beating against me like the wind. Their claws or hands or whatever it is they have tear at my to-be-sloughed-off flesh as they seize hold of us and lift us into the air, off the top of the mesa, sweeping over the landscape, into the stars and the darkness beyond.
I am still able to touch the thoughts of my companion and converse with him after a fashion that is not speech, except perhaps the speech of dreams. His words form inside my mind, as if they are my own.
This is my tragedy, I come to understand.
I have done a terrible thing, but not terrible enough.
For a while, during the years of my imposture, I didn't feel like a damned soul at all. It was very beguiling. Marguerite awakened within me emotions I did not know I even had. We were happy. When our daughter was born, it was a joy. She taught me how to laugh, something I had not done in a very long time.
That must be sloughed off.
I had a life.
And I lost it.
Again.
I have done a terrible thing.
It is of no matter. Such things do not exist in the dark.
But what if I can't slough it all off? What if the condition of nihil is only incompletely achieved? What if, in the end, my sin is a very petty and human one, a routine mixture of cowardice and prideful despair?
Now the stars swirl around us in a vast whirlpool, and then there are more dark dust clouds whirling, obscuring the light, and we pass through, borne by our captors, for I believe that is what they are, the ones to whom we have surrendered ourselves. Once again the ice-plain stretches below us, beneath the black suns, and the enormous stone visage looms before us, and the stone jaws grind and the stone throat howls, speaking the names of the lords of primal chaos, and of the chaos itself which cannot be named at all.
I have done a terrible thing.
History, family history, has a way of repeating itself, and the sins of the fathers are visited, etc., etc., but not precisely and not the way you think, because the terrible thing was simply this, that at the end of many long and happy years together with Marguerite, she began to leave me, not because she was unfaithful or wanted a divorce, much less because I blew her brains out with a heavy-caliber pistol or induced her to do the same to herself. More simply, she developed brain cancer, and after the seizures and delirium and withdrawals into hospital wards, where I last saw her hooked up to monitors and tubes like a thing, not the person I loved, who had taught me, quite unexpectedly, how to be human — after I no longer had the courage to visit her or whisper her name, I looked into the darkness once more and remembered all those strange things from my youth, and my companion, my mentor, my friend with the many funny names I'd made up for him and no name at all, was waiting for me as if no time had passed.
Cowardice and despair. How terribly, disappointingly human at the last.
Falling down from out of the black sky toward the immense thing that is more of a god than anything imagined in human mytholo gies, I realize that my only crime is that I am a liar, that I claimed to be ready for this journey when I am not, that I have not managed to slough off my humanity at all; that if anything I have suddenly regained it.
I call out to my companion. I speak strange words, like an apostle babbling in tongues. I ask him if he is my friend, if he has been my friend all my life. I tell him that I have a name, which is Joseph. I ask him his own name, and somehow I am able to press into his mind. I catch glimpses of his life and learn that he was an astronomer who worked in in Arizona about 1910, named Ezra Watkins, and he too has some deeply buried core of sorrow, a secret pain that he is terrified I might uncover and force him to confront before the darkness can swallow him up utterly and forever.
He draws away from me in something very much like panic, shouting that these things must be gotten rid of, discarded, sloughed off — the phrase he uses over and over again, chanting it like a mantra — and I can feel his immeasurable, helpless, despair as memories of his discarded humanity begin to awaken within him.
He begins to scream, to make that unbelievable, indescribable howling noise, and for once I cannot join him in his song. From out of my mouth issue only words, like a little boy's voice, not loud enough to be heard, breaking, shrill.
Consternation among our winged bearers.
This one is too heavy. He is not pure.
They let go of me. I am falling from them, through space, burning among the stars, blinded by light, away from the stone god, away from the black suns and the swirling dark.
I call out to Ezra Watkins. I reach for his hand.
But he is not there, and I can feel my ears bleeding.
Maybe my daughter Anastasia inherited my alleged total lack of human emotions, because she disappeared about the time her mother became ill, and I never heard from her again; but I am, alas, a very poor liar, which is my single crime, of which prideful despair, cowardice, and self-delusion are mere subsets, what I have failed to slough off.
I alone have escaped to tell thee.
My eyes do not glow. That is an illusion. In the dark, there is no light.
I wait. I have walked too far in the dark spaces. I have waded barefoot among the fiery stars and the black stars and burned myself. I cannot walk upon the Earth again, but only wander in the darkness, howling.
The Christians say it is the howling of a damned soul. The Native peoples, who have been here longer, have other, older ideas.
They're both right.
Nobody is going to make this better with a blanket and a cup of hot chocolate.
Now that you have come to me, you must tell the story.
