Now she lay alone on her back with her arm shielding her eyes from the afternoon glare. Her skin was tawny from the sun and glistened with baby oil and beads of sweat. She had pulled back her chestnut hair with an elastic band, but strands had come loose and they tickled her face like fine feathers when she sat up to search the horizon for Gabriel. Her wide blue eyes were mutable and untamed; they were perhaps the most striking feature of a face that never failed to turn men’s heads in public. In private, her lips glossy and fragile with balm, she seemed more vulnerable, though no less wild. When Gabriel did not appear after long minutes, Kate fell into sleep, lulled by the sound of the waves, and dreamt of a summer wedding.

In her dream the minister was asking for an exchange of rings when Gabriel emerged from the sea. He was tall and spare, but wide through the shoulders and graceful in a way that was surprising for a man of his height. Wading through the water toward the shore, he appeared unaware of his physicality, but focused completely on Kate, his objective. With an impatient hand he pushed his dark hair out of his face and wrung the sea from it before letting if fall to the middle of his back. He was a man out of step with his time, his hair too long, his face bearded, and his disposition opposed to rule by machinery. No corporation had long controlled him, and no closed room had fully contained him. Only Kate, with her feral determination, had ever held him and commanded him to be still.

Once on the strand, Gabriel trotted the twenty or so steps to Kate, then dropped to his knees and dragged his wet hair over her skin from her breasts to her waist, stopping to kiss the soft flesh an inch below her navel. She squealed in shock and delight and tugged at his hair, pulling his mouth toward hers. A mere second before they kissed, she spoke the name she had given him: “Vishko!“

“Yes?” Gabriel answered.

“You were gone a long time.”

“I was chasing a fish.”

“Did you catch it?”

“No. I only wanted to chase it.”

“Silly boy,” she smiled. “Always chasing. Never catching.”

Later, he showed her the shells he had brought from the floor of the sea, and he teased her with stories of mermaids and sirens. She giggled and feigned jealousy, making a fuss over the shells as if they were rare gems. It was then, had one been close enough to observe the scene, he would have noticed her hennaed hands, both of them covered from fingertip to wrist with an intricate design that looked like red lace gloves. Their only differences were her palms: Her left hand held a smiling sun, while the right contained a laughing quarter moon. Gabriel had inscribed them on the day of their wedding, his gift to her, and the images were fading, day by day, as the distance from their nuptials grew.

They sat, side-by-side, facing one another and resting their backs against each other’s raised thighs. They had reached the time of ritual in their day, and it was Gabriel’s turn to invent a story.

“Which will it be, Katie?” he asked.

She stared for a moment at her closed fists, as though trying to decide. Then she very slowly opened her right hand.

Part of their romantic mythology during storytelling included holding hands tightly to prevent the storyteller from escaping into a Far Country. Kate understood this and took Gabriel’s left hand in both of hers. Gabriel stared into the distance.

*

Many years ago (his narrative began) in a land where people lived simply and did not worship technology but still believed in magic, there lived a Man with No Regular Name. He was an orphan — a shape-shifter and a changeling — and many in his village believed he had been left on the doorstep of the orphanage in a basket of elfin manufacture by mysterious gnomes who were unable to care properly for a human baby. Though he grew up straight and tall and possessed a good and gentle heart, he had a mercurial nature and his eyes were the color of the moon. Most of those who lived in his village believed he was bewitched, so they gave him wide berth when they passed him on the street. Many crossed themselves out of his line of sight.

Because he had no Regular Name, he could get no regular employment. To earn his keep he collected dragonflies for a University in a Great City where technology was a God and where people cared only for scientific knowledge. To them he was nothing more than a source of the dragonflies that they genetically altered and made into the great flying machines they harness trained and buzzed from place to place. They paid the Man with No Regular Name a dollar per dragonfly, and many days he went home from the university with two hundred dollars or more in his pocket. For this reason, those in his village tolerated him: Bewitched or not, he had plenty of money.

He collected the specimens among the cattails and tall grasses growing along the banks of a pond near his home. He would scoop them into a butterfly net, remove them gently from the net with his hand and place them in a collection box made of wood and wire mesh screening. He collected from sunup until late afternoon, when he carried his bounty to the University.

One Wednesday in the middle of summer his catch was plentiful, so he worked somewhat lazily and netted only those fat dragonflies he didn’t have to chase. After a while, though, he noticed a glimmer of aquamarine in a patch of cattails. Believing he had sighted a rare and exotic Odonata indeed, he swung the net, felt the tiny weight of capture and reached inside to find—

“Please don’t hurt me,” a tiny voice said.

The Man with No Regular Name nearly dropped his catch, a small wriggling creature that felt not at all like the crisp, lustrous exoskeleton of a dragonfly, but more like the squirming flesh of a — well, of a maiden.

And so it was. The Man with No Regular Name had captured a fairy — and not just any fairy, but the Princess Vodichka, ruler of all water fairies on the planet. He stared at her in wonder. Her skin was the palest pink, very nearly white, and almost translucent. Her wings were like those of a dragonfly, but more iridescent; they threw flashes of rainbows into the air when they moved. She wore a gown made of sheer aquamarine fabric that had been woven from spider webbing and dyed with pigments from under the sea to the hue of the ocean just as it turns from turquoise to royal blue. Her hair was fine, the color of a field of ripe wheat, her lips were like apple blossoms, and her eyes were bright blue oceans. The Man with No Regular Name feared he would drown in them.

“Please, kind sir,” said Princess Vodichka in a voice like a babbling brook. “Please release me.”

“Not until you grant me a single wish,” her captor replied.

“And what would that wish be?” Princess Vodichka asked.

“I want you to give me a Regular Name,” said the man. “And I want a single kiss from your lips.” (He knew a kiss from a fairy would draw his fellow villagers to him — and perhaps remove the stigma of his restless nature and his moon eyes.)

“I can give you the kiss,” the princess said. “But you must earn your name.”

“How?”

“You must tell me a story,” the princess answered. “Then, if I think you are worthy, I will grant your wish and give you the kiss.”

The Man with No Regular Name thought a moment, then cleared his throat and began:

“Once upon a time,” he said.

“I love stories that begin —once upon a time—,” said Princess Vodichka. (“So do I,” Kate said, and she lay her head against Gabriel’s chest. He touched her hair and felt a slight sweat at the roots. Tenderness welled inside him, and for a moment the story stopped.) “Please continue.”

The Man with No Regular Name began again: “Once upon a time there was a man who fell in love with the Moon.”

“Ah,” said Princess Vodichka. “An old tale. The best.” (Kate smiled and squeezed Gabriel’s hand.)

“Every night, from the window of his apartment, he would watch the Moon and sigh. He thought she saw him too and was teasing him with her coming and going. On nights when she disappeared into black silence he would pine and write plaintive ballads that he sung in a rich baritone until the Moon, out of curiosity, he thought, returned again, slipping in quietly, a little at a time, and revealing herself to him. He came to love the Moon’s capricious nature most of all.

“The poor man longed for the Moon’s embrace. Over the years it grew into an obsession. He moved from one apartment to another, each on a higher floor of a high-rise building, hoping to be nearer the Moon, but nothing got him close enough. He bought a telescope and mounted it on the roof of his building so he might spy on the Moon, but all it did was magnify the imperfections of her face, and so further endear him. ‘My Beloved Moon,— he said, ‘is not vain.—

“Days turned months into years and even decades, and the man who loved the Moon grew very old. Oddly, his skin and hair and eyes paled to resemble the light of the Moon, and his face became a mass of craters, peaks and valleys. His love of the Moon grew into the stuff of legend, and people from around the world came nightly to stare at him, alone in his high tower, his arms spread wide, imploring the Moon: ‘Oh, come to me, my Love! Release me from this awful torment of loneliness!— Down below, onlookers stared at one another, shook their heads and said, ‘What a Fool!— The Fool heard some of them, but was not angry. He simply said to himself, ‘At least I have loved passionately.—“

At this point Princess Vodichka brushed tears from her eyes and said to the Man with No Regular Name, “This story is far too sad.” The Man with No Regular Name took out his handkerchief and touched the smallest corner of it to her eyes.

(“Vishko?” said Kate.

“Yes, Beloved,” he answered.

“Please tell me this isn’t the end of the story.”

“Patience, my Love,” Gabriel responded. His eyes turned again toward a faraway place.)

The Man with No Regular Name said, “One October evening, when the Fool who loved the Moon was so old that not even the oldest census recalled the date of his birth, and the Moon was so full and bright she seemed swollen and pregnant in the sky, the Fool implored her, ‘Oh my Love! I fear if you do not take me my heart shall surely burst!’ Then something remarkable occurred.

“The crowd below, whose numbers had swelled into the thousands, disagreed about how it had happened. Some said the man leapt from the tower and soared like a rocket toward the Moon. Others claimed his spirit left his body as a specter and simply drifted toward the heavens. Still others believed the Fool had sprouted the wings of an angel and they carried him up and up until he vanished into the night sky. But all agreed on the outcome: Where once the shadows on the Moon had been an indistinguishable mass, they now formed the silhouette of a man. Which is the reason,” said the Man with No Regular Name, “in some parts of the world even today people speak of the Man in the Moon.”

Princess Vodichka smiled a radiant, liquid smile and touched her tiny lips to the lips of the Man with No Regular Name. “You tell the most lovely story,” she said. “So I shall call you Moonteller.”

Gabriel looked into the Great Distance and whispered, almost beyond Kate’s hearing, “And so he is called by all his townspeople and in the Realm of Fairies to this very day.”

“Vishko?” said Kate.

“Yes?” Gabriel answered.

“Did Moonteller release Princess Vodichka?”

Gabriel smiled and returned from the Great Distance. “Yes. But she had learned to love his heart in the telling of the story, and with a kiss to his lips she transformed herself into a human princess and they were wed and lived in a cottage on the side of a hill. They raised six children (and bore a seventh who died in childbirth — their secret sorrow) and they grew very old. They remain there in love to this day.”

“Happily ever after?” said Kate.

“No,” Gabriel answered. “Sadly all true love stories end in sorrow.”

“Even ours?” Kate asked.

Gabriel stared at the ocean. “The fish!“ he said. For a moment he wavered, then kissed Kate, leapt to his feet and raced toward the blue water. He could see the red and black fish taunting him.

*

That night, in the safety of their rented bungalow, they slept together in a narrow bed, and Kate dreamt of a fairy princess in an aquamarine gown while Gabriel dreamt of rainbows of fishes.

They had been practicing a small sleeping ritual since first becoming lovers, one that began with Kate waking quietly in the night and whispering, “Vishko?” No matter how softly she spoke the word, Gabriel would immediately respond, “Yes?” He would pull her close and she would lay her head on his chest and listen to the beating of his heart. Between them it was a small security, and it bound them together more surely than the vows they had exchanged in a tiny chapel by the sea.

But on this night, when she uttered the single word there was no response, and, startled, she opened her eyes wide and reached to touch him. Gabriel was not beside her. Instead she found him standing at the window, staring at the moon. She spoke more firmly: “Vishko?” Gabriel shook himself and turned his gaze on her. For a moment his eyes blankly reflected the light of the moon, and a chill shot through Kate. Then his eyes softened and he said, “Yes?”

“Darling, come to bed,” she commanded.

He left the window and climbed into bed, pulling her close and nuzzling her neck. In a minute he was asleep and dreamt of the last wild beach on earth.

But for a long time Kate could not rest. She listened closely to Gabriel’s rhythmic breathing and tried to let it draw her into sleep, but the system failed; and, when exhaustion finally closed her eyes near dawn, her dreams were filled with mercurial moonlight.

Moments are like professional magicians with cards up their sleeves. They’re always rearranging things and are never quite content with reality the way you comprehend it. This is why, when you are lost in the moment, as soon as you find your way you shake your head like a magician’s assistant stepping out of the vanishing box and say, “Where am I?” Moments always rearrange love.

Love is a shape shifter. This is not one of the five things. Consider it a bonus.

The five things begin with a 2000-year-old story and end with a story in the moment. Here is the 2000-year-old story:

One day, when Jesus was trying to make a point, one of his disciples (I believe it was Judas) said, “We could have sold that Valuable Commodity and given the money to the poor.” The disciple (let’s say, for the sake of argument, it was Judas) didn’t care a whit about poor people; he was skimming off the top of petty change and wished he could add a percentage of the cost of the Valuable Commodity to his purse. Jesus was wise to him and said, “The poor will always be around. I won’t.”

A few days later, Jesus said, “Wherever you find society’s marginalized, wherever you find street bums and guttersnipes, skid row drunks and hookers on the stroll, wherever you find suicides and crack junkies and people so poor they cease to exist in the eyes of their peers, wherever you find folks you don’t want to know, that’s where you’ll find me.” His disciples were a little freaked out by that statement because they had heard him tell Judas, “The poor will always be around. I won’t.” It seemed like a contradiction to them.

Years later, 2000 in fact, she sits at her desk with a bamboo calligraphy brush and a tray of Japanese ink, and she very carefully inscribes a phrase she will not share with me on the inside of her thigh. The act angers me, because I know what she is writing. Regardless of what she says is written there, I know the truth. It is the secret Name of God. She won’t reveal it to me because she knows I cannot be trusted with it. And she is right: I would abuse the secret Name of God as I have bruised her mouth with my own; I would inflame the world with it, even as my eyes are now embers of coal staring at the place where her hand rests lightly, covering the thing she has written.

“One does not share the phrase of the moment in the moment,” she tells me.

Now this is where the story gets tricky and becomes a case of misdirection, like a magician breaking a seal on a fresh deck of cards, only to pull a rabbit out of the box: Phrase or no phrase, I want her. And — please don’t flinch away from this — I want her in every shadowy violent sense of the word. After all, what else is desire if not dark and carnivorous? I swear I want to split her lip with my insistent kisses, and drink her essence as one drains a glass of port. The throb of her pulse points is indispensable to the sustenance of life as I know it — as vital as the Name she has brushed into her skin. Unless you comprehend this first thing, you will not get any of what follows: Desire clouds everything as smoke clouds glass. But none of that matters when one can press his ear to the secret Name of God and hear the symphony of a billion oceans in the pulse of a woman’s blood.

Dark, I tell you. And getting darker as we press forward. The second thing is like the first: Whitman was right. “Without one thing all will be useless….” The thing, of course, the surprise we want to hide from the audience behind props, the intimacy we coyly hint at and slyly giggle about, the event we allude to with cinematic kisses and billowing curtains, the act we profane with pornographic efficiency, the mirror we cannot and will not look into directly is sex. Not sex in any of the aforementioned impieties, but raw, aching, needy, fundamental, elemental sex. The commingling of physical forms. Terrifying oneness, loss of individuality. A sudden, unexpected, common breath.

She presses the palms of her hands into the mahogany nightstand and pushes toward me. In that moment the molecules of her hands join those of the dark wood; her blood carries its darkness through her body into mine and I taste sawdust in my mouth. The darkness collects into Japanese kana characters along her spine, and I caress them as a blind man reads the Braille translation of a favorite novel. “Yes,” she says. “There. Oh, yes. There.” Down her spine the characters creep and transform, expressing in darkness the words spilling from her lips. I bend to trace their shapes with my tongue.

In ecstasy, I whisper perfect Russian poetry into her ear, though I cannot speak a single word of the language.

This is the third thing: Because I know that, without the secret Name of God, I am powerless to hold her, I take a sliver of glass from my pocket, open a vein, and write her name in my blood on the hardwood floor. Then I take a platinum thread, tie one end to her name and the other to her wrist.

She looses the knot and laughs. “Do you think my name defines me?” she asks. She is right: Nothing defines her.

The fourth thing is the single word she leaves each morning on her lips. The word is a medium of exchange. Yesterday it was panacea; today it is obsession. I take the word from her lips, place it under my tongue and pass the remainder of the day enriching others from the bounty she has given me. Then, home from my transactions, I slip our collected revenues from my mouth to hers with a kiss, enriching her vocabulary, expanding her horizons.

Some days her thoughts are half-formed, her dreams are not fully realized. On those mornings I close my eyes, steal into her dreams, and find her lips, her teeth, the roof of her mouth. Often, the choked and unfinished word is lodged in her palate and I pry it loose with my tongue. She awakens and asks, “Do you see what I mean?”

Now we come to the fifth thing. Ah! The fifth thing.

She forms this sentence with a blissful sigh: “I won’t restrict you.” Slowly (oh!), so slowly my heart races with suspense, she moves her hand away from the word she has written. I echo her bliss.

At first I think the phrase is “Jesus saves.” But this is not the case. Instead, there is a single word, a word that slows my rapid heartbeat to a steady, passionate throb:

“LUMPENPROLETARIAT”

I smile, knowing it is the same thing. She kisses my mouth. “Clever boy,” she says.

I kneel and touch my lips to the inside of her thigh.

The Moon and Six is a bar out on Alvarado that caters to an odd mix of drunks and recovering drunks, who are distinguished only by the color of their drinking straws. Like the rest of the 12-steppers in the room, on the evening of Twigs’ death, I nursed a red straw drink (in my case a virgin club soda with a twist of lime). Over the course of the same evening Twigs drank a fifth of Wild Turkey one neat, blue straw highball glass after another. The only apparent effect it had on him — other than a slight slurring of speech — was in making him more gregarious and daring, which is why he proposed, about a third of the way into the night, we measure his neighbor’s legs.

“I’ll bet a hundred dollars against a dime they’re 40 inches long if they’re an inch,” Twigs boasted.

Others in the room, anxious for a little action on a night that was, so far, dull as the backside of a butter knife, cocked their ears in our direction, awaiting my reply.

“How are we going to know?” I responded. “I’ll not simply take your word for it, Twiggy, no matter how good a fellow you are.”

Twigs mused a moment and said, “We’ll go up to her apartment with a tape measure and lay the rule to ’em.”

A chorus of eavesdroppers sounded assent. Things in the hobgoblin night were finally looking up, and one or two of the more enthusiastic howled at the moon.

“What?” I said. “You think she’s gonna invite us all into her home and give us a go at her inseam?”

“Why not?” Twigs asked.

I shrugged, unable to argue the point. One of the eavesdroppers worked uptown at a Hong Kong tailor’s, and she volunteered a tape measure from her purse. So off went Twigs, the tape measure slung over his shoulder and streaming out behind him like ticker tape clinging to the sleeve of a national hero, a parade of drunks and recovering drunks following, and me, my Wayfarer shades hiding my eyes even at night, taking up the rear. We stumbled down the street to Twigs’ apartment building, and he and I rode up to the 9th floor, where his upstairs neighbor lived. The drunks and recovering drunks, three elevator cars of them, trailed behind, babbling like a gaggle of geese who had just learned Mother Goose had hatched a duck. Twigs reached tentatively for the doorbell when a bourbon-inspired drunk thundered, “Hell, Twigs, let her know you’re here,” and cracked three solid thumps on the door with the meaty sledgehammer of his fist. Everyone jumped, and a guy from down the hall looked out of his apartment and quickly retreated into oblivion. We could hear his half-dozen locks slamming shut.

But if Twigs’ neighbor was alarmed or intimidated, it didn’t show on her face. She opened the door wide, and most of the shorter drunks and recovering drunks craned their necks to see the question mark on her face. She was a tower of woman, six-foot-four, at the very least, and stunning, from the abundance of her straight, jet hair to her dark doe’s eyes to her exotic, crimson mouth. She had a body built by Fisher, all sleek lines and feline automotive curves, and her legs — almighty! — her legs were the stuff of liquid dreams, long as an endless highway and the color of coffee with lots and lots of cream. She looked out into the sea of drunken and recovering drunken humanity and said, cool as a March morning, “Yes? May I help you?”

And there was old Twigs, a good foot shorter than the woman, staring up at her like she was America and he was Christopher Columbus. He said, as a man might utter a prayer, “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but could you help us settle a bar bet?”

An annoyed expression crossed the woman’s face, then faded as a miasma fades in sunlight: She could not help being swayed by Twigs’ unclouded adoration. “Pardon me?” the woman asked.

“A bar bet,” said Twigs. “I’ve bet this gentleman” — here he gestured in my direction — “a hundred dollars that your inseam measures 40 inches or more. And all these people” — he meant the drunks and recovering drunks — “ have side bets. So, ma’am, a lot of money is riding on your willingness to let me measure your inseam.” Twigs gestured with the yellow ticker tape measure.

“My name’s Madelaine, not ma’am,” said the woman. “And I’m holding the end of the tape nearest my, um, thigh, if you don’t mind.”

The party exhaled a collective sigh of relief as Twigs handed the woman the zero end of the tape measure and then knelt at her feet to read the results. Drunks and recovering drunks stared over one another’s shoulders awaiting Twigs’ verdict.

“Forty-two inches,” said Twigs.

A cheer went up from at least half the gallery, and even the losers were impressed with Twigs’ enormous cojones. I said, “Almighty,” and tossed Twigs a dime. He caught it in midair, flashed me a grin and reluctantly left his fawning position on the floor.

“I owe you a drink for this one, Twigs,” I said.

The raven-haired Madelaine was a bit put out: “I thought you told me the bet was for one hundred dollars,” she said.

“I wagered a hundred against his dime,” Twigs replied.

“My name’s Norman,” said Twigs, and offered his hand to shake. “But everybody calls me Twigs. Care to come for a drink with us? We’re headed back to the Moon and Six.”

Madelaine took his hand and smiled at him. “I don’t mind if I do,” she answered. “Wait here and I’ll get my purse.”

So Twigs hit the jackpot twice in one night. Whoever said a man can’t be lucky both at the gaming tables and at love was probably a loser on both counts. That night Twigs was a winner all the way around.

Everyone tried courting Madelaine’s attention on the way to the bar, but she had clearly attached herself to Twigs and me. Well, mostly to Twigs. I just happened to be along for the ride. But, the ride was beautiful. Earlier, the day had been filled with gray drizzle that the night transformed into a Las Vegas glitter of neon strobes, incandescent lights and shimmering reflections. When we got to the Moon and Six I still hadn’t walked all the melancholy out of my boots, so I slipped Twigs a twenty and told him the first round was on me. I reassured Madelaine I was coming back, and I walked on toward Broadway with my hands buried in the pockets of my long, tobacco-colored duster coat. On Broadway the glare from the lights and the street was so intense it reminded me of a clouded midday, and I recalled a time when light didn’t hurt my eyes and I walked, unshaded, even in the full sun. I’d grown sensitive in recent years, my skin allergic to sunlight and my eyes painfully blinded by it. I blamed it on the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Blaming the ozone was a lot easier than facing the truth. I slipped into a Broadway bar and flirted a while with a waitress, finally convincing her to meet me after her shift for a late snack. Then I went back to the Moon and Six.

∞

Twigs and Madelaine had installed themselves into a dark corner booth where they flirted and traded intimacies during my absence. They were past the point of hand holding and into the realm of neck nuzzling by the time I returned. Twigs called me over and we made a bit of small talk, but I was smart enough to excuse myself in a minute or two and find my way to my usual spot at the bar. I ordered a red straw club soda with a twist. Jonesy, the bartender, nodded in the direction of the booth and said, “That girl got the longest legs I ever saw on a woman. Damn, she good looker, too.”

“She is that, Jonesy,” I agreed.

The Moon had a good jukebox, and on any given night couples would load it up with slow tunes and shuffle out to the small dance floor for a grope. Most evenings Twigs and I would sit around making fun of them, but tonight he was with them, a full head shorter than his partner, his face buried in her generous cleavage. She’d lean in toward him and tell him things. Old Twigs: What a salesman. It wouldn’t be long before they left the bar headed somewhere more romantic, somewhere they could be more intimate.

In a little while Twigs came to me and said, “We’re going over to the subs to hear Mozart. You want to come?”

Mozart was another habitue of the Moon and Six who earned his pin money playing cello in the subway late at night. He always played near dark corners so lovers could load him up like a jukebox for a twenty and trust him to make heart-rending music and look the other way while they became better acquainted. It was definitely not the spot for a third wheel, and Twigs knew it — but he had to be polite.

“No, Twigs,” I said. “Jonesy needs me to keep him straight. Besides, I have a date later.”

“Good man,” said Twigs, and he clapped me on the shoulder before walking carefully back to the table, collecting Madelaine, and exiting the bar.

“Whooo,” said Jonesy a half-hour later. “That Twigs, he tanked to the max. He tanked so bad he walkin’ straight.”

It was not until that moment I realized they might both be in more than a little danger. “You know something, Jonesy,” I said. “You’re absolutely right.”

I paid my tab and hurriedly left the bar, raced down Alvarado toward the nearest subs entrance, and then stood kicking at the concrete loading platform, waiting for the next train headed east. Twigs and Madelaine not only had a half-hour lead on me, they had also not fought through the Broadway crowds just exiting shows and looking for transportation. By the time I arrived at Mozart’s station, a full hour had passed since Twigs left the bar.

Of course, I was too late. Already a crowd had gathered around the subway track near the stop and was staring down at the unfortunate accident. The place crawled with police. Before I edged through the press of people to view the body, Mozart collared me and said, “I tried to warn her, man, but she wouldn’t be stopped. I’m sorry, Jake. Honest I am.”

“It’s okay, Mozart,” I reassured him. “I’m the one who let her leave with Twigs.” I shook him off and forged on.

Madelaine lay on the track in four neat pieces, her head and legs severed from her torso by the subway that didn’t see her until it was too late. Unaccustomed to drinking, she had gorged herself on Twigs’ 2.0 alcohol-tainted blood and was blind drunk when she staggered out onto the platform and stumbled across the track. The train ran completely over her before anyone had the sense to stop it. Now she was just another statistic in the city’s mass transit safety record, and a bizarre statistic at that, one I could ill afford to bring me and those like me heat from law enforcement officials. So I found Mozart and had him play a hypnotic tune while I floated out onto the track and put a wooden stake through Madelaine’s heart. Ancient myth claimed vampires could be killed by severing their heads from their bodies, but I had never seen it work in practice, and there was no use letting a dismembered head and limbs and a squirming torso draw attention to the rest of us. Better safe than sorry.

Fortunately the incident on the track drew attention completely away from Twigs. Most people passed him by as just another drunk sleeping it off in the subway, so Mozart and I were able to squirrel away his body without incident.

∞

A couple of nights later I was sipping a red straw club soda with a twist when Twigs sauntered in all cool and confident and dressed in new threads with a little jingle in his pocket. He looked like a million bucks. Perching next to me on a barstool, he ordered a virgin Bloody Mary and sat with his elbows against the bar, eyeing the crowd.

“Damn, Jake,” he said. “This is great. But I have headaches that won’t quit and my eyeballs feel like they’re on fire.”

I reached into my coat pocket and handed him a pair of Wayfarer shades. “These’ll help both problems,” I told him. “In a month you’ll be navigating the city like a pro.”

“I been meaning to ask,” Twigs said, “when was it for you, Jake?”

“Eighteen-seventy-two,” I told him. “I was herding cows on the Great Prairie when I met a gypsy girl. Prettiest girl you’d ever want to know. We didn’t have Wayfarers in those days. A man just had to suffer.”

A little later Twigs said, “Shame about those legs.”

“A damned shame,” I agreed.

I spotted a pair of college girls sitting in a booth across the room. Fresh blood. I ordered another club soda and twist from Jonesy before gliding over to introduce myself and my eternal companion.

When my family first moved to the area in the early 1970s, Southern Railway owned the depot and maintained it as a sort of afterthought, hiring high school kids to slop paint over it during the summer months and paying a part-time janitor a few bucks an hour to stand around, shoot the breeze with the idle ticket agent, smoke cigarettes, and put up and take down Caution: Wet Floor signs. After Southern Railway became the Norfolk Southern in the middle ’70s, the new corporation shut down the profit-gobbling station and ceded it to the city: Good riddance. Since then city fathers have been arguing over the property like vultures over the carcass of an albatross. No one knows what to do with it. Older folk, with a nostalgic eye on the past, imagine a railroad museum; middle-agers envision a chic yuppie restaurant; youngsters would raze the property and pave it over — there’s never enough parking downtown. Once a decade or so commissioners get excited about a project and vote to paint the structure or put new glass in its gaping windows. But most of the time the depot sits and decays.

The problem is easement. Though the Norfolk Southern gave the property to the citizens of Grover, they reserved control of 10 yards or so on either side of the track. Anything replacing the depot must respect the railroad’s right of way. It crimps any architectural endeavors and stymies even the asphalt pavers. Add to it the disposition of the area in question — it’s a lot like a swayback horse, still kicking but relatively useless — and little wonder the commissioners haven’t come to a conclusion in 30 years. As my grandfather was fond of saying, “You can put makeup on a pig, but it’s still gonna oink.”

Neglect has turned the building into a haven for all sorts of wildlife, not the least of which are a bazillion crickets. On a warm spring night one can hear them tuning up, then singing in a chorus that rivals the Mormon Tabernacle, both in volume and enthusiasm; and if one has the courage to creep past the No Tresspassing signs on the doors of the depot, one finds a virtual carpet of crickets pinging about like brown popcorn on the creaking hardwood floor. Depending on one’s point of view, it is cricket heaven or cricket hell.

It is certainly lizard heaven. Multitudes of anoles and five-lined skinks (whose young have cobalt blue tails and are sometimes mistakenly called “blue-tailed skinks” ) have come like ersatz followers of Jesus in search of free eats; in the depot they most assuredly find it. Even blind, lame, halt, ignorant and feeble reptiles need only saunter into the building, open their mouths, and sooner or later one of those popcorn crickets will leap right into it: Bam! So lizards not only live in the station, they also thrive, an indication that all God’s creatures — even the reptilian — have their day.

They also have a peculiar habit, one I witnessed myself on an unusually warm March afternoon. I had gone to the depot on rumors that the city fathers had finally come to a decision concerning the building’s fate; I wanted to make graphite and verbal sketches of the place before it was ruined by modernization. I sat on the creaky wooden platform, studying cracked window panes and peeling outdoor latex, drawing examples of bread-and-butter carpentry and imagining a time when the structure was brand new.

Around 4:30 I heard the distant whistle of a train, the sole remnant of our railroading past, that passes through Grover twice a week, both times in the afternoon, on Tuesday headed from somewhere north to somewhere south and on Thursday traveling in the opposite direction. It is, perhaps, not even real, but the ghost of a train destined to haunt these tracks until they have rusted into red-brown furrows of iron oxide tied together by sawdust. Its near arrival had a magical effect on the lizards. One by one they gathered on the platform until there were hundreds of them, a cold-blooded carpet of green anoles and brown-and-black skinks, their scales glistening in the failing sun, their eyes glittering in anticipation of a train that would not stop for them and, in fact, did not know they existed.

It passed in a slow rumbling thunder of iron muscle, the diesel engine huffing and the freight cars and boxcars clanking and screeching. Beneath me, the wooden platform vibrated and hummed until, once the caboose passed and I waved at its sole occupant, the earth slowly settled and stilled. Lizards began vanishing from the platform and, eventually, I was left alone with a single five-lined skink, a handsome chocolate colored fellow whose body was as wide as half the span of my hand. He stuck out his tongue, winked at me and said: “That was better than magic fingers on a motel bed. And free, too.”

“Pardon me?” I replied.

“Vibes, man,” said the lizard. “We skinks are all about sensuality. And that train trembles us from our noses to our tails.”

“Yeah?” I said. “I thought lizards were all about reptilian sensibilities. Things like deception and subterfuge.”

The skink stuck out his tongue. “Bad press, daddy,” he insisted. “We bear the burden of guilt for something a snake did eons ago. But that was his job and this — this — is no Garden of Eden.”

I looked around me at the gray city; this manufacturing loop indeed did remind me of Blake’s “dark Satanic mills.”

“Besides,” the skink continued, “how would the sanctimonious know how good they were without reptiles to measure themselves against? It’s a matter of degrees, man. You ought to know better than anyone, a man driven to distraction by his senses. How will you achieve Nirvana when you can’t even eliminate the need for a particular green from your sensory palate?” He shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. “Your only hope is making good people feel better about themselves by comparison.”

I considered the long trail of my reptilian past and chuckled. “Maybe you’re right,” I mused aloud. I lay back against the wooden platform with my hands behind my head and stared at the buckling plywood ceiling overhead. My blood ran cold in my veins; I warmed it by scooting into a patch of sun. I tasted the air with my tongue. It was sweet. “I suppose things could be worse,” I said. “I might be a rattlesnake.”

The skink snickered. “Snakes, rabbits, skunks, sheep…” his voice trailed away in a litany of animal names. “It’s all a matter of degrees. I’m going for a bite to eat. You want I should bring you back a cricket or two?”

“No, thank you,” I answered. “I think I’ll be heading home. Thanks for the enlightening chat.”

“Think nothing of it, man,” said the skink. “Consider it retribution for all those cutesy gecko commercials on television. Paybacks are hell.” He stretched and yawned. “You sure you won’t have a nice cricket?”

“No,” I replied. “Crickets sound disgusting as people food.”

The skink shrugged his narrow reptilian shoulders. “Your loss, daddy-o,” he said.

A moment later he was gone. I started the long walk home. On the way I stopped at Grover’s only sushi bar and placed an order.

“Clicket roaf?” the waiter echoed. “Oh yes-a, we have vely fine clicket roaf. You rike vely good.”

I tell you, it was a scene straight out of Lost in Translation. And we all know nothing Hollywood ever lasts. I closed my eyes and dreamed of a garden.

Vincent van Gogh started reading the Gospel with comprehension around 1876. He asked the local religious Corporation to give him a flock. They took one look at his unruly red hair and his unruly hazel eyes and they shipped him off to Wasmes, in the Borinage, the poor mining district of Belgium, figuring, if they couldn’t shut him up, they could at least get him out of earshot.

Van Gogh lived among the poor as a poor man. Taking literally the instruction to “sell all you have and give everything to the poor,” he gave away all his belongings, his fancy Corporation preaching suits and his modest Corporation stipend, followed the poor into the mines, dug coal with them, ate their blackened potatoes with blackened hands, and relentlessly sketched their faces on paper scraps with charcoal sticks salvaged from the fireplace. He took to heart the Beatitudes, and he loved the poor.

The poor, accustomed to slick words from fancy Corporation men, were at first mistrusting of van Gogh. “Why don’t you have a television ministry?” they asked him. “Or at least a radio show?” Van Gogh shrugged his shoulders and kept digging coal.

On Sundays he preached simple sermons about sheep taken from green pastures to work underground, and about a Shepherd who loved the sheep and left the pastures and the fat herd of ninety-nine to find the the one lean stray shoveling coal. The poor eventually adored van Gogh and came from deep beneath the surface of the earth to hear him. They presented him with tithes that he refused.

When offerings from the Borinage dried up, the Corporation feared the poor, in a fit of rage, had killed unruly van Gogh and deposited his corpse in an abandoned coal tunnel. They couldn’t abide revolution. So they sent representatives to investigate. What they found was their ultimate nightmare: A blackened and emaciated van Gogh living underground and, worse, refusing tithes. The Corporation representatives brought his ministerial trial to a close.

“Why couldn’t you toe the line?” they asked. “You should have screened the Mel Gibson film we sent you.”

“Violence is easy,” van Gogh answered. “Love is hard.”

“Come with me,” van Gogh urged them. “Dirty your hands.”

The corporation men examined their carefully manicured nails and sneered at van Gogh. In a public show of disdain, they stripped van Gogh of his flock and demeaned him before the poor. “This isn’t love,” they told the poor. “This is insanity. After all, who would choose poverty over luxury?” The poor nodded in agreement and watched The Passion of the Christ and cringed and felt even smaller and sorrier. Their trickle of tithes resumed on schedule.

Van Gogh worked the mines, sketched potato eaters, and took in a prostitute and her child. His drawings grew more certain as his distance from the Corporation increased.

2

In all, Vincent van Gogh painted hundreds of self-portraits, more than 20 during a two-year stay in Paris alone. Because he was poor, he could afford no model and used himself instead. Some say this is narcissistic. I rather think it was an exercise in self-discovery.

In all the images, van Gogh’s eyes are heartbroken. In several, his ear is bandaged. These are the same thing. Postmodern psychologists maintain van Gogh suffered from manic depression. This is evident in superhuman fits of productivity when he painted skies swirling with stars or made crude sketches of selves shimmering with color, when he painted bedrooms with red bedspreads or drew psychedelic fields of wheat, and (of course) when he lopped off parts of his anatomy. It is also evident in spells of crippling depression when he lamented his manic behavior and painted sad, bandaged selves or old, dour men barely emerging from black backgrounds. Sometimes van Gogh was paralyzed with depression and painted nothing.

Van Gogh stood in art shops and imagined thousands of colors on a palette of eternal grace, spilling onto an infinite canvas in shapes of the poor and shapes of the working class and shapes of the land he loved. He coveted pigments and often wrote his younger brother begging money to buy them. He craved friendship and got, instead, Gauguin. He longed for the security his brother, Theodorus, has earned: The assurance of marriage and home and hearth. He was condemned, instead, to genius. He painted France as a dream of Arles and as a nightmare of Arles. He painted Belgium as a dream of Belgium and a nightmare of Belgium. He always painted his eyes full of heartache.

In 1967 the ghost of van Gogh sang “All You Need Is Love” with John Lennon and the Beatles on the BBC’s Our World special; also present were Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful. Van Gogh subscribed to John Lennon’s vision of the world as one and was horribly disillusioned when, in 1969 and again in 1972, the Summer of Love was truncated by corporation tee-shirts and the world turned out just as imperfect and greedy as everyone said it was.

On the flip side of the “All You Need Is Love” single was a tune called “Baby You’re a Rich Man”. This time Lennon and McCartney got it right: All you need is not love. All you need is cash. The ghost of Van Gogh considered the wealth of pigments cash could have bought him and wished he’d stayed in the religion racket for the money.

3

A pigment killed the artist in 1890. Historians say van Gogh was depressed, and after threatening his doctor with a pistol, he went for a walk and shot himself in the chest.

He lived a while — long enough for his brother Theo to arrive and cradle him in his arms until Vincent died. “I wish I could go like this,” Vincent said. A half-hour later, he went.

His coffin was covered with a white cloth and was surrounded with sunflowers and yellow dahlias. As Emile Bernard wrote to Albert Aurier, “…yellow flowers everywhere.”

Theo wrote his sister Lies, “Maybe I should call it one of the great cruelties of life on this earth and maybe we should count him among the martyrs who died with a smile on their face.”

Modern medicine might well have saved him. But for what? More poverty? More depression? More of the cruel genius that drove him?

Alizarin crimson killed him. He needed it to round out his palette but could not afford it. Only one source was available to him: Blood from his own heart. But fate had a last wicked laugh at van Gogh. The ironic bullet missed his heart and bile erupted from his wound.

It was green.

The color of money.

My shadow is unhappy with the arrangement, and this morning he simply refused to get out of bed. Instead, there was a slow s-c-rrr-itch — not unlike the sound of a long Velcro strip being slowly opened — as I arose from my fitful rest. For a moment it seemed my shadow would lose the contest of wills when, suddenly, with the pop! of a champagne cork, we separated. My shadow snoozed contentedly in the bed, and I floated like a leaky helium balloon toward the ceiling. It turns out physics is all wet: Our shadows, and not the effects of gravitation, anchor us to the earth.

At first the novelty of the thing entertained me. My back against the ceiling, I examined cobwebs in the corner and dust I missed on the blades of the ceiling fan. Everything had a different look and took on new meaning from the perspective of up. I contemplated crab-walking my way to the door and exiting into the blue day, imagining I might drift past the ozone layer through the mesopause and thermosphere into outer space, but it occurred to me that I might be trapped, instead, in the stratosphere and linger there in an absurd Limbo — depressed and sleepless, cold and hungry besides.

My shadow — the insufferable beast — arose about noon, checked his email, tinkered with a stuffed doll, made a couple of phone calls, took a shower, and settled in for a classic radio program — the story of Lamont Cranston, millionaire man about town, and his alter ego. Later he made a salad and ate it on the front porch, taunting the late-afternoon sun. Meanwhile, I was in a jam. All I could do was crabwalk around the house on the ceiling, cursing my shadow, bemoaning my loveless fate, and dusting things.

This ended when the more daring of my cats leapt from the kitchen counter to the top of the refrigerator. Now, he knew better and deserved punishment, so I felt no remorse lifting him from his perch and forcibly pulling his shadow from his paws. It came away with four little chich-es, and the four shadow limbs attached easily to my own. The cat shadow brought me quickly to earth, but it was light and daring and accentuated by its lithe sleekness my lumpy human awkardness. I felt shy and silly attached to it, and when my shadow saw it he guffawed with laughter.

“A cat shadow?” he chided. “Is that the best you can do? Why not the shadow of a refrigerator or the shadow of a blade of grass?”

“Make one more smart-aleck comment and I’ll scratch out your eyes,” I warned him. “What’s wrong with you anyway?”

My shadow kicked at the shadow of a smooth rock. “I’m tired of being bound to you,” he answered. “You get me into way too much trouble. Cost me too much heartache. And, man, you don’t sleep enough to keep the shadow of a bird alive. I want a new deal.”

“Deal?” I said. “What deal?”

“Shorter hours, for one thing,” my shadow insisted. “Longer sleeps. I need to spend less time talking and more time listening, which means you need to do the same. By damn, stop beating us to death. Time does enough damage to us without your help. Stop trying to invent a better world and make one instead.”

“Have any more aphorisms?” I asked with a sneer.

The cat passed by, shadowless, and hissed at me. I wondered briefly how he’d managed to come down from the ceiling when I noticed his extended claws: Life is better for those who adapt to every change and cling to reality no matter what comes their way. Minutes later I found myself making castles of clouds and wondering what color the moon would be when it rose in the early spring sky.

“You’re already dreaming,” my shadow said. “If you’d sleep more at night you’d do less of that during the day. Listen, if you want to be an ass about this, you can wander around with the shadow of a cat for the rest of your life. And you can be sure the wags will have a go at that when they lay you to rest. But the choice is yours.” He strummed the shadow of a guitar I have yet to find though I’ve scoured the house from top to bottom. “It’s hard enough being your shadow without having to make up your mind.”

“Don’t act like such a tough guy,” I replied. “Or I’ll bring out the flashlight. Here’s the deal: I’ll start sleeping more if you’ll stop foreshortening the future and lengthening the past. I’ve spent too much time there lately. I can’t stay there forever.”

“Fair enough,” my shadow agreed. “Give me your foot.”

He pulled loose the shadowy cat’s paw from my foot and stuck his own in its place. I grabbed the cat’s shadow by the tail and held it while we made the transfer. Then my shadow and I tracked down the shadowless cat and reattached him to the earth. He shook himself, licked his fur and bounded away.

It’s an uneasy truce, to say the least. Even as I’m typing this my shadow is looking longingly at the bed, wondering when he’ll get six uninterrupted hours. And he’s still living in better days, dragging me back with him, kicking and screaming.

But my feet are anchored to the earth, and that’s something. Sooner or later time numbs even the shadows of the past. I’ve seen it happen again and again.

An uneasy truce is better than none. Who better knows what evil lurks in my heart? And who can better help me purge it?

So on a Friday evening we flee with a picnic dinner into the mountains, where it is cooler, winding steadily up the side of the North Carolina foothills through the low deciduous forests into the newer pines, arriving at last at a pale clapboard church. I pull the car down and around the parking lot until it is out of sight of passing motorists. Not that anyone else will interrupt: At 9:30 nearly everyone who lives in the area is either settled in for a banal evening watching television or is installed at one of several honky-tonks for the long-necked Mickeys, loud country music, and a possible romantic tryst. What few cops prowl the area will be occupied chasing down DUIs, breaking up the occasional barroom brawl or reasoning a rare drunk out of a gun. It is unlikely we will be disturbed.

Even if we are, I have nearly as much right to be there as the oldest, staunchest parishioner, because the land on which the church rests belongs to my grandfather, and down the ridge a graveyard holds the remains of hundreds of my ancestors. As we walk among the graves I hold her hand to keep her from stumbling over hidden stones in the thin, milky light of the full moon. Most of the markers reflect the light and cast eerie shadows, but an occasional stone, blackened by age and half-buried by long neglect, will deliberately reach up to trip an unsuspecting soul; I know these wily dead, and I insist she walk close and place her feet where mine have been.

Her name is French: Anaïs. But in addition to the accent of a distant land, her voice is touched with magnolia blossom notes from the Deep South; it originated in cotton and rice country, chattered throughout the world and ended here, speaking in hoarse, almost reverent whispers in a graveyard full of Scottish, English and Irish names, many of them the same as mine. When we settle at the feet of a couple planted little more than ten years past, she cannot hold her tongue: “This is a little creepy. These are your grandparents, for goodness sake.”

I pretend not to hear her and, instead, set down the picnic basket, spread a blanket on the ground and open a bottle of German wine. I pour a couple dollops of the vintage on the two graves. “Pretty good stuff, isn’t it, Mockingbird?” I ask the old fellow. “Rhine wine. Milk of the Madonna. You’d appreciate it if you were still here.”

He is here, of course, strands of his DNA surging through my veins as personality markers and in the shape of my hands. I am, in fact, the representative of all those gathered for their long sleep here. My appreciation of the moon-touched distant hills, my affection for the dark river winding between them, and my deep love of the woman sitting near me on the overlook are all reflections of my ancestors’ intense passions, as though I am a mirrored ball in the ballet of the living, giving back a little light to those who have expressed a final pas de deux, who have iterated the danse macabre. In fact, I am a recent expression of the first man, a distant traveler from the fertile crescent, but no less bound to its red earth and no less a part of the cycle of birth and death, no less battered — in spite of advances in cosmetic surgery and hair coloring — by the winding wheel of time. I spend long moments staring at Anaïs, my Eve, reaching to touch her face and trace my fingers down the side of her neck. Her green eyes flash. She whispers, “Kiss me.”

“Here?” I tease her. “In the graveyard? Isn’t that profaning the dead?”

“Fuck the dead,” she says. So I kiss her to the zinging applause of crickets and the appreciative chirps of tree toads, tasting the wine-flavored liquor of her mouth. Afterward she is breathless: “Why don’t you kiss me that way all the time?”

“Because I’m not always profaning the dead,” I tell her.

“Hush,” says Anaïs. “Don’t speak sacrilege.”

I smile at her and say, “It isn’t sacrilege, darling. And I’m not really profaning the dead. I’m rather honoring them. Continuing their adventure.”

Anaïs gets it right away: “You are like the Christopher Columbus of your ancestors.”

“Yes. They represent my past and my future. I express their present. I am alive now, in this moment. I love you now. What we have is this. This nowness.”

“Baby,” says Anaïs, “you talk such beautiful rot.”

I drink deeply from the bottle of wine; I can taste each part of the grape: the salty skin, the sweet meat, the tangy heart. “Not rot,” I say. “Truth. Absolute truth. I want to drink you as I drink this wine. Give me your mouth.”

The taste of her is more delicate than the flavor from the bottle, but no less complex. We kiss until it must go one direction or another. The invitation in her eyes and her mouth is unmistakable, but I pull away and stretch out on the blanket, face-down, then reach past its edge to the grass and tangle my fingers in it. My grasp is tethered to the earth by the grass and tethered to the yawning remains of my grandfather by the earth. I feel connected to him, and he speaks through me; I press the left side of my face into the blanket.

“He wants to live through me,” I say to a passing breeze.

“Who wants to live through you, lover?” Anaïs whispers so near my ear that I feel the humidity from her breath.

“All of them,” I mumble. “Every last one of them.”

“Then we’ll let them live,” Anaïs whispers. She bites the edge of my ear and straddles my hips. I sense she is unfastening buttons, and in a minute my intuition is proven accurate when she hovers over me, lifts my tee-shirt and brushes the bare skin of my back with the dangling fabric of her open blouse. She tugs at my shirt. “Off,” she insists.

I disengage from the grass and lift the shirt over my head, discarding it at the end of my reach. Anaïs lowers her body onto mine: At first I feel the small touch of her nipples against my upper back, then the press of her breasts, finally the full, delicious weight of her. I feel I am being baptized in the electric warmth of her skin. She lays her face on mine, reaches along the length of my arms to grip my forearms just below the wrist. She sighs: “I love you.”

“And I love you,” I tell her. “And all my ancestors love you, all the way back to Adam.”

Anaïs whispers, “You say such strange things.”

We lay together for long minutes, breathing in unison, hardly daring to move. When her stomach grumbles I laugh and the moment vanishes into memory. She sits up and buttons her shirt. I reach for mine and she says, “No.”

So we sit on the blanket and drink wine from the bottle and eat a late picnic dinner: cold chicken and potato salad. Over the sound of the crickets, the night is filled with hushed noises, little notes in a symphony we take for granted. Far below us, occasional cars pass on the highway, their headlamps piercing bright pinprick holes in the pale blanket of moonlight. Touched by the glow of the moon, the distant hills look like lumbering elephants or stationary waves on a pine-infested ocean or a series of parabolic mathematical equations.

“Or my knees,” says Anaïs. “Look.” She draws her feet near thighs, lifts her skirt and allows the moon to touch her pale skin. There, in miniature, is a model of the landscape molded in her skin. I kiss each knee.

“Take off your clothes,” I tell her. Without hesitating, she begins shedding her blouse, then tugs at the clasp of the wraparound skirt and drops it away from her hips. I lift her from the ground and kick aside the blanket and clothing before lowering her onto the carpet of grass. All the while her eyes await the answer to a question she has not asked.

“Dessert,” I tell her. Anaïs smiles.

From the nearby cooler I take a piece from the heart of a watermelon, wring juice from the pulp over her belly and breasts, then lean down and drink the sweetness from her skin. She trembles.

“It’s cold,” she says. “You’re incorrigible.”

“Yes, yes,” I agree. “Incorrigible. Mad for you. Mad I tell you.”

Anaïs laughs. In minutes we are feeding one another watermelon and are covered in sticky juice, grass and grit. Out of the blue, she is sitting in my lap, facing me, and I am inside her and we are concentrating on each other’s eyes and she is breathing in rapid syncopation and sweat drips from her hair and we are speaking the language of sighs and whispers and she tugs at my face and pulls it to hers and we kiss, all watermelon sweet and sticky, and she turns away and says something unintelligible to the moon and the moon’s answer saddens her and she begins to cry and hides her face in my shoulder and sobs and I touch her hair and hold her close and whisper something in her ear and she comes and I do and she says, “All of them.”

“Yes,” I say. We sit very still for a long, hushed, solemn moment.

By now the local ants are curious about the sweetness in the grass, and we move to another place with our clothing, our picnic bounty and our blanket. Anaïs complains that she is filthy and cannot get dressed; but I have anticipated her need. I tell her to stand still, then I take a large Thermos bottle from the basket and begin to pour its contents — slightly hotter than tepid water — over her body, washing away the grass stems and grit and sticky juice.

“God!” says Anaïs. “This is so delicious it must be sinful.”

I take a second Thermos from the basket and tell her, “Do me.” She stands on tiptoe and pours the water over my shoulders and chest. She is right: The sheet of warm liquid streaming down my body is a sensual taboo.

We dry ourselves with beach towels, then wrap up together in the blanket, huddle close and eat a pair of pomegranates. Anaïs says, “The juice looks like blood.” I squeeze some from the fruit into the palm of my hand. She is right; in the moonlight it looks like a pool of blood.

“My blood for you,” I tell her.

The light of the moon glistens from her tongue as she laps up the juice like a cat, then carefully licks the palm of my hand. Her mouth is stained with the crimson color and tastes of sweet pomegranate when we kiss. “Now we are one blood,” she tells me. “And you should take me again to celebrate.” So I find her in the fragile moonlight and we make love gently, as if for the first time, among the pale stones of the graveyard.

Afterward, the night envelopes us in a warm soporific. I am certain we sleep, but the memory of it bleeds into the morning mist and vanishes in the warmth of the sun. When the caretaker arrives to mow the grass, little trace of Anaïs or me is left behind: Only a watermelon-sticky spot in the grass swarmed over by a ravenous colony of ants.

Oh. And all of my ancestors — every last one of them — are smiling and feel alive.

Every morning the orange-robed young monk crossed one leg, then another, bowed his sheared head over the sole of either foot and mumbled what I assumed were Sanskrit words over them, as the order was clearly part of the Mahayana tradition. I learned from my friend Isamu Yamada that the monk prayed his feet would not inadvertently kill an unsuspecting insect or, if they accidentally did, would cause it to be reborn into a higher consciousness. The ritual, repeated day after day in sunshine or inclement weather, was born out of an inner discipline the monk learned from his earliest training. Its result was a cheerful, humble individual who went about his daily tasks — even the most menial — with enthusiasm. He was acutely aware — perhaps as I would never be — of his community and his responsibility to it.

It was 1969. The Vietnam War was in full swing and beginning to bleed into Laos and Cambodia. For me, it was a war of vivid images: the Eddie Adams photograph of South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street, faces of young men standing in lines at the military airport awaiting transport to Saigon, the seemingly endless stream of B-52 aircraft coming and going from the airstrip near where my family lived, and the June 1963 news photo of Quang Duc, the first Vietnamese monk to immolate himself. The monk troubled me. I had a copy of the news photo, illuminated by a hippie artist and torn from the pages of an underground newspaper, tacked to a bulletin board in my room. More than anything I wanted to understand what would make a human set himself on fire. It seemed unthinkable to me.

It was part of the reason I paid such close attention to the young monk who prayed over his feet opposite my bus stop. I often wondered if he was — whether he recognized it or not — following a path that would eventually lead to death by immolation. Why did he live in community, set apart from his peers, those chattering, uniformed high school students I saw spill off commercial buses in groups of threes and fours during restless afternoons spent prowling movie theatres and purported “black market” alleyways? He hardly seemed much older than me, yet he had given up everything I valued — freedom, individuality and sexuality — for the pipe dream of religion or to satisfy the whims of his believing family. Had Quang Duc followed the same instruction against his will, instruction that led, not to his being raised to a loftier consciousness, but to his being doused with gasoline and devoured by flames?

The young monk never passed my bus stop without smiling and nodding his head at me. Isamu Yamada bowed slightly at his passing. A smile from a monk, Isamu Yamada said, was like a blessing. It meant you would have good fortune throughout the day. Superstitious nonsense, I responded. But I had to grudgingly admit I looked forward to the gentle greeting, and I was disappointed on days when the bus arrived earlier than the toothy blessing.

I have narrated this much of the story often enough, occasionally to the interest and curiosity of hearers; I have seldom — perhaps never — related the rest of the story, mainly because I was too ashamed of my behavior to tell it.

One day, after the orange robe passed, I suggested to Isamu Yamada that we ditch school and follow the monk on his rounds. After bribing my companion and translator with a free lunch and an hour at a Pachinko parlor, he agreed. We stowed our books down the street at his house (both his parents worked outside the home) and traipsed off after our quarry. In his bright orange robe, he was easy prey. We could have easily followed at a distance without much effort, but the longer we pursued, the more distance frustrated me. Before long, we found ourselves within earshot of the monk. I am certain he knew we were tailing him, but he did not acknowledge our presence. Instead, he pressed on toward the town’s residential section.

:::

There, at the home of a sympathizer, he obtained a large bowl that he carried in the crook of his arm, holding it against his body. Into it he began emptying smaller bowls of what looked like vegetables and rice from the little pagoda-like altars at house after house of those believers who contributed to the well-being of the monastery. The area was not very affluent; in fact, my mother’s maid, Kieko, who earned a mere $3.50 for a hard day’s labor, might have lived there. It seemed bad enough to me that Westerners were exploiting the island’s poor — that this religious charlatan, with his prayer beads and his bobbing, smiling head, was taking food from their tables seemed worse. I found myself wanting to erase the smile from his face. The more his bowl filled, the angrier I got.

Finally, I muttered under my breath to Isamu Yamada, “I’m going to knock him on his ass.”

I increased the pace of my step to a very brisk walk, barely hearing Isamu Yamada’s astonished, “What?!” behind me. As I neared the monk, I became aware of his stride and the location of his hips and shoulder. I was seeking his center of gravity, looking — as I did during street football games — for the place and time when he was most vulnerable. All I needed do was wait until his right foot bore his full weight, then place my left foot in front of his and bring my 160 pounds to bear on his back and shoulder. I was so near to him that I could smell the odor of his skin. I focused all my attention on his hips and shoulder. My adrenaline surged. When the time came, I struck with all my might, leaning into the task as hard as I could.

It was a classic takedown. The great bowl sprang from his grip and flew forward in the air, spilling its contents over the sidewalk and street. The young monk sprawled forward, catching the weight of his fall on his elbow and knees: He fell hard. I could almost hear the rasp of his skin on the concrete. He lay still for a moment, then turned and pulled himself to a seated position on the ground. Isamu Yamada had run forward and rattled off something in Japanese to the monk. He glared at me:

“How could you do such a thing!”

He assisted the monk to his feet, all the while talking to him in Japanese.

A long gash in the skin of the monk’s forearm and elbow dripped blood on the ground; one of his knees was badly scraped; his food was strewn over the sidewalk and street and the bowl he had carried was broken into several pieces.

He smiled at me, brought his hands together in front of his chest, bowed, and said something to me in Japanese.

“What did he say?” I asked Isamu Yamada.

My friend was shaking with anger: “He says he is sorry he got in your way,” he spat at me. “He wants you to forgive him.”

I don’t believe I ever felt more humiliated. A part of me understood how completely sinister my behavior had been and wanted to atone for the evil deed; another part wanted to slap the monk into Western reality. I felt utterly condemned. I muttered something in English and tried to press a few dollars on the monk. He refused my offer and apologized again; then he shrugged off Isamu Yamada’s assistance and bent to gather the ceramic shards from the street and sidewalk. When Isamu Yamada and I tried to help, he shook his hand and waved us away. In Japanese, he said, “The responsibility is mine.” Isamu Yamada gripped my forearm and led me down the street away from the catastrophe. Once we were back in town he told me he was going home: He didn’t want to be seen with me. More than a week passed before he would speak with me again.

I gathered my books at Isamu Yamada’s house, then wandered down to the seawall, where I sat in the sand with my back against the cinder blocks and listened to the roar of the waves and watched a group of hippies having a picnic. I considered my arrogance and what it cost me in emotional currency.

For more than a week I could not bring myself to catch the bus at my usual stop, but walked a good 8 or 12 blocks to another. One morning, running late, I could not avoid a return to my usual place. There I turned my back on the monastery and talked non-stop with Isamu Yamada (we were speaking, but had not returned to mutual trust). As usual, the young monk passed, his elbow still bandaged after our collision; he bowed and smiled. I found I could not look him in the eye.

In fact, over the remaining several months I rode that bus, I was never again able to meet his gentle gaze.

Two nights ago in a dream I followed the sound of music, a somber, otherworldly meditation that drew me into the back yard, over the tall wood fence, through the yards of backfence neighbors, across the sales lot of a mobile home dealer, over the asphalt river of a broad county road, through the parking lots and uninspired brick buildings of a community college, over chainlink and barbed wire and four lanes of concrete interstate highway past more chainlink and barbed wire, until finally — finally! — I came to an oasis of woods — oaks and hickories and pines and maples — a space that would pass, in the absence of civilization, for non-tropical rain forest. There, in the cool dense shadows of a glade I came upon hundreds of Great Apes — gorillas and chimpanzees and bonobos and orangutans — gathered together in a vast circle, playing musical instruments of their own making and singing in voices that were nothing like their usual screeching, chattering depictions, but were warm and lyrical and, above all, resigned. The apes were playing a funeral dirge. Their own.

In my dream I stood for long minutes listening to the bleak, hypnotic, percussive sound until I began to understand its meaning, and I heard the long history of a simple people who lived in trees and foraged for food and warred among themselves and with men until technology came, with its rapacious appetite and its enormous greed, and slowly ground down the bones of the ancients, distilling them into what remained: Little more than a great symphony orchestra and a handful of prisoners in zoos. I was so moved by their dirge that I stripped off all my clothing, covered my body in mud, colored my hair with ash, and uttered a primal scream out of the despair in my gut. In that moment I was the last representative of my tribe, consumed with loneliness, aching for a companionship that simply did not exist, understanding that, when I breathed my last it would not simply be my final exhalation, but the death rattle of all my people, the genocide of my kind. It is finished. Amen.

•

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills…” begins one of my favorite books, Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen’s memoir of her experience as the owner of a coffee plantation in Kenya. A number of preferred reads are centered in what Henry Stanley called the “Dark Continent,” including Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Ernest Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa. There is, in each of them, a strong appreciation of Africa’s natural beauty, coupled with a thoroughly paternalistic attitude toward the land and its people. From the Victorian era deep into the 20th century, Europeans migrated south, planted colonies, plundered them, polluted indigenous cultures and then fled back to their “civilizations” when their luck turned sour or their investments proved less than profitable. As Chinua Achebe expressed in an essay entitled “The Role of the Writer in the New Nation” for Nigeria Magazine in 1964, “African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; …their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, …they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity. It is this dignity that African people all but lost during the colonial period, and it is this that they must now regain.” Nearly a half-century later, much of Africa remains oppressed, ravaged by war, famine, and epidemic disease. In many areas the dignity Mr. Achebe envisioned is as elusive as ever. In such a fragile environment, one is hard pressed to prefer apes over humans: After all, aren’t humans of greater value than their “lesser” kin?

Truth is, we seem to blithely ignore both the relatively quick genocide of Great Apes and the slow destruction by HIV/AIDS of African humans, preferring, instead, to invest in the creation of new and improved weapons of mass destruction. So neoconservatism has as its ultimate goal not the preservation of life, but its abolition. Perhaps it takes a little too seriously the REM lyric, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” Or maybe there is truth in the notion that the neocons believe they are hastening the Second Coming of Christ. Whatever the case, to hear the Vice Fund tell it, investing in self-destruction is quite profitable. How this relates to the extinction of Great Apes may not be immediately clear, but consider this: If we care so little for the preservation of our own species, and choose profit over survival, why should we be expected to care about the loss of a few higher primates? The world lost passenger pigeons and dodo birds at the turn of the 20th century. It is simply moving a little higher up the food chain at the turn of the 21st.

•

When I was a kid, accepted wisdom concerning the Neanderthal peoples was this: They were distant ancestors in a chain that passed from Great Apes through homo erectus and homo neanderthalensis to homo sapiens. According to the convention, in my distant past there existed a series of blood kin Neanderthals. Science in the 1960s said they were as much a part of my family tree as my own mother and father. But the accepted wisdom was mistaken. Nearly all anthropologists now agree that Neanderthals were “an evolutionary dead end,” and DNA evidence seems to support their view. Neanderthals were a very different species from modern humans.

Still debated is how exactly Neanderthal man ceased to exist. Some claim lower birth rates and higher morbidity rates caused the decline in Neanderthals; others blame the climate or environmental changes. I agree with those who hold the view that modern man simply exterminated his Neanderthal neighbors. Considering we have been for centuries quite willing to kill our homo sapiens brothers and sisters for something as simple as the amount of melanin in their skin, it is little wonder that, competing with a different species for territory and food, we would resort to violence. It’s our modus operandi.

That interpretation, as distasteful as it sounds, goes a long way toward explaining why we have succeeded as a species for long centuries where others have failed. We’ve been smart at winnowing out everything that got in our way. From tiny bacteria to great beasts, we’ve met them all and taken them out; at our technological acme, we can now eliminate hundreds of thousands of our own kind with the utterance of a single bomb. If homo sapiens are good at anything, they are good at this: We are perhaps the best killers on the planet.

It may well be the reason Gaea spewed us up in the first place. Maybe she is tired of these squirmers squirming over her crust; maybe she longs, as a dog longs to rid himself of fleas, to purge herself of these wrigglers wriggling. Perhaps homo sapiens are her answer to the problem — a gang of highly specialized killers who, in their bloodlust, will eventually destroy even themselves. Perhaps my sentimental belief that we should stop encroaching on the habitat of the Great Apes, that we have a moral obligation to those humans dying of HIV/AIDS in Africa is exactly that: A sentimental belief. It could be those who deride me as a “tree-hugger” and a “knee-jerk liberal” are on the money. This isn’t Disneyland. We’re here to do a job. Let’s get on with it.

But the notion chafes at everything I’ve come to believe in 48 years, and at the teaching of a man whose birth we seem hell-bent on forgetting in our lust for a perfectly commercialized holiday season. He points toward a higher way, a nobler evolutionary path: “Love your enemies,” he says. “And pray for those who spitefully use you.” His closest disciples define love not in the way we take lives, but in the way we lay down our lives. In other words, this man, this radical preacher, this rebel Jesus (to quote Jackson Browne) wants homo sapiens to live utterly opposing their deadly natures. Taken at his word, he is the anti-Rambo. No wonder neocons twist his sermons and distort his teachings. He is not one of them. Not even remotely.

•

In my dream one of the Great Apes, a gentle orangutan, is named Jesus. He makes one promise, one guarantee to his apostles: “If you follow me,” he says, “you will suffer persecution.” None of his disciples question what he means by it. He is talking about physical suffering and death. “And then, the resurrection,” he says.

Outside, on this late-December morning, shoppers are scurrying from place-to-place, buying presents and hanging tinsel, hastening, hurrying. The great carol of the day is not “Silent Night” nor “Noel” but the hustle and bustle of consumerism. It’s what we know in the world of plastic Jesuses and one too many pontificators interpreting his teaching. I suppose the condemnation reaches all the way down to me. He said it most eloquently himself: “Turn the other cheek.” The best acknowledgement of it is not in repeating the words, but in doing it. In turning the other cheek. We aren’t big on cheek-turning in the beginning of the 21st century. We’re much better at revenge.

In the orchestra of my dreams, bonobo drummers keep a steady rhythm, and I imagine a procession of humans carrying the corpse of the last Great Ape, perhaps a gorilla, from the wild to its final resting place.

The corpse looks remarkably human.

•

For those who have read this far, thank you. I hope your holidays are happy ones. For insight into how I arrived here, I offer the following links:

• UNAIDS
• Countdown to extinction for world’s great apes
• Orangutans Headed Toward “Catastrophe”

Of all the cats, she is the most affectionate, rubbing against my ankles and pressing her long, dark fur into my touch. She is a social cat. She appreciates music, prefers Mozart or James to Telemann and Counting Crows. She will not endure Beethoven, and leaves the room in a haughty huff during the opening bars of the Eroica. We have come to a compromise over Pearl Jam. She tolerates them, but only once. If I repeat a CD, she leaves her favorite spot on the sofa, leaps up on my desk and glares. The signal is clear: One of us must relent. The few times I overruled her, she uttered an angry yammer and prissed out of the room.

Molly is the most vocal of the four cats. Rocky lost his powers of speech when a veterinarian accidentally destroyed his vocal cords while intubating him prior to surgery. His blocked urethra was opened and his distended bladder was emptied, but he came away from the procedure mute. Now he simply croaks and squeaks. Max talks, but only to fake mice and genuine insects that fall prey to him. He’ll hold a frenzied moth at bay by pinning a wing with his front paw, and he’ll very politely explain how he is sorry for all his carnivorous urges before eating it. Scruffy never talks. Like the Sphinx, she keeps all her wisdom to herself.

Molly demonstrates no such restraint. Like a feline blogger with an axe to grind, she talks loudly and about everything. “Mouse?” she asks. Where is the toy mouse? And why aren’t we playing fetch? Throw the mouse. Mouse is her favorite word, and she repeats it again and again during the course of any conversation: Mouse!

“Out!” she says, standing at the back door. This, of course, means, “I have been standing here behind your chair for a good three minutes and I expect you to pay attention to my every whim and open this door right now!” Outside, on the back step, she says, “Out!” I am out! Let me in! I’m tired and I need a nap! Once inside, she pauses at my chair and tells me the whole story of her outdoor adventures; or, if I have been lax in opening the door, she tells me off in no uncertain terms while crossing the office, never looking back, making her way to her food dish or the water trough.

“How?” she asks. How did this food dish get empty? How come there is no water for me to drink? How long has it been since somebody scraped out this litter box?

If mouse is her favorite noun, now is her favorite adverb. She has no patience. Everything must be done now. “Now, now, now, now, now,” she says.

Ow! is her only complaint. Ow! You’ve stepped on my tail! Ow! That’s my paw! Ow! Watch where you’re sitting. The operative part of her discourse is clear: Molly will not budge. If anyone moves, I will do the moving. Like all the women I love, she makes her own determinations and bends them only after sustained negotiation.

She is open to negotiation. If she sprawls across the loveseat so I cannot occupy it, I’ll rub her head and shoulders, scratch round her neck, and gently persuade her that it is in her best interests to relent. She does so by degrees, as a reminder that she is not acquiescing, but simply compromising in the moment. Tomorrow I might not be as fortunate. “I understand, darling,” I tell her.

She stretches and kneads the sofa, arches her back so I’ll rub down the length of her spine. “I like you this afternoon,” her loud purr tells me. “I like you a lot.”

Tomorrow I might not be so lucky. “I’m thinking!” she’ll shrug. “I’m busy. Leave me alone.” Fortunately, I understand this behavior; I’ve done it often enough myself. But because we mostly live in the moment, today’s rebuff will be diminished by tomorrow’s small intimacies.

“Now!” she’ll tell me. Scratch me there! And I’ll realize again that her vocal warmth is worth the price of her small silences.