explanation she might have made. We parted without farewells, without more words.
I left the gray garden which had become bitter cold during our conversation. I left America that same day and my real life ended.
There's more to it than this but I cannot get it straight in my mind. Something has happened to my memory. I wonder if perhaps I have not dreamed all this: a long nightmare drawing to its bitter close in this dry ruin of an older world.
It is late now. I still live though I am exhausted and indifferent to everything except that violent living sun whose morning light has just this moment begun to strike upon the western hills across the river: all that is left, all that ever was, the red fire.
I shall not take Cavesway even though I die in pain and confusion. Anubis must wait for me in the valley until the last and, even then, I shall struggle in his arms for I know now that life,
Though my memory is going from me rapidly, the meaning is clear and unmistakable and I see the pattern whole at last, marked in giant strokes upon the air: I was he whom the world awaited. I was that figure, that messiah whose work might have been the world's delight, and liberation. But the villain death once more undid me and to
1947 to November, 1953: Barrytown, N. Y.
Gore Vidal
