art of love in 18th century France, the science of attraction, “elective affinities” as Goethe characterized such impulses, and the great courtesans of the era.  She was well aware of where these words were leading her.  But, Dr. Mrose was very reserved, even reticent, and she didn’t sense anything unpleasantly overt about his responses. 

Her car was parked at his office.  He drove her back to the bulky SUV parked curbside near the strange soldier’s bungalow in which he worked.  Dr. Mrose said that he would make a cup of coffee before she attempted to navigate the unfamiliar roads back to her hotel.  He told her that it was stuffy in the building, the season before air-conditioning was necessary, but when the days could be rather warm.  She was relieved that he didn’t ask her to go inside.  But she needed to use the toilet and, so, he unlocked the door, said he would make the coffee, and pointed down the hallway to a bathroom which she had, in fact, used the day before.  When she emerged, Dr. Mrose suggested she sit on the veranda while he brewed the coffee.  She went outside in the overwhelming perfume of the big, scaly eucalyptus tree on the lawn.   A siren wailed and some dogs barked.  Dr. Mrose came onto the porch carrying a candle and the tripod-frame for making silhouette tracings.  He lit the candle and placed it on the redwood rail.  Dr. Mrose, then, set the tripod behind Elise so that her shadow fell on the window-shaped frame with oval opening.  He unrolled some tracing paper and clipped it in place.  The coffee was ready and he went back into the building.  A pedestrian passing by looked curiously at the candle and the tripod with the paper taut over the frame.

After returning to veranda, Dr. Mrose handed Elise a mug of coffee and, then, standing behind her, out of her range of sight, outlined her profile on the tracing paper.  She heard his thick piece of black chalk scraping at the paper.  It was suddenly very still.  The chalk scratched on the paper and she heard her breath as a rhythmic whisper, a breeze in the tree, footsteps somewhere and a cough, traffic murmuring on some distant thoroughfare like waves surging against a rocky shore. 

The coffee was strong.  It sharpened her senses.  She felt a slight trickle of sweat under her ear and the breeze caressing her there.  “See how it works!” Dr. Mrose announced to her, releasing the clips, and, then, tearing the paper.  The ripping sound was disquieting, violent.  He showed her the profile that he had traced from her shadow.  The candle flickered a little. 

The profile was very flattering.  Her features looked classical, the outline of a marble goddess.

Elise turned to Dr. Mrose to thank him.  His eyes were glittering against the olive of his brow.  The candle burning on the porch railing cast a shadow of Dr. Mrose against the white lathe siding next to the cottage door.  For an instant, Dr. Mrose’s tightly curled hair seemed like a cap of snakes writhing atop his skull.  It was just a trick of the light, the candle’s flicker animating the snakes for a instant.  His secret was revealed but, then, the tangled wreath of serpents flattened and she saw that his profile was shapely, handsome, well-proportioned.

It was enough.  She was sure that Dr. Mrose would be unable to hold his tongue, that he would report on their date and its outcome to that loathsome Dr. Kemenworth.  Her doctoral advisor’s pride would be wounded and he would retaliate against her in some way and things between them would become deeply unpleasant and contentious.  She knew that she was more intelligent than Dr. Kemenworth, more ingenious, and imaginative as well, but he was her advisor and had control over her future and she couldn’t risk upsetting him at this juncture in their relationship.  And, in any event, the thing with Dr. Mrose would turn out to be botched, a mere daub, not worthy of framing, a bagatelle that would turn into some kind of serious misfortune that would haunt her, probably, for several years.  Men were apt to take such things far more seriously than they should – it was a matter of amour propre.

The silhouette was quite beautiful and Elise asked if she could keep it.  “Oh, yes,” Dr. Mrose said.  “It is for you and you alone.”  Elise had finished her coffee.  She rolled up the paper into a tight cylinder.  Then, she asked him if she should bring her coffee cup back inside the bungalow.  Dr. Mrose told her he would manage.  She shook his hand – it was warm and firm.  He looked a little surprised and opened his eyes very wide to embrace her with his gaze.  Then, she thanked him for everything, made certain promises about contacting him in the next few weeks, and slipped sideways into the fragrant night.

At the hotel, she stood in front of the mirror in her bathroom.  It was the sort of mirror that magnifies its reflections.  The light in the bathroom was profoundly unflattering, a harsh clinical glare better suited to a surgery than a hotel room.  Elise thought that her eyes bulged too much, that her cheeks were a little sunken, and that there was something uncanny and unpleasant about the shape of her mandible.  The skull beneath her skin recommended itself to her in the mirror.

She had nightmares about the book in the pathology library and felt uneasy and, even, slightly nauseated when she awoke the next morning.  Perhaps, it was a hangover.  There were sulfites in the red wine and these didn’t always agree with her. 

5.
She was up early.  There was a McDonald’s down the street and she ate an Egg and Sausage McMuffin.  Her flight from the airport at Burlingame near San Francisco wasn’t until 4:30 in the afternoon and so she decided to drive up to the Sequoia grove across the Golden Gate at Muir
Wood. 

The great bridge reminded her of Vertigo, a movie that she disliked.  Mist was draped around the bare, cold-looking Marin headlands. Elise had been to the park many years earlier with her father. When they walked among the towering trees, he told her that they were like tiny bugs crawling through the tall grass. She had memories about how to reach the place but those recollections were faulty and, several times, she had to pull off the road to look at the map on her cell-phone.  She missed the park entrance off Highway 1 and found herself overlooking a cold beach where grey waves rolled against grey sand under a slumping canopy of fog – at sea, a foghorn wailed.  Elise retraced her route, found the entrance and passed the Zen Center in the canyon notch in Mount Tamalpais.  The winding park road was blind with mist but she drove forward, distance elongated in the fog, curving around wooded slopes until she reached the park gate.  Normally, the park was painfully crowded and visitors to the sequoias had to ride buses from remote parking lots to reach the trees.  But this morning was mid-week, early, and the fog was inclement so that no on was manning the pay-kiosk at the ranger station.  The road into the ravine with the tall trees was empty and she was able to park close to the trail-head.  Only a few other vehicles were in the lot, several  shabby old vans fitted-out surfer style and a VW bus with a Grateful Dead bumper sticker – “tree-huggers,” Elise thought.   

The path to Cathedral Grove was wet and the fog was so dense that she could only see the curving ramparts of the trees, all grizzled and split with dark alcoves, but nothing above her head was visible where the grey mist hung like a ceiling.  She walked for a few minutes and, then, it occurred to her that this stroll was, perhaps, dangerous – she was all alone in the woods and her footsteps made a dull, hollow thudding sound that seemed to echo.  She was conscious of her breathing as well, a rasping sound, and she wondered how far she had come from the parking lot and whether the inhabitants of battered, vaguely sinister-looking vehicles behind her were stirring now, maybe, trailing her in the foggy woods. Several times, she thought she heard footfalls, either ahead of her or behind, but she couldn’t see anyone nearby and the distance was covered with a pall of fog.  If there were predators, then, she was prey.  It was an odd notion: what preyed on female pre-doctoral interns at the Getty?  She inhaled sharply: everything apparently.

The sun pushed its beams through the ground mist and, for a moment, her shadow preceded her encircled by an iridescent glory, prismatic and glistening around the shape of her head and shoulders cast against the screen of water droplets in the air.  She stopped to admire the phenomenon, but it was transient and, then, the trees with their russet trunks caught the light and were radiant and she could, suddenly, see upward along the great arching bridges of lightning-chiseled trunk to the green canopy poised against the blue sky. 

The ravine was suddenly alive with light and shadow.  Fallen trees with bearish, uprooted stumps menaced the trail.  She turned to examine the texture of a trunk next to her, spread out her fingers to stroke the bark and saw several black ants prospecting in the flaking, splintery grooves.  The shadow of her head like a dark globe was projected against the side of the tree, trembling a little and blurry with the exhalations of mist still troubling the air. 

Then, there was something else, another shadow blurry at first but expanding as something approached from behind her.  She flinched a little and saw the shadow cast by her skull twitch.  The other shadow condensed into a dark blot on the tree.  The form was that of a tiny bulbous protrusion above hunched shoulders, a tumor with strands emerging from its brow and an irregularly shaped jaw with palps, perhaps, like a spider or a beetle.  Elise stood very still, holding her breath.  The cold air tingled on the back of her neck.  The shadow was now next to her, cast onto the rugged screen of the redwood, a little below the height of her own head.

Whatever it was, the thing was very near.  Elise thought that she should turn and confront the apparition but she was too frightened.  For a long moment, she stood motionless, staring into the dark shadow next to her silhouetted profile.  Elise heard the thing stirring a little behind her.  It was very close.  Then, the thing made a high-pitched squeaking sound complicated by a kind of buzz.  This was too much for her to bear and Elise ran, without looking over her shoulder, ran and ran, gasping for breath, until she reached the big SUV glistening with dew in the parking lot. 



 

Degringolade

1.
So it fell.

So it fell unseen, dropped from a pocket or satchel.  The thumb-drive lay on a side-walk, near an intersection, under the feet of people hurrying about their business.  How long it was lost, undisturbed amidst the rest of the world’s trash in that Asian metropolis is unknown and unknowable, because the drive is permanently lost now, destroyed, although innumerable copies of the code on that device (as we all know) exist and have been transmitted and broadcast and analyzed ad infinitum.  What is known is that some someone, noticing the thumb drive fallen to the ground, retrieved the thing and carried it home and out of the idle curiosity that, as we know kills the cat, inserted the drive into his or her or their or its computer with the result that the malicious virus harbored in that device contaminated first that computer, then, other computers with which it was networked, spreading at the rate of 6 to 11 megabytes per second through the World Wide Web until almost every computer in the world was infected, then, making the leap onto cell-phones, I-pads, voice-mail messaging systems, programmable toasters and coffee-makers, Siri and Alexa systems, home security networks including surveillance equipment, camera-eye door-bells, computerized HVAC, and, at last, medical devices including implantable difibrillators and pace-makers, and, thus, becoming the first cybernotic disease, arcing across the man-machine interface into the human population where the virus spread inexorably although much less efficiently because machines made of lymph, muscle, and bone are far less effective in the transmission of data than their computer counterparts.

This is not to say that you couldn’t catch the virus from human-to-human contact.  In fact, I think I was infected the old fashion way – that is, by opening a malicious program on my laptop, providing some identifiers that I should have kept confidential, and, then, clicking on the wrong icon.  Once the disease infects the system, there’s no predicting how you will get it.

2.
The nascent phase of the infection lasts, at least, eighteen days, in some instances twice that amount of time.  During the first half of the incubation period, the victim is asymptomatic although virulently infectious.  Later, a headache manifests, then, sniffles, and a sore throat with coughing.  Dramatic pathology doesn’t present until the last quarter of the incubation phase.  Mortality rates are significant although many survive.  The disease is almost unknown among infants, children, and, even, adolescents.  Plastic effects of the pathology necessarily require adult bone structure and muscle/soft tissue distributions to sculpt the victim in accord with the disease’s code.

The progression of the disease is idiosyncratic and unpredictable.  No single account should be deemed definitive.  Therefore, you should read this narrative with caution.

3.
Our town is twenty miles beyond the mountain pass on the edge of the Red Rock desert.  The desert begins to the north of where we live, at the higher altitudes in the basin.  Industrious pioneers irrigated the basin’s lower elevation south of town.  In season, the land is green with a patchwork of fields criss-crossed by canal.  The canals are the width of a sidewalk, lined with cement with mossy bottoms about four feet below grade.  An intricate system of weirs and overflow channels conveys snow-melt from the mountains into the irrigation system.  Since the town is dry with no on-sale booze on offer, road crossings in the cultivate area are adorned with small supper clubs with liquor bars and roadhouses.  Our town was founded by Mormons, or more properly stated, the Latter Day Saints and there are enough parish wards in the city to warrant a “stake” as it is called – a larger Church with white columns and an equally white pointed steeple aimed like a needle at the sky.

Before I became sick, I drove a delivery truck in the basin.  My routes took me most everywhere between the parallel ranges of mountains that define our valley.  Eight mile from town, amidst the barren buttes and canyons of the red rock desert, the army maintains a proving ground, although there haven’t been any tests in that place for several decades.  Beyond the proving ground, the roads degrade to gravel and, then, the gravel turns to dirt tracks in the foothills where the Wild Horse Range is located.  You can drive a jeep into the stony hills and hunt antelope on the flanks of the escarpment.  I traveled there often when I was younger.

One afternoon, driving with some parcels for the military post, I encountered a dozen khaki-colored bulldozers flattening out an eroded pinkish hillside.  Where the bulldozers had completed their work, a fleet of olive green dump trucks were pouring concrete, as if making a broad runway on an airport in the desert.  I asked a couple workers what they were doing, but the men told me it was “very hush-hush.”  A few days later, the concrete slabs were in place and cranes were lifting pre-fabricated walls into place, setting the pale yellow and blue panels into slots in the cement.  Many men in fatigues were working at the site and turquoise-colored porta-potties were arranged at intervals near the construction.  Closer to town, the bulldozers and dump trucks were installing more slabs, but this time, in fact, as a long narrow runway.  I knew that the concrete was intended for planes because already there were orange air-socks mounted on steel poles and inflated by the wind and, at the end of the construction site, a make-shift control tower with thick conduits of electrical wire running from a dozen big diesel generators protected by high fences topped with coils of razor-wire.  Along the road, I passed ranks and ranks of planter boxes, each cradling a scoop of gravel and a single green, heart-shaped succulent plant.  The little plants were livid green and looked artificial but when I stopped to inspect, I could see that they were real, moist with thick rubbery leaves like an artichoke.  An officer in a jeep stopped by my truck and asked if he could help me.  “What are the plants for?” I asked.  “Each bay in the field hospital will have a house plant,” the officer said, blinking at me through his sunglasses.  “It’ll make the rooms more appealing,” the officer said.  Then, he put his jeep in gear and drove away.

No one was saying much about the epidemic at that point.  Apparently, the big cities were hard hit, but the nature of the disease was still mostly vague to us.  The officials didn’t want anyone to panic.

4.
Then, the jets began to land, military transports by the look of things.  The wall of mountains forced the planes to descend steeply, plunging like meteors out of the sky.  Nose-down the planes dropped on us, pulling up at the last moment to skid along the desert tarmac.  Slipstream from the transport jets kicked up eddies of red desert that the wind molded into little dust devils.  Ranks of limousines were waiting along the runway, long black vehicles with sleek silhouettes, and this fleet of cars chauffeured the people from the planes, no doubt shaken-up by the dive into the basin, out to the pre-fab field hospital.  Suddenly, there were military doctors in town, mostly Indians with round horn-rim glasses, but also a few Black women.  We saw them fueling up at the gas stations and, sometimes, eating steak at one of the road-houses in the irrigated part of the county.  The doctors kept to themselves and, even if you bought them drinks or shots of tequila, they were close-mouthed about the contagion.  It was all mysterious but good for the local economy and the merchants in town, the Target and the Walmart were all flush with cash.

A delivery took me out past the improvised hospital, along the graded gravel road to the trailer and quonset hut on Wild Horse Range.  Returning across the red rock desert, I met a hitchhiker slouching at the side of the freshly poured asphalt lane to the medical facility.  It was late afternoon and the shadows were lengthening and the man next to the road was dressed in black so that, from a distance, it wasn’t clear where his dark boots ended and his long, slender shadow began.  The man’s head was blurry with black whiskers close-cropped on his chin and his sideburns bushy and flared down his cheeks which seemed hollow, although this was, perhaps, just a trick of the oblique light in the stubble on the side of his face.  The hitchhiker beckoned and I pulled onto the shoulder of the road.  Although the red rock desert radiates heat like an oven, wiggly thermals over the blacktop, the air was cool above the ground even a little chilly.  The man looked familiar to me – his eyes were narrow, as if squinting in the sunlight, although this was just the way his eyelids were constructed, a hint of the Asian east in his face and slight snarl of his lips.  Where had I seen this man before?  I couldn’t exactly place him, although he seemed to me to be a movie star.  He muttered something to me, and pointed vaguely into the distance where the blue foothills marched up to the snowy escarpment.  Curiously, his voice was high-pitched, warbling a little.  I looked into his familiar face and wondered why the voice didn’t match the masculine features, the stubble of whiskers, the handsome jaw and the wolf man sideburns.  There was no doubt, that he spoke with a woman’s voice, fruity and seductive.

I was disconcerted and said that I would get help and, then, told him to wait until someone came to pick him up.  The incongruity of his male features and breathy woman’s voice made me uncomfortable.  “Mulholland,” he trilled.  “Which way is Mulholland?”  Then, he curtsied to me as I drove away, watching him twist his torso a little and, then, slump his broad shoulder once again as he stood at the edge of the road.

At the checkpoint for the hospital, I pulled up to the booth and said that a patient was standing on the road to town, about a mile from the facility.  I had placed the actor while driving away from him, but couldn’t think of the name.  “It’s the dude from The Matrix, I said, you know that John Wick guy,” I told the guard.  “Keanu Reeves,” the guard said.  “They all look like Keanu Reeves or Madonna.”  He waved me back from the fence enclosing the hospital.  In the distance, near the building with its pale walls low-slung across the desert, I saw a half dozen people in Kleenex-blue hospital gowns.  Some of them had dark heads, furry like the man I had encountered on the roadside, others showed platinum blonde beehives of hair.

I drove back to the warehouse.  I thought I should have asked for Mr. Reeves’ signature as an autograph.  But, undoubtedly, the actor was very sick.  I looked him up on Wikipedia using my cell-phone.  Yes, that confirmed the identification.

“Listen guys,” I said to the others who were washing their delivery vans.  “I don’t want to start rumors but, you know, at the hospital, one of the patients is Keanu Reeves.”

“Reeves?”  Someone asked.  “Who’s that?”  The man was a Mormon and didn’t go to the movies much.

“Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” I said, “Point Break..”

“I seen those flicks,” the Latter-Day Saint said.

“Keanu Reeves and Madonna too.”

“Madonna?”

“You bet,” I said.  “But don’t go starting rumors.”

The Saint pretended that his pointer finger was a key, locked his lips, and, then, threw the key away.

5.
A few days later, I had a slight fever and my eyes felt as if they were congested with particles of the red rock desert that I couldn’t wash out of them.  At night, my body ached and I couldn’t find a comfortable position in bed, although during the day, I was just a little bit stiff and sore.  I kept thinking of how I had used my cell-phone to look up Keanu Reeves.  The phone seemed filthy to me and so I swabbed it down with moist, disinfectant towelette.

I made some deliveries to the road-houses in the green part of the basin.  The spring snow-melt had filled all the canals so that rippling water caught the mid-day sun and the irrigation ditches were like golden laces suturing up the brown furrowed fields.  My vision was better, more clear, with objects standing out in space as if sculpted – everything seemed more three-dimensional and, when I removed my glasses, I could see even more clearly.  My eyesight was more acutely binocular as if my eyes were migrating to be farther apart and, therefore, more adept at perceiving contours.  I found myself driving at high speeds, lured into greater velocity by my much improved vision and proprioception.  The distant mountain ranges rising above the basin were shaped by deep blue shadow and remote pinnacles that I saw as if through a telescope – it had been years since I had seen the mountains with such clarity and I was stunned by their ornate, chiseled beauty.  My GPS wasn’t functioning exactly as intended and I couldn’t find the addresses that I was seeking.  I had to look at old paper maps that were yellow and torn where the paper folded and, then, re-folded.  At a couple of the taverns marking the intersections in the irrigated land, the owners, who had known me for many years, seemed cool and remote, as if I were a stranger.

That night, my wife told me that I was the most handsome man that she had ever seen, that the years had just made me more desirable and that she loved me passionately.  While we were having sex, she moaned that my cock had become enormous.  The next morning, she begged me to call in sick so that we could spend the morning in bed.  I did as she told me.  “You make love to me,” she said, “just like a movie star.”

By early afternoon, she was exhausted and had fallen asleep.  I went out onto the porch behind the house and looked up at the mountains which were now my delight.  Each shingle, each siding board, each eaves-trough and gutter seemed a distinct thing, a sort of miracle.  My senses were wonderfully acute.  I could hear field mice in tall weeds behind the garage, a mother bat squeaking to her baby in a  hollow oak, the slither of a snake in a dusty ravine a quarter-mile away.  I was full of energy, not tired in the least, and so I called my agent at the delivery warehouse and said that I was feeling better, much better, and asked him for a route.  My agent said that if I stopped at the office, he would have an assignment for me.

I drove the van over to the warehouse, picked up some parcels, programming the addresses into my GPS console.  Apparently, there were some areas in the basin that were no longer connected to the grid – it had something to do with the contagion.  My agent said that I should write down the addresses on a note-pad in case I couldn’t find them on the internet maps.  He asked me if I had done something to change my grooming.  “Dude,” he said, “you look pretty great.”  “I feel great too,” I replied.  I had doused myself in cologne and the stubble of my beard itched a little.

I drove north into the red rock desert.  Planes were landing on the new runway.  The wind had changed and the planes couldn’t simply dive-bomb down onto the tarmac.  Instead, they sailed over the pass, floated over the acres of military hospital and, then, spiraled down, circling at lower and lower elevations out over the sea.  I had trouble locating my drop-offs – my agent was right: there was no service in the more remote parts of the basin and I didn’t recognize the terrain.  The escarpment with its peaks like white, remote clouds over the high rim riven by deep canyons looked unfamiliar.  It seemed that I had come into a part of the San Fernando or Simi valley that was strangely desolate and unpopulated.  I found the addresses that I was seeking by sheer accident.  A big fan of debris washed down from the peaks spread across the basin near the gravel road where I was driving.  Boulders as large as school buses had rolled to distances four or five miles from the elevated mouths of the pour-offs.  The road ended at a shallow wash full of crystalline, pale sand.  I parked my vehicle.  I had to use a toilet, but no toilets were anywhere near me, and, so, I wandered out among the field of boulders, each of them standing apart from the others like great, carved mausoleums.  I squatted in the shade of one of the rocks.  A lizard watched me with a baleful, unblinking eye.  Then, I was nauseated and vomited.  My limbs began to tremble and, when I stood, I felt as if I were about to faint and, so, I crawled a dozen yards away from the noisome mess I had made and lay down in the grey, dusty shadow.  My skin tingled as if ants were crawling over me and my face felt like an ill-fitting mask.  I clawed at my hairy cheeks to see if I could yank the mask off, but it wouldn’t budge.  Then, I fell asleep.

Green dusk enveloped me when I opened my eyes.  The dry chaparral was indistinct and I was surprised to see my car parked on the edge of a ravine a quarter of a mile away.  Someone had been sick near the place where I had napped.  A large black bird swept by overhead.

There was something wrong with my Lamborghini.  It rode rough, like a panel truck.  In the distance, an intersection was marked by a white metal scaffolding bearing aloft a glowing shield advertising gasoline.  I thought that the gas station in the desert had clean lines and was well-lit.  The place would make a good location for a film.  The car was low on gas and the pumps didn’t offer the premium fuel that I ordinarily used.  I went into the station to pay with a card – the card-reader at the pump wasn’t working.  The clerk was a pretty young girl.  She asked me sign the credit card receipt.  Then, she blushed and admitted: “You really didn’t have to sign, Mr. Reeves.  I just wanted your autograph.”  I flashed a grin at her.  “No worries,” I said.  It’s the price of fame.

Most of the city seemed blacked-out, probably because of the virus.  From Mulholland, I could see the red flashing lights of planes circling LAX, but great swaths of the basin were dark.  I found Cahuenga Boulevard and, from there, I could see that the 101 was strangely deserted.  I merged onto the freeway, found an empty lane, and wound out the Lamborghini’s engine a little.  The tires must have been misaligned because the vehicle was still running rough, even at 90 miles per hour.  I exited in the Hollywood Hills and drove to the AFI Silver Theater at Los Feliz and Western.  The traffic remained sparse, accommodating – the night was lush and immense and smelled of eucalyptus and, everything seemed devised for my comfort and pleasure.  The cocktail party at the theater was lavish and I saw many of my friends.  The occasion was the premiere of a documentary film produced by someone that I knew.  I didn’t stay for the screening – I could see the picture later at the producer’s house.  He made that promise to me, beaming with joy that I had come for the premiere.  Some paparazzi took my picture with my arm thrown around my buddy’s shoulder.  Some girls posed with me also and I smiled for the camera.  In this business, you have to be seen or people will forget you.

I didn’t seem to have any small bills in my wallet for the valet who brought my car.  I shrugged and kissed the kid on the cheek.  “I’ll get you next time,” I told the young man.  “No worries, Mr. Reeves,” he said.  I was embarrassed about not having suitable cash.  “You can call me, Keanu,” I said.  The kid gestured at a long black limousine double-parked in the AFI lot.  “Perhaps, you would like to take the limousine,” the young man said.  “Oh no,” I said.  “It’s a nice night for driving and I have deliveries to make on my route.”  The moon had come out and, because the City was mostly dark, the sky was radiant with its silvery light.

Sunset Boulevard was, also, deserted.  Sometimes, at the traffic semaphores, I waited alone for the lights to change.  A few yellow taxis slipped away from the avenue, exploring side streets where restaurants and bars glittered.  The sultry breezes whispering down the canyons were overwhelmed with the scent of eucalyptus.  I found the Gallery where there was a gala opening.  Again, I surrendered the Lamborghini to the attendant at the postage-stamp-sized parking lot next to the gallery.  The artist had ingeniously remade the place (it had been night-club before) to look like a roadhouse out in the country.  The installation was perfect, simulating a supper club in a rural part Kansas or Manitoba.  The place was crawling with agents pushing various properties.  I spoke with several of them and, then, the manager of the place posed with me.  His wife, a younger man with Sanskrit letters tattooed on his throat under his ear, came from behind the bar, whispered in the manager’s ear, and, then, presented his cheek to me.  I kissed him there while people took cell-phone pictures that made bright sparks in the gloom.  The tattooed man was wearing some kind of dangly earring that interceded between my lips and his cheek.  As I stood under the awning, beckoning to the valet, I licked blood off my lower lip.  I felt as if someone had punched me, but, how could this have happened?  It must have been an encounter with that sharp, pendulous earring.  Again, I had no cash to tip, the valet.  “I’ll get you next time,” I told the young man.  He grinned at me.  “No worries, Mr. Reeves,” he said.  A big black limousine glided from the shadows.  The chauffeur got out and extended his hand to me.  I was confused but shook it.  “Did you want to ride?” he asked with a Russian accent. “No,” I said.  “I have my car.”  The chauffeur looked sad.  He reached up and tapped his finger to the brim of his cap as a kind of salute.

The Glenlivet in my belly made me feel a little dizzy and I was ravenous.  Except for a couple of shrimp at the AFI premiere, I hadn’t eaten anything.  For some reason, there had been no hors d’oeuvres at the art gallery opening.  I was supposed to meet Madonna at a seafood place in Malibu, the Patio café on the pier.  There was still plenty of time and the moon was high overhead singing to me sweetly and the odor of eucalyptus was so intense that, when I closed my eyes while driving, it seemed that I could navigate by scent alone, keeping the great perfumed trees equidistant on both sides of my Porsche or Lamborghini or whatever it was.  I followed Sunset into Santa Monica, took the roller-coaster hill down below the seaside dirt-cliffs, and, then, turned right on the Pacific Coastal Highway.  No one was driving tonight.  The planes circled lazily in the sky over the airport and a couple of joggers were trotting along the side of the road, a dangerous place to run in this gloom.  I winged one of them with the left front of my car and watched him spinning like a top in my rear-view mirror.  It was his fault and there was no reason to stop for a minor accident.

I knew Malibu Seafood and the Patio Café from a trip to the West Coast with my parents when I was a boy.  The place looked different from what I recalled – an austere building on stilts over the sounding sea.  The facade had white pillars and there was a pointed steeple over the entrance.  The parking lot was empty and there were no lines of tourists waiting to be seated near the front door.  As soon as I pulled into the lot, where there were many spaces, a valet materialized in front of me, standing like cherub with a flaming sword in the high-beam of my lights.  “I’ll have to park this for you,” the cherub said.  “Can I put your tip on the restaurant bill?” I asked.  “I’m not carrying any cash.”  “Sure, Mr. Reeves,” the young man said.  “Just write down my name next to the figure.”  “Okay,” I said as I handed the keys to him.  He said that his name was Tommy or Billy or Jimmy or something like that.  A couple of long black limousines were parked near the edge of the lot where some wooden steps dropped down to the sandy slope of the beach.  The tide must have been low because the sea was so far away that I couldn’t hear the pounding surf – indeed, it was profoundly silent.  Inside the restaurant, I said that I had come to see the woman who was dining in the reserved room.  The maitre de nodded, gave me an insolent wink, and, then, directed me along a private corridor behind a door next to an oil painting of Jesus with doe-eyes praying at the foot of a pyramid among Red Indians.  It was an odd painting and I thought that the place must be under new management.  Jesus was handsome but I was more handsome and, undoubtedly had a bigger cock.  Madonna was waiting for me in a small room overlooking the vast and deserted beach.  Moonlight shimmered on the dunes.  She looked fabulous, much younger than her actual age with a complexion like porcelain, and she was sipping a cocktail in which a green olive rolled its eye toward her own violet eyes, electric with light.  Her driver was a big bald thug, sipping a Fresca, and, when I was ushered into the room, she made a dismissive gesture and he quietly vanished.  I wondered if I would have sex with her.  It seemed a possibility and, then, I thought that I should have masturbated in the car at the stoplights on Sunset Boulevard so that I wouldn’t come so quickly and could please her with my huge cock.  She extended her pale, cool hand to me and I kissed it.  I ordered a martini like the one that she was drinking – “it’s a dirty martini,” she said, winking at me.  The drink was very strong and I don’t recall what happened next.  Then, someone was helping me stay on my feet in the parking lot.  The valet said that he thought that I should take the long, black limousine home to my place in Topanga Canyon.  ‘No,” I said.  “Let me drive.”  I was sweating heavily and my face was ill-fitting and so I tried to peel it off my skull, but succeeded only in tearing the skin under my ears.  Reluctantly, the cherub with the flaming sword found my panel truck, drove it under my nose, and, then, opened the door for me.  I got in and shut off the car.  “No, no,” the kid said.  “I had left the car running.”  “No worries,” I said.  I fumbled with my keys and tried to insert them into the data-port.  The kid leaned across me and turned on the car.  “Mr. Reeves, I think you should take the limousine,” he said.  “No, I’m fine,” I told him.  “Did you tip me, you know, on the bill?”  “I think so,” I said.  He blinked at me sadly, as if trying to squeeze some tears out of his eyes and, then, I put the car in gear and eased out onto the highway, but I was going the wrong direction and so I had to make a u-turn but there was a median so that I jumped the concrete island and knocked down some stanchions marked with amber reflectors and, then, drove down the road with the cars all honking at me and swerving to the right or left so that I sideswiped several of them and saw sparks shooting up where the metal scraped metal and, then, my vehicle went sideways and crashed into something and I looked down and saw what had happened – I was masturbating, trying to prepare my huge cock for sex with Madonna and, of course, I didn’t want to embarrass myself in the sack with her and, so, the giant thing was in my hands and the car was wrecked on the side of the road and, then, there were kindly-looking cops all around and a man dressed like a paramedic wearing a pale blue surgical mask and he said: “Mr. Reeves, Mr. Reeves, you will have to come with me...” and he lifted me out of the panel van and pushed my penis back in my trousers and I saw a long, black limousine with smoked windows waiting just for me on the side of the road. 

6.
As it turned out, the virus went everywhere it could and spread the contagion across the world.  In the United States and Canada, where the virus sculpted the sick to resemble Madonna or Keanu Reeves, many died.  Men who had the misfortune to be transformed into Madonna, perhaps due to some secret predilection, died at a rate of about 60%.  Women did better – their morbidity was around 30%.  Both men and women shaped by the virus to look like Keanu Reeves did much better – their death rate was 18%.  This was attributed to the fact that Reeves’ was in excellent shape – his athletic performance as the assassin John Wick was instrumental in saving many lives.  After a few months, Google developed a patch for the virus and stopped its spread through computers and cell-phones.  I don’t know exactly how the patch was designed.  I was in a medically induced coma when things improved.

7.
I had been looking for a long time without seeing, looking so long that my eyes were dull and dry from being open for so many hours.  But, then, I started to see and, at first, there was nothing in front of me but a little green plant in a pot with pink gravel, a succulent like a miniature rubber tree.

A deep voice moaned nearby.  The cubicle opened onto the desert and a light bulb blazed above a plank walkway.  Madonna was writhing on a cot next to me, squirming in some kind of sexual ecstasy.  She was burly with merchant marine tattoos on her biceps and pointed breasts.  Beyond the light bulb, there were dark stains on the slick-looking rocks.  The air smelled of rain.

The latches on the buckles binding me were loose and I slipped them off.  Madonna opened her eyes very wide and wheezed.  She reminded me a little of a truck driver that I had known in town.  Her feet and ankles were shoved out from under the sheets and her toe nails were thick, cracked and yellow.  I sat up and felt very dizzy.  I wasn’t sure my legs would support me, but they did and, so, I found some slippers and stepped out onto the veranda, a walkway extending in both directions for several hundred yards, lit intermittently by naked light bulbs screwed into sockets on a long wire strung atop aluminum tent poles.  No one was stirring among these cubicles, although I saw figures in Haz-Mat suits moving like robots in slow-motion closer to the center of the camp where there were more lights, rows of black limousines and jeeps and floodlights splashing beams down on several platforms where I could see computer terminals and battered metal carts of the kind that stewardesses push on airplanes.  In the other direction, someone was coming, heavily masked with an oxygen pack.  I stepped sideways into another cubicle where it was silent except for the faint hum of a respirator.  Two figures, features obscured by plastic masks shaped like shells or bedpan urinals lay motionless in the shadows.  I thought of the fat Madonna undulating next to my bed and, suddenly, I was outside, breathing heavily as I walked away into the desert.

The raw scintillating lights of the compound dropped below a fin-shaped ridge of eroded red rock.  The dark basin spread out before me vast and black in its bowl of mountains.  I followed a jeep track to a sandy place where the ground was disturbed.  The air smelled bad and there was a wire fence wrapped around an aluminum platform stacked with man-sized rubber cocoons.  Three coyotes were scratching at the loose sand, trying to uncover what was buried there.

It was too much to bear.  I tried to run but my legs were too weak.  After falling several times and cutting my knee, I crawled up a steep slope to a grassy terrace where I rested.

Something large and warm was above me.  I opened my eyes.  A horse bent over to nuzzle me.  Several other horses with thick winter manes stood in the wet grass.  The peaks of the mountains were glowing with pale rose light.

I found the gravel road to the headquarter trailer for the Wild Horse Range.  It was still early and no one was at the office.  I sat on the door-stoop until the park ranger arrived in her battered SUV.  She seemed to recognize me.  I stood up and she called me by a name that I abandoned long ago.

8.
A month later, after my recovery, I drove through the green fields to make some deliveries.  The oily- green soybean plants were knee-high and, among the vegetables, work crews were bent over the crops behind old pick-up trucks with their tailgates down.  The day was sweet and fresh and I was happy to be alive.

After my delivery, I stopped to buy a Mountain Dew and use the restroom at a Kwik Trip.  Some steel grain bins lined a railroad track and, beside the gas station, there was a shuttered bar behind a false-front decorated with a bucking bronco.  Another failed tavern was marked with Spanish-language signs inviting passers-by to Pentecostal worship with la Senda Antigua.

I looked at myself in the restroom mirror.  I had lost twenty pounds, but my face fit squarely on my head once more and my shoulders were no longer broad but now round, even a little hunched.  The last vestiges of the sickness were six-pack abs tacked to my scrawny belly like a decal.

The Kwik Trip rented DVDs and I glanced at them.  The movies starring Keanu Reeves had mostly been removed from the shelves.  However, I saw a copy of The Matrix Revisited displayed next to the counter where a girl was making pizzas to be frozen and sold.  The girl’s face was crumpled-up like a crushed kleenex.

Driving back toward town, I suddenly remembered Mulholland Drive and the Silver Theater and, then, the candle-lit private dining room overlooking the Pacific at Malibu Beach.  Deep, painful longing blurred my eyes and I had to pull over to the side of the road as I wept for my lost glamour.

9.
The infected brain is the only tool with which we can survey the disease and its ravages and measure whether we have reached maximum medical improvement.  I have felt a slight fever as I write these words.  Therefore, it is not entirely certain that I am healed.  You will have to be the judge of that.

Lazzaretto

(The doctors pronounced my father’s case hopeless.  He was consigned to palliative hospice care.  Two times a day, a nurse appeared at our house to administer morphine.  The nurse spoke in whispers, something that I found irritating.  Her services were unnecessary a couple days later when my father slipped into a coma.  Death followed shortly thereafter.  The notes below, written in my father’s handwriting, were discovered in his desk about a month after his burial.)




1.
I came up from the sea and the stone docks to the funicular.  Here the sea is very cold.  Icy mist hid the harbor with its ships and hydrofoils.  Foghorns moaned and I heard seals barking on the hollow rocks of an unseen reef. 

The lazzaretto is on the third sea-terrace.  On the lowest terrace, the harbor lifts grey masonry ramparts above the bay.  A pedestrian promenade runs along the half-moon-shaped waterfront, something like a walkway atop a great curving wall.  On the land side, there are guest houses, hospices, hotels where the relatives of the patients await news from above.  There is only space for three parallel and curved boulevards lined with businesses between the sea and the shattered grey cliff that rises to the second terrace.  The most ostentatious and expensive lodgings are along the harbor promenade: doormen in somber livery stand beside the crystalline entrances to the lobbies full of precious works of art and whispering fountains.  Less prestigious places are on the boulevard behind the seaside promenade.  Under the cliffs, where rock falls sometimes slam down from the heights, the motels are cheap and gloomy, fragile-looking edifices of stucco and stick beside the whale-sized boulders dropped in their midst.

The second terrace atop the crumbling cliff, as you can imagine, is occupied by a vast necropolis.  There is no soil on this terrace, just veins of pink and white salt braided over barren rock.  No one is buried under the ground, something that is not our custom in any event, but there are also no mortuary towers.  The dead are entombed in mausoleums, some of them large as houses with columns and arcades and porticos where sculpted ancestors in ancient garb open their arms to greet their dying generations.  Other tombs are smaller, some of them silver geodesic domes or brick shells shaped like hornitos.  It is said that the dead don’t decay in this vast cemetery.  The salt and the icy wind dry the corpses into mummies the color of old leather. 

On the day that I arrived, the icy crystals in the sea fog were less dense in the air at the second terrace and, from the funicular, I could see the grey dissolving overhead and the strange steeples and zinc domes in the city of the dead emerging from the mist.  The funicular car rattled on its 45 degree track and the chains shuddered as we went upwards.  My guts were quivering and I was afraid that some of the gravel in my belly would be dislodged into my urine. 

The cliffs above the necropolis were cleft in many places with flood-ways but there was no water stirring anywhere and the pour-offs were benched with slabs of fallen granite glittering with rock-crystal.  Above the second cliff, the funicular track bent down toward the horizontal.  Here, the air was clear.  I looked back upon clouds of frothing grey mist below. 

Attendants at the station took notice of the medallion around my neck.  The shed over the funicular cars was lined with wheelchairs, steel-ribbed walkers, crutches, even little solar-powered scooters.  Thank god, I was still able to walk, navigating my way slowly and unsteadily, but with determination through the iron and concrete corridors, up the gently inclining ramps to where porters with rickshaws were waiting, shod in rubber boots but otherwise almost naked, hoisting unsafe-looking conveyances in which the men stood between the wooden tongs of their carts. 

The porter took me to my acclimation lodging, with back and front sides furled up during the day.  The tent was suspended from aluminum tubes bolted to a concrete slab.  The privy and shower were screened by khaki-green plastic hanging from a circular track overhead.  The cot was hard and narrow. Ancient carpets with hallucinogenic symmetries woven into them covered the concrete pad.  Several power-points had been installed for laptop computers and cell-phones although I knew that such devices were forbidden in the lazzaretto.  Now, I understood why it was said that if the cure didn’t kill you, the patient would emerge from this place not only healed but robust. 

It was midday and warm, but to my surprise the cold water below in the bay moderated the temperature of the desert and, even during the coldest hour, just before dawn, the air-temperature did not vary by more than a few degrees.  The overwhelming impression of burning heat was the result of the barren desolation of the landscape – not all deserts are hot, although none of them possess much water and, here, it was said that rain fell only once in a decade, although then in catastrophic amounts that gouged deep channels into the cliffs and hilltops. 

Through the open back of my acclimation tent, I could see the lazzaretto rising in steps up the side of the brown gently sloping hillside.  The great ramp of the mountain was covered with what seemed to be ruins of vast extent.  Fallen walls made of clay bricks crisscrossed on the heights overlooking my tent and I could see entrenched pathways, decaying stone steps curving around deep eye-socket-shaped cisterns, grooves and tunnels on ridges where weathered colossi squatted atop huge crumbling thrones, all of these quarries and pits and adobe ramparts the same colorless no-color, a sort of faded brown that brightened to alkali-white where the sun caught the brick ledges and walls.  Open plazas were visible at intervals amidst the huge structure and I could see tiny figures laboriously navigating those sun-bleached squares beneath stone embankments.  On the highest ridge, turrets and towers of ruinous aspect rose against the indifferent no-color sky and the whole disheveled compound, stretching limitlessly to my right and left on the hillside seemed suffused in a single shadowless and clinical light, uniform and without either darkness or glare. 

I looked up to the high obelisks.  It was all the color and texture of ancient bone.  I have been told that most patients required more than 60 days to reach the heights where the cure would be complete.  But some have lingered for years.

In my rucksack, I had a copy of Montaigne’s essays.  I sat on my cot and tried to read.


2.
My father died of the ailment that afflicts me.  The extremity of his distress was such that my poor mother was driven to criminal blasphemy to assist him.  Stones in his urine blocked his pass-way and my father became feverish, jaundiced, writhing in pain.  The discipline of dying overtook our house.  Except for his groans, all was silent, hushed, grimaces upon each encounter and all doors closed upon darkened corridors.  My father had suffered this agony periodically from his fortieth year, but bouts with this illness occurred at ever-diminishing intervals and, at last, became continuous. Instead of making water, he produced blood.  His eyes became yellow and his lips were swollen and cracked.  He didn’t dare drink for fear of what the fluid would do to exacerbate his symptoms and, so, he lay entangled in his sweat-soaked sheets, bare-chested, raging, doomed.

Someone urged my mother to summon a Desecrator and she sent a message through one of our servants (accustomed to unseemly transactions) that the services of such a criminal were required and, indeed, would be handsomely recompensed.  The man came to our house under the cover of darkness, wearing a hood over his head, and he carried a leather bag hiding his tools.  He was a withered little fellow, unhealthy-looking himself, and it seemed absurd to think that there was any healing in him.  Although he extended his hand, no one would shake with him – who knows what foul and nightmarish crimes those fingers had committed.  I stood aside as my mother, her face washed with tears, ushered the wizened Desecrator into my father’s bedroom.  The door stood open for a moment and the man drew back his hood and showed his face.  He had the features of a mummified chimpanzee and his eyes were like those of venomous snake.  His leather bag sagged open and I saw all steel there, horrible blades and pincers, devices that looked like awful instruments of torture.  Then, the door swung shut and my father’s cries increased until they resounded throughout the house and, at last, the Desecrator slunk away, the lap of his trousers girdled with a raw, red streak of blood. 

It didn’t avail and my father was dead before dawn, lying stark and wide-eyed diagonally across his bed.  The authorities were called by a servant to certify the death and the incisions were duly noted.  My mother was questioned but, in this last instance of grief thought that she had nothing to lose and so, stony-faced, refused their inquiries.  But, someone else spoke and, within hours the Desecrator was apprehended – the same servant who had known his whereabouts sent the police to his lair.  The instruments of his surgical trade were everywhere in his home and there were sketchbooks proving that the man had done the unthinkable, dissected corpses to draw maps of their interior organs.  There was no need for a trial: the Desecrator admitted his crimes – on three occasions, he had secured cadavers (a man, woman, and child) and cut through the skin veiling the temples of torso and skull.  Some organs he had extracted, others he had kept in their place and made Polaroid photographs of them for future study.  Musculature and sinew, the pulleys and cords and knotted joints, he had laid bare as well.  The rumor was that his home was noisome with the stench of death and that there were horrible things preserved in formaldehyde on the shelves in his study.  His bag of tools was buried, but not before one of the shears in his kit had been used to cut away all of his fingers.  Then, he was buried chest deep in the public square so that the people in our city could observe as his eyes were gouged out.  Such was the penalty for those who dare desecrate the flesh and expose mysteries that should be known only to the gods. 

My father’s body was wrapped in linen and hauled to the Tower of Darkness on the ridge overlooking the city.  Several Desecrators whose hands had been spared perched like gargoyles atop the high rampart, sun-scorched and ragged   Other mourners were present and each group brought loaves of bread, jugs of water, canned goods with packs of potato chips and beer.  Sixty feet overhead, the mutilated and eyeless Desecrators, all of them with their tongues torn out, signaled to the mourners, crying like rooks, and, then, fumbling to let down the biers upon which the dead were placed.  With the provisions, the corpses were slowly winched up to the top of the concrete tower to be laid out on altars for the birds to devour.  The eye of the sun was blackened by predatory birds whirling in a somber vortex overhead and women wept and, somewhere, a baby screamed inconsolably.  As my father was lifted into the sky, one of his white, limp arms drooped from the bier, an aimless, casual gesture such as a person might make, dipping fingers in water while drifting in a rowboat on a calm lake.   Then, the birds plunged out of the sky, diving down to seize the bodies.  The stained rim of the rampart revealed no secrets and, with their loot, the Desecrators withdrew into their dominion of death and decay. 

I was well until a year ago.  Then, my urine clouded and I passed stones and, of course, my nights were confused with bad memories that came to me in the still darkness.  The doom was upon me, enhanced, it seems, by my mother’s desperate crime twenty-five years before.  As I glared open-eyed into the night, I thought of the secret interior of my body: the grooves and channels, the tubes and pulleys and braided tissue, the crumbling ramparts around each separate faculty, the tiers and hierarchies of function, the whole edifice cracked and eroded under heartless constellations whirling overhead.  When fallen into disarray, it was chaos that could not be mapped.

At the airport, I saw police herding beggars, a sad, motley mob of them, and, amidst those miscreants, I thought I glimpsed the Descrator who had ripped open my father, a white eyeless head, mute, with knuckles for fingers, bird-like with his nose like a withered beak – how could he still be alive?  It was an omen, I thought.

Someone is praying in a nearby tent.  The fan on its tripod sweeps back and forth moving the air that smells of salt and seaweed, the icy breath of sharks patrolling the cold current: we are castaways on a desert island.


3.
Up at dawn: those who can walk, walk.

Everything proceeds in slow motion.  The lazzaretto stirs.  Someone is howling in a stone chamber high on the hill.  The whole place seems to whisper.  Sounds are amplified by the brick plazas but nothing is intelligible.  Gradually, the shadow of the great compound cast over the tents and basilicas of the meeting place withdraws.  The dank chill recedes and the heights are golden with sunshine.  Below the sea keeps heaving fog against the shore and the harbor is like a kettle of steam.

My medallion twitches with digital messages.  Sickness can not be conquered unless understood and, so, there are several lectures scheduled for today.  All messages relayed by medallion must be obeyed.  The display on the medallion congratulates me for completing the 3rd step of the 12 stage healing process.  Apparently, just reaching this place is progress.

My urine is clear today, without any tint of blood.  I feel feverish from a sleepless night, but, in fact, the air here must be salubrious.  This morning, I’m suffused with optimism.

Ancient stone pulpits, tilted boulders carved into chalice-like tribunes rise at intervals along the rim of the cliff overlooking the cemetery below.  Before the sun is too high, speakers take their places in the pulpits and the supplicants sit on benches, also hewn from cold stone, to listen to the mandatory lectures.  Around me, the sick people wheeze and cough and hiss through abscesses in their flesh.  Someone swoons and I can the sound of retching behind a low rock wall.  The lectures seem to activate the symptoms in the supplicants and some of the listeners have to be carried away from the rim of the cliff and the stone lecterns on stretchers.

Sickness, the first speaker tells us, is caused by a misadjustment between the patient’s astral body and his or her physical body.  Where the two bodies don’t properly align, the rhythm of the organism is disrupted and this creates friction in the intelligible body, the thinking and perceiving spirit that arises at the intersection of the other two bodies.  Bad thought ravages the flesh and such thoughts are the outcome of the misfit between astral body and the physical corpus 

In a certain light, it makes sense.  The lecturer, a perky young woman wearing a safari hat against the sun, explains that human beings have skin of various thickness and permeability.  Some are more sensitive to the malign influences of the environment than others.  This variability in the human specimen must also be taken into account.  One of the purposes for the exercises in the healing compound is to toughen the surface of the body, provide it with necessary calluses that otherwise might be absent – this will prevent harmful environmental influences from entering and keep those forces from maladjusting the alignment between astral and physical bodies. 

The sun has boiled away the cold mist beneath our sea-terrace.  The great harbor is open below, like a huge amphitheater and the brothels and nightclubs along the seaside promenade look sleepy in the bright vertical light – I can dimly descry people sweeping out entrances onto the sidewalk and washing the paving stones with buckets of water.  The cemetery below wraps around the harbor, ruinous where boulders have crashed down from our height to shatter the mausoleums.  Some mourners are trekking along a rough, stone-strewn path toward a tiny Greek temple consecrated to the dead.  A stone cherub plays a stone fiddle.

 
4.
The food is not so bad. On my second day, better rested, my appetite has returned.  Perhaps, I haven’t come to die here.

We eat in an underground cafeteria lit by brilliant and clinical florescent lights.  The medallion’s display calls us to our meals. The light is intense and even and it magnifies the symptoms visible on the faces and bodies of the other sufferers.   As is often the case, those with the most garish symptoms are the least ill.  A raw-looking red rash or a second-degree scald or the blisters and pustules of some contagious disease are things that will clear up.  Those dying of ailments of their central core are unblemished.  They sit wrapped in blankets, wanly chewing on viands picked from their plates, almost paralyzed, and, apparently, sunk in deep thought. 

Today’s lecture is about how disease molds the soul.  The disease that you suffer was made for you – it is bespoke like a fine garment.  Karma has enfolded you in this pathology.  If you survive, you will be better for your trial.

The lecture for tomorrow is about the influence of hereditary and the stars. 
   

5.
On the fifth day, I am still without pain.  Perhaps, this admission is unnecessary.  But tomorrow, treatment begins.


6.
A bad night – terrible dreams and a sense of suffocation.  My groin feels all swampy and there are tiny crystals in my urine.  Before dawn: diarrhea.  I’m probably anxious about commencing therapy today.  Listless, I loiter on my cot, watching the fan pushing air as its slowly turns on its axis. 

Everyone knows that treatment begins with “the Slots.”  People have described this part of the program to me and, since I have some tendencies toward claustrophobia, I am apprehensive.  Generally, you aren’t supposed to know what is ahead of you within the Lazzaretto, and therapy is individualized in ways that make the progress through the compound unpredictable.  But, in the dining hall, people have described “the Slots” and, I suppose, those descriptions and my reactions to them are part of the treatment – nothing is accidental here.

Mid-day, a Preceptor appears, a figure clad in white and without discernible gender, lean and with rust-red cheekbones extruding from a gaunt face.  The Preceptor seems a figure from another dimension and he or she leads me from the sleeping tent along the causeway between the crumbling buttresses and ramparts of the Lazzaretto and the stone pulpits where instructors are preaching to crowds of ill people blinking nervously in the sun, skin reddening, eyes watery and indistinct.

Five flagstone steps lead down to a passageway chiseled in living rock, a dark channel wide enough at first for me to enter with arms outstretched but fingers not touching the hacked granite walls.  The way is dark, although I can detect a sliver of light at the far end of the tunnel. A gust of air exhales from the compound as if the whole place is breathing and I can feel that breeze on my face, mingling with the air from the terrace outside, a desert wind veined with the cool salt smell of the sea.  The Preceptor bows very slightly to me and beckons like a waiter in an expensive restaurant setting a gourmet meal before the diner that he is serving. 

The tunnel becomes very dark and, when I extend my arms to both sides, I can now feel the cold stone.  The walls encroach on my way and gradually my elbows are bent to my side while my fingers trace their way into the rock.  After another twenty steps, the path narrows so that my shoulders now are gliding along the stone walls.  Then, it becomes even more tight and I have to turn sideways and, then, this doesn’t avail either – my nose is scraping at the wall next to me and I have to rotate my head and, then, waves of panic surging through me, the stone has me in its grip.  I don’t think I can go forward – it’s too tight.  But, then, I see the light suffusing the fissure through which I am squeezing and I perceive that the walls have been worn glass-smooth by the passage of many bodies through this opening and, so, I inhale and, holding my breath, slip through the tightest squeeze, feeling the hard stone compressing my rib cage, but, then, I am free. 

The chamber is elliptical with air shafts overhead through which vibrating pillars of sunshine pierce the gloom.  At the end of the chamber, a small niche opens inward, corkscrewing in a different direction and, then, I find myself on a ramp of rock covered with raked sand.  The ramp rises imperceptibly at first, but, then, more steeply and, at the same time, the slabs of granite overhead bear down on me, tilting toward a pinch point that gleams with grey-gold light – the slot seems improbably tiny and remote.  The roof lowers to the point that I must bend my head tightly forward, then, I have to flex my knees and go forward in that way, a means of walking that makes my calves and thighs ache, and, then, I am squat-walking and, at last, crawling.  The ramp tilts steeply upward so that the slot pierces a prism of stone in ceiling above.  I can wrap my hands over the sill and laboriously pull my self up, again inhaling and holding my breath to slip through the small crack in the rock.

I am in another oval chamber with a paved floor and round, staring eyes carved into the walls.  Another tunnel branches away from the small room, reversing direction it seems and tilting downward.  This way is very dark, only the faintest rays of light entering this corridor.  Several times, the floor tilts even more sharply downward and, again, the walls enclosing me draw closer and closer on all sides.  In the end, I am trapped belly down at right-hand turn in the tunnel.  I wriggle through the tight place and, then, see a beam of vertical light beyond the tiny slot.  I writhe forward, twisting and turning, and, then, fall down into a shaft, dropping two or three feet, to the bottom of a circular cistern.  The oubliette is the size of a small silo, stone masonry wet with condensation and grout crystallizing between the heavy stone slabs.  Looking upward, I can see a round lid of blue sky screwed down tight over the pit.  A bench runs along the wall, eighteen inches wide, and the hole smells bad – people have pissed themselves here.  When I mutter something to myself, my voice resounds against the slippery stone-walled shaft.  I pray and chant and sing, something that I heard on the radio a few days ago.  My voice seems deep and resonant, even oracular. 

Overhead, the blue sky is penetrated by some pale white stars.  Gradually, the indifferent blue deepens into purple and the stars shine more brightly and, perhaps, the beams of the wandering moon will briefly visit me in the cistern.

Voices awake me.  I have nodded off into a dreamless sleep.  The sky overhead is dark but I can see heads ballooning against the stars.  Someone drops down a kind of leather harness and, with much grunting and groaning, I am hauled up out of the pit. 

A Preceptor leads me across a plaza where a god sits on a granite stool as high as a house.  The god is a reminder of the great age of the Lazzaretto and the fact that it originated long before our current age of reason and enlightenment.  The wind and blowing sand have erased the god’s face.  On his lap, he bears an gnarled iron meteorite like an infant.  Atop his great throne, shadowy in the night, he wears a mask of oblivion. 

Beneath the plaza, a sleeping cell has been provided for me.  A candle is burning there and I have a hard cot on which to sleep.  In a niche cut into the wall, a gleaming white jug holds some cold water. 


7.
I am weak and sore when the attendants bathe me.  I am unsteady on my feet and bruised from the previous day. 

Another Preceptor ushers me across the plaza where the sun shines down on the eroded leonine head of the god on his throne.  Then, I enter a labyrinth of small, lightless cells, tiny closet-like rooms made of dull-brown clay bricks with small tee-shaped doors between the chambers.  Navigating these cells is fatiguing and several times, I rest, closing my eyes, and, then, waking only some time later.  Occasionally, I hear someone breathing in an adjacent cell and a hacking cough often rings out in the distance, but I don’t encounter any one else in the maze.  Three times, I enter little rooms that dead-end, but there is some bread waiting for me there, and water in a shining ceramic jugs the color of alabaster.

At last, I crawl out of a doorway and find myself in another plaza.  Light is rising from the edge of the world but the dawn seems to be in the wrong quadrant – perhaps, I think, it is sunset.  How long have I been inside the endless succession of small featureless mud rooms?


8.
Scorpion tea.  I am squatting against a wall where the stones are cut into the shapes of dolphins and porpoises playing in the sea.  Pots of water are boiling and the steam fogs my eyes.  The scorpions are all entangled, hooks and stings and crooked crab-like pincers clasping legs, bundles of them drizzled into the bubbling brew, like intertwined hooks and pins.  It tastes as you might expect: a metallic tinge, a slight fragrance of rotting fish that you can’t quite sense on your tongue, and the strong scent of cinnamon.


9.
Gout in my right ankle, an inflamed rosy red adorning the bony protuberance: it is painful to walk and I swing my foot to the side, twisting my toes outward.  This gait disrupts my knee, discomfort that translates upward into a knot in my low back.  For several days, I rest in a cool underground alcove, sedated by salmon pink tablets that make me drowsy and encourage sleep.  The Preceptors bring me bread and fruit and have me hobble along a passageway with its roof split open and a rain channel gouged into the floor underneath that fissure, a dry gutter running down toward a pentagonal system of drains.  The groove in the floor is vibrant with grey wolf spiders playfully darting back and forth. 

Other niches line the corridor and some of them are occupied by shadowy figures that cough and sniffle and wheeze in the darkness.  A gauzy bower of mosquito netting surrounds my cot.  When the air feels warm, wasps sometimes hover nearby.  Time passes in a mist of blood red pain and dreamless sleep.

Then, I am up and half-carried down tilted tunnels that become increasingly damp until my Preceptors are storming forward against knee-deep black water flooding the passages.  A sort of damp altar rises from the water in the middle of an open area where the walls recede around a dark pond.  I rest on the altar for several hours, feverish and trembling in the chill air and, when I urinate off the pier, I see a quick flare of blood.  Splashing in the distance heralds a flat-bottomed boat laboriously rowed toward me – I hear it long before it appears.  A oarsman wrapped in a grey mantle with latex gloves covering his hands is rowing the long, narrow barge.  Several corpses are on-board, covered in white sheets.  The oarsman drags the corpses onto the altar-shaped pier and, then, beckons that I come onto his boat.  The vessel rocks unsteadily and I am almost pitched into the black lagoon.  Then, the oarsman, silent as death, rows me into a basin where water is cascading downward on all sides and the roof is high above, supported by slender columns of pale white stone – a diffuse light expands around me, a grey misty radiance that reflects off the water and seems to originate in narrow slits cut into the stone domes above.  Then, walls close in once more, and the oarsman leaps off the boat and stands hip-deep in the water, urging that I do likewise.  I sink down into the cold liquid, my damaged right ankle yielding a little.  Then, the oarsman clambers back on his barge and slides this paddle through the water and the boat glides away. 

For a long time, I stand motionless without any idea where to turn.  Then, I see a light bobbing in one of the flooded passages ahead of me and I set off, limping through the water in that direction.   The lantern is too remote for me to visualize who holds it and, often, I can’t see it directly, rather only its beams reflected on the oozing stone walls.  I hike through the water for a long time, trudging forward against the pull and slosh of the water.  Sometimes, the floor rises a little and there are islands humped up out of the dismal lagoons and canals.  I rest on the islands, passing out from time to time, drowned by sleep that seems somehow an analogy for the dark water through which I am making my way.  The extent of this underground lake is unclear and its dimensions are irregular.  At last, I find myself staggering through water that is only ankle-deep and, then, just mud squeezed between my toes.  Some marble steps lead upward to a round tower with thick walls split by embrasures at intervals around the circumference of the room where I am confined.  After some indefinite period of time has lapsed a trap door opens overhead and a preceptor lowers a steel ladder.  Atop the turret, the wind is blowing, all clotted with foul-smelling dust.  I see some lights but don’t know if this represents the harbor or some other settlement that I have not previously seen.  Someone erects a shelter over where I am squatting and I spend the night, an immense endless expanse of featureless time, under an unscrolled canvas awning. 

As dawn ignites the horizon, two ghostly preceptors arrive.  They pray to the morning star and, then, lead me over the parapet and down a narrow ledge along the outside of the round tower.  I put foot in front of foot on the downward spiral, my buttocks and shoulders pressed hard against the stone.  There are ruins below, a place where burnt roofs have collapsed, troughs between adobe bricks full of black and grey ash.


10.
A couple days pass.  I have a cold and my breath is ragged.  The grippe has settled into my lungs.  I am confined in a stone vault with several other sufferers, men who cry out at night and rage at the darkness and who are sometimes convulsed by pain.

“You have suffered a set-back,” a preceptor in red robes tells me.  Moxibustion is tried.  Aromatic knots of sage and other herbs are burned on my skin under glass cups.  My rations must contain a painkiller because I see my skin redden and, then, blister where the little flame flares, but I don’t feel anything.  A vast numbness has entered me, a sense of exhausted indifference. 

“We will have to assign a reciprocal,” the preceptor says after a couple of days during which I am scorched at eight or nine places across my rump, shoulders, and chest.  “Of course, it’s a therapy of last resort and we don’t want to use reciprocal if it can be helped,” the preceptor advises.  There is a faint tone of accusation in his words.  One of the men in the vault seems to be in a coma and his breath is labored, as if he is snoring.  “It’s emotionally trying and costly, but if we don’t make progress, then, we’ll bring in an reciprocal.”

I don’t fully understand what he is saying.  My consciousness is clouded and I am pissing needle-like crystals.  Fever seizes me and I imagine faces in a grave and somber ring looking down into some deep hole where I am resting.  I want to speak with the people gazing down at me – they represent everyone whom I have ever known.  Each man or woman stands for multitudes.  The fever heightens my senses.  I can feel the whole vast compound somehow engorged and within my body, mazes inside of mazes.

The fever breaks and I’m drenched in cold sweat.  “You’re improving,” the Preceptor says.  He may be unreal, a figure in a dream.  “You’re getting better,” he says.  “We won’t need to slaughter a reciprocal to save you.”

I can’t exactly grasp what he means.


11.
The squirrel-cages turn rotors slotted into gears.  The gears produce mechanical advantage, although I’m not equipped to understand the machine’s details.  Sometimes, pilgrims emerge from a shell-shaped grotto opposite the fractured cliffside where the squirrel-cage grind against their heavy timber frames. The machines are for lifting and, when the pilgrims reach ramps between the turning rotors, they wait for saucer-shaped buckets that bear them up to the top of the escarpment.  The cliff is veined with pinkish threads of quartzite and rises about sixty feet above the paved plaza.  The pilgrims are lame, leaning on staffs or hanging limply between crutches and not a few of them seem to be blind – little ragged reciprocals lead them by the hand to the queues on the tilted wooden ramps. 

The pilgrims come at intervals, generally in groups of eight or nine.  Between arrivals, the men in the treadmill squirrel-cages march in place to lift bronze buckets of water to the top of the cliff.  The bucket chains engage when the saucer lifts are not required and, so, the work produces energy continuously, lifting alternately pilgrims and water buckets to the cliff-top.  The buckets are filled from water gushing into a deep trench cut into the base of the rock, an artesian well regulated into a sort of fountain. 

I am assigned a squirrel cage and walk an hour, then, rest an hour, and, then, walk again, shifts that repeat for half a day.  When not turning the treadmill, the supplicants sit on stone benches bathing their feet in the cold agitated water bubbling out of the cliff.  The pilgrims, as the supplicants are called her, make fluting sounds in their noses and throats like birds.  Many of them are very delicate – several expire, it seems, on the flagstones between the shell-shaped grotto and the squirrel-cage lifts and are dragged away, face down over the paving.  After sunset, we go underground for feasting and massage.   The hard work makes me sleep on my stone shelf dreamlessly.

The squirrel cage is not so hard to turn at first, but the rotors and gears resist and, after an hour, the worker is foot-sore and eager for rest.  The preceptors urge us on.  “It’s hard work to get well,” they say. 

Each day, I move from one squirrel cage to the next and it is clear that when I have reached the end of the ten treadmills, then, I will be lifted in turn to the top of the cliff.  My urine is still a little vexed with gravel, but I am feeling better. 

On the last day, the resistance against which I am turning the squirrel-cage seems to have increased.  I can scarcely complete my hour of work.  Feet dandling in the cool, gushing fountain, I wonder if I will be able to continue.  The saucers carry the pilgrims up into the sun, some of them standing with arms outstretched.  The day is hot and, on my third shift turning the treadmill, I collapse.  The squirrel-cage rolls back under me, reversing motion, but there is a brake that halts the bucket chain that my work is lifting to the cliff-top.  The preceptors help me off the treadmill, bathe my face and feet and hands, and, then, sprawl me across one of the leather-rimmed saucers.  The hammock under me tilts and swings precariously as it is hoisted upward.  For a moment, I can see over the adobe walls and enclosures huddled tightly around the sun-baked plaza.  The sea angles up to the horizon and I glimpse the city encircling the harbor.  Then, hands reach for me and I’m pulled across the yawning gulf onto the cliff’s top.

The buckets on their chain loops are poured into stone-lined channels where the water pours downward to activate water-hammers.  A forge sprays sparks into the arcade where the water-hammers are working.  The clatter of the hammers makes a racket that rises to high heaven.  The hillside is a shambles of low, wrecked walls, tiny plazas where hooded idols of bronze and ancient marble hover atop broken plinths, ornate carved facades that seem to be sinking into the general ruin that has befallen the slope upward, terrain rising beyond amphitheaters to eye-shaped grottoes atop in the mesa wall.  It’s a daunting landscape, built up and, then, broken down, tunnel mouths like the openings into ancient mines, pulleys and cross-beams atop of tilted poles, fenced-off pits, weathered stone stairways oozing down shadowy ravines, high altars shaped like sarcophagi, belvederes built like the prows of seagoing ships, pulpits and lean-tos, ragged scarecrows posted like sentinels on the edges of grim-looking terraces, here and there supplicants visible, clambering out of craters, shell-shocked and baffled. 

“You will work the water hammers for a week,” a Preceptor says.  Metal clangs and rings.
   

12.
After the water hammers, we are led into the cloaca maxima.  First there is the black purge, then, on the next day, the red purge.  This is followed by the yellow purge and, at last, the white purge.


13.
Disease has many causes.  Diet, foul air, sudden reversals in climactic conditions, shock, parasitic infection, inanition, bad water, hereditary disposition, karma, inequity among the humors, evil eye and other forms of sorcery, disruption of the vital energy conduits, mesmeric influence, nightmares, inexact and morbid thought, enforced proximity, solitude, melancholy, sleep disorders – all of these things can disrupt the fragile balance of the organism and lead to illness, even death.  We should not discount, as well, the influence of sexual urges, whether beneficent or malign, in the construction of disease.  Any regimen directed toward healing must, of course, take these instincts in consideration and, indeed, devise measures to counteract disruptions and impediments in erotic activity that may be insalubrious.  On this subject, however, modesty compels reticence and, because the writing in this diary, may, at some time, be perused by my heirs, I think it best to draw a discrete veil over this aspect of my recovery.

Suffice it to say that there is a cleft between two great and ancient walls in the lazzaretto and that this declivity is occupied by five sex pavilions corresponding to the known variations in sexual inclination.  The five pavilions are surmounted by small onion-shaped domes and, beneath those protuberances, porticos of antique aspect, give access to the perfumed interiors of the pleasure kiosks.  In this part of the lazzaretto compound there are great numbers of small, mischievous monkeys, tiny dog-faced creatures whose excrement is smeared all over the old, weatherbeaten stone steps leading into the pavilions.  Overhead, the gorge between the two ancient walls is spanned by a dozen or more bridges, some of them built as stone arches, others simply causeways crossing over the declivity between the ramparts.  Diseases are categorized above and the sufferers assigned a crossing over the shadowy channel between the walls consistent with their diagnosis.  From the monkey-haunted depths of this canyon between the walls, we can see people passing over the bridges, some sufferers striding briskly, others limping or staggering, some borne on palanquins and others pushed in wheelchairs or gurneys.  Here everything is organized by ailment.  There is a bridge for those with tumors, a bridge for the skeletally infirm and those with joint disease.   There is a bridge for disorders of the blood and another for skin diseases and, of course, a bridge or causeway for those who can’t breathe, and those, like me, who can’t urinate, a bridge for those who can’t eat or digest their food and those with bloody flux and a tumultuous narrow causeway for the maniacs, the sleepwalkers, the corpse-faced living dead, those with falling sickness and the black melancholy which fills them up with wind so that they are bloated human balloons. 

But this is just digression away from the sex pavilions, each of which must be navigated and experienced in due course, the kiosk-creatures lounging just within the scented gloom of the stone porch, flesh glistening with oil, eyes lengthened with kohl, patterns of henna imprinted on feet and hands.  You are clad in white raiment to enter the first pavilion, your medallion credited with fees to repel the monkeys from following you amidst the steam rooms and the baths of flavored water and the flimsy cubicles designed to be wholly permeable to the sound of what is occurring within.  You must submit to the activities of each separate pavilion and, in the course of this therapy, your white tunic and white pajama pants become increasingly soiled, stained with secretions and blood and, then, after the final pavilion, the supplicant emerges blinking in the sunlight, the processions overhead on the dozen bridges still underway whatever the hour of night or day – voices sifting down and chorales, people singing, others crying out in grief or pain, the shadows of the ill marching overhead cast down into the fissure between the huge walls. 

You stand at the opening where the walls spread their legs.  Here the cracks in the huge ramparts are green with thistles, nettles, vines.  Water is being distilled for purity.  Your white tunic and white harem trousers are now speckled, spattered, discolored and filthy, greasy in a thousand ways.  The garments are stripped away and you stand naked, trembling in the cold air that smells of sea-salt and rotting fish and, from scaffolding overhead, torrents of warm cleaning water are unleashed upon you, cascades of warm, purified water falling heavily in bucket-sized drops onto your shoulders and head, a regular battering that leaves you unsteady on your feet and, in an alcove near by, the soiled garments are burned in charcoal pits and preceptors come forth from niches to put fresh clothes on you.

After this: more calculi in my urine, piercing flank pain, a bloody flux as well – my progress is arrested.  I am confined to an underground cell for almost a week.


14.
They teach us to install boundaries in our mind between waking consciousness and sleep.  The boundary marker may be a weathered pylon or a herm with erect phallus or a hirsute, noble lion patrolling the contested territory between sleep and wakefulness.  The preceptor advises us to mindfully intend these words: “I am dreaming, all of this is an illusion”.  This declaration should be brought to mind at least three times daily.  And, then, just before crossing the border into sleep, one must mindfully intend this statement: “I am awake, all of this is real.”  In this way, the mind learns to confuse dream with wakefulness with the objective that the patient may control the content and progress of his or her dreams.  This is called “lucid dreaming”, a process in which the supplicant exerts the faculties of wakefulness in the midst of a dream.  If this practice is mastered, the one dreaming may follow the twists and turns of reverie, the hypnogogic maze, to secret places where, perhaps, the idols and totems of illness are worshiped.  Since all sickness proceeds from pathology in the mind, the soul can expel from itself the hidden causes of illness even though they are wrapped in spectral layers of dream.

With the aid of soporifics, we practice this dream discipline.  At the brink of sleep, I imagine a freeway where I am driving or the rooms of my house, a television turned on in an empty dimly lit chamber, the kitchen light over the oven glowing and outside a black dog barking or I am hiking alone in a mountain meadow and come to a stream and there is the black dog again, eyeing me earnestly, the same black dog that I glimpsed crossing the four-lanes of the Interstate, and I recognize that the black dog is the sentinel that I have poised between being awake and sleep, and, then, I am dreaming.  But the dream is always the same: ruined walls of clay bricks, a warren of tiny roofless cells, the mountainside sloping up to ancient ramparts and brick turrets like those of an abandoned fort, decrepit arcades, tunnels, and gutters full of water toppling down from hidden artesian wells, stone porches carved with monstrous faces and strange insignia, plazas either windswept or sun-scorched, shafts drilled down to bedrock, crumbling arches, and, somewhere, hidden within this desolation, you soul like a rodent buried in a burrow. 


15.
A cryptoporticus runs at an angle to intersecting tunnels.  In the cryptoporticus, each illness occupies a chapel bracketed by water-stained and fissured pilasters: votives are stacked on the low balustrades in front of the shadowy figures supine or upright on alabaster pedestal: here is mucous-faced Ague, ocher Scarlet Fever with blisters of sweat like red pearls covering the idol; Flux, Palsy, Paresis represented as a staring torso disconnected from limbs scattered about like luggage at plane crash, Ricketts, the Falling Sickness with black tongue clenched between fang-like teeth, skeletal Consumption, Apoplexy with bulging lidless eyes, Quinsy, Ship Fever, Mania clawing at herself until her skin hangs in rags, Locomotor Ataxis squatting next to terpsichorean Chorea, the Cancers represented as clawed beasts embedded in abscessed flesh, Malaria and Black Cholera, Dyspepsia with a barrel-shaped belly and bloated Dropsy, Spotted Fever, Depression represented as a colossal hanged man with darkened face, Blindness pitched forward to stumble over dwarf-like Failure to Thrive, and, at last, the gonadal diseases, portrayed with grotesquely swollen genitalia pushed before the body on a little two-handled wheelbarrow – each idol has his or her saints and martyrs and the Supplicants kneel on the grooved flagging stones in front of the figures of their Gods and the echoing corridor babbles with the sound of weeping and cries of pain...


16.
I must have passed out in the endless passage among the chapels.  I open my eyes and see mitered joints in the stone above my cot, an ooze of small stalactites like tiny finger tips pressing through the seeping cracks.  A small, sad, moon-faced Reciprocal sits on a stool next to my bed.  The Reciprocal has his or her head shaven and wears a portal under his or her chin, a sort of plastic apparatus with a tap embedded in his or her (its) jugular vein.

The Reciprocal looks up at me.  The little figure is stunted, half my size, with delicate mouse-like hands and pink bare feet.  The Reciprocal grins.  “Feeling a little better, Boss?” the Reciprocal asks.  “I am,” I say.  “My name is Lucky,” the Reciprocal says.  “Lucky?” “Yes, ‘Lucky’,” Lucky says. 

My forehead is wet with water weeping through the joint in the ceiling.

“Why ‘Lucky’?” I ask.

“You are my fourth Reciprocal,” Lucky says.  You see we are Reciprocals of one another, decreed to a common fate.  I am Lucky’s inverse; Lucky is the fraction of my integer.   

Lucky again shows me yellow teeth and a nose wrinkled with concern that likewise furrows the forehead.

“After five Reciprocals healed,” Lucky says, “I retire.  The port’s removed.  I’m free.”

“Just me and one more,” I tell Lucky.

“You got it, Boss,” Lucky says.  “We get through this together.”


17.
And, in fact, we go everywhere side-by-side: the mud baths, the steam rooms, the mirror chamber, the courses of acupuncture, coffee enemas, Reike healing and high colonic detoxification, the sensory deprivation pools, the hypnosis in the cavern full of koi swimming in great lily-pad-shaped turquoise-tinted pools, the leeches, the aromatherapy, the crystals and sage and hydrotherapy – Lucky and I endure these things together.


18.
The bridge was not properly designed, then, built incompetently, and allowed to decay over hundreds of years.  There is a predisposition to regard our forefathers as master-builders and craftsman.  But ineptitude reigns in all generations and this span, buckled to an arch over a terrifying chasm has been collapsing since the day it was built.  To the extent that light penetrates the gash in the mountain, I can see that the dusty depths of the gorge are all paved and heaped with stones fallen down from the bridge.  One of its balustrades has toppled entirely into the canyon and most of the capstones to the arch are fallen, leaving only a narrowing passage over the span, at its crown, at most a yard wide.  In some places, the flagstones incline perilously toward side or the other and, it seems, that the slightest footfall might dislodge them and send the whole structure crashing downward in an avalanche of lose blocks. 

The preceptors tell us that health is somewhere beyond the unsteady bridge and that we must cross.  Lucky tells me that each path to healing is different and he or she hasn’t crossed over this bridge before and, what’s more, the dwarfish Reciprocal has a horror of heights. 

“I will have to go forward with eyes shut,” Lucky tells me.

We walk a little onto the up-tilted paving stones rising to the fractured crest of the bridge.  The stones flex underneath and grind against one another like teeth gnashing in a nightmare.  I have my hand in Lucky’s hand and I am on tiptoes to keep from exerting the wrong kind of weight on the fragile structure.  A beam of sunlight pierces the depths of the canyon and I can see three-yard fragments of the balustrade dropped onto gloomy ledges below and, then, stones drizzled from the underside of the bridge and its arched crest entirely paving the narrow, plunging ravine below.  As we proceed forward, more bricks drop and I can hear them clopping heavily against other blocks far below.   The sound of stone on stone reverberates in the hollow of the canyon. 

Lucky slips and almost falls, and one of the Reciprocal’s feet catches on the edge of place where the span is pierced.  We draw closer to one another and step-by-step come to the crest where the way is too narrow to go two abreast.  I pull Lucky behind me and determining that speed here is of the essence, dart forward over the teetering span, more stones crashing down and making the canyon roar.  Something drags me backward and I turn to see Lucky half-fallen over the side, one foot dangling over empty space.  I yank as if to rip the Reciprocals arm from shoulder and, then, we skid down to the other side of bridge. 

While crossing the bridge night has fallen and, indeed, it is perhaps another day.  I have no sense of time.  My beard has been uncut for days now.  Some benches are rudely hewn into rock on the terrace perched above the canyon.  We sit and watch the sun rise.  The sea is not visible from this flank of the hillside.  From here, the vantage is on a vast flat and grey desert, entirely lifeless, where dust devils idle over the featureless land.


19.
The Reciprocal Ordeal is tomorrow.  We pass the night in an onion-domed chapel half full of sand drifted in from the desert.  Lucky is on knees praying.  Through a slot in the wall, the cold wind intrudes.  Lucky asks me to pray also.  But I don’t know any prayers any more.  I have forgotten them all. 


20.
Two Preceptors with red eyes and long curving fingernails trudge up the crumbling cloister-walk to the chapel.  It is still dark outside with a sorrowful, howling wind blowing against the serrated and knobby side of the mountain.  Just before dawn, the sky assumes shade of supernaturally deep and pure blue.

“You two,” the Preceptors says.  “You two would seek out Desecrators if criminals of that kind existed here.  You have no faith.”

Lucky looks downward.  I shake my head.

“No Desecrator knows more about what’s inside here than me,” the Preceptor says, tapping his belly and breast with his claw.  “I’ve seen a hundred Reciprocals torn to shreds, ripped apart and their filthy insides scattered all over the stones.  I’ve seen the hyenas and the vultures dismembering them.  A Desecrator maybe cuts open a half-dozen cadavers in his life time.  We’ve seen thousands of Reciprocals pulled apart fiber by fiber.”

“Do you understand this?” the other Preceptor says. 

Lucky is sobbing.

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.

“People put their hopes in false therapies,” the first Preceptor says.  “They think one type of healer has precedence over another.  But all are equal.”

“I’ve seen with my own eyes what Desecrators have seen,” the other Preceptor says.  “All the secret filth and ooze and slime, the wet parcels, the coiled things, the throbbing pumping thing, the nasty channels and pathways.”

“Do you think we don’t know those things?” the first Preceptor says.

“I don’t know what you know” – that’s all that I can say.

One of the Preceptor drags Lucky by the ear so that the little Reciprocal squeals.  Then, we go up some switchbacks where Lucky is cuffed in the face at each turn.  A little sun is bubbling over the horizon.  The rocks and temple faces take light and flare against the grey-blue shadow.  The air stirs with a bad odor, a stench like rotting meat, and, then, we pass under a gate made from tilted slabs of stone, great cut rocks, and the trail becomes a trench that bores forward to where the smell of decay seems most intense. 

The Ordeal field is between walls on a terrace.  For a hundred yards, arrayed atop an imperfect square, hip-high ruins cover the field.  The battered stone walls are black with gore and flies whirl about in little tornados that sweep over the brick parapets.  These small cell-like enclosures must have been entered from the top because there are no doors linking the rooms – some of them are tiny, no larger than the width of a man, others extend for half-dozen yards between crumbling ramparts.  Shadows are cupped between the battered stone walls.  I can see eyes and faces carved into the heavy irregularly-shaped boulder surrounding the terrace.

One of the Preceptor hands me a bronze ladle and says that I should draw water from a stone trough at the edge of the ruins.  Lucky is fettered to some rusty iron links embedded in a head-shaped boulder next to the trough.  The water in the stone sarcophagus smells bad and is slimy with green aquatic weed. 

“This is easy enough,” the Preceptor says.  “Just carry a ladle-full of water across the field to that lion.”

On the opposite side of the terrace, across the field of ruined walls, I can see a weathered stone lion chiseled from a huge rock.  The lion holds between his paws a pale, alabaster goblet.

“It’s not hard, Boss,” Lucky says.  “You can do it.”

I fill up the ladle and start across the ruins, carefully balancing as I scramble over the first couple walls.  There are spatters of blood everywhere furred with flies and several of the stones cells are full of angry wasps buzzing around bulb-shaped nests made from feathery grey clay.  About a third of the way across the field, I lose my footing and fall forward, spilling the water onto the thirsty dust.  I make my way back to the trough and fill the ladle again.  This time, I only get about 15 paces before I unsettle a wasp which arrows up to sting me on the cheek.  The dirty water is spilled all over the ground.  Brushing tears from my eyes, I hurry back for another ladle of water. 

This next transit seems easier and I am half-way through the rubble-strewn ruins before the stink of decay rising from the black blood painting the pits and brick walls overcomes me.  I loose my focus and fall again, scuffing my knee in a paste of potsherds and blood.  I am allowed two more trials before I have to make the passage with Lucky’s blood in the ladle.  Now, my hands are trembling and sweat blurs my vision and the flies batten upon me and crawl over my lips and, each time, I bear the water through the ruins, I fail, twisting and about to fall so that the ladle tilts and the precious waters spills, the last time, even, dropping the dipper when a wasp stings me again. 

“It’s okay, Boss,” Lucky says.  “I’ve got lots of blood.”

One of the Preceptor opens the port under Lucky’s jaw and blood spurts into the ladle.  Then, Lucky’s eyes glaze a little.  “It’s okay,” Lucky says again.  The air shimmers with heat.  “It doesn’t hurt at all,” Lucky says.

A loose brick clutches my ankle only ten feet from the shackled Reciprocal and the blood spills all over the dilapidated first wall. 

“It’ll be better next time,” Lucky says. 

I stagger back to where Lucky is pinioned.  The faces of the Preceptors are ghoulishly long and discolored.  Again, the port is opened and swift, bright blood darts forth, rhythmically pumping into the ladle.  Lucky stretches his or her body defiantly, as if to reach fullest size. 

“You got it this time,” Lucky says.

I rotate slowly and with infinite caution put one step in front of another, balancing on the broken stones, flies nestling in the sweat drenching my forehead.  It takes me the better part of a half hour to wind my way across the field of debris.  The wasps whirl around me like bright meteors but none stings.  I can see ahead of me a path between two conical heaps of debris that will bring me to the opposite edge of these shattered cellars.  But, then, I feel my heart beating more swiftly and I imagine the fountain of blood at Lucky’s throat and eagerness to be done with this trial causes my feet to move more swiftly, imprudently even, and I stumble, falling forward so hard that the ladle is struck from my hands and the half coagulated gore splashed over the broken stones.  I’ve skinned my knee and my chin is bleeding itself and, as I turn to cross back across the ruins, the task seems hopeless.

This time, Lucky’s lips are contorted.  “Almost,” Lucky says.  “Almost boss.”  The Preceptor stoops, opens the spigot on Lucky’s throat and, again, the blood pumps out into the ladle.

I turn and start back across the maze of quarry-like pits.  A wasp stings my forearm and the brilliant, coruscating charge of the venom numbs my hand and the ladle drops nervelessly into the blood-suffused dust.

It’s not so far back to Lucky’s station.  The Reciprocal’s skin is waxen and eyes almost colorless, translucent, but Lucky smiles a little and puts out his or her little throat to be drained again. 

Lucky says: “Don’t worry boss, I got a lot of juice left.”

“I’ll make it this time,” I reply.

Lucky says something else.  S/he is speaking from a constricted part of the throat and the words are hard to decipher.

I make my zigzag way across the ruins.  A wasp stabs me in the shoulder but this is bearable and the flies make a buzzing globe about my head so that I swallow several of them that have squatted on my lips and the stones underfoot are all swampy with spilled blood.  But I reach the end of the field of ruins, pause to take my bearings, and, then, angle toward the weathered stone lion clutching in sphinx-like paws the alabaster basin.  I am dizzy when I reach the carved effigy but still upright and I carefully drain the ladle of blood into the alabaster calyx-shaped vessel where water propelled from some place overhead whirls in transparent spirals.

Across the terrace, I can hear Lucky cry out in triumph.

A Preceptor appears from the shadowy alcove behind the stone lion.  After the blood in the basin is washed away, the Preceptor bathes my hands and eyes and feet with the water coiling there.  Then, I am led up a course of irregular stone steps incised in a fissure in the cliff.  A tholos-shaped belvedere with elegant fluted columns stands on an outcropping.  The tholos is very ancient and carved from pink sandstone that the wind has polished so as to eliminate any sharp or beveled edges.  The belvedere seems to be blurred, half-faded away. 

From within the belvedere, I can see that the mountain rises high over me, shaped into many portico-shaped temples and altars, a steep ascent accessed by winding steps.  I glimpse ragged supplicants much, much higher, engaged it seems in various trials, and, all of them, gaunt, dilapidated, moving very, very slowly.  The top of the mountain is washed in brilliant sunshine, transfigured by veins of rose quartz and agate near the summit.

My heart sinks: “Do I have to reach the top?”

“Oh no,” the Preceptor says.  “Your case was not so difficult.  Now, you are cured.”


21.
The marble vault is far underground, cool and silent.  We rest on cold stone slabs.  Solemn music plays faintly somewhere.  The air is still and glows – unseen lamps hidden in niches in the walls illumine the place.  The lights are set on timers and they gradually dim and, then, brighten again. 

The enemy is not death.  Death is sweet with emptiness.  The enemy is pain.

How long are we hallowed in this place?


22.
A Preceptor stands at the gate.  Beyond the gate, I see an loggia where people with hand-carts are selling newspapers, candy and soda pop, fruit, cell-phones and cell-phone cards. The throng seems happy.  The Preceptor takes my medallion before I depart. 

“I would like to shake hands with my Reciprocal,” I tell the Preceptor manning the kiosk at the gate.  The Preceptor is sleek, suave, well-fed, scarcely kin to the haggard scarecrows roaming the lazzaretto. 

“What is the name?” the Preceptor asks.

I tell him. 

“That’s not too helpful,” the Preceptor says.  “About half of the reciprocals are named ‘Lucky’.”

I describe Lucky.

“A reciprocal named ‘Lucky’ was sacrificed about four days ago,” the Preceptor tells me, scanning a computer screen.  “It was a bad case of the Funnel.”

Funnel sickness is when the body turns into a funnel and melts away, pouring out of its bottom. 

“Bled-out,” the Preceptor says.  “Pretty much as expected.”


23.
The harbor lights are very beautiful, twinkling across the chilly, deep-blue rapture of the waves.  At a sidewalk café, I see a man who looks familiar to me.   The man has a long equine-shaped head and face and his eyes are red as if he has been recently weeping.  The man sits alone, facing a little cast-iron table on which there is a bottle of mineral water and a small cup of expresso coffee.  I can see that the man has a long, scimitar-shaped fingernails.  After a moment, I puzzle out the man’s identity – he’s one of the Preceptors from the ordeal involving Lucky and the ladle.  The man gazes out over the harbor.  Here there’s nothing fearsome about him – he’s just a man among other men. 


23.
I can calculate how long I endured the lazzaretto but the exercise seems futile to me.  I return to my wife, who has aged, and my children grown up.  The world’s affairs have reorganized themselves – it still the same components of human greed, cruelty and folly, but with the deck, as it were, re-shuffled.  Things are familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.  Technology has advanced and there seem to be more people.

One morning, I awake in sharp pain.  There’s gravel in my urine again.  But it’s not frightening to me.  I know that I can overcome these symptoms.  Ultimately, they are inconsequential – this is the lesson I have learned. 

Of course, all remedies are temporary.