Jitterbug Perfume

Part II. LOOKING UP CHOMOLUNGMA'S DRESS

AS THE AFTERNOON PROGRESSES, our shadows grow longer. At night, in the dark, we become our shadows. That is as true today as then. In the old days, people were aware of it, that's all. In the old days, the whole world was religious and full of interest.

Alobar had been at the lamasery twenty years when Kudra arrived, dressed as a boy. The lamas saw through her disguise immediately but put her to work moving stones. She had worked on the wall less than an hour before Alobar, too, realized she was a woman. Her shadow fell off of her with perfect discretion. Shadows do. It was her aroma that gave her away.

They took their afternoon tea by the cold river. The lama who was overseeing the construction of the wall suggested that the workers disrobe and enjoy a dip. Alobar encouraged this idea, for it had been a long time since he had seen a naked woman. He found himself trembling.

Kudra declined to swim. The lama persisted. “Come on, boy,” he said. “Everybody must bathe or else the wall will fall down.” In the high mountain air, there was mischief afoot.

Finally, the “boy” dashed up to Alobar, who was just wading into the water, and whispered, “Help me, please. Don't you recognize me?”

Of course, he didn't recognize her. Naked, he would not have recognized her. She had been eight years old when he had seen her last.

“You called me by a foreign name. Wren, little Wrenna, I believe it was.” Kudra smiled. “You haven't aged at all, you know.”

The icy water swirling around Alobar's ankles was causing his genitals to retract. He felt ashamed and wanted to turn his back. This mischief was a mistake.

Kudra grasped his arm. “Remember? You tried to persuade me to eat a beet.”

Of our nine planets, Saturn is the one that looks like fun. Of our trees, the palm is obviously the stand-up comedian. Among fowl, the jester's cap is worn by the duck. Of our fruits and vegetables, the tomato could play Falstaff, the banana a more slapstick role. As Hamlet — or Macbeth — the beet is cast. In largely vegetarian India, the beet is rarely eaten because its color is suggestive of blood. Out, damned mangel-wurzel.

Alobar was remembering. .

He had been put off from the moment he sighted smoke. On a day so sultry that he moved through it the way an inchworm might move through a mound of lye, a day so bright that it sent his eyeballs retreating into the shade of their own sockets, he simply could not conceive of any advantage in torches. Surely torches could have waited until after sunset, although upon the sweltering Ganges plain it seemed to Alobar that one's sweat poured as profusely by night as by day. As he drew nearer to the flames, he realized that they were borne by mourners gathering for a funeral — all the more reason to detour to the cheerful cool of a grove. It should come as no surprise that the traveler from the west was, in funeral matters, slightly shy.

The road, which had seen too many monsoons and forgotten too few, passed within yards of the funeral site, alas, and in the grassy savannas to the side of the road, Alobar had detected the odd hiss and slither, a persuasive inducement to stick to the well-worn path. Thus, he soon found himself in the midst of the white-clad mourners, an unwilling witness to unappetizing customs.

Not far from the river, four tall beams had been planted in the ground to form the corners of a square. They supported four thick planks firmly held by mortises. Between the beams there lay a plexus of logs, arranged in such a manner as to leave a space in the center, into which wood chips and resin had been scattered. Around and upon the log pile, dry branches of the sort that might burn quickly and brightly lay in wait. The roof of the pyre was made of planks covered with turf. The end result was a kind of tinder shack, a cottage at which no insurance agent would ever call, a studio apartment of death.

The corpse was placed in the middle of the square, upon the pile of logs. The dead man looked comfortable enough, all things considered (it bothered Alobar, philosophically, that the dead invariably seemed more self-possessed than the living), but obviously it only would be a matter of minutes before he began to char like one of those loaves the forgetful Frol was forever leaving too long on the hearth, an image that further hastened Alobar's departure. He had progressed but a few steps, however, before his path was blocked by a procession that, with great pomp, was leading a garlanded woman to the pyre.

As the procession wound around the site, Alobar inquired of a mourner if the woman might be the widow. Hardly had the stranger nodded “yes” than the female moved slowly, but without hesitation, to the “door” of the pyre. A Brahman followed her and handed her one of the torches, with which she lit each corner of the square. Then, to Alobar's horror, she lay down beside her dead husband.

It was with calm resignation, if not dim intelligence, that she at first regarded the flames that darted among the boughs like finches from hell, but when the heat grew more intense and she felt the early bites of pain, she cried out sharply and sat upright in her intended tomb. The Brahmans poked her with the long bamboo poles that they carried to funerals in case a widow should lose her enthusiasm for suicide suttee. A full panic seized her. She brushed the poles aside and made to leap from the square of fire. Using their poles, the Brahmans brought down the roof on her head, but her overheated adrenaline lent her a flash of superhuman strength, and she managed to spring from the blazing pyre and run, her sari smoking, toward the river.

The Brahmans overtook her on the bank and wrestled her back to the pyre, which was now roaring like a furnace. While the woman struggled with the priests, the crowd screamed and yelled. To his surprise, Alobar noticed that he, alone, was cheering for the woman. Under a rash impulse to intervene, he was drawing his knife when three sturdy Brahmans pried her from the earth to which she clung and flung her into the middle of the inferno. She continued to struggle for a minute, parting the heat waves with her shrieks, but by the time Alobar reached the pyre, she was as still and silent as any log in the blaze.

Shoving jabbering mourners roughly aside, holding his nose against the cannibal recipes that were pasting themselves in the air; scattering lotus garlands, hibiscus wreaths, rice balls, and milk bowls with kicks from what little was left of his boots, he barreled from the funeral grounds with an elephant's drive, and nothing, not Brahmanic curses nor the starched curtain of heat nor the craters and clouds of red dust in the road slowed him down. He might have continued at that pace for miles had he not come alongside a small girl, who was also fleeing the scene, sobbing hysterically.

Alobar put his arm around the child and tried to comfort her. From the rags of his blanket roll, he fished a piece of honeyed coconut meat that he had been saving for his bedtime treat. The girl refused it, though her sobs subsided somewhat, and she rested her head against his side. When they reached a leafy mango tree, out of sight of hair smoke and lip ash and bowel cinders, Alobar sat her down, dried her tears, and sang for her his ditty about the world being, against all evidence, round. She took the sweet.

Between bites, the child explained that she was unrelated to the funeral party but had come upon it by chance in the course of running a family errand. Thereupon she opened her basket and revealed its contents: a dozen round and ruddy roots, caked with loam.

“Beets!” cried Alobar. “Aren't you the lucky one?” He smacked his lips. “You shall dine handsomely this night.”

The girl made a face. “Nobody eats these ugly things,” she said. She went on to tell how her family boiled down beets for the color that was in them. Her father had dispatched her to gather this batch so that he might dye the strips of cotton cloth in which he wrapped the aromatic cones and sticks that he made and sold. She had been born, eight years earlier, into a caste of incense makers, and since business was flourishing at the holy sites along the Ganges where pilgrims bathed, and since she had but one brother, she was frequently called away from household chores in order to help in the trade.

“Dye,” grumbled Alobar. “A tragic waste of fine food.” But his lament was short-lived. There was something about the girl more interesting than her beet basket. She was a miniature version of Wren! The longer Alobar looked at her, the stronger the feeling. Her eyelids, like Wren's, were as thick and languid as the peel of some pulpy fruit; she had the same chin dimple: a wormhole in a pear; the same occupied codpiece for a nose. As did Wren's, her lips parted reluctantly, like waters protecting an oyster bed, to slowly disclose the aquatic shelf of bright teeth behind them, and in the girl's eyes there fluttered illuminated parchments upon which intelligent things were written, things that Alobar could scarcely hope to read. She was two or three shades darker, and several sizes smaller, naturally, but he could not help but call her Wren, his little Wrenna, unaware that his wife had been murdered by the jealous necromancer Noog a few weeks after Alobar was carried feet-first from his citadel eight years before.

“My name is Kudra,” said the child. “Kudra, not Wren, and I believe I must go now.”

“Yes, you must,” agreed Alobar, who was ashamed and alarmed at the way his cock was beginning to push against the folds of its tent. “I, too, must resume my trek.” He pointed to the north, in whose far mountains there supposedly dwelt the teachers he had long been seeking, the masters over death. He related to Kudra only a modicum of his travel plans, but she was to remember them in times to come, just as she was to remember his parting testimony in praise of the edibility of beets and as she was to remember how he had turned and run after her, grasped her shoulders and made her promise, through a fresh outpouring of tears, that what had transpired with the widow at the pyre that day would never transpire with her. .

“Bones are patient. Bones never tire nor do they run away. When you come upon a man who has been dead many years, his bones will still be lying there, in place, content, patiently waiting, but his flesh will have gotten up and left him. Water is like flesh. Water will not stand still. It is always off to somewhere else; restless, talkative, and curious. Even water in a covered jar will disappear in time. Flesh is water. Stones are like bones. Satisfied. Patient. Dependable. Tell me, then, Alobar, in order to achieve immortality, should you emulate water or stone? Should you trust your flesh or your bones?”

Alobar had stared at the lama and said nothing. After several minutes, the lama had asked him why he remained silent. “Water babbles to stone,” said Alobar, “but stone will not answer.”

From then on, they showed him some respect.

When Kudra revealed herself to him at the river, Alobar dressed quickly and led her away. “Where are you going with that boy?” called the lama. “Come back here! We have many stones to move.”

“Stones are patient,” Alobar replied. “I thought you knew.”

They climbed from the riverbed to a grassy outcropping, where they might find a bit of padding for their backsides and perhaps watch the mountains vying with one another to see who could be tallest. Chomolungma was winning. Chomolungma was what the world looked like when the world stood on tiptoes. Pale from the strain, blue from the lack of oxygen. The vegetation had all grown dizzy and slid down her back, snow swirled in perpetual spirals around her skull, she wore a glacier in her crotch like a sanitary napkin.

“Could it be?” asked Alobar. “You are actually the child I met by the Ganges? Yes, I can tell by your chin depression, you are the one. Or else, her brother.”

Kudra removed her turban, allowing her waist-length hair to spill out. She unbuttoned her baggy phulu jacket and loosened her vest. Unbound, her breasts bobbed to the surface like jellyfish coming up to feed. She sighed with relief. Alobar sighed with appreciation. “It might be better if you remained a boy,” he said.

“Why is that?”

“In this region, women are considered bad luck. They have a saying here: 'Dogs, children, and women are the roots of trouble.'”

“Oh?”

“They have another saying: 'If you pay attention to the talk of a woman, the roof of your house will soon be overgrown with weeds.'”

“Is that so? Weeds, eh?”

“They have another saying—”

“All right, all right. I get the idea.”

“I am sorry. You must feel that it would be better not to be born at all than to be born a woman.”

“I am sorry. I don't feel that way in the least.”

“You don't? Then why are you dressed in this manner?”

Kudra produced a boar-bristle brush and laid it to her tangles. In a moment, her hair was rippling and shining. Mount Chomolungma raised a few inches higher on her toes to see where that black glow was coming from.

“I suppose I have always been pleased to be alive, female or not,” she said. “These days I am more pleased about it than ever. Would you have any interest in hearing my story, or do you fear for your roof?”

Alobar decided to be intrigued. Chomolungma, on the other hand, settled back down to her customary height of twenty-nine thousand, twenty-eight feet. On that spring day, sixty-eight pairs of snow leopards and eleven pairs of yeti had mated on her slopes. What did she care about a man and a woman trying to get acquainted?

For weeks after her experience at the cremation grounds, Kudra had been troubled by nightmares. She would thrash and whimper until she would wake up the whole family. Some nights they would coo to her in soothing mantras and fetch her warm milk, other nights they snapped at her irritably. Her aunt threatened to make her sleep in the courtyard where the cow was staked, but her father objected that it would be rude to interrupt a cow at rest. While her mother was sympathetic, she could not understand the reason for the bad dreams. Suttee was a common practice, after all, and this was hardly the first time that Kudra had seen a widow join her husband's body on the pyre.

“But. . she ran away,” sobbed Kudra.

“A stupid woman,” said her mother. “The life of a widow is worse than fire.”

“An evil, cowardly woman,” said her father. “A husband and wife are one. Eternity depends upon them being together. A suttee woman is the heroic savior of her husband's eternity. Praise Shiva.” Usually, her father saved his spiritual instruction for her brother.

“Someday I will inform you about the life of a widow,” said her mother.

In time, the bad dreams ceased, although one day, several months later, when Kudra's parents returned from a cremation, she was unable to prevent herself from asking, “Did the widow try to escape?” Her father slapped her face.

Nonetheless, the fiery dreams did fade, and inside rooms made of clay and painted blue, sweeter visions were nourished. At the start of monsoon season, when the great cloud ships rolled in from the sea to discharge their tanks of green rain in the rice fields and to haul away dust balls, scorpion skins, and mounds of worthless diamonds made of heat — summer's dolorous cargo — Kudra participated in the No Salt Ceremony. Each day, for five days, she dined in seclusion on unsalted food and worshipped tender seedlings that had sprouted from wheat and barely grains that she herself had planted prior to the ceremony. This ritual was to help psychologically prepare her for her designated role in life, the role of wife and mother, nurturing and sustaining her children, her husband, and the husband's relatives.

In a universe that was perceived as inherently divine, where sacred animals munched sacred plants in groves of sacred trees, where holy rivers spilled from the laps of mountains that were gods, to nurture life was a lovely and important thing. Kudra enjoyed taking care of babies, and the notion of making babies excited her in some vague, itchy way. At age eight, she already was versed in the art of baking flat bread, and she was fast learning the secrets of the curry pot, with its fury and perfume. Her true delight, however, came in the hours when necessity called her out of the kitchen and into the workshop, to assist in one way or another with the manufacture or marketing of incense. She liked mixing gums and balsams more than she liked mixing rice and lentils, she liked rasping sandalwood more than she liked mending clothes. She did not consider why. As she grew older and the incense trade grew alongside her, she began to spend as much time in the business as in the household, and it never occurred to her that a conflict might be sprouting, like one of the ritual barley seeds, in the moist soil of her heart.

When Kudra was twelve, she and her brother accompanied their father on an ambitious business trip. It was a journey of nearly four months, during which Calcutta, Delhi, Benares, and many smaller towns were visited in an attempt to crack Buddhist markets, for the Buddhists had begun to use incense in a greater volume than the Hindus along the Ganges. The trip left the girl gaga, goofy, tainted, transformed, her nose a busted hymen through which sperm of a thousand colors swam a hootchy-kootchy stroke into her cerebral lagoon. Now, whenever she smelled the gums, the balsams, and the special aromatics that arrived with merchants from afar, her head reeled with images of temples, shrines, palaces, fortresses, mysterious walls, tapestries, paintings, jewels, liquors, icons, drugs, dyes, meats, sweets, sweetmeats, silks, bolts and bolts of cotton cloth, ores, shiny metals, foodstuffs, spices, musical instruments, ivory daggers and ivory dolls, masks, bells, carvings, statues (ten times as tall as she!), lumber, leopards on leashes, peacocks, monkeys, white elephants with tattooed ears, horses, camels, princes, maharajah, conquerors, travelers (Turks with threatening mustaches and Greeks with skin as pale as the stranger who had befriended her at the funeral grounds), singers, fakirs, magicians, acrobats, prophets, scholars, monks, madmen, sages, saints, mystics, dreamers, prostitutes, dancers, fanatics, avatars, poets, thieves, warriors, snake charmers, pageants, parades, rituals, executions, weddings, seductions, concerts, new religions, strange philosophies, fevers, diseases, splendors and magnificences and things too fearsome to be recounted, all writhing, cascading, jumbling, mixing, splashing, and spinning; vast, complex, inexhaustible, forever.

It was then that she realized that it was the odor of the incense that had intrigued her all along, only now the smells filled in the fantasies that heretofore had been mere outlines, smeary contours scrawled in ghost chalk. Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere — the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.

The day of Kudra's fifteenth natal anniversary began like any other, with a predawn bath in the river, followed by prayers to Kali and an offering of clarified butter in the courtyard cookfire. By first light, she had served breakfast to her father, brother, and one-legged uncle and was already washing the curds that would be the principal dish at the noontide meal. She was bent over the curd jars when, from the workshop, her father called for her, just as she hoped he would.

“Honored father.” She bowed to him, searching out of the corner of her eye for some fresh basket of bosmellia bark, opopanox resin, nutmeg, or patchouli, for she had heard unfamiliar voices in the shop and suspected there had been a delivery. Nothing new was in evidence, but that was all right, she'd be content just to shave some sandalwood chips as she had several days before. The coarse-grained sandalwood was so tough it made her arms ache to chip it, but with each laborious push of the rasp, it propelled a zephyr of warm, clean, forest air past her nose, an invisible vapor that sang to her of the pad of the tiger's paw upon dry leaves, upon fallen parrot nests and dark Madras moss.

“Kudra,” said her father, “I have good news. Praise Shiva.”

Another merchandising trip, perhaps? Her imagination galloped about the room astride a sandalwood broom.

“The parents of a respectable man were just here. We have arranged for you to marry him, come the monsoons. Praise Shiva.”

The broom crashed to the hard clay floor. Kudra began to cry. Her tears did not upset her father. He had expected them to flow. Every Hindu girl wept and wailed about her marriage, from its announcement through the wedding and into the honeymoon. It was fitting that a bride-to-be weep. Marriage meant that she must leave her father's home to live with her husband's family, who would treat her like a servant if she was lucky, like monkey shit if she was not. It was the way life was. Kudra's mother had bawled. Now it was Kudra's turn. Tradition and continuity were the flours from which the social loaf was baked; feeding the culture, pleasing the gods.

“Father, I am not ready. .” blubbered Kudra.

“Eh? Of course, you are ready. If you were not thinking about catching a husband, why would you fix yourself up in this way? Praise Shiva.”

The incense merchant was referring to the crimson lac with which she had began to fresco her heavy eyelids, the sandalwood paste that she finger-painted over her body in sinuous designs, the jasmine-scented unguents that these days lent her cheeks the glow of butter lamps at dawn. How could she make him understand that what appealed to her was the aroma of these substances, that what she sought to catch was not a man but the strange and wondrous images that the aromas conjured?

Teardrops spurted. “I–I—I want to work with you, I–I want to work here with you.” Teardrops spewed.

That hit her father where he lived. The fact was, Kudra was better help than her brother, better than her gimpy uncle, certainly better than the lazy Sudra laborers whom he had started to employ. She was diligent and cheerful, and she had a feeling for the incense, not just an enthusiasm but a rapport. It was partly on her account that his business was prospering. Still, she was a girl, and everybody knew that girls were hotter than mongooses and certain to lose their virginity at the faintest hint of an opportunity. The way this one's breasts were inflating, the way her eyes had popped when she got a look at the erotic friezes at Khujaras, it was only wise to bind her to a husband before disaster struck.

“Do not worry, my little patchouli drop. Your betrothed's family has a very fine business, praise Shiva, and is said to be shorthanded in the shop.”

That proved to be the case. But her husband's family did not make incense. It made rope.

Rope. The gods have a great sense of humor, don't they? If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic dreamers will end up in the rope yard. You may protest that it is too much to ask of an uneducated fifteen-year-old girl that she defy her family, her society, her weighty cultural and religious heritage in order to pursue a dream that she doesn't really understand. Of course it is asking too much. The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

So it was rope for Kudra. Rope drab in color, rope harsh in texture, rope utilitarian in design, rope barren in smell. In late summer, she would accompany others of the caste into the streaming hills to chop the fibrous stalks of bhabar grass. The rest of the year, when she wasn't busy with household duties, she sat on the ground next to her husband, combing fiber into ribbons, spinning ribbons into yarn, twisting yarn into strands, and braiding strands into rope. Rope to keep the cow from deserting the farmer, rope to prevent the riverboat from running away to sea, rope to teach the individual stick of firewood the strategy of the bundle, rope to hold a young wife to a bedpost, an oven, a lurid panoply of gods.

In the streets of Calcutta, she had seen a fakir make a rope rear up like a cobra. Uncoiling from a basket with a dancing motion, the rope rose until its end was higher than the treetops, whereupon the fakir shinnied up it and disappeared in the sky. Now, as yard after yard, mile after mile, of rope wound through her blistered fingers, she strained to exert some influence over it, tried her best to will it skyward so that she might climb it, stopping periodically to wave good-bye to her mother-in-law, and cast her lot with the clouds.

Alas, the rope moved strictly horizontally, and then only when physically forced. Conditioned as she was, Kudra probably wouldn't have climbed the rope, anyhow, let's face it. Besides, she had established a couple of escape routes that allowed her to ascend above the world of in-laws and bhabar fiber. One was scent. Her father kept her supplied with natural aromatics, which she turned into oils and essences to lavish upon her body. Whether she was loading the rope cart, carrying out slops, or scraping cow dung from her mother-in-law's shoes, Kudra was enveloped in a portable fog of fragrance, entwined with a rope of perfume up which she could shinny and partially, at least, disappear. Since it was traditional among Hindus that one way to Shiva was through the nose, and since in India there was no such thing as too much piety, her in-laws could not object, although sometimes they fell into coughing fits when she passed by. As for Navin, her husband, he may have been publicly embarrassed by his bride's excesses, but in private he was enflamed. Navin's prurient reaction to the smells of his wife widened her second avenue of escape: sex.

Kudra took to the marriage bed the way a water buffalo takes to a mud wallow. Like any conscientious merchant-caste groom, Navin had studied the Kama Sutra, the Hindu love manual. Since he was thirty when they were wed, twice the age of his bride, he had had time to learn it by heart, and indeed he was well acquainted, in theory if not in practice, with the eight kinds of embrace (four mild, four hot), the four parts of the body that the handbook taught might be individually embraced, the three ways of kissing an innocent maiden, and the four angles from which it might be accomplished; the sixteen ways of kissing a wife (including the moderate kiss, the pressed kiss, the soft one, the contracted one, the clasping one, and the “kiss of the hungry donkey"); the eight kinds of love bites, the eight kinds of scratch marks that might be left on the body (the Kama Sutra even described how a lover's nails should ideally be manicured), the eight stages of oral intercourse, the nine ways of moving the penis inside the vagina, and the forty varieties of sound that might be uttered the while (including thundering, weeping, cooing; words of praise, pain, and prohibition; and the sounds of the dove, the cuckoo, the green pigeon, the parrot, the sparrow, the flamingo, the duck, and the quail), as well as more than thirty coital positions, with names such as “the fixing of a spike” and “the place where four roads meet.” If all that education, aspects of which smacked of arithmetic, ornithology, carpentry, and animal husbandry, suggests that Navin was overqualified for the job of satisfying a teenage virgin, well, it must be recorded that at no time did Kudra complain of overkill. If she was not his equal in technique, she compensated in fragrance and enthusiasm, and night after night they dissolved their rope burns and fatigue in the salty flux and radiant slime of the glad-hearted fuck.

It is hardly surprising that the couple had four children in five years. They might have had still more had not the mother-in-law decided that the house was becoming too crowded and introduced Kudra to pennyroyal's application as an oral contraceptive.

Kudra loved her babies. One day, a dozen years into the marriage, she came to love her husband, as well. It happened on the morning after the festival of Mahashivaratri — the Great Night of Shiva — when, weakened by fasting and loosened by a kind of spiritual hangover, Navin revealed to Kudra that he adored horses and that during his youth had entertained the impossible dream of miraculously transcending Vaisya, the merchant caste, and ascending to Kshatriya, the warrior caste, so that he might ride. The admission of his ridiculous longing shamed him, but Kudra was touched to learn that, like her, Navin had a blasphemous desire locked away in his breast. It made them partners in a new, more intimate sense, and whenever she thought about his secret, she would reach across the rope bin to pat him tenderly. She did not share her own hidden dream because she didn't know how to articulate it. She only knew that it made her restless, that it smelled good, and that it was always there.

About a month after Navin's disclosure, a column of warriors paid a call at the rope shop to order some fancy, customized bridles, braided with bells and tassels, for their steeds. Kudra drew the leader aside and charmed him into offering Navin a ride.

“Oh, no, no, I could never,” protested Navin.

“Go ahead,” Kudra urged. “This is your chance. Just as far as the temple and back.”

The army officer, who had his eye on Kudra's ripe hips, helped Navin aboard and gave the big horse a whack that sent it off at a gallop. Navin, terrified, leaned too far forward and sailed off into a rock pile. His head split like a milk bowl, sending forbidden ambition, mixed with blood and brain, trickling into the public light.

During the next few days, Kudra seriously considered joining Navin's corpse on the pyre. It was not because she blamed herself for his demise — guilt is a neurotic emotion that Christianity was to exploit to fullest economic and political advantage; Hinduism was healthier in that regard — but because face to face with widowhood, she learned that her mother's dire description of it was, if anything, understated.

From the moment of her mate's death, a widow was under the tutelage of her sons, even if, as in Kudra's case, the sons were mere boys. She could never remarry, and were she to engage in illicit sexual activities, the Brahmans would administer to her a whipping that would expose the white of her bones. Prohibited from returning to her parents, she must remain with her husband's family, and while she would be expected to perform household chores from dawn to dusk, she could never attend the family festivals that played so big a part in Hindu life, for a widow's gloom would bring bad luck to everyone present. For all intents and purposes, a widow was an ascetic, shaving her head, sleeping on the ground, eating only one meal a day and that without honey, wine, or salt. She could wear neither colored garments nor ornaments, she could not use perfumes.

The ban on perfumes was, for Kudra, the final straw. She found herself nodding in agreement when a delegation of village Brahmans enumerated for her the spiritual advantages of suttee. When the priests left, she ran after them to inquire how long they thought it might take for her to be reincarnated. Not wishing to interrupt their conversation, she followed them silently down the dusty road and overheard them speculating about the worth of her jewelry. Upon suttee, her personal belongings would, by law, go to the Brahmans. One priest was of the opinion that Navin, like any good merchant-class husband, had lavished gold and silver ornaments upon his wife, and that they could scarcely afford to let Kudra forgo the funeral fire.

Kudra felt her entrails turn on an axle of lead. The Sanskrit alphabet, heavy-footed and squirmy, snag itself out in her belly; a cobra's tongue swam across the waters of her eyes. As the landscape blurred before her, she could see with pristine clarity the widow in smoking sari being pulled from the riverbank and dragged, screaming, back to the pyre. And she remembered then her promise to the pale-skinned stranger that such a fate would never be hers.

That night, the eve of cremation, after the household was fast asleep, she dressed herself in her nephew's clothing. She laid out her jewelry for the Brahmans, so that they might be less inclined to pursue her. She wrapped some flat cakes, rice balls, and coins in a silk scarf. Then she undid the package and added a hairbrush and several ivory vials of perfume. Then she unknotted the scarf a second time and, without consciously thinking why, put in a small pouch of pennyroyal. As warm vanilla moonlight creamed through the windows, she knelt before her crude little personal shrine, offered a bowl of ghee to the goddess Kali and begged for forgiveness. She knelt before Navin's casket and begged the same. She kissed each of her children in his sleep. Keeping to the shadows, she slipped from the house, stopping in the yard only long enough to kick with all of her might a flabbergasted basket of rope.

“So you ran away from death,” said Alobar. He was obviously pleased. Kudra's flight brought back memories of the two times he had ducked the swipe of the Reaper's sickle. It meant that he and this woman had something in common, something revolutionary and scandalous that bound them together out on the edge of behavior where the bond is tightest and sweetest.

“No,” said Kudra. “I did not run away from death. How can a person run away from death? And why would a person want to? Death is release. I did not flee death but the corruption of the Brahmans.”

“Nonsense! Do you mean to tell me that had the Brahmans been interested in your eternal soul instead of your bangles, you would have dived into the flames?”

“Well. . I have much fear of flames.”

“Suppose they had wanted you to drown yourself, then. Would you have gone to water more gladly than to fire?”

“Yes. No. Oh, I do not know! Drowning is not such a good way to die.”

“What is a good way to die?”

“In your sleep, I suppose. When you are old and your children are grown.”

“Oh? Old and in your sleep? After a lifetime of hard work and ill treatment? And how old is old? Is it ever old enough? You could have accepted the painful life of the widow and died unappreciated in your sleep at the age of forty, you could have chosen that instead of the fire, that option was open to you, but you ran away from that, as well.”

“You are shaming me. Do you bid me return?”

Alobar put his hand on her shoulder. It was the softest thing he had touched in years. The heat of her flesh, wafting through her boy's jacket, caused fish eggs of perspiration to pop out on his palm. “Not in the least,” he said. “I merely want you to admit that you do not wish to die. You want to live and, what is more, you want to live decently and happily, you want to live a life that you yourself have chosen. Admit that, now, and you shall be rewarded.”

Kudra eyed his fingers suspiciously. They were kneading her shoulder and seemed to be of a mind to migrate south. “And what is to be my reward?”

Sensing her mistrust, he removed his hand. “The comfort and protection of a kindred spirit.”

“How can you protect me? Can you not see, I am certain to be reincarnated as a spider for what I have done. A spider or a flea or a worm.” She shuddered.

“All the more reason to live a long, enjoyable life while you are still human.”

“NowI shall probably have to endure a hundred more lifetimes before I reach nirvana and gain my final release.”

“What difference does it make if you live a million more lifetimes? At least, you can enjoy this one.”

“To believe in the reality and permanence of the fleeting everyday world is foolish.”

“Then why are you here and not in the ash heap at the cemetery?”

“Perhaps because I am a foolish woman.”

“Good.” Alobar smiled. “My own foolishness could use some company.”

Kudra smiled, too. She didn't mean to smile. It just happened. The smile was an embarrassment to her, as if she had belched or broken wind. She tried to drive the smile away with thoughts of her sorrowful experiences, her disgraceful behavior, her insecure situation, but this was one smile that didn't scare easily, it hung in there like a tenant who knows his rights and refuses to be evicted. Finally, Kudra turned away, but Alobar could see her smiling through the back of her head.

“What is your name again?” Alobar moved closer to her.

“Kudra.” The word swam out through her smile like a blowfish swimming through a crack in a reef.

“Mine is Alobar.” He slipped his arm around her and cupped her left breast. It was heavy and jiggled in his hand as if it were full of liquid. Melon water. Or beet juice. “The grass is soft here, Kudra.”

“A mattress is softer. It is not my habit to copulate in the grass like an animal.”

“Well, you had better get used to it. I mean, if you are going to be reincarnated as a bug. .”

“Unhand me, please. I am a widow and do not even know you.” The smile was gone now, although whether it had drawn back inside her head or flown off toward the ices of Chomolungma was anybody's guess.

“You know me well enough,” said Alobar. Reluctantly, he dropped the satin coconut. He imagined that it gurgled when he let go. “Did not you come up into these mountains looking for me?”

“Not exactly. Back then when I was a child, you informed me that you were traveling to the Himalayas in search of masters who had power over death. When I ran away, I had no place to go, and I thought I must make my way to Calcutta to become a woman of the streets, but first I decided I would have a look for these masters myself. You were kind to me back then, and the promise you extracted from me influenced my decision not to submit to suttee. Partly because of you I took a less virtuous path. But there is a limit to how much virtue I shall allow you to talk me out of.”

“If being alive is not a virtue, then there is little virtue in virtue, that is what I say.”

“Disgustingly enough, I am finding joy in my continued presence in this world of illusions.” She turned to face him. The smile came back, surprised them both, then left again abruptly without saying good-bye. “Tell me, Alobar, are these lamas you live with the masters whom you sought? And have they taught you the secret of life everlasting?”

“Um? Well, er, in some ways, I think. . I'm not sure. Uh. .”

“What do you mean? Are they or are they not? Have they or haven't they? They look like Buddhist monks to me, and where I come from, Buddhists die just as regularly as everybody else.”

Alobar stood up and gazed at the mountains for a while. The mountains looked like the white picket fence around the cottage of eternity, although Alobar clearly thought about them in another way entirely. Perhaps he thought of them as storehouses stocked with thunderclap hinges and earthquake parts and dusty bolts of lightning; perhaps he saw them as just another opportunity for the gods to make him seem puny and weak and mortal. In any case, he stared at the peaks for a while, and then he turned back to Kudra.

“When I crossed the border from your land into this one, I asked some herdsmen where the great teachers lived, and they answered, 'At Samye,' so I made my way here. I knocked at the gatehouse of the Samye lamasery, and some men in red robes took me in and gave me food and tea, they heated buckets of water with which I bathed myself, and they supplied me with warm clothes and boots, for my own were in tatters and falling off me. Then they asked what I wanted — I was a curious sight to them — and I replied, 'I wish to live a thousand years.' They looked at each other, and then one of them asked, 'In this body?' And when I said 'yes,' they shook their heads and clucked their tongues. They said they could not help in the fulfillment of my vain, misguided wish, and that after a good night's rest I must be on my way. As I was leaving the next morning, one of them, Fosco, a painter of poems, whispered to me that I might get what I was looking for from the Bandaloop doctors. He said I could find these personages in the foothills caves back down toward India. So I thanked him and off I went.”

“But you didn't find them, these Bandaloopers?”

“Oh, yes, I found them, all right, although it was not easy. They had no fine stone buildings, as they have here at Samye, but lived in a honeycomb of caverns, far off the main path.”

“But you found them?”

“Yes. Or, rather, they found me. I was resting in a ravine one day, thinking, 'Oh, how I wish I had something to eat,' when suddenly I was pelted with ears of corn. Hard. Very hard. Made my nose bleed and my ears ring. I drew my knife and looked up at the cliff whence the corn had come, and there were three hairy men dressed almost as motley as I, laughing at me. I shook my blade at them, and they yelled, 'Well, you said you were hungry.'”

“Praise Shiva. How did they hear your thought?”

“I intended to find that out. After I roasted and ate the corn, I sniffed out their trail and tracked them to a hillside riddled with caves. 'You must be the Bandaloop doctors,' I said when several of them approached. 'You must be Alobar,' one of them replied. 'How did you learn my name?' I asked. 'How did you learn ours?' he shot back. 'A Samye holy man told me,' I said. At that, they all had a hearty laugh.”

“They strike me as rude.”

“Rude? Yes, they were plenty of that. But, you see, a long time ago, far off in the west where I come from, I met two rude characters, one a shaman, one a god, and though each treated me disagreeably in the beginning, one gave me special courage, the other special fear, both of which I required for this journey that I am on. Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else. So, a man seeking knowledge must be first tested to determine if he is worthy. From what I have gathered, rudeness on the part of the master is the first phase of the test.”

“You mean, if you allow the master to be uncivil, to treat you any old way he likes, and to insult your dignity, then he may deem you fit to hear his view of things?”

“Quite the contrary. You must defend you integrity, assuming you have integrity to defend. But you must defend it nobly, not by imitating his own low behavior. If you are gentle where he is rough, if you are polite where he is uncouth, then he will recognize you as potentially worthy. If he does not, then he is not a master, after all, and you may feel free to kick his ass.”

“Interesting. Is that how it went with the Bandaloop doctors?”

Alobar shook his head. “No,” he said. He took another long look at Chomolungma and the runners-up in the world's tallest mountain competition. The sun was starting to sink, and the peaks were pinned with colored clouds, like ribbons designating where each had placed in the contest. It was fairly easy to spot the winner, and numbers two and three. Miss Congeniality was a bit more difficult to identify. “No, that is not the way it went with the Bandaloop doctors. They were alternately hospitable and antagonistic. They would pour me milk to drink, then drop a turd in the cup. They would flatter me, then spit in my face. They would ignore me, then as I made to leave, they'd implore me to stay. It was damnably confusing. And there was no question of kicking ass. They invited me to strike them, but they were so quick I could not lay a hand on them. Their movements were imperceptible, yet they were always a fraction of an inch to the left or right of wherever I aimed my blow. Not one of them touched me, but I beat my own self bloody missing them and falling down.”

“You were humiliated.”

“My lady, that is an understatement. In my own land I had a reputation as a warrior.”

“Did you leave then?”

“I was too winded to even crawl away on my knees. They gave me some oil for my scrapes and scratches and invited me into the caves. What do you think it was like in them? Sharp rocks, cold water dripping from the ceilings, bats screeching by in the darkness? Oh, no, those caves were covered with beautiful carpets and tapestries, thick and warm and opulent. Every nook and cranny glowed with butter lamps, and in little saucers powders were burning that caused the air to smell like orange groves and gardens.”

“Incense!” exclaimed Kudra.

“Whatever. And there were women inside preparing spiced lamb and heating wine. Everyone drank wine until their eyes were red. They also smoked pipes of ground-up leaves from the hemp plant—”

“I know the plant. We made rope from it. Smoked it, you say?”

“Yes, and it seemed to make them dreamy. They would stare into the fire, laughing for no apparent reason. They offered me a pipe, they offered me wine and meat, they even offered me a woman, or two women if I chose. Of course, I refused. I thought it was a trick, a test of my purity. I fell asleep alone, splitting with desire, only to be awakened in the middle of the night by a bucket of icy water emptied upon my head. Well, then I got out, let me assure you. I was angry and confused — and scared. Because, Kudra, no hand held the bucket that dumped that water on me, the bucket was suspended in midair, just tipping itself on me of its own accord.”

“Alobar, you were confused, all right. Or else dreaming. Or. .” She lowered her eyelids, lids that resembled purses sewn from the skins of thick, dark grapes. “Or you are telling me a fable.”

“It is all true, I swear it.”

“Then I suppose I must believe you. Tell me, did they permit you to leave freely?”

“One of the company — there were perhaps a dozen of them in all, not counting the women — followed me outside to inquire about my intentions. I told him I thought I would return to the Samye lamasery. 'Good,' he said. 'You will learn much there. Then you can come back to us.' Well, that heated me up, to be sure. 'There are not enough demons in this world or the next to drag me back to this accursed place,' I yelled. I swore that I would never return. He laughed and reached into my clothes and pulled an egg from where no egg had been. He cracked the egg on the ground, and a huge dog bounded out of it — it looked exactly like Mik, my own dog from my own city that I had not seen in the span of eight Feasts of Feasts. It licked my feet in a familiar way, and then it ran into a cave and disappeared. .”

“Alobar!”

“I swear it to be true.”

“Remarkable. And did you run after it?”

“Oh, no. I staggered off into the night and eventually did, indeed, return to Samye, where you have caught up with me. I wanted to forget the whole experience with Bandaloop. Unfortunately, it has remained alive in my mind.”

“But you have never gone back?”

“I made a vow. If we mortals can better the gods in no other way, we can at least keep our promises.”

“Why did you return to Samye?”

“I do not know for sure. When I arrived, I asked to see Fosco. He entered the gatehouse with his calligraphy brush in his hand, and I seized him by his robe and shook him until ink flew. 'Why did you send me to that crazed place?' I demanded. He answered me mildly. 'The Bandaloop doctors are much despised by my superiors, and I risked reproachment for directing you to them. They practice a base, orgiastic form of religion that we cannot condone. But they are powerful magicians and healers and fortunetellers, and I thought they might assist you in your obsession with your earthly vessel. Forgive me.' Fosco was so obviously sincere that it behooved me to ask his forgiveness. Not only did he grant it, he persuaded the abbot to let me remain at Samye as a laborer and student. It appears that I have been here a long time.”

Kudra looked him over. “Samye has agreed with you. You appear healthy and strong. I did not lie when I mentioned down at the river that you have not aged since I saw you last. Perhaps you are receiving here the knowledge you were after all along. What have the lamas taught you that would keep you in their tutelage for twenty years?”

“You really think I have not aged? We had a magic glass back at. .” His voice trailed off, held hostage by memory. Bound, gagged, and blindfolded with a swath of ermine ripped from a concubine-stained bedspread, his voice lay in an unlit corner until memory collected its ransom or else took pity. The sun had sunk so low that it was looking up Chomolungma's dress by the time Alobar's freed voice resumed its normal life. “There are no mirrors hereabouts. The river shows me how to shave, but it shows me little in the way of skin condition or hair color. Hmm. It pleases me, what you say.” He sat down, and once again he touched her shoulder. She did not pull away.

“I have found peace here. Years of one sort of turmoil or another had rubbed against my spirit until it was raw, but it has been healed by tranquility, a calm that comes from within as well as without. The architecture, the painting, the sculpture, the music and liturgy and refined garments, but most of all, I think, the meditation, the hours each day of sitting silent and motionless, these things have smoothed my frayed edges and left me floating through life like a toad bladder in a mountain stream. The lamas have suffered endlessly from my resistance to their dogma and strict morality, but I daresay we have all benefited. I have grown serene, and they, well, many a ton of stone has been moved for them, and they have been kept on their toes. Ha ha.”

“Am I to assume that they have not instructed you in the practice of long life?”

“Not openly. They speak to me occasionally on the subject, but they obtain their ideal through gradual stages of spiritual progress. And their ideal is neither immortality nor longevity, but release from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.”

“Yes, yes. That is my people's ideal, as well. Do you fail to appreciate the perfection that lies at the heart of that goal?”

With his free hand, Alobar scratched his head, a head herring-boned with equal parts chestnut and silver, like a cow pie on a frosty morning. The other hand held fast to its roost on Kudra's shoulder. “Frankly, I do not appreciate it as deeply as I probably should. Or, maybe it is that I long not for the perfect but for the complete, and there is something incomplete about a life that is dedicated to escape from life.”

“Please, explain.”

“Here they teach that much of existence amounts only to misery; that misery is caused by desire; therefore, if desire is eliminated, then misery will be eliminated. Now, that is true enough, as far as it goes. There is plenty of misery in the world, all right, but there is ample pleasure, as well. If a person forswears pleasure in order to avoid misery, what has he gained? A life with neither misery nor pleasure is an empty, neutral existence, and, indeed, it is the nothingness of the void that is the lamas' final objective. To actively seek nothingness is worse than defeat; why, Kudra, it is surrender; craven, chickenhearted, dishonorable surrender. Poor little babies are so afraid of pain that they spurn the myriad sweet wonders of life so that they might protect themselves from hurt. How can you respect that sort of weakness, how can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointments can bring?”

Alobar was surprised by the ferocity with which he felt himself attacking the teachings of the men who had pacified him for the past two decades. Perhaps his need for Kudra was whipping long-smoldering dissatisfactions into flames. For her part, Kudra could not locate the words with which to defend her faith. Perhaps her faith had been taken from her. She looked at Alobar and said nothing. He accepted her silent gaze as encouragement to continue his diatribe — and to inch his fingers toward orbit of her coconut moons.

“If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls against temptation, why not get better at fulfilling desire? Salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb. If the gods would tax ecstasy, then I shall pay; however, I shall protest their taxes at each opportunity, and if Woden or Shiva or Buddha or that Christian fellow — what's his name? — cannot respect that, then I'll accept their wrath. At least I will have tasted the banquet that they have spread before me on this rich, round planet, rather than recoiling from it like a toothless bunny. I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to tempt us, to make it the more difficult for us to capture the grand prize: the safety of the void. To fashion of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods.”

Alobar paused to consider what he'd said. He had not given voice, even inwardly, to such thoughts in years, although one day, watching a yak calf gambol about the rocks like a goat, he asked himself what the Great God Pan might think of the Buddhist way of life. The answer promoted a prolonged twinge of discontent.

“The lamas declare that they have no fear of death, yet is it anything less than fear that causes them to die before they die? In order to tame death, they refuse to completely enjoy life. In rejecting complete enjoyment, they are half-dead in advance — and that with no guarantee that their sacrifice will actually benefit them when all is done. They are good fellows, and I must respect their choice, but fullness, completion, not empty perfection, is this fool's goal.”

“I take it that if the Bandaloop doctors were to give you another go at their provisions, you would not this time abstain?”

“There is the matter of quality, my lady. Have I implied that a person must abandon discretion in what he enjoys, then my tongue, or your ear, has erred.”

As if to correct the one or the other, he thrust his tongue into the nacreous coils of her ear, smothering all the while her breasts with his hands, lest their rocking motion somehow interfere with the process of correction. Her right ear thusly plugged, her left nevertheless clearly heard a donging back at the lamasery.

“I'm famished!” she announced, springing to her feet with such force that for a moment he feared she'd taken his tongue with her. “I do hope that is the dinner bell.”

Reluctantly, he led her down from the outcropping, whose grass was destined to go unmoistened by their mingled dew. She was reassigning her hair to the turban as they walked, and frequently stumbled, on the uneven ground. She was thick-thighed, broad-hipped, and heavy-breasted, but so slender of waist that a snail with a limp could circle her beltline in two minutes flat; in short, she manifested the Indian ideal of the woman built for physical satisfaction, and while Alobar had developed slightly different standards, he could not help but watch wide-eyed as this turbulent culture of flesh fought to gain control over its barbaric frontiers (bouncing breasts, swinging buttocks) and consolidate into an integrated empire as it slipped and slid down the hillside.

Much as the departure of daylight had turned the mountains into violet silhouettes, so had the departure of inner peace silhouetted Alobar against the overcast of his frustration. He was in such a funk that when he fetched a dish of buttered barley to the rockpile outside the gatehouse, where the “boy” Kudra waited, he completely missed the significance of the pennyroyal that she sprinkled on her food.

Alobar took his simple meal with the lamas, as was his custom. After dinner, with Fosco's assistance, he found Kudra a place to sleep in the stable.

“I apologize,” Alobar said, “but this is the way women are regarded around here.”

“I am used to that,” said Kudra. “The way you regard women, however, is more of a novelty to me.” She squeezed his hand. “Come back when the moon is above the stable,” she whispered.

Alobar went outside and walked around in the Himalayan night, the dark at the top of the stairs. The thin, crisp air vibrated like a hive with the chants of the lamas. White stars pimpled the atmosphere. It was easy to imagine that the stars were bees, that they were the source of the ubiquitous lama-buzz. It was easy to imagine that the pale crescent moon was the beekeeper's paddle, dipping into the hum and honey.

The nightful of chanting was soothing to him in the way that the sound of a turning screw would one day be soothing to men at sea. In those days, boats were only as noisy as the winds that drove them, and there were no sailors in the Himalayas, of course; there were not even leafy trees that could unfurl flotillas of little sails, as green as mermaids' curtains. Himalayan winds blew snow-flakes about, and grass seed and panda hairs and the serious, droning vowels of lamas.

Alobar had, himself, learned a chant. The abbot had given him the syllables personally. The chant transported him to a place inside himself impervious to gales or breezes, a place as unruffled as the abbot's shaved noggin, as smooth as Buddha's belly. That night, however, he felt more inclined to sing that little ditty he had made up long ago, the one that went: The world is round-o, round-o. . Obviously, it was the dusky widow who was reviving in him those old sensations.

Kudra had awakened him from a long sleep. No, that was false, he hadn't been asleep at Samye, he had been in a state of heightened awareness, but there is a sense in which awareness can be as stagnating as sloth. His stay at the lamasery had become a rut, a tranquil, nourishing, educational rut that had done him little harm and much good, but a rut, nonetheless; his wheel was stuck in a ditch of light, so to speak, and he felt an overpowering urge to steer in the direction of darkness. If the earth needs night as well as day, wouldn't it follow that the soul requires endarkenment to balance enlightenment?

In any event, Alobar had lost his calm satisfaction only to gain a kind of anxious, electric joy. Whether it was a temporary state, tied to the licentious yearning that Kudra had reawakened in him, or whether it signaled the end of his serene years as Samye's token pagan, he could not ascertain. What he did know was that the lunar rooster was crowing on the stable lintel now, and that, inside, the fugitive widow had some need or other of him.

It is said that when a man is anticipating sexual activity, his whiskers grow at an accelerated rate. Alobar might have to stop and shave before we reach the end of this paragraph. Before the last of the chanting dies out behind the high walls and the condensed breath of a dozing yak momentarily fogs the page.

Having finished a bath in a pony trough, Kudra was debating whether or not she should squirm back into her nephew's clothes. There was a chill in the May night that had set her to shivering, but the prospect of pulling those soiled, unfeminine garments over her glistening brown body was less inviting than goose bumps. Besides, Alobar would only undress her again, would he not?

She was resigned to having him mount her. She would have preferred to postpone, if not avoid it — with so many things to sort out in the head, the body must be regarded as a distraction — but he was as bent on carnal embrace as a pilgrim was bent on the Ganges. To see him again would be to roll around with him, and she simply must see him.

He is overwhelmingly exiting, she thought. Then she added, Not in any sexual way, of course. He excited her because he was as damned as she was, yet had no regrets. He actually made damnation seem attractive. She had heard of men who rejected the gods, who professed not to believe, but here was a believer who refused to grovel, a man who stood up to Shiva, to Buddha, to the gods of his own race, whoever they might be, who stood right up to them and demanded an accounting for a system in which pleasure must be paid for with pain, a system in which the only triumph over suffering was hard-won oblivion, a system that offered its captive audience little choice in matters concerning duration of performance.

The Brahmans could explain away such complaints; she was well acquainted with their explanations, and, furthermore, she believed that they were right; she just wasn't in the market for theological justifications, not anymore. She was a sinner now, and her options were these: she could repent and pay the certain price, or she could cast her lot with this handsome heretic and see where it might lead. Oh, did she call him “handsome"? She didn't mean to say that, although he wasn't bad to look at, now that she'd mentioned it. It didn't bother her that he was over sixty, he was fit and youthful, and besides, Hindu women customarily were paired with older men. Not that she had any notion of being paired with him, you understand.

Perhaps the gods were sympathetic to Alobar's demands. Perhaps they were considering alterations in the divine order of things. Perhaps it was a mistake, an oversight, that human beings had been granted short, unhappy lives, only the error had never been corrected because no one had ever openly complained before. No thunderbolt, in any case, had struck Alobar down. Another thought occurred to her, then, and it stacked goose bumps upon her goose bumps. Had Alobar been spared out of indifference? What if the gods had not even noticed his rebellion?

For the moment, it didn't matter. What mattered was that she was caught up in something large and important, or so it seemed. She felt that she had embarked on an adventure far greater than the merchandising trip that she'd taken with her father, that wondrous journey that had erected a towered city on the scrubby plane of her brain and spoiled her for a life of normal, sedentary wifehood for all time.

Pale moonlight was seeping over the stable eaves and puddling on the surface of the pony trough. Alobar's arrival was imminent. Good, she could inquire further about those Bandaloopers, the magic that they practiced, and the secrets that they knew. That was why she had invited him back, for that and for no other reason. Let it be known.

Suddenly, he walked through the door, catching her unaware, not even dressed yet. Kudra recalled later that he had rushed up to her, although the ponies, the moon, and the trough water remembered it another way. At any rate, there was no denying that she was in his arms, that her tongue was sliding about in his mouth, and that her hand was groping for something perpendicular — praise Kali — in the general vicinity of his groin.

Something was wrong. Instead of an elephant prod, Kudra found a braid of hemp. Was rope to be her destiny? Alobar was limp enough to knot, and even now he was pulling away from her embrace.

Bewildered and embarrassed, she grabbed a shredded old pony blanket and tried to cover her nakedness. “Is it my color?” she asked.

“What about your color?”

“A horse cannot mate with a cow. Is it possible that a fair-skinned man is incapable of intercourse with a dark-skinned woman?” Kudra had slept with only one man in her life and had experience neither with impotence nor rejection.

“No,” said Alobar. The idea made him snort. “I had a reputation, in fact, as a man who relishes dark meat.”

Kudra thought, You also had a reputation as a warrior, to hear you tell it, but you did not fare too well against the Bandaloop. She asked, “Is it my nose, then? Perhaps its size offends you.”

“You are lucky to own such a fine large nose. It will serve you as a rudder and steer you through the troubled waters of life.”

Was he sincere? She had never considered her proboscis in that regard. “Well, I must have been too forward: my kiss, my tongue. .”

“A new experience for me, I do admit.”

“Truly?" You need only open your mouth not your mind, she thought. But she said, “Then why do you spurn me?” She adjusted the worn-out blanket in an attempt to protect a larger area of her body from the evening's chill and Alobar's gaze.

“Yes, this 'kizz' as you call it is unknown in the west. A rather odd sensation, but one I would not object to repeating. I have an open mind.”

“To be absolutely frank, it is your smell.”

“My smell?!” She was incredulous. “But I have just bathed and rubbed myself with fragrant oils. You were willing enough to take me in the grass, when I was caked with grime and sweat; I saw the bulge in your robes; yet, here on the soft, private straw, when I am clean and perfumed. .”

“You smelled fine up there on the hill, you smelled like a woman. Right now you smell like one of those little piles of powder they burned in the caves; you smell like a — like a fruit bush!”

They worked it out. It was back to the trough for Kudra, to scrub the jasmine and patchouli scents from her skin, whereupon, Alobar, whose wives and concubines had known little of the science of the bath and nothing of the art of perfumery (save for the rare spices they sewed in their harem cushions), sniffed her from head to heel, pronouncing her, if not arousing, at least inoffensive. With a little help from her rope-yard-deft fingers, he commenced to wax. And wax. And wax. Until she squealed.

“Did not I explain that I was once a king?”

A king you are still, she thought, vowing never again to doubt his various reputations.

Within the hour, the molecules reaching his nose were more to his liking, although the sounds in his ears — dove, cuckoo, green pigeon, parrot, sparrow, flamingo, duck, and quail — destroyed any illusions he might harbor that he was on familiar ground.

Later, by what little moonlight that remained, she cataloged five types of scratch marks on his shoulders and back. To him, they each stung the same.

“I would like to read this Kama Sutra,” said Alobar. “Except that I cannot read.”

“Nor can I. But I can teach you those of its contents that might benefit you most. Unless you object, I will demonstrate rather than recite.” She had had four orgasms and was feeling assured. “For now, however, you must tell me more of the Bandaloop doctors.”

“There is nothing left to tell.”

“You mean that you never heard of them again?”

“Oh, stories about them abound, but their veracity. . Actually, something happened once. .”

“What happened, Alobar?”

“One spring, on the pass south of here, there was a snow slide. Travelers were buried. Some of us from Samye went to help dig them out. We removed several bodies, frozen stiff, which we laid on the side of the road. After a bit, one of them stirred. It was a female. She stood and stretched, and thanked us and walked away. Just walked away. Fosco must have noticed that I was stunned, for he put a hand on me and whispered, 'She was a Bandaloop woman.' That was all that was ever said about it. The rest of the victims behaved the way corpses ought to.”

Kudra, propped on her elbows, shaking her head in amazement, said, “And she was merely one of their women.”

“Yes.”

“Hmmm.” She lowered herself into the straw, her rump in the air. The last moonbeam of the evening was snagged in the tangle of her pubic moraine. Alobar reached in from the rear, as if to free it. Like a careless animal on the lip of a tar pit, his middle finger slipped and sank quickly from view. Kudra writhed automatically, then lay still. Her mind was off somewhere. Her body and Alobar waited patiently for its return. He fell asleep with his hand still in place. When the lamas awoke him, well after sunrise, his finger was waterlogged. But Kudra was gone.

One thing about moving out of a Tibetan Buddhist lamasery, you don't have to hire a cart. Alobar's worldly possessions — a tea bowl, a change of clothing, and a knife that in twenty years had been used only for shaving — were packed in a flash. He bid farewell solely to Fosco. Fosco put down his brush, folded his inky hands upon his belly, and regarded Alobar affectionately. The little lama did not seem surprised by the departure, but rather hurried him to the gate, where, looking into the only blue eyes the Himalayas had ever known, he said something so incomprehensible that Alobar was ready to delay his leave to get to the bottom of it. Fosco withheld any explanation, however, and soon Alobar was winding down the mountainside, pausing every few hundred yards to glance back at the placid walls of Samye. Stone remains, water goes, he thought. For once, at least, he knew where he was going.

In less than a day, he caught up with Kudra. She was squatting by the path relieving herself when he rounded the bend. She leapt to her feet in midstream and threw her arms about him.

“I knew you would follow me,” she said, with the kind of confidence some women exude when they sense that they have made a clean capture with the vaginal net.

“You left without a word,” he said. Her kiss, so wet and exotic upon his unpracticed Western lips, vented much of the steam from his accusation.

“I feared that you would talk me out of it. You have talked me out of several things already, including my widow's virtue and my obligation on the funeral pyre.”

“Praise Shiva,” he said mockingly.

“Praise Shiva,” she repeated, after a long pause, and with more than a hint of the poignant.

She still had not pulled up her boy's trousers, and Alobar kneaded her bare, piss-damp thighs. “You made it impossible for me to remain at Samye,” he said.

“Your stories of the Bandaloop made it impossible for me to remain there.”

“So, your destination was the caves.”

“My destination is the caves. And you are going with me.”

Any protest he might have uttered was drowned out by the fluttering of the pages of the Kama Sutra, dog-eared pages with notes in their margins, which she taught Alobar to read with his one oozing eye, the Kama Sutra being a book that usually opens in the middle and begins at the end.

When the volume had been wiped and placed back on the shelf, they again took to the path. Irrigated by snow-melt, the recently awakened grass on the slopes glittered like spinach between the teeth of the hard earth. Far below them, in deep, narrow gorges, streams worked themselves into a lather, roaring like all the seashells in the world turned inside out; and above, great cold peaks in mineral armor were trying to smash the sky. Step by step, the path led them down and away from this terrible beauty.

“I have been considering,” said Kudra, a tad out of breath, “what you said about desire.”

“Ah,” said Alobar. “And now you agree that the devotee's desire to be without desire is the most insidious desire of all.”

“Not exactly, Alobar. Look at it this way. The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then there can be no desire, for there is nothing left to want. I think that what the Buddha may have been trying to tell us is that we have it all, each of us, all the time; therefore, desire is simply unnecessary.” She stopped to catch her breath. “To eliminate the agitation and disappointment of desire, we need but awaken to the fact that we have everything we want and need right now.”

Alobar thought, She is a smart one, smarter even than Wrenna, whom she resembles in odd physical ways. And her vulva is as clever as her speech. I was right to pursue her, though I must be careful that her power does not turn against me, and I must come between her and those sickening oils she likes to smear upon her flesh.

Aloud, he asked, “Do we have everything, you and I?”

They were descending into a small valley. The valley had clouds tipping into it, and the clouds were dark, as if bruised by the jagged thrusts of the peaks. One cloud was so black that Chomolungma herself might have battered it. The wind was at their heels and beginning to bark.

“I have lost my husband, my children, my people, my faith,” said Kudra. “Yet I feel that still I have everything. Everything, at least, that I deserve. Brrr. It is growing cold.”

“A storm is building,” said Alobar. “There is one thing we have not, and it is that thing we are obliged to desire.”

“And that is?” Kudra buttoned her vest against the first blown drops of gelid rain.

“Some influence over the unknown tribunal that sentences us to die against our wishes. A reform of that law that decrees death a certain consequence of birth.”

The wind had grown so strong it practically rolled them down the path. When Kudra said, “I cannot tell if that be the one valid desire or the greatest deception,” she had to yell to be heard. “Perhaps we shall have our answer from the Bandaloop.”

“The what?”

“The Bandaloo-oo-p.” The word sailed away on the wind, its vowels banging together and scattering, its consonants tearing the lips of the word like the bit of a runaway horse.

There proved to be no shelter in the valley, not even a boulder leaning at a protective angle, so Alobar and Kudra pressed on. Soon, they were regaining altitude. By nightfall, the rain had turned to snow, the last blizzard of the Himalayan spring. Should they continue to walk, they might topple into a gorge; should they stop, they might freeze. They walked, keeping to a pace just fast enough to promote circulation.

When dawn finally came, it was only a stain in the sky. Kudra prayed to Shiva and Kali, separately and together, and while looking for a signal from the gods that light was still on their payroll, she crashed into the trunk of a Yünnan pine that a gale had muscled into the presumed path. She had to sit in a drift until the pain subsided, Alobar draped over her like a human tent. The kneecap swelled up until it was as round as one of her breasts and as tight as a devil drum. She leaned against Alobar and, she hobbling and he shuffling, their bellies agonizing and their energy all but gone, they reentered the mainstream of the storm.

Within two hours, he was not so much supporting as dragging her. She was babbling about sandalwood groves, and marketplaces where crumbs of jasmine flower blew about the streets like music. Although his fingers were numb, he sensed them losing their grip on her.

“Please hold on. Kudra, please hold on. Please, Kudra, please, Kudra, please.”

The trail was descending again, but if his calculations were correct, they were yet two days from the foothills. Three days, if the weather didn't break. An eternity, if she couldn't get back on her feet.

“Please, Kudra. It won't be long. . ” He bit his blue lip against the falsehood. “It won't be long until we reach the caves.”

She wailed. The cry was so similar to the wails of the widow on the cremation fire that a huge horror seized him, a horror shot through with adrenaline, and he picked her up in his arms and began to run with her.

The horror changed into a kind of giddiness. This must look ridiculous, he thought, though to whom it looked ridiculous he failed to name. He must have meant Death, for in a minute he conceded, “Death has trapped us, that's for sure, but he shall not take us sitting still.” And, as the pageant of his life, no less ridiculous than this mad dash in the snow, flashed before him, he laughed and laughed.

Almost immediately the wind fell quiet, like a drunk who has passed out in the middle of a rage. The sun burned through and set about boiling clouds into dumplings, then into gravy.

With Kudra somewhat revived, they made the foothills in little more than a day. It was practically on their hands and knees that they covered the final mile. But nobody greeted them. The caves of the Bandaloop were empty and bare.

Alobar gathered wood and built a fire. In the process of drying their damp clothing, they slipped into unconsciousness and did not awake for hours. When his eyes did open, Alobar arose and remade the fire. He recognized some herbs not far from the caves, picked them and steeped a strong, green beverage in his bowl. After taking tea, they went to sleep again. This sequence was repeated numerous times, until upon a sunny morning, perhaps four days hence, they found themselves sitting in a cave mouth, wide awake and reasonably nourished.

Concluding his account of how he had swept her up and run with her, Alobar ventured the opinion that they had survived because he reached a point where he did not take his desire to live seriously. “My desire was no less than before, you understand, but I no longer identified with the desire. Perhaps that is why desire causes men calamity. By identifying with our desires and taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.”

“Maybe,” mumbled Kudra, stretching her sun-warmed muscles until the elastic shuddered pleasurably and a mindless animal happiness collected in a pool at the base of her skull. Alobar is a glorious man, she thought lazily, but this constant prattle about the meaning of things can make a person tired.

Mistaking her reticence for incredulity, Alobar said, “I suppose you think I made it all up. About the Bandaloop, I mean.”

In tandem, they turned their heads to stare into the cave, where rock was as raw as a lump in the throat and bats orbited the dead star of a dank ether.

“I believe you.”

“You do?”

“Much incense has been burned in these caves. The traces are faint, but I can smell it.”

“I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to hear you say that. But where—”

“It no longer matters,” Kudra said firmly. She retrieved a pine bough and, favoring her sore knee, began to sweep the entrance way. “The immortals are gone. Now we are the immortals.”

That night they made love on a bed of bhabar grass, the twisting of her hips nearly weaving it into rope. She progressed from orgasm into dream without skipping a beat, but Alobar did not so quickly sleep. His arms pillowing his head, he lay beneath the echo circles of the bats and wondered about the former occupants of the caves. In certain ways, he was relieved that they were missing, yet in the velvet shadows of his heart, he sensed that he must someday deal with them, or others equally disturbing: infinity, apparently, did not travel safe highways or join in polite company. But those strange, strange words of Fosco's, what could they possibly have meant?

Fosco, the plump little poem painter, had looked into Alobar's uncomprehending eyes and said:

“The next time you encounter Bandaloop, it will be a dance craze sweeping Argentina in 1986.”

SEATTLE

HERE IT COMES, across the stars, eating worlds, sucking the energy out of atoms and suns; here it comes, bullets can't kill it, dogs can't bite it, it refuses to listen to reason; here it comes, it just ate a hydrogen bomb. Oh, my Lord, here it comes, heading our way! nightmare asteroid, maniac vacuum, transcosmic pig-out; can't stop it, drunk on photons, burping pizzas of poisoned plutonium. It wants our oil, it wants our beautiful lumps of coal, it wants Air Force One, Graceland, and the wash on the line; it will slurp every erg, gnaw every volt, unless. . It trashed our magnetic laser net, barbed wire is useless, napalm a treat, can't evade it, can't divert it, only this little boy can stop it; big blue eyes, mustard on his T-shirt, this adorable towhead with the discount dirt bike and the horny mom; only Jeffrey Joshua and his fuzzy teddy bear, Mr. Bundy, stands between us and galactic oblivion; can he. .?

Priscilla was watching a TV movie in the bar at El Papa Muerta. She and several other waitresses had completed the setups in the dining room and were awaiting the 5:00 P.M. opening (Seattleites dined early). Ricki was behind the bar, having been promoted recently to assistant bartender.

Priscilla was watching the movie and not watching the movie. Ricki noticed the part that was not watching and came over. “Have a hard night in the lab?”

“Matter of fact. There's gonna be nothin' but hard nights until I can afford the stuff I need.” The “stuff” Priscilla needed was high-quality jasmine oil. It came from France and cost six hundred dollars an ounce. Priscilla figured she needed a minimum of three ounces, to begin with. That would take care of the middle. Then there would still be the matter of matching the base note. What was that goddamned base? Sometimes she wished she had left that bottle where she found it.

“Go ahead, tell me your troubles,” said Ricki. “As a novice bartender, I need the practice.”

Priscilla sighed. She watched a swoosh of rocket exhaust. The TV color needed adjusting, and the rocket blast was as pink as a nursery. She could have used a jet assist herself, even a soft pastel one. “Ricki,” she said, wearily, “do you ever pray?”

“Pray?”

“Yeah, pray.”

“Sure I do, honey. I pray all the time.”

“Well, when you talk to God, does he answer?”

“Absolutely.”

“What does God say?”

Ricki glanced around her. The bar was starting to fill up with customers waiting for the dining room to open. “Have you noticed,” she said, “that you and I are the only Mexicans in this place?”

“I'm Irish and you're Italian. Ricki, be serious. What does God say?”

“God says the check is in the mail,” answered Ricki, moving to the waitress station where the cocktail girl stood gargling a mouthful of orders.

In a busy restaurant bar, a waitress must order from a bartender in a particular sequence: neats, rocks, waters, sodas, Sevens, tonics, collins, Cokes, miscellaneous mixes, juices, sour blended, creamy blended, beer, and wine. This was partly to aid memory, partly to facilitate arrangement of glassware, mainly to prevent the mix from one drink from tasting in the next (should a bit of 7-Up spill, in the rapid firing of the bar gun, into a collins, it wouldn't be detected, whereas Coke would definitely intrude).

“Jack/soda, tall; four 'ritas, a sunrise, a Dos Equis, and a Bud.”

A bartender's beauty is in his moves. Like a lover's, like a matador's. The finished product means little: a spent orgasm, a dead bull. Satiation and stringy beef. To be sure, there are drinks of fine workmanship and drinks of poor; there are coherent ramos fizzes and incoherent; there are martinis in which the gin is autonomous and martinis where integration and harmony of ingredients prevail; bloody marys can suffer high blood pressure or low. Yet Priscilla had never heard a customer complain of a drink, unless it was to impress a companion, unless there wasn't enough booze therein, and at El Papa Muerta, at least, there was always enough booze.

A bartender's beauty is in his moves, in the way he struts his stuff, in the field of rhythms that is set up in the orchestrated hatching of a large order of drinks. A skillful barkeep no more looks at his accoutrements than a practiced typist or pianist peers at the keys, but works with both hands simultaneously, full blast, undimmed by the usual dull requirements of routine. (Even in a lull, with only one drink to mix, he will not slacken his pace nor take a glyptic approach.) When he snatches a bottle from the well, he knows, without looking, that it is grenadine and not triple sec, and if it should prove to be triple sec, too bad, dad, the drink is already mixed. Stirring and sloshing, rinsing and wiping, pouring and garnishing, with a fry cook's retention and an acrobat's timing, he virtually dances through his shift, skating, as it were, on the chunky ice he scoops with furious delicacy into each glass. The regular at El Papa Muerta was a master of bar dance, he consumed the space around his station, he had speed, presence, and finesse; his output was huge. Ricki had a lot to learn. Her style was kinky. Ugly and odd. But Priscilla sensed that Ricki would be a good one in time. To her advantage, she was impatient with small stuff and detail, and with the fussing and adjusting that the dilettante in any field tries to substitute for inspiration and thus rescue his art. She had a capacity for the grand, and it was with some faint concept of eventual grandeur that she set about to mix the first order of drinks on that autumn evening, her arms — and her mood — arched to parallel the natural curve of flowing liquid.

“Jack/rocks, C. C./water, vodka martini, five 'ritas, one grande, one strawberry; and a draft. That martini takes a twist.”

It has entered our solar system. It's becoming our solar system! If that kid doesn't make contact. . What's that? His teddybear is missing?!?!

Priscilla closed her eyes and slipped into a crack between the bar noise and the movie noise, where, under her coffee-scented breath, she prayed; asking God, in whom she only marginally believed, what to do about the formula, what to do about Ricki's lust and love. She closed, out of habit, with an “amen,” not knowing for sure what “amen” really meant, but suspecting that when God finally ended the world his big boom-boom voice would not bellow “amen” but “Tha-tha-tha-tha-that's all, folks,” à la Porky Pig.

Into the dining room she went, virtually limping with fatigue, screwing up her face with distaste at the diners being shown to their tables. What kind of gourmet would trust a Mexican restaurant where the entrees smelled like ketchup and the waitresses wore sailor dresses? It was a long way from the perfect taco. Five minutes later she was back in the bar, placing her first drink order.

“Two sloe gin fizzes, two fast gin fizzes; three martinis, dry, no starch; twenty-eight shots of tequila, three beers (a Bud, a Tree Frog, and a Coors lite), seven rum separators, five coffee nudges, two Scotch and waters, five vodka and buttermilks, a zombie, a zoombie, four tequila mockingbirds, thirteen glasses of cheap white wine, a mug of mulled Burgundy, nine shots of Wild Turkey (hold the stuffing on three), one Manhattan (with eight cherries), two yellow jackets, fifteen straitjackets, thirty-seven flying dragons, nine brides of Frankenstein, and a green beret made with 7-Up instead of sweet vermouth and in place of grenadine, banana liqueur. Amen.”

The fraud backfired. Before Priscilla had reached the end, Ricki was in full panic, and even after Pris said, “Make that two margaritas, grande; and a Carta Blanca,” Ricki just stood there, up to her elbows in glassware, looking as if she'd had the brain electricity sucked out of her by the black hole, which on the TV, had stopped eating Grand Coulee Dam and was sharing a granola bar with Jeffrey Joshua. There was at least one tear in her eye. “That was a rotten thing to do to you on your first shift alone,” Priscilla apologized. Then she whispered, “Take your break at nine-thirty, if you can. I've got a special treat for us.”

But, of course, Ricki wanted something more than the pinch of cocaine, and Priscilla found herself, during break, in the ladies' stall with her panty hose down around her knees.

“I'm sorry, I guess I'm pretty dry.”

“That's okay,” said Ricki. “I'm like a cactus. I can make maximum use of minimal amounts of moisture.”

A loud rap on the restroom door caused them both to jump.

“Pris. Pris, are you in there?”

Priscilla pushed Ricki away and hurried to pull up her Danskins.

“Pris, there's a delivery for you from Federal Express.”

It was with mixed emotions that Priscilla headed for the reservations desk. On the one hand, she was relieved to get out of Ricki's grasp; on the other, she was afraid of what that delivery might be. She had received mysteriously almost a dozen beets at her apartment. What if they started to show up at work?

The Federal Express envelope contained no raw vegetables, however, but a fancy, engraved invitation, requesting her presence at a dinner party honoring Wolfgang Morgenstern, the Nobel prizewinning chemist. The dinner was to be held at the Last Laugh Foundation. This was even more puzzling than the beets. Priscilla, who had completed but one year of her chemistry major, knew Dr. Morgenstern by reputation only, while, aside from the war room at Boeing Aircraft, the Last Laugh Foundation was the most exclusive turf, the most inaccessible sanctum in Seattle.

“Why me?” she asked.

“The Last Laugh Foundation,” mused Ricki. “That's that immortality place.”

“I know. Ricki, do you believe in immortality?”

“I'll try anything once.”

The cocaine was leaning on the doorbell in Pris's tummy. She was buzzing at the same frequency as the orange auras that had begun to pulsate from the pseudo-Guadalajara wrought-iron light fixtures. Physically, at least, she was primed to return to the dinner trays, freighting what she'd sworn to one diner was “the most authentic Mexican cuisine north of Knott's Berry Farm.”

“You aren't upset with me, are you?”

Ricki looked her over. “No,” she said. “I realize that you're just jealous that I got the barkeep job. They couldn't have put you in there, Pris. You're too scatterbrained and too clumsy.” She turned on her flat heel and walked away.

Priscilla made it through the shift without crying or praying, although, befuddled by the invitation and bruised by Ricki's remark, she concentrated on her duties with difficulty. So badly did she mix up orders that two tables didn't tip her. That was no way to earn three ounces of jasmine oil, let alone to earn three years of omphaloskepsis, which was what the doctor ordered (or did the doctor order the smothered burrito?).Curious, thought Priscilla, promptly pedaling over a steep curb, spilling her bike, ripping her panty hose, and scraping her leg.

Bicycling home at midnight, she pedaled five blocks out of her way to pass the Capitol Hill townhouse in which the Last Laugh Foundation was headquartered. It was a stately old mansion, charming of cupola, angular of gable, a university's worth of ivy clawing the ivory paint from its boards, a high, stucco wall topped with broken glass protecting its grounds. As usual, there were people at its gate, trying, in one manner or another, to get past the security guards. However, whereas a month before there might have been ten people at the gate, now — in the middle of a damp November night — they were lined up to the end of the block.

By the time she reached home, attended to her wound, shampooed, and donned her dirty lab coat, she had put both the invitation and Ricki's insult pretty much out of mind. From the bathroom cabinet, she removed a Kotex box and checked under the pads to ascertain that the bottle was still hidden there. She did not remove the bottle, however. What was the use?

She needed help, but God was in a meeting whenever she rang, and the Daughters of the Daily Special had postponed her grant almost as often as she had postponed going to bed with Ricki. With Ricki, her sponsor, turning hostile, Priscilla had to assume that the grant might never come through. “Well, shit,” she said. “Shit shit shit. I've got no choice but to make that call.”

She shoved the Kotex box back in the cabinet, pulled on some stiff jeans, dipped a fistful of coins from the fishbowl, and ran down the hall, not even looking to see if she might have run over a beet. It was late, but she knew that her party had a habit of working into the night. Her finger was trembling, but she managed to dial.

The wall phone swallowed the quarters, Priscilla swallowed her pride.

“Hello, Stepmother,” she said.

There was a pause. Then:

“Where are you?”

Madame Lily Devalier always asked “Where are you?” in a way that insinuated that there were only two places on earth one could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous.

NEW ORLEANS

WHEN WE ACCEPT SMALL WONDERS, we qualify ourselves to imagine great wonders. Thus, if we admit that an oyster — radiant, limp, succulent, and serene — can egress from a shell, we are ready to imagine Aphrodite exiting from a similar address. We might, moreover, should we have that turn of mind, imagine Aphrodite exuding her shell, constructing her studio apartment, its valves, hinges, and whorls, of her own secretions, the way an oyster does, although the average imagination, it must be said, probably would stop someplace short of that.

“Oh, no, Miz Lily, Ah not be putting no raw oyster in mah mouf! Ah eats cold soup wif you, Ah eats libber spread wif you, made from goose libbers, but Ah not be eatin' no slime.”

“Really, child! How inelegant.”

Madame Devalier replaced upon its bed of rock salt and cracked ice the half-shell whose contents she had been about to slurp, and, while waiting for the word “slime” to cease its vile reverberations in her mind's ear, she poured herself another glass of champagne.

“To Papa's fat,” she said.

“We done drink to fat three time,” said V'lu, raising her own glass of Nehi orange soda, to which Madame Devalier had added, under protest, even though it was a celebration, a squirt of hurricane drops.

“Very well, then. To Bingo Pajama.”

“To Bingo Pajama,” V'lu said wistfully. “Wherever him po'soul be.”

“Now, cher, you mustn't worry your pretty head about that crazy Jamaican. I am confident he can take care of himself.” She sipped. She studied the circle of shellfish, each ritzy blob glistening upon the lustrous floor (or ceiling) of its own intimate architecture, the solidified geometry of its desire. The oyster was an animal worthy of New Orleans, as mysterious and private and beautiful as the city itself. If one could accept that oysters built their houses out of their lives, one could imagine the same of New Orleans, whose houses were similarly and resolutely shuttered against an outside world that could never be trusted to show proper sensitivity toward the oozing delicacies within. She sipped again. If one could accept the exaggerated fact of the oyster, one could imagine the exaggerated fact of Bingo Pajama, who had disappeared after the policeman who attempted to arrest him for selling flowers without a permit had been stung to death by bees; one could imagine that Bingo Pajama would keep his promise to bring them still more jasmine, the laborious but successful extraction of whose essence had occasioned this little celebration on Royal Street.

The telephone rang.

“I'll get it,” said Madame, somewhat surprised that the dusty phone remembered how to ring. There was an odd look on her face as she pried her bulk from the depression in the love seat, much as the counterman at Acme's had pried open the oysters a half-hour before. When she returned to the rear of the shop five, maybe ten, minutes later, her expression was even more odd. She looked to be sad, but gay about it; or gay, but sad about it. Sad, gay, it was all the same to V'lu, whose immense brown eyes were becoming somnambulant, if not squamulous, a sure sign that the hurricane drops were beginning to take effect.

“Priscilla was a Mardi Gras baby,” Lily said, out of the blue. “Have I mentioned that?”

“Yes, ma'am. You sho' 'nuf have mentioned that.”

“A Mardi Gras baby.” She drained her glass, regarding the oysters now with no appreciable indication of appetite. “Conceived one Mardi Gras, abandoned the next.”

“Who she mama?”

“Pardon?”

“Ol' Wallet Lifter she daddy, who she mama?”

“Her mother.” Madame sighed into her empty glass. “You know, V'lu, I no longer remember her mother's real name. She was from a good Irish Catholic family, lived in a fine house in the Garden District, I know that. But the devil will bite a young girl if she gives him a spot, and he sure took a nibble of this one. She could have watched the parade from her veranda, they lived right on St. Charles, but, no, she had to come down to the Quarter, mix with the so-called artists — she loved those artists — and that is where Wally spotted her. He seduced her on the street, under the crepe paper skirts of a float that had stalled.”

“Revern' Wallet Lifter.”

“That's what the cynics called him, yes. The Reverend Wally Lester was what he called himself. From the Irish Channel, poor white trash, more than likely, but he wasn't dumb. I never actually heard him preach, but he must have been fairly good, he had the looks and he had the tongue. Traveled throughout Texas; Oklahoma, too, conducting revival meetings in a circus tent; overdramatizing the word of God, turning the Scriptures into a cross between German opera and a hockey game, as only a Protestant can do. Then, every year, about a week before Mardi Gras, never fail, he'd suddenly show up in the Quarter. Oh, nobody enjoyed Mardi Gras more than Wally. He'd go on a rip that lasted well into Lent. After everybody else had wound down, he'd still be bouncing off barroom walls. Next thing you knew, though, he'd be gone; he'd go down into Mexico, some said after women, some said after gold — he obviously had more luck with the women. In any case, by Easter Sunday, he would be back to preaching, setting up his plastic pulpit on top of half the prairie-dog holes in Texas. Until Mardi Gras, when he would return to the Quarter and start the whole thing all over again. Sacrebleu.”

“Yo oysters be gitting warm, ma'am,” V'lu announced dreamily. Ignoring her, Madame Devalier went on telling her things about the Reverend Wally Lester that she'd told a dozen times before. “Warm slime don't taste nowhere near as nice as cold slime,” said V'lu. She smiled, revealing a mouthful of small, iridescent teeth. If oysters drove cars, their hood ornaments would look like V'lu's smile.

“The girl traveled with him for a season. She gave birth in his air-conditioned trailer, parked in one of those awful towns where jackrabbits hop down Main Street.” Lily made a face. “I've always maintained that Priscilla got off to a bad start by not being born in New Orleans.” She refilled her glass. “More champagne? Oh, I forgot. I'm sorry.”

“Ah 'pose dat be Miz Priscilla on dee phone?”

“I'll never forget the day they came back. The minute they hit town, she gathered up her things and jumped on the first streetcar to the Garden District, although they managed to have le combat before she got away. Wally brought the baby by the shop so that I could see her, and there were claw marks on his cheek, the blood was barely dry. He rubbed the baby's bare bottom over the scratches, as if that would heal them. A few days later, he brought her by a second time and asked if I would watch her while he 'administered to those sinners who mock the true Christian meaning of Mardi Gras,' as he put it. It was a year before I saw him again. His face had healed without scarring.”

“Why you?”

“Why me? Why did Wally leave her with me? Well, I suppose he trusted me. You see, he used to hang out at the shop—”

“He like you?”

A blush stained Madame Devalier in the way that debits color the ledgers of a failing business. “No, no, he wasn't interested in me personally. Even then I was too old and stout. I was born old and stout. He was interested in the 'work.' He wanted to learn the 'work,' although what an evangelist would do with it I never understood. I sold him some — some items. He was the only white man I ever sold to.”

An oyster Cadillac rolled into view, V'lu Jackson incisors sparkling, leading the way. “Hee hee hee. Ol' Wallet Lifter be jazzing up Jesus wif some drops.”

“Romance powders and money mojo were more in his line, but that's neither here nor there. I agreed to rear his child, because. . well, I was convinced that I would never marry, and because I thought I could use a girl in the shop, someone to help, you see, someone to teach perfumery to. That didn't work out, of course. Priscilla always loathed the shop, and I never had the assistant I needed until — until you.”

It might have been V'lu's turn to blush; whether she did or not we'll never know. She did manage a proud pursing of the lips, however, and then she asked, “Dat Miz Pris on dee line?”

“She was not a brat, you understand. In fact, she would make a sincere effort every now and again to follow in my footsteps, as it were. She was careless and messy, broke a lot of things, but she'd work hard. Then Mardi Gras would come around and, sure enough, here's Wally. He'd bring her armloads of presents: lollipops and pralines, all sorts of sweets, and dollies and stuffed animals and tricycles and, later, bikes, and the cutest clothes: little dotted-swiss dresses with ruffles and sashes. She thought her papa was rich, she believed that with all of her heart, and Wally encouraged it, the swine. When he left she'd beg him to take her with him, but he'd tell her that he had to go south of the border to attend to his gold mines and that Mexico was no place for rich little American girls. Mon Dieu, how it killed me to watch her fight back the tears! For months afterward she'd be moody and morose, claim that the smell of perfume made her ill.”

Lily poured the last of the champagne. Briefly, she regarded the uneaten oysters, which, although beginning to look increasingly flabby, lay in perfect repose upon the remaining hemispheres of the dream houses in which they'd once enjoyed such exquisite solitude. Two strong hands and a steel blade were required to storm the privacy of the oyster's dark entrance hall. It takes a team of four horses to force the giant clam of the South Seas to yawn against its will. Every passive mollusk demonstrates the hidden vigor of introversion, the power that is contained in peace.

“About that time the shop started to lose money. I went to Paris with my formulas and was brutally rejected. LeFever showed interest, but eventually it, too, turned me down—”

At the mention of “LeFever,” a blush actually did seep through V'lu's protective pigmentation, spreading upon her carob complexion like an oil slick on the muddy Mississippi, and even though her nervous system was, by hurricane drops, entertained, she flinched.

“—after stringing me along, and with not so much as a franc for my time and trouble. I should never have left New Orleans. I was depressed after that, I admit, but Priscilla was worse. At least I kept a roof over our heads, dealing in items I had rather not discuss. Priscilla wouldn't turn a hand, just talked about her papa all the time, how he was going to come and give her this and that, buy her a sports car, pay for ballet lessons, move her into a big house with a yard, until finally I had to tell her the truth about the Reverend Wallet Lifter and his Mexican fortune; I had no choice, V'lu.”

V'lu was still recovering from the dent that the reference to the French fragrance house of LeFever had kicked in the fuselage of her midnight airship. She perceived that her mistress needed comforting, but “She believe you?” was the extent to which she could respond.

“No, she didn't believe me, but she never forgave me, either. Oh, I suppose deep down she may have believed me. In any case, Wally's next visit was a stormy one, and did little to improve our financial situation. Six months later, she ran off and married that accordion player.”

“How old her be den?”

“Sixteen.” Madame shook her head and clucked. “Sixteen.”

“He hab plenny money.”

“He had some money. Priscilla imagined that it was plenty. And money was what she wanted. I mean, he was pushing forty, not exactly your dashing Latin lover, and she was such a pretty little thing — and so smart in school! His band, it was one of those South American tango fandango bands, was fairly popular for a while. They traveled all over, from Puerto Rico to the New York state mountains, playing in resort hotels. He claimed he was going to train her to dance with his troupe. I can't fathom how either one of them could have believed that for an instant. Mon Dieu, the girl has two left feet!”

“Him go he home, though. Overseas.”

“Yes, his band eventually folded, and he returned to Argentina alone, but I believe she had already left him by then. She left him right after Wally passed away.”

“Her come watch she daddy die?” V'lu knew perfectly well that Priscilla had been at her father's deathbed, she'd heard the story more times than there were beets rotting under her cot, but she was disposed to hear it again.

“Pris was there at the end. Wally took sick in Mexico and had the decency to come back to New Orleans to expire. He was rather far gone when Pris and I got to Charity.” Madame crossed herself, ringed fingers flashing like UFOs over the summits of her mountainous breasts. “The second we walked into the ward, though, he opened his eyes. His eyes were heavy and feverish, rather like yours are right now. He stared at Priscilla for quite a while before he spoke.”

“Whut he say?”

“He said, 'You're startin' to turn out like your ol' daddy, darlin'. A novelty act.' That hit her like a brick.

“Then he recognized me and winked. He was only fifty, but he looked sixty-five. 'Stay in touch,' he said to me. 'Have you ever. .?'

“He closed his eyes and folded his arms on his chest; you could almost see the life ticking out of him. He sighed, kind of sweetly, and a contented smile softened his face. He muttered something. Then he was gone.”

“Whut he mutter?”

“He said, 'The perfect taco.' That's it, those were his last words. He sighed, 'Ahhh,' and said, 'The perfect taco.'”

The two women were silent for some time, maybe meditating upon the mystery of it all — the life, the death, the goofiness — maybe, in V'lu's case, in communion with a private totem. The oysters, those tender masters of sequestrable engineering, apparently had given up the ghost, perhaps to be reborn, in distant times, in distant foams, as Aphrodites. When finally V'lu spoke, the abruptness caused Lily to accidentally jettison the last remaining bubbles of champagne.

“Whut Miz Priscilla call about?”

“Pardon? Oh. Well, Miss Priscilla is seeking help, monetary or otherwise, in obtaining some — are you prepared for this? — some premium jasmine oil.”

"Jamais!" snapped V'lu. She caught herself. “Never,” she repeated in English, catching herself once more and amending her response to: “Nebber.”

“Chérie, I am surprised at you. Don't look so upset.” With a yellowed linen napkin, Madame dabbed at the champagne spots on the love-seat velvet. “The Parfumerie Devalier has extracted eight ounces of the most magnificent jasmine essence the world has ever known. When we establish the proper base note, we shall own a boof that will have Paris crawling here, to me, on its knees. It could ruin us if our extract fell into the wrong hands, but still, Pris has some rights. It took a lot of heart for her to turn to me after I rejected her three years ago, pushed her away in favor of you, when she asked to come back into the shop—”

“But—”

“I am aware of what you are going to say: she refused to help me when I really needed her. Well, I refused to help her when she needed it, too.”

“You hep her she whole life.”

“I could have helped more.”

“How?”

“I could have told her the truth about Wally. Years before I did. I could have squelched her silly fantasies.” Madame paused. “But then, perfume business is fantasy business, is it not?” She draped her napkin over the shellfish platter like a shroud. “Don't fret, cher. I didn't even mention our jasmine to Priscilla, and since we have no assurance that the Jamaican will supply any more, we may not be able to afford to share with her. Yet, what harm if we did? I can't imagine how she might use it. To be frank, it would please me if her recent interest in perfumes proved sincere. But she is far from expert in the field.”

V'lu sat upright, her countenance uncharacteristically grim. “Her hab dee bottle,” she said firmly. “Her hab dat dadblasted bottle!”

The older woman seemed about to protest but changed her mind. The two of them just sat there, as if they were mourners sitting the night with the shrouded oysters. It was early in the week, so no bellows of alcoholic gaiety drifted in from Bourbon Street, nor any screech from a tourist having her purse snatched over on St. Ann. They might as well have been on the plantation; indeed, they could make out crickets rubbing their patent leather hooves together in some nearby courtyard. A tomcat wailed. A foghorn Mark Twained on the river. Then, directly above their heads, there was a single soft thud or plop, followed by the softer sound of something rolling across the floor.

“Hmmm,” said Madame D. “Maybe our Bingo Pajama has returned.”

“Yes, ma'am. Or else it be somebody else all dee time be throwin' dem beets.”

That, at any rate, was what V'lu had intended to say. At precisely that moment, however, the hurricane drops hit her with full force, and, instead, she exclaimed, “Ui zeh! Ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch.”

PARIS

LATE ONE FOGGY AFTERNOON in November, just as he was snapping shut his attaché case and calling it a day, Claude LeFever was summoned to the offices of his father, Luc, president of LeFever Odeurs. He arrived to find the old man wearing a whale mask.

“Papa! What in the world. .? Take that off!”

Although more accustomed to giving the orders, Luc did as he was bid. When the mask had been removed, it was easy to see why Claude reacted as strongly as he did. There are people in this world who can wear whale masks and people who cannot, and the wise know to which group they belong. A tall man, shoulders only slightly rounded by seventy years of nagging gravity; a powerfully built man, whose torso the blind might mistake for a home freezer; a handsome man, nose structurally sound enough to support what might have been the heaviest pair of horn-rimmed spectacles in Europe; a dignified man, despite a residual patch of snow-and-rust hair that resembled a wad of stuffing from a wino's mattress, Luc LeFever was so staid of bearing that on those rare occasions when he forged a smile, his body treated it as an infection, tripling its output of interferon in a frantic attempt to repulse the alien life form that had invaded it. This is not a portrait of your average whale-mask man.

(Of course, Marcel LeFever was also a distinguished-looking gentleman, sober in his selection of tailor, barber, and facial expression, but in Marcel's eyes were telltale squadrons of milkweed seeds, eager to fly to faraway places upon the first cooperative breeze; whereas Luc's gaze was sedentary, a clump of briers that scratched with severity anything careless enough to brush against it.)

“I wished to experience, for just five minutes, what it must be like being him,” said Luc. He smoothed his hair. He lit, with a gold-plated lighter, a Romeo y Julieta Presidente, handmade in the Dominican Republic with Cameroon wrapper: a foe of socialism, Luc had long maintained a personal boycott of Havana cigars.

“I wished to experience what it must be like to be. . unstable.” He blew a smoke ring. It was square.

Claude was more than a little surprised. “What brought this on?”

“Death”

“Pardon?”

“I was examined by physicians this morning.”

“Oh, no.”

“Relax. My blood pressure has escalated, but if I submit to their damned medication, it will come back down. Other than that, I have a faint heart murmur, and a slight swelling of the big toe that could herald an attack of gout. Nothing to be alarmed about, but it underscores the fact that I'm getting to be an old, old man. I mentioned this in passing to one of the doctors, and he said, 'Nobody lives forever, Monsieur LeFever.'”

“An astute observation. For once, the medical profession has issued a statement with which I can agree.”

“Can you now? I suppose you haven't heard of the Last Laugh Foundation?”

“Yes, Papa, I have heard of the Last Laugh Foundation. What a farce. You know who operates that place? Wiggs Dannyboy, the drug addict and jailbird. Insane Irish—”

“Yes, it's true that the notorious Dr. Dannyboy founded it, but do you know who's cast his lot with him? Wolfgang Morgenstern. I attended the Sorbonne with Morgenstern, he was in my elementary chemistry classes, we knew one another. Splendid fellow. He went on to win two Nobel prizes. Two, mind you.”

“Yes, but—”

“Morgenstern wouldn't be involved if there wasn't something to it.”

“Yes, but—”

“I can tell you, Morgenstern is not the sort to join forces with a charlatan.”

“Papa, are you considering having yourself admitted to the immortality clinic?” Disapproval was as thick in Claude's voice as fog was thick in the Parisian streets.

With his fingertips, Luc slowly twirled the cigar. He examined its ash. The higher the quality of the cigar, the longer the ash it will produce. Eventually, however, ever ash must drop. And the drop usually is as sudden as it is final. Did Luc detect a metaphor in the cigar ash? Might he muse philosophically about the nature of the Eternal Ashtray? Might we?

“No,” he said, after a puff or two. “I must confess to having experienced a twinge of temptation, knowing Morgenstern as I do. But in the end" — he sighed—"immortality is not for me. Did I make a pun, there? No? Good. In any case, dying is a tradition, and I am simply not the type of fellow who defies tradition.”

“Unless there is profit in it.”

“Eh?”

“You've always been willing to break with tradition if there was a profit in it. That's the secret of your success in business.”

“Um. That may be. But I see no profit in struggling to live beyond one's natural limits. There's something greedy about that, and I've taught you to distinguish between the profit motive and greed. Sooner or later, the greedy lose their profits. Profiteering is honorable and healthy, greed is degrading, perverse.”

“Life's not the same as money.”

“Thank God! Life ebbs away, but money, properly managed, grows and continues to grow, lifetime after lifetime. Life is transitory, money is eternal. Or it could be, if the damned Americans would lower their interest rates.” Luc picked up the whale mask and blew a stream of blue smoke through its eyeholes. “This small talk about death, money, and, last but not least, perversity, cannot help but bring us back to him.”

“Christ?”

“No, you idiot, not Christ. Your cousin. Marcel.”

Claude frowned. “Papa, if you're going to jump on Bunny's back again, forget it. You know how I feel about him.”

“Indeed, I do, and there's something perverse about that, too. You spend more time with that bedbug than you do with your wife.”

“Yes, well, Bunny is more entertaining than my wife. And he makes us more money.”

“Your wife doesn't ridicule you in public. And if wearing a cardboard fish head is your idea of entertainment. .”

“A whale is not a fish.”

“So what?”

“I'm willing to accept his ridicule, and his peculiarities. And, ultimately, Papa, so are you. Without Bunny, where would this firm be?”

“That's a contingency for which I have been preparing.”

“What do you mean?”

Luc propped his cigar against the rim of an alabaster ashtray. The cigar looked like some kind of vegetable, a root crop, related, perhaps, to the mangel-wurzel. The vegetable was on fire. Arson was suspected.

“I mean that Marcel is unstable.” Luc retrieved the cigar and with it, tapped the whale mask. Ash sifted onto the jaws. The cigar burned on. Fireman, fireman, save my vegetable! “I mean that any day Marcel might up and decide to swim to Tahiti. Look at the way he's abandoned New Wave, attacking it as if it were some sort of dangerous political movement, rather than a highly promising perfume in which we've invested millions, and which he, himself, developed. Now he's talking about making scent from seaweed. He thinks women will pay a thousand francs an ounce to smell like low tide. I thought most women bought perfume to avoid smelling like the mouth of the Amazon.”

“But—”

“Listen, I still trust Marcel. He's also beginning to show new interest in natural jasmines, which might be a sound idea. He's the best nose in the business, and he's been correct too many times for me to sour on him now. Nevertheless, he is unpredictable, and therefore a risk. So, while you've been taking out insurance policies on him and filling his kitchen with assistants, not one of whom, unfortunately, could come close to filling his shoes, I've been taking other precautions.” Luc removed a folder from a desk drawer. “After the scare the doctors put into me today, I decided I should go ahead and turn this over to you.”

“What is it?”

“A list of agents.”

“Agents?”

“Selected employees of our main competitors. France. New York. Germany. Plus a few people situated with small perfumeries, certain promising shops off the beaten track where something might develop that the big boys have overlooked.”

“Spies?”

“If that's what you choose to call them. Let's just say that if Marcel should go astray, we will still have access to blue-chip recipes. And if one of the little perfumeries should strike gold. . You have objections?”

A bit sheepishly Claude shook his head. “I suppose not. So long as it's just a failsafe, a backup. You see, I'm confident that the cuckoo is going to stay put in Bunny's clock. He won't do anything rash.” Luc shot him a disbelieving look. “Well, nothing so rash as to endanger the firm and justify extralegal activities. But, you know, the way he wanders around on foggy evenings like this without a topcoat, it wouldn't hurt to have something up our sleeves in the event that he catches a fatal chill in his liver. I mean, those things happen.”

Luc expelled such a geyser of smoke that had it come from a derailed tank car, the authorities would have immediately evacuated the neighborhood. Under certain conditions, Luc's exhalation could have forced hundreds of people to spend the night in church basements and high-school gymnasiums. “It's not his liver I'm concerned about. Nor mine. I've always been a prime physical specimen, I expected to live a century, but the doctors have pulled the rug out from under that idea. All right, I can accept it, I'm no sissy hippie about death. What worries me is: what if Marcel should outlive you? Can you imagine Marcel in charge?”

“Papa!”

“Jesus. This building. He'd probably rent out the top twenty-three stories and operate a little perfumerie in the basement, like the monks had seven hundred years ago, or that little Kudra shop that was next-door when our ancestors bought the business in 1666.”

“Papa! How ridiculous. In the first place, I'm in better health than Bunny. In the second place, the articles of incorporation would prohibit him from doing anything like that, even if he wanted to. Third, this is the best way for a person to raise his blood pressure, worrying about things like longevity, which you have no control over.”

Another column of smoke erupted from the tank car of compressed mangel-wurzel, delaying any hopes the neighbors might have had of returning to their homes. “But what if someone does have control?” Luc asked.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“This. I'm talking about this. A few days ago, Marcel received an invitation to visit the Last Laugh Foundation.”

“In America?”

“You idiot. Of course, in America.”

“Why Marcel? Surely he isn't going?”

“His secretary says he accepted. Today.”

Claude furrowed his brow. He tugged at the ax blade of his beard. “But what's this all about?”

“I wish to hell I knew. That's what I want you to find out. It may be a spinoff from that ridiculous speech he gave at the perfumers' convention, or it may be something else.”

After cautioning his father to take his medication, Claude left him. On the way to the elevator, he peeked into Marcel's office. Marcel wasn't there. Everything seemed normal, except, of course, for the beet on the silver tray.

Claude rode to the ground floor. Through the plate glass windows, the foggy streets looked like Frankenstein's idea of Club Med. Claude had a hunch that before he went outside he ought to lock Luc's “agent” file in his attaché case. As he was about to put it in, he flipped rapidly through it. The name V'lu Jackson caught his eye.