“ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘here is the Canaanite tablet with the ritual that created you. It’s in four pieces, but I can put it together.’ He assembled the four pieces and he made the tablet whole.
“I think I was relieved. I’d forgotten all about it. It had not been in the casket. It was small, thick, covered in tiny cuneiform writing, and seemed perfect, as if it had never been broken.
“He looked up suddenly and then he said, ‘Don’t just stand about. We need to work. Look, lay out all the bones in the form of a man.’
“ ‘I will not!’ I said. My wrath came up so hot I felt it even in this shell. It didn’t make me melt. But it gave me a shimmer of heat which I could almost see. ‘I will not touch them.’
“ ‘All right, suit yourself, sit down and be quiet. Think, try to think of everything you know. Use your mind which is in your spirit, and never was in your body.’
“ ‘If we destroy these bones, will I die?’ I asked.
“ ‘I said for you to think, not talk,’ he said. ‘No, you won’t die. You can’t die. Do you want to end up a tottering idiot of a spirit mumbling in the wind? You’ve seen them, haven’t you? Or a stupefied angel roaming the fields trying to remember heavenly hymns? You’re of this earth now, forever, and you might as well forget any bright ideas of simply dispatching the bones. The bones will keep you together, literally. The bones will give you a badly needed resting place. The bones will keep your spirit formed in a manner that will allow it to use its strength. Listen to what I’m telling you. Don’t be a fool.’
“ ‘I’m not arguing with you,’ I said. ‘Have you finished reading the Canaanite tablet?’
“ ‘Hush up.’
“I sighed angrily and sat back. I looked at my fingernails. They were splendid. I felt my hair, thick and the same. What was this like? Being alive in perfect health at a perfect moment of wakefulness and energy, untouched by hunger, fatigue, the remotest discomfort…a seemingly perfect physical statue. I smacked the floor with my slippered feet. I had on my favorite embroidered robes, naturally, and velvet slippers. The slippers made a good noise.
“Finally he put all the tablets aside and said, ‘All right, since you are so reluctant to touch your own bones, finicky, cowardly young spirit, I’ll do the work for you.’
“He came to the center of the room. He dumped all the bones out on the floor. He stood back and he stretched out his hands and then he lowered himself slowly, bending his knees, and out of his mouth came a long series of Persian incantations, murmurings, and I saw from his hands something coming forth, like heat perhaps from a fire, but nothing more visible than that.
“To my amazement the bones assembled themselves in the form of a man laid out for burial, and now he continued his exhortations, and making a whipping gesture with his hand, as though sewing, he brought to him an immense spool of heavy wire, copper, or gold, or what, I couldn’t tell, and now with the gesture repeated over and over he made the wire thread the entire skeleton together as if it were beads. He hooked bone to bone with this wire, without ever touching anything, merely making the motions, and he let his hands linger long over the hands and feet of the body which had so many little bones. Then he moved to the ribs and the pelvis, and finally, with a long sweeping gesture of his right hand, he laid out the spine of this skeleton and connected it to the skull. He now had it all threaded together. One could have hung it from a hook to jangle in the wind.
“I saw a skeleton laid there as though in an open grave. I pushed aside all memory of the cauldron, of the pain, and I merely looked at it.
“Meantime he had rushed into another room and now returned with two short little boys, boys about the age of ten, which I realized in an instant were not real, but spirits, barely corporeal. They carried with them another casket, smaller than the first, rectangular, smelling of cedar, yet heavily plated in gold and silver, thick with jewels. He opened this casket. I saw a bed of folded silk. He told the little boys now to take this skeleton and to arrange it as if it were a child in its mother’s womb, with its arms drawn up, and its head bent down, and its knees to its chin.
“The little ones obeyed these commands. They both stood up and looked at me with ink-black eyes. The bent-up skeleton just fit into the casket. It hadn’t an inch to spare.
“ ‘Go!’ he said to the little ones, ‘and wait for my next command.’ They didn’t want to. ‘Go!’ he roared.
“They ran from the room, and stood peeping at me from the far door.
“I stood up and came towards the casket. It was like an old burial now, one found in the hills, from the ancient times when they buried men like this, in the womb of Mother Earth. I looked down at it.
“He was brooding. ‘Wax,’ he said. ‘I want a great deal of melted wax.’ He stood up and turned. At once I felt a shock of fear. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he demanded.
“His two servants appeared again, eyeing me cautiously and carrying a big bucket of the melted wax. He took the kettle from them, for that’s what it was, more or less, and he poured the wax all around the bones, so that as it hardened before my eyes, it fixed them in place. It was a soft, white fixture for them. And then he told the little ones to go again, get rid of the kettle, and that they could play in the garden for an hour in their bodies if they didn’t make noise. They were overjoyed.
“ ‘Are they ghosts?’ I asked.
“ ‘They don’t know,’ he said, still staring at the bones now fixed in wax. Obviously the question didn’t interest him. He shut the casket. It had strong hinges and a strong lock. He tested this and opened it. ‘In time,’ he said, ‘though I won’t wait too long, being as old as I am, I will make a tablet of silver to go with this, containing all that is needed from the Canaanite tablet, but for now, the bones are as they should always be. Go into them and come back out.’
“Naturally I didn’t want to do it. I felt a loathing for the bones, and a rebellious temper. But he waited me out like a wise teacher, and I did it, dissolving, feeling the smooth calm darkness, and then being sucked out of it in a whirl of heat and finding myself standing beside him, embodied again.
“ ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘Excellent. Now tell me all you remember of your life.’
“Now that request on his part began one of the most unpleasant arguments of my entire immortal existence. I couldn’t remember anything of my life. No matter how he badgered me I couldn’t remember. I knew I feared a cauldron. I knew I feared heat. I knew I feared bees and the wax had made me think of them. I knew that I had seen Cyrus, King of Persia, and that the favor I had asked of him had not been unreasonable. Other than that? I knew only general things.
“Over and over he demanded I try. Over and over I failed. I wept. Finally I told him to leave me alone, what did he want of me, and he touched me on the shoulder and said, ‘There, there, don’t you see, if you don’t remember your life, you can’t remember its moral lessons.’
“ ‘Well, what if there were none!’ I said ominously. ‘What if all I saw was treachery and lies.’
“ ‘That is simply impossible,’ he said. ‘But you do remember Cyrus, and you do remember what you did today?’
“All that I could remember—coming to him, all he’d said, being sent to slay the bedouins and enjoying it, and coming back to him and all that had happened since. He threw at me a few random questions about details…such as what had the fire been made of round which the bedouins camped: camel dung was the answer. Had there been any women? No. Where was the place? I had to think and extract an answer, as I had taken no note, but it came to me to his satisfaction, fifty miles from where the desert begins due east of Miletus.
“ ‘Who is King now?’
“ ‘Cyrus of Persia,’ I said. He then went into a whole series of questions. I answered them all. Who were the Lydians, the Medians, the Ionians, where was Athens, who was Pharaoh, what was the city where Cyrus had been declared King of the World. I answered and answered and answered.
“He asked practical questions about colors and food and air and warmth and heat. I knew all the answers. I knew everything general, but nothing pertaining to my own life. I knew lots about silver and gold and could tell him that—he was impressed. I looked at the emeralds the King had sent him and told him they were most precious and especially beautiful and which was better than another. I told him the names of flowers in his garden. Then I felt tired.
“A strange thing happened. I began to weep. I began to weep like a child. I couldn’t stop myself from it and any sense of being humiliated before him didn’t matter to me. Finally I looked up and saw him waiting with his bright, curious, and rather merciless blue eyes.
“ ‘Did you really mean it when you said, always remember the hungry and the poor?’ I asked.
“ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m going to tell you the most important things I know now. Listen. I want this repeated
