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.