Last Stories and Other Stories

WHEN WE WERE SEVENTEEN

Less than a mile within the posted limits of our city, at the intersection where Mr. Murmuracki’s establishment used to be, a left turn parallel to the cemetery will bring you past the old gas station to frost on the weed-islands between which white-beaked dark birds dip down at dawn, and sunrise arrives half-seen above a wind-riddled thunderhead, hurling down slantwise rays through every wound. Mist-fingers grope up out of steely pools. Suddenly color returns to the world, silvers going red, lovely russets and greens introducing themselves, the long rays of light now floating on the cress. Across the levee, a file of ducks swims in the ditch of ice-colored water which once morning reaches it will return to algae-green. Back at West Laurel Hill, whose original wall commences two and a half miles from here, sun-rectangles and polyhedral shadows decorate the frosted grass between the plinths, and the headstones remain partially silhouetted against the rising sun. An approximation of their projections could be made with the most elementary mechanical drafting instruments; while here at the marsh the shadow-patterns remain too grand to be understood, supernatural powers being in fact so feeble that darkness owns greater power around rivers than around graves. Now warmth touches the railroad embankment, unfurling downward, releasing the mud’s smoky smell, until all the things of this world — those galls on that oak tree, the dead reeds, the hank of down from last year’s cattails, the clot of spiderweb, that snorting otter rolling in a sunny patch of grass, the meadow’s stripes of silver and russet — appear fixed in their true natures, as if a flashlight-beam would prove them to retain their present forms no matter how powerful tonight’s darkness.

A neighbor of mine once whiled away a summer here. I will not write his name.

His greyhaired ladyfriends still flattered him that his hair was not grey, merely greying a trifle at the temples. He avoided mirrors; and the neighbors with whom he was growing old treated him as if he were as young as they, so he returned the favor even though he knew that unlike them he truly was—or at least younger than he looked. One morning his stomach felt a trifle upset, but the next day found him as healthy as ever; and yet he seemed to be losing his appetite; he used to love bacon and eggs, and now the smell made him sick. The nausea descended like snow, almost imperceptibly coating the inside of his throat, piling up flake by flake in his chest and drifting down into his belly. For years he had been overweight, so this was actually fortuitous. He abstained from fatty foods more easily than ever before; and if his face began to draw in, well, didn’t that mean he’d soon be lighter on his feet? The doctor gave him four months.

The instant he was alone again, he sat down at his desk.

His best friend Luke had been a practical soul who took pleasure in errands checked off, a bare desk and taxes paid early. He gave away most of what he owned, dispatching each thing to whoever he supposed would use it best. They scattered his ashes in the mountains.

Before Luke, and partially coterminously with him, there had once also been a certain tall, skinny friend called Isaac, whom he never would have known were it not for Clara, who had loved Isaac in high school and still alluded sadly to the summer when Isaac went away, which is to say from everyone, and of course from Clara in particular. She must have just turned nineteen, which would have made Isaac twenty-one, so this neighbor of mine who now had four months left had been twenty-two and already engaged to Clara when she asked him to meet Isaac. At that time he dreaded new people, not to mention any boy for whom Clara evidently still cared, but he obliged her, as a peculiar result of which he and Isaac became close. Nearly forty years ago now (it must have been the spring after Clara threw him out), he met Luke, and presently introduced him to Isaac, who among other virtues declined to possess more than he could carry on his back. Luke guardedly admired this. Wherever he went, Isaac journeyed deep, and kept on going. He was hardy, abstemious, longlegged, cheerful if fidgety, generous if spendthrift, capable of opening his heart and therefore of exciting affection in others, particularly women; and, above all, light in his travels. His bugbears were dishonesty and uncleanliness. Narcissists readily fail to notice that honesty can be unkind, while filthiness derives no more frequently from culpability or innate foulness than from helplessness or brokenness. Isaac’s stellar fidelity to himself rendered him accordingly liable to fits of capricious extremism. Hence the summer when he went away, Clara’s seventeenth. Luke used to observe that whatever meanness someone committed elsewhere would eventually repeat itself at close hand, and in due course Isaac went away again, into the desert, where he decided to live out his life. Luke, who kept up a love of hiking literally to the end, was impressed, indeed, almost haunted by his example, and used to praise him, but that methodical breaking of contact with his old friends partook of cruelty, at least from the standpoint of my neighbor with the upset stomach, who had never respected the decisions of Buddha and Jesus, let alone (for instance) Clara, to abandon those who loved them. Isaac did not mind breaking women’s hearts; he felt what he felt, so why live a lie? When he went away from my neighbor, a woman told him to do it — for in between leaving women, Isaac made them his empresses. Perhaps what Luke admired the most about him was that he seemed never to regret himself. So Isaac went away, and my neighbor heard nothing of him for years. Presently, by some accident (Isaac needed help in obtaining antibiotics), they became friends again. But once my neighbor began to get fat, Isaac grew contemptuous. For his part, the fat one imagined that he had done a lot for Isaac, materially and otherwise; loyalty was his particular fetish, which must have been why he remained faithful to all his many girlfriends. One night after a certain favorite had jilted him, he sought to express his grief to Isaac, who knew her moderately. It was sad, no doubt; the fat man felt quite weak just then; he nearly wept while relating his pain to Isaac — who promptly went away from him for good. Somewhere on the other side is a gentler valley of milky-green rivers whose broad rapids enclose many-ledged islands upon each of which a skeleton may sun itself, but whether or not Isaac got there I cannot say. Were one to know a spiderweb only by glimpsing it edge-on, that would still be understanding of a sort; therefore, he and Isaac comprehended one another. To Isaac’s way of thinking, he must have been as flabby and unclean as he looked; while to the fat one, this second betrayal was unforgivable, not that forgiveness was relevant. In point of fact, the fat one was goodhearted enough, like most people of his temperament; and had Isaac ever called upon him he would have been as agreeable as he supposed he had been to Clara (who, I must admit, had gone away not thinking highly of him). Who are we, then, the inhabitors of our courteous actions, or the happy perpetrators of our malignant fantasies?

Over the years the recollection of Isaac became apparently indifferent to him; he did not mind when Luke invoked him; and when Luke commenced giving away his possessions, it even comforted him to imagine his friend as entering into the situation of Isaac, who, having already disencumbered himself of his one piece of furniture, a mattress, slept for a final handful of nights on the carpet of his rented room, and was now, in the space of a quarter-hour, loading everything he owned into his backpack, preparatory to striding forever into the wind of the white canyon. If such could have been in even the most metaphorical sense Luke’s destination, then his passing out of sight (let’s say into the relative brightness of the lunar highlands) escaped being terrible. Of course my fat neighbor knew it to be terrible and worse; all the same, when his own turn came, he found himself preparing to unlock his desk, so as to make disposition of what was most precious of all his treasures — namely, the letters from all the women he’d loved.

In fact, two desks belonged to him. One was an antique rolltop formerly his father’s. Prior to becoming old he’d wondered what to do with it. Never practical, he employed its pigeonholes for the adapters and plugs of lost electric-powered devices, which might yet reveal themselves (for in those days it was patent that he would live forever); not to mention the fat old analog microphone, the flash cards he had once made in order to dither with the Inuktitut language, broken pencil leads, pens which might or might not be out of ink, boxes of color slides whose subjects he had forgotten (but worth saving in case some of them might be naked pictures), spectacles which no longer befitted his eyes, keys to forgotten chests, padlocks, apartments and houses, and an empty pill bottle which remained eligible for one refill fourteen years ago. Luke gave him those pills when he developed a certain intimate complaint.

It makes me happy to think of you having this desk, his father had said. The son already owned the other desk. He liked his father’s desk and vaguely hoped to someday work at it in a worthy manner. His father had been as uncluttered as Luke. Seeing what became of his desk, his father said nothing.

When he sat down to cross his arms on its bed of darkgrained red-stained maple, he knew that his father must have rested his elbows here in some analogous configuration, wide-eyed in his spectacles, sipping tea, steadily and probably contentedly preparing business drafts. His father had always been a light sleeper, and in early middle age sometimes worked through the night. Once the boy himself had insomnia, and came barefoot and quiet into the study at dawn, peeping at his father, whom he loved very much but of whom he was somewhat afraid. His father did not send him away. They sat together, his father working prodigiously over these papers which the child could not understand: the boy in the leather armchair, his bare feet cold, his father at this desk. It was one of the few objects he could imagine which appeared both precious and dependable. Even now he could barely grasp both of its curving wings when he outstretched his arms. Of course his father had been a bigger man in every way; once his mother had them stand back to back to be measured, and his father was a quarter-inch taller. — I want you to have this, his father said when his parents moved away. But while his father lived, the desk was not so much used as imposed upon. This box of rope, scissors and string, what would happen to it now? He opened the drawer which contained a wooden gouge, perhaps his father’s, a box of Luke’s travel slides, the hair ornament pertaining to a bygone girlfriend (the scent of her cheap pomade, somewhat simplified by the decades, nonetheless resisted them), a square of the red cloth in which his signal pistol used to be wrapped, and the red pinwheel which his daughter had awarded him when she was in elementary school (nowadays her children preoccupied her so happily that he preferred not to inform her of his condition); and then he closed that drawer again, gnawing on a pain pill. The next drawer down was so full of unlabeled color negatives that it barely closed. He pulled it out an inch, just to remind himself that someday — as if there were still a someday! — he would sort all those images, and even utilize them. Shutting that one as best he could, he drew out the drawer containing an obsolete “Guide for Expeditions to the Canadian Arctic Islands,” a galvanized nail, a bottle of expired sulfa powder for frostbite, a photograph of a very young and handsome Luke (he ought to mail it to the widow, who continued unremarried), a pamphlet which discussed the breathing holes of ringed seals and the overwintering strategies of bearded seals, and a moon map, copyrighted thirty-five years ago. Half-smiling, he browsed for a moment over the craters of that bluish-grey disk. When he was a schoolboy, the teachers used to promise atomic-powered lunar travel “in our lifetime.” He had always wished to visit the moon.

But it was not in his father’s desk but in his own that he had to search. The stout square legs of this ugly if likewise capacious item, whose smooth top was wood-patterned laminate, doubled as filing cabinets. The left side being unlockable, he used that for his contracts and other such items which he never would miss if someone stole them. His father would have guarded them better. The righthand cabinet was for old love letters; those he had locked up years ago. Where was the key? Over the years he had dropped all keys extraneous, unknown or momentarily unnecessary into a ceramic dish on his father’s desk. As it was, he still carried too many around — the price of owning properties, leasing mailboxes and hiding secrets.

And so in advance of dawn he was on his knees before the desk, wearily trying this key and that in the spiderwebbed lock on the inner side of the righthand leg. He seemed to remember a brass, short-necked entity with a trapezoidal head. But no object of any comparable description served. Could the lock require oiling? He would spray it as soon as he felt less ill — any day, no doubt. First he’d better open it. An impatient craving overtook him for this forgotten miniature country, whose people and landscapes he once knew so well. In his healthier years, boredom had impelled neglect; and so he had commenced the effort half expecting to be stupefied by futility and disgust the instant he gained admittance; but with every failure his longing waxed. — That’s life, thought the dying man. — In his haste he made the mistake of trying only the most likely keys in each ring. Then he started all over again, more systematically. One brass key whose head happened to be ovoid penetrated to the hilt, but declined to turn. A loose silver key leaped from his fingers and disappeared into the dusty darkness. He reached for it, but his stomach checked him at once. Rising, he swallowed two codeine pills. It was sunrise. He lay down, his eyes slowly half-closing.

When he found the key three days later, he had given up looking for it. Most certainly he had tried every key in the ceramic dish. This one, the ugly-headed object, lay beside the dish as if it had always been there. He turned the lock and opened the drawer. So many women! Luke had met several of them. — Bella struck me as brilliant from the beginning, he said. But she never did her homework. I wonder if she’s lost her mind? — Then for a moment the two friends would remember Bella together, and because Bella had been so long ago there was no pain, only the moderate pleasure which scientific colleagues might share when they identified another previously uncatalogued virus. — Beatrice was my favorite, Luke would say. I felt like she and I had a lot in common. What a goddamned nightmare she was. Have you heard from her? — And he would feel happy that Luke was remembering him by remembering his girlfriends.

He scooped up letters and let them fall. Now he was getting tired. At the very bottom (for she had been his first) lay the sack of letters from Victoria, in the fat envelope and the thin one.

He smiled; his heart beat fast. It was she whom he now most longed to know.

Had he first met her in later life he might have found her ordinary, although she probably wasn’t, this slightly plump blue-eyed blonde who had once been most provisionally his; and if he could have come across her now as she was then, he would simply have turned away from seventeen-year-old jailbait. But since he had known her then as he was then, he was free to claim her.

People smilingly refer to “puppy love,” for most of us do pass through it. Considered as a stage of character formation, it becomes innocuous, necessary. In its throes, of course, sufferers perceive it differently. His passion for Victoria had been absurdly noble. He accepted any negligence from her, even cruelty, without complaint; and while an onlooker might have been functionally correct to posit in this the desperate resignation of a lonely, unloved, self-despising adolescent, all the same, the boy did love her with all his best impulses. Yes, he lusted after her, as well he should have; certainly his infatuation remained nearly unencumbered by self-knowledge, let alone any comprehension of the girl herself; but it is touching and commendable as well as laughable that he would have done anything for her. And when she ended it, he imagined in his grief that he would never again be able to give himself to another as utterly as he had to her. In fact, as was proved by all those other letters in his desk drawer, he managed quite well — but had he done any better than manage? In the sensitivities of children — to raised voices, violence against animals, the softness of grass — there lies, if not wisdom, an empathy, which it is one of maturation’s express purposes to blunt. So our smiles when puppy love gets mentioned are not entirely mocking; we remember when we were better. For a year or two, until he forgot her more thoroughly, he was pleased to blame Victoria for the ever increasing selfishness which he deployed in his romances. Irregularly bright glades of memories, hedged in as if by marshes or poison oak, comprised most of what he had left of her. In the arms of subsequent lovers he orbited over the Marsh of Mists, then the Marsh of Epidemics, the Marsh of Decay, round and round, and it seemed that the future would always be peach-colored like the June sky at sunset. By the time he was middle-aged, he and his male friends agreed that it was a fine thing to know exactly what one desires in life, and to demand it of each night-companion (ghosts rising up like angry bluejays at dawn). They convinced themselves that the young women who in truth had no more use for them than for their worn out grandfathers would have constituted annoyances, because, being young, the women must not have figured themselves out. Oh, how fine to have oneself figured out! To be an adventurer in a mystery, asking for nothing, speeding through space toward the silver-goldness of the Lunar Alps, and seeing for the very first time a round dark crater (Victoria’s navel) aglow along part of its circumference, and otherwise shadowed — to bear happy hopes of knowing the Rhipaean Mountains, the Rheita Valley, the Sirsalis Rille, when knowing them would actually be above our capacity, or else be death — to experience each moment with Victoria as so perfect that its recollection fills up the darkest separations from her — to feel dizzy at the first sound of her voice — how preposterous! So he locked her letters away and mislaid the key.

Just then it was enough simply to lay out those two large envelopes on his desk. He sat there with his right hand on them until the doorbell rang. His next door neighbor had offered to drive him to the hospital.

At some point we ought to discuss palliative care, said the doctor.

Don’t worry about it, he replied. I have guns.

For an instant the doctor appeared offended. Then he drummed his index finger rapidly on his knee and said: Have you ever tried antidepressants?

The neighbor drove him home, and he thanked her. Another neighbor whom he barely knew had sent him flowers. That must mean that he would die. He smiled, thinking of Victoria’s letters. The evening sky glowed white, and the scent of jasmines descended upon him. All at once he grew rich in hopes and projects. But when he went upstairs, all he looked at was his moon map. Then he lay down.

That night he dreamed that in his father’s desk were two drawers which somehow also existed as doorways. One of them had always given onto sunlight before; now its interior was nearly as dark as the lunar seas, which are really lava. The other, which had been dark, seemed to have taken on depth and luster, like an attic filled with someone else’s dust-gilded toys.

From the fat envelope he first drew by chance that letter from thirty-five years ago when with her typical self-fullness she called herself lonelier than an angel must feel. What am I doing? And I feel rebellious. I want to disagree with everything you said in your letter and I want to escape the caresses. I want to be left alone. But he couldn’t take that hint, not in those days when he had no one else. Thank goodness he’d since been given love by others! His memories of them resembled lichen on the shoulders of a semilegible gravestone.

Having forgotten her for so long, he had evidently attached to her a spurious sweetness; and as he continued to pick through those envelopes, each with its thirteen-cent stamp, he grew melancholy, although not overmuch, to see how greatly she had resented and sought to escape him, in part because he had not been a wholesome giving sort, but also because she had been, as she kept saying, restless, almost as if she sensed she would die young. If anything, it was to her credit that under the circumstances she sent him so many letters — although she might have done so simply because she had not known herself — or been instilled with a habit of polite kindness… How could he even remember her, especially when he had never known her? Calling her up now was equivalent to imagining how it would have been on the moon when the so-called planetesimals were striking, exploding and cratering.

Scratching his grey cheeks, he found himself even less convinced that he liked this dead young woman. Of course, he barely liked himself now (never mind that he’d indulged himself unfailingly); so what would he have felt for that skinny, acne’d teenager who offered Victoria so little beyond his need — and, of course, that most undervalued of treasures, unsullied adoration? Isn’t that what we want others to feel for us, even while experience renders us incapable of giving it to them?

Well, even nowadays he considered himself less selfish than some. For instance, he had never loved any woman the less for being plain; that remained to his credit. All the same, how lovely Victoria had been!

In the drawer there were photographs and faintly scented hairclasps, withered flowers pressed within small folded squares of watercolor paper, photographs of women’s faces and bodies, single earrings, half-rings and other such love tokens, postcards from unforgotten Asian prostitutes (he still imagined that he never forgot anybody), a tiny wax-sealed bottle which contained green liquid, happy letters, beseeching ones and ones which promised or sweetly commanded (he had already destroyed most of the angry ones), roots and nests of memory all in a mucky tangle, living in the decaying matrix of too many years — and, yes, back at the very bottom again, hence appropriate to Victoria, the fat envelope and the thin one. The fat one held the letters from when they were seventeen, each one in its original envelope, the righthand side of which had been carefully, reverently slit open by the idolatrous boy. Yes, thirteen-cent butterfly stamps! Had life truly been so inexpensive in 1977?

The thin envelope contained their early middle age, when she had decided to reestablish contact with him. He had opened these communications almost carelessly, discarding the envelopes. By then it had not been such a thrill to receive letters from a woman — particularly from one who had jilted him. As might be expected, the papers were in no kind of order. They now seemed as bright as sun-caught dust-grains on a spiderweb over dark ivy. He took up a pink sheet of paper and read: I know I said I wouldn’t write. Evidently, like Isaac, she had broken off with him again; he couldn’t remember. Well, she was married. He had been mildly surprised and pleased to hear from her at all. In those days they each sought to respect the lives they had made. I lied, said the letter. I’ve just been told that I have invasive breast cancer and will have a mastectomy and removal of the lymph nodes within the week. I am scared to death. I have three small children, one almost five, a three-year-old and the baby is ten months. I cannot believe this is happening. I am not vain; I do not care about my chest, but I want to live. Do you believe in God? I’ll have radiation and chemotherapy. So, tell me. This fear, I can smell it, is it like being in war? What do you read when you are afraid? You don’t have to write; you don’t even know me, nor I you, and as I said before, my husband would hate this. But I still need to write it. If I figure out why, I’ll explain someday.

In another yellowing envelope with a thirteen-cent Liberty Bell stamp and a 1977 postmark lay a cheap machine print whose color had shifted redwards. His smiling blonde Victoria, clasping her hands across the waistline of her leopard print skirt, holding a blue balloon (on the reverse she’d written always the child) was now almost a redhead. The shadows of the park had gone plum and winelike. Victoria stood flushing as if she were drunk, embarrassed or filled with desire for him to whom she had given this portrait. She was still a virgin then, at least so far as he knew. The blue sky had darkened; the balloon’s shadows were purple. When he saw this photograph now, it meant more to him than before. She had sent it to him, so he had supposed, as a halfhearted appeasement; doubtless he had been hounding her for a picture, and on the back she had also penned Well, I’ll do better but please accept this anyway. Doing better would have in his seventeen-year-old definition entailed writing: I love you. Well, why should she? Being young, she possessed the pleasure of declining to define herself. And she hadn’t loved him, or if she had, it meant nothing in the end. Cocking her head, tossing her breast-length hair, Victoria smiled widely at him from the wine-rich past.

It was in fact a treasure that she had given him. No one else would ever get another from her. Unaware of her own death and his elderly ugliness, the girl offered him her bare knees, and the wind pulled her balloon eternally away. It looked to have been spring; the trees were barely in leaf. At whom was she smiling, and why? He had never thought to ask. With his now characteristic resentful suspicion he unfolded the accompanying letter, whose cheap white paper had shifted nearly orange, and read: I think I’m going to miss you. Our relationship is different now, but I feel happier about it—because I was gone, he thought. My sister and I are expanding our minds by watching Rebel Without a Cause on television. I hope it ends soon. I hope you hold at least fond memories of this place and me and semi-dormant expectations. Needing you again does not totally please me — I think you realized that. Is there anything you don’t realize about me? If there is, I fear distance can only make it easier to see. Please keep your promise. When you decide to break it, please give me a little time and notice. Will I suffer withdrawal symptoms? Love, Victoria.

So she had loved him, at least on that day. What more could he have asked for?

And once upon a time a certain witch had loved him, too. As one might expect, she was passionate; there was no end to the things she could do in bed. In his memories she resembled the silvergold disk of the evening sun in a wall of wild grapes. Although he had enjoyed her body, she otherwise bored and occasionally frightened him, whereas he had been the love of her life. She had risen up as if out of the ground to seize hold of him, jealous of every instant that he failed to inhale her breath. He never comprehended why she loved him; nor could she understand why she remained unloved by him. — It’s not simple chemistry, said the witch. If that’s all it were, I could fix that with two potions. What’s your astrological sign?

He told her.

Oh, said the witch. Well, no wonder.

Indeed, she could have made him love her, through much the same procedure as the one through which an impure tomb-spirit may be tricked into inhabiting another dead carcass. To her credit, she did not want that.

One morning she went away. Her parting gift was a tiny bottle of green liquid. She said to him: This can be used only once. If you pour it out on something belonging to a woman, the woman will appear before you.

He thanked her.

She gave him a locket whose window disclosed a many-fingered glob of mercury. For years she had worn it between her breasts. She said: Pour out the bottle on this, and I’ll instantly return to you.

I understand, he said.

Don’t call me back unless you want me. Otherwise it will hurt me too much. Do you promise?

I promise.

You’ll use it for some other girl, I know. You don’t care about me.

Of course I care about you. I love you—

Then marry me.

No.

Please, why can’t you love me?

I don’t know.

Is it because I’m old?

You’re not old.

What is it about me? wept the witch. Nobody loves me.

I love you.

Goodbye, said the witch, and walked away without looking back.

He lay awake in the darkness thinking about Victoria until it began to seem as if she were thinking about him. His stomach hurt. He rose and visited the bathroom. In the mirror by the medicine cabinet, he saw the specter of himself, unshaven, pale, grimacing and bewildered, with dark hollows under his eyes. How could this be him? He tried to smooth down his sweaty grey hair, swallowed two antacids and three pain pills, and returned to the darkness. Now he could nearly see Victoria standing over him in midair. She too was thinner than formerly, but no less beautiful. Her long hair, which he had remembered as sunny yellow, now appeared silver-white like lunar beams — not grey like his, but as young as ever. He was neither ecstatic nor afraid. A slow joy settled upon him, as if she were bending over him, tossing her hair upon his chest.

He knew that a wall of agony awaited him; he was already in its shadow. Above swam the pitted moon; below hung a pale gall alone in an oak. Of course this had little to do with Victoria, who might indeed distract him from his impending appointment with the wall, which for some reason he began to imagine as pertaining to an old-fashioned New England churchyard. He had never visited her grave, and in fact had scarcely wondered where she was buried. A quarter-hour on the computer sufficed for that: West Laurel Hill, near the edge of town. A map appeared on his screen. He zoomed in and in, until the site had minutely located itself.

The grand trees behind the entrance arch recalled a trifle of the verdancy which framed our great nineteenth-century mausoleums, supposedly forever. The hill which once looked down on forest, church, field and brook, warning off colored people and Jews, was now an uninspired slope of homogeneous late-twentieth-century slabs. The great stele of every rich man was ringed round — at a distance, to be sure — by granite footnotes to the poor, many of which flew miniature American flags. It was late afternoon. His stomach ached. A bird-shadow sped over the breathless grass, whose scent resembled cured tobacco. Each tombstone’s zone of shade had contracted, hiding all but snout or whiskers under the cracked plinth. Now he passed through another wealthy old section. Bemused by those dishonest arched doorways which looked from hillsides, as if the dead could see out and the living were invited within, he remembered his dream of his father’s desk. Bypassing two marble cornucopias which had been gnawed at by automobile exhaust, he arrived at the new section containing Victoria’s hill — more precisely, a modest mound whose crest alone had been sold by the time the twentieth century began. He sorted through the lesser bric-a-brac of modern tombs. In a thicket of stair-plinthed granite crosses, square slabs, gravestones which epitomized the negative spaces cut out of archways, he presently found a monument to Mrs. Emilia Woodruff, who lay SAFE IN HER SAVIOUR’S ARMS, and beside her rotted Victoria.

She had sent him another photograph; the baby, who sat in her lap, wearing a plaid skirt, must have been about ten months. What if he and Victoria had had children? He remembered her eidetically from the time when she had been his sweetheart. In this family photograph (already time-stained on the back — a blotchy scarlet like some rare lichen), she failed to resemble the girl he had loved. Her blonde hair had thinned a trifle and taken on a reddish tint — the color of the three children’s hair. Although she had lost her baby fat, her face remained unwrinkled. Had she owned so many freckles at seventeen? She was smiling, and he liked her cheekbones very much. He assumed the person at whom she was smiling to be her husband. She and the children were sitting on the steps of a suburban house, evidently gazing into the sun, because she was squinting, as was the middle child, who was grimacing, clutching his toy spaceship. The baby was clenching her fat white little fists, staring sideways at the eldest boy, whose eyes were also narrowed against the light but was seeking in sweet submission to look into the photographer’s eyes. Victoria’s expression could have been read as happiness or compliance. She wore green. With the infant on her lap and the two others on either side of her, drawn in by her pleasantly pale hands, she concealed most of her body from him in this image, which no doubt she had chosen for just that reason; she had stepped out on her husband, but innocuously, careful to assert her familial self. Had the husband discovered who had received this photograph, he could at least have told himself that Victoria was not alone in it; moreover, her collar came up nearly to her chin. She wore white crescent earrings. No, she did look happy! She was the center of a young, healthy and prosperous family. Now she was a skeleton, or ashes. You will not be aware of this, said another letter, but it is the anniversary of my mastectomy and I am supposed to be happy that I survived and all of that.

Now with the mourners and other regular people gone, the front gate locked, the crows returned to the cemetery grass, watching him sidelong through their metallic ring-eyes. In case there might be a watchman, he hid inside the bell-cupola of the Bartlett mausoleum. The moon emerged suddenly, much as illnesses, realizations and heartbreaks so often do; so that it was now time to call up Victoria. How welcoming would she be? Sometimes in that last year he used to telephone Luke to see how well he was enduring, imagining that he was performing some virtuous duty, only to discover that Luke was bored with talking, or with him. Why shouldn’t this be worse?

From his shirt pocket he withdrew the card through whose means she had first reestablished communication: distantly formal, and as haughty as ever — how he would have hated to be married to her! You, for all I know, do not remember me. But, I think you remember at least a little. That was Victoria for you — certain of her effect. I’ve always felt bad for snubbing you so awfully. There were extenuating parenting and adolescent circumstances, but I was very horrible. I’m sure you would have been dumped (or vice versa) but later I learned to do it and accept it with some small degree of grace. The next lay tidily folded in its envelope, with a cancelled twenty-nine-cent stamp of wild columbine: Even though I have been thoroughly faithful in every possible way, Ryan, I think, lives in fear he’ll lose me to something: a cause, a job, another man, and I’ll bet you liked it that way, didn’t you, Victoria? The third was typed singlespaced and went on for several pages. She had confessed to calling him and then hanging up. There are probably unresolved feelings for you that probably contributed to my feeling embarrassed. Please be flattered. I don’t have feelings for many people — at least, not embarrassing feelings! I think it is ridiculous that there has to be closure for every relationship, friend, choice. Yes, you would think that. No wonder you hated to die. I can’t tell if you mind questions. I think that in fact you do. I hope this reaches you before you are gone again to find your cigarette stand girl. How were the polar bears? The cold north, it sounds very appealing to an ice princess like me.

I dislike other people’s children but they like me because I treat them well and feed them and bring goldfish to class.

The moon resembled a marble wreath when he poured the liquid onto Victoria’s grave.

Her smile was a flower without scent. He felt more saddened than beguiled.

When he came home, he took his pain pills and pored over the moon map. Then he read two or three of her oldest letters. Playfully, the cancer flexed its fingers within his entrails. Taking up a pen, he began to write a reply, for practice, so that he would know what he ought to say to her.

The second time he visited, worn down by the sweaty brightness of his summer evenings, Victoria was sitting on her tomb, in one of those midlength skirts which had been in fashion when she was seventeen, with her white hands in her lap and her knees shining like moonlight. She had combed her hair just so over her shoulders; he had never seen her so formal. She gazed straight ahead.

You must have suffered so much, he said.

Don’t speak of it.

He thought her way of expressing herself old-fashioned. — Do you mean it still hurts you? he said.

Actually, I guess it doesn’t make any difference now.

The last time I called you, the nurse said you were too weak to talk. And then I didn’t know for a long time. I was afraid to disturb your family. But I could imagine your physical agony, and the emotional agony of leaving your children behind—

She turned half away.

Has he remarried?

I think those questions are intrusive, said Victoria.

Which ones?

Any of them. I’m not asking you any.

I did notice that. Come to think of it, maybe you don’t know if he—

You believe that I don’t want to know anything about you.

Or maybe that you know everything you care to. Can the dead read minds or see the future?

I’ve learned not to force any issue, said Victoria.

Why should that be such a secret? he demanded, which he would never have done at seventeen.

Surprisingly, she smiled at him.

He said: Next time I’ll bring you flowers.

You’re having a bad year, aren’t you? said Victoria.

You could say that.

You think you used to love your life, but you never did.

How do you know?

I’m not in a position to complain about anything.

Not with a marble slab on your chest! he replied, meaning to be wry but merely achieving bitterness.

Sometimes it hurts me. It’s the heaviest thing I ever had to bear.

I’m sorry. You’re having a bad time, too. Should I get you out of there?

It wouldn’t do any good. But flowers, flowers would be nice—

What kind would you like? I never got you any before, so I don’t know.

I love moonflowers. But you won’t be able to get them. You don’t even know what they are.

At seventeen he would have been crushed or at least disconcerted. Now he barely noticed humiliations of this sort. Rising, he said: I’ll bring you six white roses.

To go with my complexion?

And with your pretty winding-sheet.

I’m not wearing one.

Then don’t wear anything.

Victoria’s ghost giggled. He blew her a kiss and went away.

The disk on the lunar map was more or less the same tarnished yellow-silver-green as the key which had finally unlocked his desk drawer. Through the loupe which formerly belonged to Luke’s jeweler friend Raymond, he observed the Fra Mauro formation where Apollo 14 landed. The enlarged dots taught him nothing, for even the acutest seeing, if it is of the wrong sort, can mislead more perplexingly than sincere blindness. Do you believe me? Sit down at the cemetery’s edge; send your eyes into the ground. Behind the raspberry leaves lies a fern between whose green ribs ivy manifests itself like grey-green shadow; between the ivy leaves hang teeth and fangs of crisp darkness scattered in air as if new-smitten from a monster’s jawbone; but now, just when you begin to wonder whether you might in time perceive moonflowers within those black places, the noon sun intrudes, perching like a hot puppy upon your shoulder, panting light into your sweating ear, slobbering rays of brightness into the sweet black places, chasing away their darkness more quickly than your vision can follow; so that all that remains behind the ivy leaves is tea-brown dirt partitioned by grey stalks. Now you must go away until late afternoon; not until then can you ever hope to find moonflowers. So flee the sun; lay down the loupe; and may the eyeballs of desire be your jewels.

Below the Mare Tranquillitatis, just east of where Apollo 11 touched down, the narrower, canyonlike windings of the Mare Nectaris went south, petering out in a confusion of craters of which Fracastorius (latitude 20˚ S) was the most impressive; and in the cratered badlands to the northwest was Catharina, which allured him because it was a woman’s name. Rheita, Vega, Biela, Messala, Agrippa, Caroline Herschel, Gemma Frisius and Hypatia kept her company. He had a fancy that after he died, if he really wished to, he could take Victoria to that region. Well, wasn’t it all fancy at this stage? There was no reason he should prefer her over others, since for so long she’d scarcely visited his thoughts. Come to think of it, that might be the very reason he dwelled on her — because he hadn’t; in which case the excavation had to do with self-knowledge. But what the dirt that rooted her had to do with the moon, that he certainly could not say.

Not wishing to show himself up by asking for moonflowers, he wandered discreetly into a florist’s shop, glancing into the dimmest refrigerator cases in case some bluish-white or greenish-yellow blossoms might whisper. Before he had completed his escape, the darkhaired young woman coaxed him back, promising that she could help him. Like many people who work with plants, she had unassuming ways, which must have reassured the shy and the sorrowful. He hesitated.

If you feel like describing the occasion, said the woman, carefully snipping off a rose stalk, I might be able to put something together for you.

Thank you, he said. But it’s difficult to describe.

I understand, she said. Well, thank you for coming in.

Do you always have white roses in stock?

Almost always. Most of the time you don’t need to call ahead.

Thank you, he said. The woman gazed after him in alarm; he must have looked unwell. When he got home, he vomited, then lay down for the rest of the morning. In the afternoon he telephoned the doctor.

Can you explain your problem? said the advice nurse. The doctor will call you back.

I’m dying.

Sir, if this is an emergency you’d better come straight in.

It’s not an emergency.

Then what would you like the doctor to do for you? Do you need a refill on your pain medication?

I’d like something stronger.

Then you’ll need to make an appointment. What’s your date of birth?

I could give you my date of death.

That’s not what we go by, sir.

What do you go by in your life?

Sir, the doctor can fit you in tomorrow at three-o’-clock. Make sure you bring your insurance card with you.

You, too, he said. He hung up, chewed up three antacids as delicately as if he were making love to them, waited a quarter-hour, then swallowed three pain pills.

Down on the far side of the cemetery lay Hal Murmuracki’s Chapel of Flowers, an establishment whose black hearse never left the carport and whose lights whispered day and night through the closed blinds. It was early evening now, and the pills supported him. He turned the long doorlatch. On the left an old man sat behind a half open door, verifying accounts by means of a silent adding machine.

Yes, said the man. Please sit down.

I’d like some flowers. To…

What kind of flowers?

Moonflowers, he replied.

I don’t believe I’ve heard of those.

They’re… Well, I’ve never seen them myself.

Just a moment, said the old man. He summed zero to zero, slowly, then shut off the adding machine.

For a remembrance, is it? the old man asked sadly.

Yes.

She must be very special to you. Well, let’s see what we have in our floral section.

Across the hall was a door inset with a black window. The old man knocked three times, then unlocked it. — It’s only me here today, he explained.

The darkened room, not much larger than a closet, smelled of jasmine and sweet pea. The old man turned on the light. There was nothing inside but a sink and a long steel table.

I’m expecting a delivery right about now, said the old man. Ah, here it comes.

Through the mail slot sped a cylindrical tube wrapped in black paper. The old man caught it as it came, then slowly rolled it round and round on the table. — Yes, he said, this must be your order. A hundred dollars, please. It’s best to keep them in the package right up to the graveside, because this species is perishable, unfortunately. Quite light-sensitive, you see. They might last until sunrise tomorrow.

Thank you for helping me.

You won’t suffer as much as she did, said the old man. Don’t be afraid.

Are you Mr. Murmuracki?

No, I’m his father. Would you like a receipt?

Suspecting that this might be a test, he gazed into the old man’s sorrowful eyes and said: I trust you.

Thank you for coming to see me, said Victoria. It makes me happy. There’s not a lot to do down here.

Nor much for me up here. I’m glad it’s getting dark—

I loved what you said to me last time. It had me laughing and laughing…

What did I say? Anyhow, were you truly laughing?

I was laughing down here but I didn’t want you to know.

Why didn’t you?

So you wouldn’t have power over me. It’s bad enough that you called me up. I had no choice but to come to you.

If you’d had a choice, would you have come?

I have a choice now. I don’t have to be with you unless I want to.

Well, that’s a compliment, he said wearily.

Don’t get irritated. If you do, I’ll hide. What did you bring me?

Moonflowers, I hope.

Did you really? It’s been ages since anybody brought me a present! Please, please open them right now. Oh, they’re pretty!

Where shall I put them?

Lay them down across my headstone, and then I’ll sit here and hold them in my lap, like this. Do I look beautiful?

So beautiful—

I’ll tell you a secret. I’ve never seen moonflowers before!

Where did you learn about them?

A long time ago I overheard the family in that mausoleum arguing. It was quite nasty, actually; I won’t repeat what they said. And the wife said that she wouldn’t forgive the husband for a hundred and one years, unless he gave her moonflowers.

And did he?

I don’t know. How could he get them? I don’t care about that couple really, although the elder daughter can be sweet. I don’t care about very many people. Do you think I should keep flirting with you like this?

Well, why do you suppose I’m here?

For love or advice.

Or both, if you’re interested. But I’ve spent so many years assuming that you weren’t—

But here you are, she laughed. As if we might have a future.

Or a past.

It upsets me that everyone up here mentions the future so unemotionally. Why don’t they scream death, death, death?

Because we—

Because you don’t care! It’s too awful and far away.

You’re not far away. Not from me.

No. But I’m awful. I was always awful to you.

You’re being nice to me right now. What was in your mind when I came to you?

Well, my first thought was, you still have the hormones of a seventeen-year-old, and you’ll never get beyond that with me. Then I thought: How sweet, actually! You must have considered what would cheer up a rotting skeleton with her eyesockets full of worms—

But that’s not your form—

Look! See!

He nearly screamed. But he compelled himself to be brave, and advanced toward her with outstretched arms.

At once she became as pale as a spring sky at twilight, but she was waveringly seventeen. The beauty of that he couldn’t bear; he would rather have her be a skeleton.

One of the reasons Victoria had left him was that at seventeen he was intensely morbid, and when he sent her a notebook filled with poems about skeleton women, she responded with angry disgust. This notebook and her final letter to him lay within a large yellow envelope in that drawer of his desk, buried, probably accidentally, beneath her other letters; whenever he saw that yellow envelope, which had turned orange with age, he felt sickish, and so he had never looked inside it since that first time, when they were seventeen. (Very slowly and cautiously, in tiny bites, he chewed a wisp of bread, hoping to calm his stomach.) In point of fact, whatever nausea the envelope recalled or engendered could not have afflicted him, since he forgot it for so many years at a time, and never reopened it. Since then he must have become, it seemed safe to say, a successful, alluring individual, for just look at all those letters from other women! When he was seventeen, no girl but Victoria had been at all interested in him. The reason that the envelope’s contents might unsettle his belly was that (until we begin dying, of course) the future is a new blank notebook unmarred, in which all our wishes may perhaps be written, while whatever has been written, being utterly real, must be utterly imperfect. And thank goodness he had done better and better since then! Why on earth would he care to wallow in the grief and humiliation of that time before he had begun to do well? Hence opening the notebook would have been painful enough; as for rereading Victoria’s stinging final letter, no, thank you. — So as he pulled fat or thin envelopes out of that pile, at first it was with a feeling of sweetness; and then, as the probability of drawing a letter similar to the one in that orange envelope increased (and probably he would open the orange envelope sometime, out of mere thoroughness), he found the nausea beginning to waft up out of his guts and into his throat.

And yet, strange to say, Victoria had herself been morbid. She had written him a romantic letter: Jesus, I want to die of leukemia, too!

Why on earth had the two of them wanted that? He had forgotten. And there were ever so many letters left to reread; perhaps he would never find the answer; very likely neither of them had known, being only seventeen.

(Seventeen is actually a perfectly aware and decisive age, he reminded himself. I am no wiser than I was then — merely farther away from being seventeen.)

It was certainly strange not to remember the circumstances of so peculiar a thing. Why had he written those poems? And what was he supposed to be learning now? But since his reacquaintance with Victoria had rendered the close of his life a sort of fairy tale, such incidental failures of recollection and understanding failed to trouble him. On certain hot afternoons when he felt so unwell that even a crumb of bread on his tongue made him retch, and Victoria’s letters were too much for him, he lay down with a volume of someone else’s fairy stories. One of Hermann Hesse’s parables accompanied someone away from the blue iris flower of his childhood. With growing sorrow and fear, the poor man painfully saw how empty and wasted the life behind him had become. It no longer belonged to him but was strange and disconnected, like something once memorized that could be recalled only with difficulty in the form of barren fragments. For the man who loved Victoria, the past was not this way. To be sure, it no longer belonged to him, but he did not wish to be seventeen anymore; and however much he had forgotten scarcely mattered, since he would so soon lose the rest. Moreover, had his life been any more empty than Victoria’s, or anyone’s? Could he have done better? If not, regret would be misplaced. So the hot days embraced him as he lay sweating and queasy on his bed, and only occasionally did her old letters speak to him. Sometimes they charmed or embarrassed him, but did they hint at anything of which he had lost sight? Had Isaac been correct in his way of life, and Luke in his death, then the thing to do was to open his hands and let the letters fall away. Well, should he? The women whom he had clung to (and who had clung to him), the erotic gardens in which he had played, entering and leaving them through caverns of loneliness, these had offered him ever so many blue irises, including Victoria herself; and the flowers, now pressed and preserved in his desk drawer, retained as much fragrance as any dying man deserved. They proved that his life had not been wasted.

The night grew as dark as a mausoleum’s doorway. Victoria had told him how to find the spot where the Spirit of Progress had updated the cemetery wall into a chainlink fence cut with a hole. Through this he now came and went as he pleased, counting off stone Sphinxes, eagles and doves to avoid getting lost. Sometimes he heard the muffled rhythmic clapping of unseen wings.

My first child was the politest, she said. He never comes here. Of course, if he did, he couldn’t see me. There’s no helpful witch in love with him. How she must hate you!

You haven’t met her, evidently.

Why should I take the trouble? I’m not interested.

But you mentioned her.

Well, I admit to feeling flattered that you used her potion or whatever it was in order to see me! And since you chose me over her, I certainly don’t need to be jealous, do I?

No.

But I think you should go home and live your life. You don’t have much of it left.

Do you know when I’ll die?

Yes, but cross my heart, I’ll never, ever tell you! No one truly wants to know.

How much do you miss your life?

I miss my children. I certainly don’t miss you. I miss my house. I miss — oh, we had an aquarium with a catfish in it that kept swimming madly around, trying to die; I used to go down there in the middle of the night to watch it…

And what did you feel?

Now I know I was watching myself, but at the time I just felt amused, the way I used to when I hurt you and you tried to hide it from me; I think I’ve always been a sadist, although I’ve never done anything terrible. Or have I? How terrible was I to you?

I don’t remember.

You see? That’s how it is!

He asked about the neighbors, and she said: I don’t particularly like the family next door, because they don’t engage in intellectual discussions; they’d rather give impressions and unanalyzed opinions. Of course, I’m not exactly brilliant myself, so that’s ungracious of me…

And who’s on the other side?

That woman is thoroughly unpleasant. All she likes to do is chew the dirt in her grave. Oh, dear, I shouldn’t have told you that, because—

So that’s what happens.

Not to all of us.

What happens to the rest?

Victoria smiled. — Someday I might tell you.

Annoyed and weary, he considered walking away. But then he remembered that his illness caused him to be irritable, just as Luke had been whenever the pain tired him without making him desperate or confused.

As if to further spite him, she added: Actually I like them all. I don’t have anybody else who goes back so far. Certainly not you.

But we’ve known each other forty years.

I think we haven’t. You’d forgotten my name until I wrote you.

No, I hadn’t.

But what kind of memory do you actually have? You think that you remember things, but you’re actually at the point where it all goes away.

Will it come back when I’m dead? Don’t ghosts remember everything?

You’re always fishing for answers. I think we should just agree that I don’t have to tell you anything.

Spoken like a seventeen-year-old girl!

Well, I’m immature. I married at twenty-one so I would never have to have another affair to get what I wanted.

What exactly did you want?

I won’t tell you.

Naturally. Well, did you get what you wanted?

She was silent. Then she said: I hope you’ve found your satisfaction somewhere. If my husband had ever cheated I’d have killed him.

If you mean sexual satisfaction, I don’t aspire to that anymore. I’m dying.

I think you do still have desires.

Well, what a fruitless conversation this is.

Then go home.

So long.

Don’t go. I’m bored here. I’ll apologize if you ask me to. Will you ask me to?

He shook his head, smiling.

At least stay until the moon comes up.

All right.

He lay down in the cool grass, slowly curling in upon his side, weary almost to death, seasick at the dancings of the dandelions. Grass-shadows sawed across his face; he closed his eyes. Was that Victoria stroking his hair, or was it the wind? The spasm departed; he stood up. On the knoll where the nineteenth-century rich were buried, something tall turned away from him. The evening sky remained brightly pale. From the swamplands not far off came the humidity of grape-leaves and oaks.

Are you better? she inquired.

Sure.

Do you want to talk about you or me?

Let’s talk about you.

But we always do. I think we should talk about you.

We’d both rather talk about you.

I can feel the moon coming now.

There it is.

You can only see it, but I can feel it.

Did I ever tell you about that moon map I have?

Which edition is it?

I don’t remember.

I used to have the third edition; for awhile it was over my bed at college. I taped it up the day I left you. Do you mind my telling you that?

Not at all.

How old am I right now?

You know.

In a way I am still seventeen, said Victoria. If I weren’t, you wouldn’t be here. And at seventeen, please understand, I wanted someone to love my mind before my body. I held any boy who showed interest in my body in great disdain. Not that my body’s in very good shape now, as you saw. But my spirit, that’s not so bad, is it?

Your spirit, or ghost, or whatever it is, is very pretty. You look seventeen to me.

If my husband had called me up, I’d look twenty-one.

So he never did cheat? At least I never read his obituary!

I was all he could handle.

Does he have someone or not?

Don’t ask about now.

Why won’t you tell me what you know? The end will be easier for me if I could expect—

It won’t, believe me.

Are you able to haunt your children? Because if you can’t, I’ll go and report what they look like—

No, said the woman in the ground.

Are you afraid?

I’m trying to protect you from understanding, and you just won’t let me—

By the way, I’m not afraid of what anybody looks like. Be a skeleton again if you like; I don’t care.

You’d probably like it. You see, I do remember your poems—

What do you want to be?

Right now? Well, beautiful, of course. And—

You are, Victoria, I promise.

Actually, until you started coming around, it never occurred to me that I could escape some of this horror by pretending. I do like to pretend, because it passes the time.

Then do you want to pretend that you’re still my sweetheart?

Oh, grow up! laughed Victoria.

He never felt lonely anymore. Even when she was not thinking of him, she awaited him. Perhaps this should have frightened him, but, after all, he had initiated their reunion of his own desire, and nothing happened except when he wished it to; she could not come to him. He avoided visiting on holidays, lest he meet her family, although he inferred that they no longer paid their respects. When he and Victoria were seventeen, they had needed to get around their parents to arrange their retrospectively innocuous meetings, and this felt nearly the same.

I’ve thought of you all the time and kept quiet, she said. What would you like to hear about tonight? The couple next door, the woman who chews dirt, the sounds that the rats make? Sometimes I think if I can only strain my eyes hard enough I’ll be able to see through the darkness; and then I start to see a star or maybe the moon, and then I remember that I don’t have eyes and if I could see anything at all it would only be a maggot crawling across me. I can’t see you and you can’t see me—

Yes I can.

I remember my children over and over, of course. They must be quite different now.

Then you don’t know anyone’s lives. Now I finally know—

I like to tell myself the plots of books I’ve read—

Victoria, how much has dying damaged you? And is there anything good?

It was nauseating. It went on and on until I was semiconscious, and then the pain would wake me up, or I would start hemorrhaging or vomiting, and sometimes my children were standing there crying, not that they understood. I had wanted it to be over, but then when I saw them I panicked again; I was afraid of leaving them without a mother. By then I usually couldn’t speak to them, or if I did it hardly made sense. And the morphine made the nausea worse, or maybe it caused it; I don’t remember. And… Did you ever live in Baltimore? I managed a whole year there, across the street from a funeral parlor, before I got married. The man next door beat his wife every Friday night.

No, I never—

I want you to go there and see if that’s still going on, said the ghost. I’ll give you the address. Because it’s getting to be an effort to hold onto everything. Does that answer your question?

I’m not sure.

Then I’ll tell you a little more, since I’m the only one you’ve kept up with who’s gone through it. At first you can’t do anything but fight it; you keep trying to protect yourself against further injury and agony and degradation. The first day they gave me chemo, they put the needle in, and I started vomiting right there at the hospital. I vomited for four days straight; my husband almost went mad. I lived for almost two years after that, although for awhile I did get better, but that was just the beginning. You feel that it’s unbearable, but you have to bear it. Then it gets worse, and then much worse. You go into shock, but somehow you still know that this truly is unbearable, and you’re getting so hurt now that nothing can fix you. Then you start breaking into pieces. It’s like that point in childbirth when you realize you have no control and you’re irrelevant. Some people never come back together; they go straightaway into the same condition as that lady next to me who can’t do anything except chew on dirt. But for me… well, after a long time my pieces flowed back together like mercury. I think that all of me is back, but I don’t know. What do you think? Tell me! I can’t ask anyone else. Do you think any part of me is missing?

No.

You’re not just saying that? Promise—

I promise. To me you seem the same.

You know, dying hurt so much that for a long time I kept expecting to keep hurting. And at first I was changing so quickly, but now… How long have I been dead?

Thirteen years, I think. Well, let me read your—

You mean you don’t know?

How would I? You didn’t exactly tell me! And I didn’t ask your husband. But I always read your headstone when I visit you. What does it say now? It’s so dark. Anyway, when it comes to arithmetic—

That’s right. I always got better grades than you.

That must have been one of the reasons you looked down on me.

Of course! But I don’t now. You’re so nice to come here, especially at night. I’m getting used to not having anything.

I can imagine.

But when I was getting chemotherapy, I learned to like having no hair.

Such beautiful hair…

Not having to toss it out of my face… My eyes seemed larger and more intense. That was nice. But it was humbling, of course, and being in the ground is so much worse. Did you know that lovers often come here at night?

I’m not surprised. After all, he remarked bitterly, here I am, with you.

Disregarding this, she said: When I see a very female female, with cleavage and long hair, flirting with somebody at the side of my grave, it makes me sad. Last summer, or maybe the summer before, a couple made love on top of me, and I was a little titillated, but mostly I was angry. At them. For being alive and showing me no consideration. But why should they?

You can flirt with me.

I did just now, a little. But I don’t feel anything.

You never did, with me.

That’s true. How stupid that you’re the only one of us two who cares! Or do you? Aren’t you just going through the motions?

Aren’t we both?

Look, I’m not with anyone! Certainly not with you. The way you act toward me reminds me of how it was when the baby was crying or my husband wanted me back the way I used to be. Believe it or not, I have no desire to feel sexy. I’d rather feel alive. I’d like to heave this marble slab off my chest and breathe! I—

Victoria?

What is it? Oh, is it time for you to leave? Well, goodbye.

Victoria, do you want me to get you out of here?

You asked me that.

But if I—

And put me where?

Maybe in a fancy flowerpot. We can grow whatever you like on top of you, some black roses or—

Let me think about that. I like making you come to me. Maybe that’s the best I can expect now.

I’m not feeling well. I’m going home.

Run along then, said Victoria, and he almost hated her. At least this was not the same misery she had caused him when he was seventeen.

Of course their doings had not brought him misery alone; that was why he remembered her so fondly, or gratefully, or something. They had kissed and caressed several times, and once it went farther. He remembered her in his bedroom on that summer afternoon — where had his parents been? — and they had drawn the curtains. She stood nude before him, the blonde locks licking down around her nipples as she smiled unreadably, doubtless prepared to withdraw herself at any juncture, as was her right; and he fell to his knees, burying his face in her bright blonde crotch. Then somehow she was in his bed with her legs open. It was his first time, although from what she later intimated, perhaps simply to push him away, it might not have been hers; he’d neglected or declined to ask, as was his policy on so many subjects. So he adored her, and it was all perfect. He would have given anything to keep it from ending. It did, and Victoria, triumphant, alarmed or simply cool, dressed and rapidly departed; he was not to call her without further instructions. That was the day of his great joy. Not until he was twenty-one did he penetrate a woman; but what Victoria had allowed him was no less intimate than that. That was his glory; she was forever his, at least in a certain seventeen-year-old kind of way. And in the painfully lovely brightness of his last summer, Victoria was whispering to him almost like the wind, or perhaps like a rotten tree rocking in the wind. She had opened her legs, and then… His belly ached. In the west, two silver dragon-continents faced off upon the moon’s yellow disk, the sky’s red gashes bleeding orange and a pair of raptors taking wing — dew on every railing and plaque, and outside the wall and across the street, doorknobs and porches wet in the country of the living. — Victoria said: When I was seventeen and I got a sunburn, I liked it because it made the hidden me look so white… — And his old penis nearly stirred, to remember her white parts. She had been like the moon, or like a concert singer’s voice alone in the darkness, living and altering. He seemed to recall her sitting at the next table at the high school library, turned slightly away from him as she studied for her chemistry test, her handsome legs bare above the knee, the creases behind her knees calling upon him to lick them, her plump, pale buttocks, which he was to see and touch only that once, announcing themselves to him within the paisley dress, her arms alive with pinkness, her hair a brilliant straw-blonde: all these attributes were hers; this was her, but, being seventeen, he never thought to inquire what else might be her. And her breast, or some other woman’s, green and hard in his mind as a half-made acorn, it dazzled him, as when one has sat in the sun too long and wishes to pass into the shade. Then came that maddening tenderness in his sides, nausea in his throat, and he forgot to breathe when he saw her.

In high school they took mostly different classes; she nearly might as well have been IN MANSIONS ABOVE. They used to pass in the hall, and exchanged notes. Who would have supposed that this beautiful girl named Victoria would actually write to him? He knew he would keep her letters forever.

What might he keep of her now? Had his life-horizon continued to roll indefinitely forward, like a planet’s so called “terminator” where night gives way to dawn, then he might have wished, “forsaking all others” as the wedding vow put it, to lead her past the ruined angel whose marble hands would never come unclasped, then through the gate, for he most certainly lacked any wish to dwell here with her, eating dirt — but the rules have little to do with our wishes. Nor, it seemed, did Victoria yearn to abide with him. Wouldn’t she rather flitter around her abandoned children? And why shouldn’t she? Wouldn’t that be the best, most loving thing, to reincorporate her with them? But if that wasn’t practical, and if Victoria grew fonder of him, and therefore he of her, and could he but live aboveground awhile longer — or for that matter dwell in death with her — where should they abide? In the years when Luke and his wife used to quarrel, they had maintained separate residences, she not being above locking him out of the bedroom in the middle of the night, for which cause he discouraged her from selling her place and moving into the house whose mortgage he had finally almost paid off — what if she evicted him from his own bedroom? When his last illness softened their wills, they removed to a new home, where indeed they must have lived happily ever after, for the widow still remained there. At this stage what could one hope for but the mitigation of loneliness? He had to confess, it hurt his heart to think upon Victoria lying alone down there in the dirt, forever, no matter what she said about the neighbors. For all he knew, they might be one of her sad caprices, and whenever he quitted her she lay isolated and helpless, spinning out her skein of inventions just to kill more years and hours. The way she spoke mainly of herself, and then so inexactly (one shouldn’t say evasively), conveyed nothing. He pitied her for being dead. Goodhearted, thinking merely to save her, in much the same way that Isaac ought to have rescued him from his needs and griefs, he sometimes, as you know, imagined carrying her far away from both their pasts — for example, to the moon, which might be the place to which her neighbor’s tomb was referring when it asserted: IN MANSIONS ABOVE. In one of her letters from when they were seventeen, she had written: I am what I pretend to be. Do pretend, Victoria. Come to the moon with me; pretend away.

Bemused, Luke used to ask why the fat one needed so many women whispering in his ear, like a crush of cottonwoods around a sulphur spring; although Luke loved his moody but affectionate wife sincerely, he detested depending on her, or, worse yet, her expecting him to take care of her as if she were a child. — If I choose to be with her, he said in those last years, then I need to allow her to modify me. — Hence Luke sought to learn from his Stephanie how to be cheerful, at which she intermittently excelled, especially in the morning; and how to be effective with strangers by being social; that came easily to her. He admired her beauty even as she aged. Truth to tell, Stephanie was a fine-looking woman. In shape and deportment she partially exemplified a certain tall ex-ladyfriend of my neighbor’s named Angeline, who had jilted him more cruelly, since with greater awareness, than Victoria; but Angeline’s signature characteristic was treachery, while Stephanie adored her husband desperately even when she raged against him. They were both loyal. After he moved out, the marriage appeared to lack what a young person might call a “future”; then it got better year by year; and the month before his death Luke calmly reported (which seemed impossible) that it was improving day by day. Whenever his surgeries, chemotherapies and radiation treatments reduced him to that state of dependence which he so greatly feared, Stephanie ruled him with great love, showing his oldest friends the door when he tired, hounding the doctors to be less absent, sleeplessly spoonfeeding him her heart’s best blood. Stephanie and the moon-gazer invariably got along well, because the latter respected her authority. She told Luke that she loved this fat friend of his; she was sweet that way.

Even while praising Stephanie, Luke occasionally used to invoke another woman. Long before Stephanie, he had loved an Eve with commendable seriousness, admiring without knowing her, barely revealing his interest, perhaps to prevent her from disdaining him. Before Eve lost her youth she moved away and married someone else. Her name came sweetly to Luke’s lips. After uttering it he’d say: And then I realized that what I thought I remembered was just pieces of a dream.

What would have happened if you’d married her instead of Stephanie?

Oh, nothing. Stephanie’s perfect for me.

For our dying moon-gazer, as for Luke, the Eves, the Angelines and their sisters were heavenly dreams; through them his life might be infinitely multiplied. Just as he grew better acquainted with his father after the latter’s death, once he knowingly began to die he came to know his bygone women better; they could no longer save him, but their images comforted him; it might have been that way for Luke with his dream-Eve, who was one of his dearest secrets — not to be exposed to others.

Asked whether he might find Eve after death, Luke, as so often when she came up, changed the subject. Perhaps by then he had managed to lay aside his dream of her, for even before he met Isaac, Luke had always wished to depart an empty house, carrying the fewest necessities on his back. As for Isaac, he had certainly left nothing behind! He might still be alive in the stillness of rock-crowds in some dry wash, alone in the desert where it becomes practical to listen to life and death. As for Luke, where he had gone was unknown. He had always been stronger than this fat friend who survived him. To the southwest the gibbous moon remained high over the snow-corduroyed rock-hills, while the sky grew orange over the sharp blue ridge behind which the still unseen sun was approaching. Luke and Raymond planned out their climb, while the third one, the fat one, sat by himself. Raymond sought to persuade him along, kindly assuring him that it didn’t matter if he couldn’t make it, but he preferred not to be the cause of failure on what might and did prove to be Luke’s sole chance to reach the summit; so he sat alone, his incapacity (which scarcely humiliated him at all) as glaring as the line of a salt lake on the horizon at noon. To be sure, he would have liked to keep them company — for much the same reason that he later wished that there might be a way to reach the cemetery through the drawer of his father’s desk — or instantaneously to traverse the Straight Wall of the moon.

In the summer after Luke’s death he had walked to the shore of a certain high lake and sat on the rocks for a long time, watching the cattails trembling and the clouds pressing as tightly upon the mountains as hands smothering someone’s face; and the water altered from ultramarine to turquoise to milky grey as he sat there with the tears coming so easily and silently that he felt healthy while the wind carried off his tears as quickly as they appeared; and he sat in a kind of ease, listening to a bluejay, waiting for the tears to cease, so that he could return into the sight of others without embarrassment. On the far side of the lake rose a saddle between snowy mountains, too far and high for him to aspire to, although perhaps Luke could have reached it. At last a cold wind arose from the lake, and overcame his remaining tears; as he sat shivering, he couldn’t help but wonder how the smallest birds stayed warm. Sometimes in his boyhood he used to see frozen sparrows in January; how did the others get through to summer? That might be one more thing which he used to know. His teeth chattered. A robin darted on the gravel beach, seeming to play with the waves, chasing them out and flying back when they came in. He felt chilled now, so chilled! Then he began to get dizzy. He sat for a long time, until the sun returned, and the wet rock took on color.

Stephanie, greyhaired and crushed, still worked (and kept an ageing quarter horse); once or twice a year he phoned her and they spoke of Luke, not for more than twenty minutes. What Luke had left in her heart was, of course, the couple’s secret.

It was the anniversary of Luke’s death. He telephoned her. She asked how he was. — No complaints, he said. What about you?

She was in debt. Luke’s estate resisted liquidation; it tired her so; she didn’t know how to go forward. — To this he didn’t know what to say.

A cramp stuck him, so he said goodbye, perhaps too quickly; unaware of his condition, she might now suppose that he felt bored with her. But what was he supposed to do? Soon enough, like Victoria, he would lack the capacity even to roll that gravestone off his chest. The nausea was a longnecked bird within his chest; now it opened its wings. He could not imagine how this could be necessary. Why shouldn’t he have lived forever, becoming ever happier and richer? (Not even his witch lover could have promised that; in fact, her love kept dragging him down beneath the ground.) Withdrawing the moon map from his father’s desk, he searched for a likely growing-place for those chilly, waxy flower-buds which had so pleased Victoria; they were bluish, almost grey, yet also as brilliant as the white lip of a calla lily on a sun-field’s edge. Perhaps they originated in the Marsh of Sleep. This was one of the questions which it was surely inappropriate to ask of Mr. Murmuracki.

There was a telephone message from the entity pretending to be his doctor: A new insurance form was required of him. The laboratory informed him that he was expected for more blood tests at six forty-five tomorrow morning, and he was supposed to have been fasting for twenty-four hours. Meanwhile into his mail slot came an invoice for forty-seven thousand dollars, which the insurance company declined to pay on his behalf, although the patient advocate in another city might or might not adjust the bill. He made two phone calls on this subject, listening to recorded music until pain and nausea released him. Wondering how much of his life he had dribbled away on such unworthy matters, he decided that he would lose no more time on doctors, except to get more pain pills. If they made it inconvenient to get those, he would go straight to the graveyard and dwell with Victoria.

He lay down. Closing his eyes, he seemed to perceive a moist, heterogeneous blackness crawling with stars. Somewhere within it, the tall blue people sat on high thrones, and the laughing green people rolled from side to side. Whom these might be he did not know. Seeking to dream of Victoria, he sank deeper into that blackness. The blue people were watching him, evidently from farther away. The green ones had gone. He heard something chewing, but it was his heartbeat. His ears were singing and roaring; he must have chewed too many pain pills.

Once he surprised a certain long green swamp-snake, and after smoothly backing away, her tiny head raised high to watch him, the creature suddenly flashed her long white belly sideways, whipping her head around to point into the highest darkest grass; then she was gone, presumably underground. His dream went away similarly. In its first recession he thought to keep all of it in his understanding, but then it somehow turned, and some essential yet already meaningless edge of its anatomy glittered like sunlit water on dark rock, after which he could remember only that he had dreamed of Victoria very beautifully and possibly happily.

It was dawn. Pain greeted him. Staggering to the toilet to vomit up blackness, he exhausted and disgusted himself. But the sun shone in on him through the bathroom window, so he chewed up five pills, swallowing them very slowly and carefully, with innumerable sips of water, so that he would not sick them up again, then rose to his knees. He asked of himself whether living remained worthwhile, and replied that it was. He then asked what he wished to do with his days. To be sure, the answer had something to do with Victoria, but just then he desired, he knew not why or how, to express regret, or undo or redo the past. Luke, who in that last year had sometimes been angry, often grieved and occasionally felt gratitude, used to remark that what he felt at any moment was less important than that he attend to those feelings and feel them to the full. One trait which he and Luke possessed in common was adeptness at drinking the bitter cup. So he sat on the toilet, with the sun on his face, feeling sorry for himself, then expressing regret indeed, earnestly, for all the women he had not loved better, and the many lessons he had never learned, including uncovering who Victoria had or might have been to him and why he had written her those poems. But above all he regretted his years of near indifference to the sun and the stars.

Now he felt better. Chewing two more pills just in case, he stood up. He went downstairs to the kitchen and made himself a banana milkshake. He drank it in careful little sips. He washed the blender. This took him half an hour.

He opened his front door, meaning to go out into the day, but the sunshine nauseated him instantaneously. Bitterly he crept upstairs to lie down like a corpse in a coffin, staring straight up at the ceiling until late afternoon.

Do you remember when you said you like to pretend?

So?

Well, you know, Victoria, I was just reading in one of your old letters about that Indian print bedspread you spread out in your window seat at college; and if it would please you—

I thought I’d already left you by then.

Not quite.

Yes, I do remember, and I hung some ferns from the ceiling—

And your moon map—

No, that was when I left you.

And on the walls you had prints that argued with each other—

Correct! Did I write you which ones?

No.

I must not have wanted you to know.

I didn’t keep any secrets from you.

You can guess now, if you like.

Well, you were very intelligent and didn’t want to be conventional—

Was I?

Were you conventional?

Yes.

I think you aspired to an upper middle class life, which was what you came from. When you were seventeen you tried to run away from it, but you wanted children and security, and—

Are you criticizing me?

No. I think you did well. I wish I’d had both of those together. When I was seventeen I—

Tell me.

Actually, I don’t remember much about when I was seventeen. I’m sorry, Victoria.

Well, this is all very pleasant! she cried bitterly, and he realized that forgetfulness terrified her.

What did your Indian print bedspread look like? I can try to buy you one sort of like it, and I’ll spread it over your grave when I come visiting, and we can sit on it.

That’s sort of girly.

Well, isn’t that the sort of thing you—

Actually, I don’t feel like pretending at the moment.

And my stomach is hurting me, so I’ll be going.

Did you know that I can see your tumor?

What does it look like?

It’s like a blackish-purple jellyfish with a mushroom head. Very delicate, with translucent tendrils; there’s one coiled most of the way around your backbone; when it reaches your throat you’ll die. It’s beautiful.

Thanks for that. I’ll see you when I feel better.

Don’t wait too long. And bring a nice bedspread or blanket for us to sit on. I want blue and—

I’ll pick out the pattern.

I offended you, didn’t I?

You did your best, he said, laughing a little. She laughed like water coming out of a narrownecked bottle, and he went away.

When he was seventeen he used to feel grief almost unto despair whenever his meetings with her had been concluded; he certainly felt nothing of the sort nowadays; of course, he had been granted quite a few years to get over the loss of her — and now she couldn’t get away from him. Even if she declined to come out he would know that she was lying on her back six feet under him, with darkness in her eyesockets.

Tell me about all your women, she said. I vaguely envision your life as a very complicated orgy, with all sorts of women loving you and then hating you.

No, it hasn’t been like that, although I’ve certainly loved a lot of them.

Actually, don’t tell me. It’s not that I’m not curious. I’d just rather not know.

You’d respect me more if I were a ladykiller.

I do prefer strong men. If you’ve let them all do to you what I did to you, that would disgust me, to tell the truth.

Do you remember the high school dance, when you invited me and then picked that boy who was—

Smarter and better put together? That wasn’t me. That was Zoë Conway, who became a state prosecutor. Of course my news is out of date, but I think that if she had died I would have heard about it. You invited me to the dance, but I turned you down. We all gossiped about it.

And Zoë disinvited me at the last minute, so I never—

What changed you? Because, now that I think about it, you actually are a ladykiller, a very successful one. You know how to keep my interest. You don’t need me the way you used to—

Because I’m dying.

No, that’s not all of it.

Well, I’ve had a lot of pussy in my time. That gave me confidence. And I’ve been good at pleasuring women, which is the most important thing.

What would you like to do with me right now? Not that I’d let you.

First I’d strip off that winding-sheet of yours—

Why do you keep calling it that? It’s my favorite leopard print dress—

And I’d very carefully brush the ants and dirt off your bones. I’d get in between your ribs and clean with a child’s toothbrush. And while I did that, I’d be singing to you, songs from when we were seventeen. I’d clean out your eyesockets with cotton swabs, very very gently, in case there’s anything left, and I’d comb your hair — you still have some. I’d comb it straight down your backbone. I’d brush your teeth for you, and I’d kiss you where you used to have a mouth. I’d scour out your pelvis with sweetgrass and lavender oil. Then I’d start kissing you there. I’d lick your bones right there. And afterward I’d go to a jeweler and buy a ring that would fit your pretty skeleton-hand, Victoria…

At least you can make me laugh. Honestly, I don’t find much to laugh about when you’re gone.

Do you wish I stayed longer?

Actually, your visits make me guilty. You don’t have much time left, and I’m not giving you anything.

Yes you are.

Do you love me?

I’ll take a leaf out of your book, and say: I’m not going to tell you.

I don’t love you at all. But I’m undeniably attracted to you.

Because I’m alive, I guess.

That’s much of it.

Would you ever choose to live with me? I mean, if you couldn’t go home—

You do love to make up stories, don’t you?

So do you, darling! This morning I was rereading one of your old letters—

I told you to destroy them!

Well, I didn’t, because I was in love with you—

But I told you!

I never promised.

Yes you did.

Anyhow, you wrote it exactly a week before my seventeenth birthday (you were always conscientious about dating them, Victoria). You had dreamed you had sleepwalked to the shower, and later you wondered if you had really dreamed it or—

Did you ever show my letters to anybody?

No.

Swear it.

I swear. But what does it matter to you?

Well, it does. It may seem stupid to you—

What’s the longest you’ve cried?

Here? Sometimes I’ve cried for a year or two straight. But I’m enjoying your visits now, even if I occasionally get irritated.

Thank you.

By the way, do you have a best friend?

He’s dead.

Then I might have met him.

No, he’s not at the cemetery.

What’s his name?

Luke.

Of course I don’t know him. Why is he your best friend?

For years he was almost like my older brother. He taught me how to organize weight in my backpack. Whenever anything went wrong in my house, he could usually fix it or tell me how to. There were certain things he didn’t deal with, like leaky roofs or doors out of true. He did a lot for me. When my father was alive, he and my father used to do things for me…

It’s good to be sad, said Victoria. That makes you more like me.

Gazing up at the constellated sky, he felt as if he were about to sink into black water which was snowed with cattail-down. It was getting dark earlier nowadays. Carefully he inquired: Can I love you except by being sad about you?

I’ll consider that.

Luke was very wise. He said so many things that I always remember. For instance: Don’t keep making the same mistake. Make a different mistake. And I could talk to him about my love life. When I was younger I used to ask him for advice, and then when he was suffering with Stephanie I wanted to give him advice, just because I loved him and that was something I could give, and sometimes it helped him, or her, but he was more his own man than I was. Now I think I’m becoming more my own man; I don’t know why—

Because you’re dying.

Into his mind came Luke’s assertion that dying could become freedom. Even while he felt relatively well, Luke had begun giving up ever more experiences and aspirations as well as things, in order to die better. But he and Stephanie never had children. That must have made it easier. Victoria had fought death, for her children’s sake.

Luke, to whom trust came hard, had gentled toward him over the years, but until the end, so it seemed, could not help but suspect even this close friend of selfish motives. If he made a date with Luke for lunch, Luke would pick him up at the station — then let fall some grim remark which implied that Luke knew very well that his friend was using him to get a ride. Or he might give Luke a book he had read and liked, in which case Luke might say that it must not have been a good book, or the moon-dreamer would have kept it. As for him to whom Luke had given so many rides over the years, he himself had surely been negligent or ungrateful on occasion; he and Luke had hurt each other every now and then, mostly by saying no. Of the two of them, Luke was more generous with his capabilities, having more; while the moon-dreamer more easily gave away money and possessions to others. What Luke did for his wife — the repaired washing machine and balanced checkbook — often went unnoticed by her; what he blamed her for were her temper and her flightiness. It must have been his cancer which inspired or compelled him into trusting Stephanie. About the cancer Luke once said: What I hate more than anything is throwing up. That must be the reason I got this disease, so that I have to throw up over and over again. — And so it might be argued that the illness refined or at least steeled him, or at least that he could have made a virtue out of his suffering. Not Victoria!

Why are you quiet? Do you need to go?

Victoria, tell me how long I have to live.

I already said I wouldn’t.

But you know?

Of course I do.

If I had a month, I’d live differently than if I had three, or—

And then you’d want to know whether I love you, and what I will and won’t do, and which sort of future we’d have, when I’ve already told you how I feel about futures. That was another reason I left you. You demanded certainty from me. What seventeen-year-old girl can give that?

But you married at twenty-one. Are you glad that you did?

I’m so grateful that I had children.

When we were seventeen, you told me that you might marry for money. You were laughing when you said it—

If I’d lived to be forty I might have had an affair. Maybe with you. But I never would have married you.

Why not?

Because nobody changes very much, so what I disliked in you would have remained. Besides, you wouldn’t have loved me as much as you did before. It’s refreshing to be adored. You’d stop doing that if you knew me—

I don’t adore you now.

Well, that’s not very nice! I’m going now.

Turning away from him, Victoria sank under the grass. The last he saw of her was her beautiful blonde hair.

He had forgotten that she had sent him more than one photograph. As he sat in his study that afternoon, too unwell to consider going to the cemetery, he withdrew a letter from his father’s desk; on the back of the envelope she had written amusing enclosures and Inside are pictures!!!!! Lions + tigers, monkeys, cats and zebras and she had drawn a heart dripping two drops and then she had written: If I wrote you in French could you understand it?

For a time he held the letter in his hand, smiling. How many pictures had she sent him, after all? (The more he read, the more she was winning him over.)

She was at the zoo, and her lovely hair was blowing. Perhaps her sister, who might still be alive, and if so perhaps a grandmother, had clicked the shutter. She had lowered her head and closed her eyes when she smiled. In a high-necked white blouse and a paisley skirt, she stood before a giraffe, which cocked its head at her, its neck at a rigid near-horizontal, while she held a small blue balloon at her left breast, clasping her pretty long fingers together across her waist, the string wound around them. This photograph had not decayed so far into the red as the other; the sky was purple, the phony rocks reddish, the animal perhaps a bit more red than brown, but Victoria had barely begun to flush; her hands remained as fair as ever, and her blonde hair scarcely intimated red. He turned it over. On the back she had written that she loved him.

My mother is fine — no complications, no cancer. Help me. I know you are. Love me.

Victoria, he cried out, help me; love me!

No one answered.

There remained to him this sweet world of unread letters; perhaps it was better to guard them as if they were the future, rereading only a few; they were his treasures, or possibly the verdict against him. The true horror, much worse than that of the death which already drooled at his shoulder, was the fact of who he had been at seventeen. The reason he had clung like death to Victoria was that hardly anyone else would come near him! In high school he finally began to have friends, for the hormonal allurements at puberty can be so irresistible that we learn to disguise our faults in hopes of losing later rather than sooner; the shy girl parts her hair over what her mother helpfully assures her is the uglier side of her face; the farmboy takes more showers, and the boy who loved Victoria learned to hide his kinship to ghouls, skeletons and rotting corpses; in his summer nightmares the graves flipped round like lazy susans to fling death in his face! He always woke up smelling it. Years later, when he witnessed death without dreaming, he found that it smelled quite different — more vomity when fresh, more like garbage later on — but the death in his dreams intermittently continued to exude a sulphurous vileness, perhaps because he had once believed in hell, not to mention his own badness; certainly something about him was wrong, and when he was young his schoolmates would tear at him in a frenzy, children scratching at their common scab; he never should have existed at all! Later he disguised this fact; hence women loved him. Was it because he focused the lens of his own so-called love upon pleasuring them, so that, lost to his expert ministrations, they mistook procedure for soul? Give the devil credit; he’d had a knack; even Victoria, his first patient, appeared to enjoy the operation as far as it went. Better yet, he performed it sincerely. But certain natures are born in the shadow. In his first grade art class he was already drawing pictures of lightning-storms, carefully coloring the sky black and purple. Why are some people like that? I repeat: He should never have seen the sunlight. Nor did he mean to see it. When Luke and Raymond departed on that final hike, the reason that the moon-gazer stayed behind was that he’d spoil everything otherwise; he’d never been able to live among others; he slimed over everything he touched! No wonder Victoria fled him! What he should have done upon receipt of his fatal diagnosis was to remember all this, in order to begin to answer the question: Why am I this way? Some creatures are shadow-born, yes, but why? And who are they? Were death oblivion and could he rush into it, like a child darting under the bedclothes at night before the monsters come, then there might be scant interest in hunting this subject, but Victoria’s postmortem consciousness unfortunately proved that avoiding or denying one’s identity is not so easy. Once upon a time there had been that witch who loved him, the one who mixed green potions; why hadn’t he loved her? She knew who he was (he supposed), and even liked it. But Victoria, who rather than being noble was possessed by a selfishness as ordinary, healthy and therefore as good as the movements of her bowels, intuited who he was and knew that she had to get away. He said to himself: To begin to see myself I must diagram the movements of the living ones whom I repel. Death had struck Victoria, shattering her skull and cramming fistfuls of worms inside her brainpan. She had sought to run from death, which had begun with a kiss, sucking those round pale breasts with which he had played in his seventeenth summer, then insinuated itself within the glands, clawing into her armpits, nibbling here and there until her strong young bones were breached — and she screamed, wept, vomited, perhaps prayed or pretended to for the sake of those children to whom she clung as he once had to her; she would have done anything to be selfish and move her bowels a little longer. Now her bowels pulsed with moonlight; to him she was more beautiful than ever. But she had gone over there, to this other man whom she had married. And when he was a child, the other boys, punching him a few times, had then kicked him into his place, which was westward of here, where the moon rose. Had he stayed hidden on the lunar surface (or at least concealed between broken marble urns), no one would have troubled about him — but perhaps the moon was another of those localities which were too good for him. Waiting for the school bus, in one of those winters before Victoria wrote her first note to him, he stood by himself, and then a girl in a ski parka grappled him, having fun, bullying him but also being sexual with him, and of course that excited him; he didn’t know how boldly to grapple her back; it lasted but a moment, and then a strong, healthy boy, who hated cancer, came and punched him in the face. He had never told Victoria, who felt his unwholesomeness anyhow, sure enough. The fact that he later learned to love himself because women loved him is evidence that evil things need not find trouble in continuing to exist. — But why was he evil? It kept coming back to that. Had he asked the other children, and had they been able to articulate their loathing, they might have said: Because you’re different. — And why was he different? Why does the rat seek out putrescent flesh? Rats aren’t evil, are they?

He had just begun to nibble at a can of salmon when his cancer thrust a skeleton hand up his windpipe and his breastbone groaned with pain; no, that was him groaning. For a long while he bent over the sink, struggling to vomit. (If it were only true what the statues of angelic harpists promised: ASLEEP!) Finally the fish came up, streaked with black blood. Eased and exhausted, he lay down on the sofa.

In a rage he snatched up another of her unread letters: Now she was the one who demanded to know the future! I always need to know everything for me to be comfortable. She was just like him! Meanwhile he was everything he had disliked in her: suspicious, withholding, prissily critical, even nasty — while the poor girl timidly hoped for his approval, and even worried that she might be bothering him — how could he have not seen it? Again and again she worried that he would leave her; she reread his letters with foolish minuteness comparable to his — she was a darling, really; his badness must have driven her away.

He felt all the more ashamed, not only for having been harsh but also for prying into her heartpourings to her young boy — none of his business! He was an old man eavesdropping on children. So he turned to the letters from the year when she was dying, and read: Are you really such a sweetheart? How could I have not known that about you? You know I don’t want to ask you questions because I don’t want to pry. Do you care if I do? Someday I’ll write you about something — a really vivid memory I have of something we did in high school. You’ll really laugh and kick yourself that you didn’t know what I thought. What right did he have to spy on this doomed married woman and the man with whom she platonically flirted? He was a grime-eaten angel whose stone trumpet was as cracked as his penis.

How have I forgotten so much? I was certain I’d never let go any of it. And it hasn’t really been long! Why can’t I remember more? It’s as if my seventeen-year-old Victoria were but a blurry, roughed-out figurine of jeweler’s wax — or a shapeless corpse. I’ll go to her — tonight, and tomorrow night, if I’m well enough. No, I’ll remember her tonight and study the moon map. Those photographs help me at least as much as does visiting her. And if I stay too long at the cemetery I’ll get sicker; I can feel my tumor when I’m there, for some reason. So let me just read her letters once more — not the ones I don’t remember but the ones I’ve come to know again.

Outside the window, his conception of Victoria hovered in the trees like a solitary gall.

So much of the loveliness of that summer had had to do with waiting for her; sometimes he met her once a week, occasionally more often. Until their next meeting he had her latest letter to read over and over with desperate happiness.

Shyly, desperately, happily the boy followed the blonde girl with his eyes. He slept with her letters under his pillow. Since she was more a part of her family than he of his, her letters sometimes described her brother and her sister, or her mother’s health. He was never in her home; he never saw her bedroom.

Does old age invariably imagine youth to be a more innocent time? After all, babies keep getting made and grownups keep getting depraved. In any event, he almost never even held her hand. He never passed a night with her; nor was he with her at that moment past dawn when the cicadas begin to stridulate. He did remember meeting her in a park; he had walked and she had ridden her bicycle. The grass was so green around them that the greenness had stained the inside of his skull, although now it was verdigrised, a penny in a skeleton’s hand. He remembered the summer humidity, and her lovely young face; but their time together never exceeded two or three hours, and sometimes she didn’t come as she had promised.

Just as Victoria’s not yet reread letters lay waiting for him nearly as invitingly as when they had been new — all the more now, perhaps, for the white envelopes had aged ever so delicately to cream, their thirteen-cent stamps were sweetly antique, the writing on them was precious since the hand was dead, never mind the modest yet significant alteration of the English language since then — and the unremembered contents could not affright him more than any page in some old love story (besides, it wouldn’t end until that horrible orange envelope) — so this morning, and the summer world flowing from it, promised him an innocuous sweetness. The dawn was not far gone; the breeze was cool. Feeling less unwell than usual, he decided for that day to live his life instead of Victoria’s.

Behind Hal Murmuracki’s Chapel of Flowers was an abandoned gas station, after which the swamp began. Nobody he knew had gone there. In truth, he was less of an adventurer than Luke or Isaac; he entered the swamp almost as an exercise; had his tumor tortured him as much as usual, he would have been satisfied to be alone in repose, in his bed, his own place; he didn’t need to set out anywhere; he was already suited to being dead. But (so Luke might have said) why not try what did not suit him?

As sky and meadows brightened behind the cool reeds, he felt grateful for the newness of life, and nearly believed himself to be healthy. Happy thoughts of previous women illuminated him in much the same way that morning light jitters back and forth on the spiderwebs between jade reeds; rather than perceiving complete strands, one sees continually altering segments of midair brightness.

When last night’s darkness slinks back into reed-shade, one feels the opportunity to play an important part: Very soon I too will make something of myself; I long to; I expect to; for who could waste this morning light? Before the sun has drunk away everything, I will drink my share from the cool breath of reeds just as I have drunk and will drink again from Victoria’s cool reed-breath… — But then, when the light exposes each reed in earnest, leaving only outlines shadowed, disappointment arrives. — Once he had seen the corpse of a young murdered woman who had been looking forward to a party. Not yet autopsied, she lay in her pink dress, with pink ribbons in her hair, her face bloody and yellow; and the stink of excrement from her abdominal wound was the smell of disappointment. Had her dress been alive, it would have wished to fly away from her; it could still be happy and dance. Here lay a woman who had very likely herself been happy sometimes, who had hurried in excitement to her death, and now there was nothing but disillusionment and failure.

In his memory that pink dress resembled a shady place not yet overrun by solar heat; still the night fragrance could hide here for another quarter-hour, defying the encircling day. But in full light, with the chance to make something of himself now once more safely past, the green reeds were going a lovely silver, their tips whitewashed so newly, the birds now awake (by now the cemetery grass would be a dreary orange-brown); and still he thought to improve his day just as morning gilds grassheads and wet grass. Morning presented him with the colors of berries and the songs of meadowlarks, the dark water beneath bright reeds, algae’d water like jellied jade, two rabbits chasing each other in a circle — and now in the widening of the morning, the smell of reeds and water began to be superseded by the delicious odors of trees.

The whipping of the trees made him queasy. It was the trees, nothing else. If only they would stop! Closing his eyes did not help, because he knew that the trees were still writhing. Making another effort, he stared them down. They swayed until he could no longer remember every place that they had been, which was when he vomited. So he got into his car and drove home. Needless to say, no time of day is as profitless to ghost-lovers as high noon, particularly in summer. Life sweats away our thanatotic idealizations, and then where are we? Toying with two of Victoria’s unremembered letters, he smiled, but decided to treasure them as they were for a while longer. It was not right to decant her sayings when he felt less than his best.

It was a very hot day. He lay in misery, waiting for his prescription narcotics to rescue him. He would not reenter the hospital; those people would weigh down his misery with powerlessness, and he would still die. Cheered by his determination to be free (and forgetting that he had already made it), he opened a letter and read:

Dear Vickie:

You’re tipsy. No, I’m sober. Then why are you writing this? Because I don’t want to go too long without having him receive a letter even if it’s not what he wants. Give him what he wants, Vickie. No, Victoria, I don’t know what he wants from me. You do, mostly. What do you expect, a list of rules? Do this, don’t do that? Pour your heart out to me, screw around all you want but leave me your soul. Write me intense romantic letters every Sunday over tea and biscuits. Scent your letters. Discuss your erotica. I’m tired. Who isn’t?

In twenty years I bet I’ll have breast cancer. I wonder what it feels like to lose a breast. If I’m going to be unhealthy I’m not going to live. Yes, you’ll show them, won’t you? Lung and breast cancer, kidney disease and maybe a goiter, and you’ll just go and die. You’re unstable, aren’t you, Vickie? I admit it. Not everyone does. After I’m done with prettiness, I know what I am — silly as it is. Vickie, no one thinks I’m a rock of security, but do they know you’re compulsive, self-destructive, paranoid? Probably.

Will this amuse him?

Are you amused?

I’ll tell you, Vickie, when he answers.

Will he answer?

Sure, he’s probably cross at me but he’ll answer me.

Love,

Toria.

P.S. My mother has a tumor in her breast. I hope it isn’t malignant. Selfishly, I’m worried not only for her but for me and the children I’ll have.

P.P.S. I’m still getting the great American suntan in my wholesome sexy swimsuit and Riviera sunglasses. You in your hijacker sunglasses and me in mine, what a pair! I’m reading The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, The Hite Report, and The Total Woman. I’ve decided to become a man — grow hair on my chest and cultivate a tight ass.

P.P.P.S. Purge the earth. Kill every third person. No, every fourth. No, just all those that protest.

Luke’s friend Raymond had sometimes spoken quite calmly and freely of his first wife, the one who had left him and whom he still loved the most. And Luke used to take pleasure in speaking of Eve, whom, as he freely confessed, he loved because he never knew her; some years it had seemed as if he loved her more than Stephanie, out of self-spite or something more glorious. By the time he had thinned out, staggering dizzily and clutching at his greying head, he rarely mentioned Eve. As for Victoria, hopefully her husband had both known her and prized her over other women; whereas this formerly seventeen-year-old lover of hers was only now getting acquainted with her. What he had begun to learn from rereading her old letters shamed him: even then she had offered him this knowledge of her, openly and honestly — perhaps because she did not love him, for if she did, would she have been so brave? Or did this conclusion simply indicate how debased his idea of love must be? But then who could be as cruel as Victoria, who when she went away to college liked to calmly, brightly write him about all the boys to whom she opened her legs? As to whether these revelations had hurt him at the time, he had no recollection. After her he had had, among others, a number of prostitute girlfriends, and even when his middleclass sweethearts cheated on him and lied about it, he never felt especially jealous — oh, a little, perhaps. Had Victoria broken him of that habit? He longed to rush off to the cemetery right then; he had many things to ask her. But some of love’s most delicious business takes place behind the beloved’s back — for instance, remembering her. There were times that long ago summer when he got to see Victoria for an hour — and then, while he was with her, he loved her so much that he wished they were already apart, so he could begin to remember her sayings and smiles; if he stayed with her too long, he might forget one or two of them. (Which ones hadn’t he forgotten by now?) Smelling the insides of the envelopes, and sometimes peering inside them just in case there might be something still undiscovered which his dead girl had sent him, he chewed pain pills. He would have liked to ask Luke’s advice: Next time he went to the cemetery, should he, so to speak, go deeper? At seventeen he had a male friend to whom he related everything, while Victoria must have had some other seventeen-year-old girl, or perhaps her younger sister, to whom she confided this or that about him—or had she truly been so strong, or isolated, that she kept him to herself? He wished to describe to Luke what it was like to see Victoria welling up out of her grave like a swarm of fireflies; sometimes her skull grinned at him like a stone lantern before the flesh seethed mistily and milkily over it. Knowing that the dead could come back was one of the great experiences of his life; he yearned to tell Luke all about it. But presumably Luke, being dead, already knew. Anyhow, shouldn’t he have used the green potion to bring Luke back, instead of putting Victoria first? No; Luke would not have wanted to return; that would have been unkind. Then why wasn’t it unkind to resurrect Victoria? Well, she was confined to her grave; it wasn’t as if he had kidnapped her out of oblivion and imprisoned her like a pretty goldfish! Then where was Luke? What if he too were trapped? At least his ashes were scattered in the mountains. And Luke had assured him, he had insisted and promised (although how could he know?) that there was no postmortem consciousness; did that mean that Luke was safe from being one with the old man whose marble head gazed sternly out of the niche in his family skeletons’ landmark?

Victoria, or at least her circumstances, might have intrigued Luke. If nothing else, Luke would have listened to him kindly and patiently. His grief for Luke was as deep as a bullfrog’s voice in a sweltering swamp whose summer evening smell of sunburned live oaks now begins to ooze away at the edges, for fingers of coolness are oozing out of the muck; now the light softens from gold to white, and dusk dances on the triggerhairs of grasses.

(I try to keep my life at arm’s length and just look at it, Luke once said. I haven’t done a lot of things I wanted to do or should have done, but I don’t pretend I have.)

Remembering when he and Luke were young and went hiking in the mountains together, he lay down, chewing more pain pills; the bottle was nearly empty. After that he might have been dreaming. Opening the middle drawer of his father’s desk, he saw the dead moon in the black sky. He loved the sight. How often, if ever, did Luna duplicate herself? Wearily he crept to the window and found another moon there. Then he was sick to his stomach. Once that ended, he lay down on top of his unmade bed and closed his eyes. He saw the moon again. This time it appeared to be falling up toward the blue earth.

When he met Mr. Murmuracki again, he realized that he had lately been perceiving everyone else as if through glass, distant and muted. Only this old man did he see true.

He knew enough not to inquire about moonflowers. He said: I’d like to go to the moon.

Well, said Mr. Murmuracki, for that you don’t need me. You need—

Excuse me, but I can’t seem to find anyone else.

Ah. How much time did you say you had left?

I’d guess three months. But how can I know? My stomach hurts—

And why is it exactly that you thought I might be able to help you?

I bought my moonflowers from you.

Yes, I remember, but how does that signify?

I’d like to go to the moon because—

Yes. Why exactly would you wish to travel to the moon, especially in your condition?

If I could just see what’s going on up there right now—

That’s different. We do have a channel, to communicate with our suppliers. You’d be satisfied to observe it from the viewing room?

Have you been to the moon?

Oh, I’ve never missed a day of work. I’m much like your late father in that respect…

You knew him?

A fine man. One of the best.

Could I see him?

He’s gone.

Where did he go?

Where you’re going.

Will I see him then?

He’s considerably farther away than the moon.

Oh.

Now, as I mentioned, we do have a viewing room. Whom would you like to see?

Victoria.

Of course. A pretty name, isn’t it?

Yes—

You have very good taste, if I may say so, to feel as you do toward that lovely young woman. In her life she was, how shall I say, unappreciated—

But she—

Yes, yes, that’s right. This way. Now, when you open the door, it will seem quite dark. Close the door behind you and wait for your eyes to adjust. Remember also that from here to the moon is a good light-second or two, as we both know from our college days. Just take your time. I’ll be in my office up front.

Thank you, Mr. Murmuracki.

Within seconds he had become one of the elect who comprehend that the moonglare is caused by a certain pearlescent cloud-lid pressed tight over the Mountains of the Moon, whose fragile purple teeth and angles become black by contrast with this painful cloud and with the steep white bow of snow beneath; something about these entities makes for an awful and dangerous dazzlement.

Isaac was sitting alone and moody by the shore of a high cold lunar lake whose surface happened to be, in horrible contrast to Isaac himself, alive with earth-tides; he was picking moonflowers and dissecting them into nothing, ignoring Victoria, who hovered seductively at his shoulder, festively clad in her flesh; the breeze kept whipping her long blonde hair in Isaac’s face; sometimes a strand of it flicked into his eyesocket, and then without looking up he brushed it away with his wristbone, meanwhile ruining more and more moonflowers, whose petals flew up like fireflies toward the lunar mountains. The roar of the lake-waves against the dun and cinder-dark moon rocks was so loud that whatever those two might have been saying to each other, if anything, could not be overheard; but presently Victoria began to ascend away, and as she cast one look over her shoulder, my neighbor who watched discovered her face sparkling with tears. Isaac never looked up. Pitying her, this sad watcher, whom both of them had rejected, leaped up to call to her; he thought merely to console her; he wasn’t selfishly desirous! At this, Isaac gangled himself upright, a tall skeleton no longer in possession of all his metacarpii (no doubt he rambled hard here on the moon), turned round, waved and grinned at his former friend, who waved back neutrally, neither disliking nor blaming him but disinclined to be won over and re-abandoned (when he was young, he, like Isaac, had tried his best to make everyone love him, until failures taught him how to strengthen himself with the magic spell called no); whereas Victoria, flitting and hesitating, finally alit upon the water, at arm’s length from the shore, wiped her eyes upon her fairskinned arm, and said: Hi.

Hello, he said. I was just—

I don’t want to talk about it.

All right, he replied, mildly sorry that he could not help her. A moon-bird with a pearlescent beak rushed silently between them. He turned away as she began to strip, and Isaac swung the telescopic barrels of his eyesockets toward her. He left them then, approving of them both, wondering whether Victoria would succeed, in which case Isaac would certainly break her much-broken heart: all in a day’s work.

Far away across the milky moon-lake, which widened and narrowed like a woman’s body, there was a rolling rise of moon-alders and laval outcroppings, and beyond this grew many blackish-purple mountains of fantastic height, sharpness and fragility, like broken glass upended on narrow points, flaring out into double-bladed wings, and then terminating (where the clouds revealed it) in needles; and because he was on the moon, and therefore already partially of this place, he found himself able to speed as rapidly as a water-bird, if not as gracefully as his Victoria, over the waves and then up that lava-pored tree-swale and up a very steep yet rounded canyon to a glacier amphitheater amidst the highest peaks; and there, as he had suspected and hoped, walked Luke, quite steadily and still undecomposed; while at his shoulder now flew that naughty, never satisfied Victoria, so good at making herself and others unhappy, whispering, giggling, touching herself; just then she was a skeleton and did not seem to know it — or perhaps she had tried everything else and hoped to tempt Luke through this more advanced state of undress. Luke trudged on. Why didn’t he fly like her? Well, he hated to cut corners. When she swirled down before him, seeking to clasp him in her bony arms, he pushed her away. She fell to the ground, perhaps on purpose, then leaped into the sky and streaked upward, leaving behind her a glowing trail of anger which condensed and fell to the snow as reddish-brown crystals which in turn sublimed into nothing.

Giving Luke awhile to recover from the irritation which Victoria must have caused, he presently overtook him, and called out. Luke uttered his name with cheerful surprise, and so he flew down to visit his friend.

How are you getting on?

Oh, not bad, said Luke. There’s a million-year hike I plan to take, if I last that long, which I probably won’t. What’s going on?

Happily and excitedly he began to tell Luke all about himself. So often in their lives he had talked and talked, and Luke had patiently listened. At intervals Luke had called upon him in distress; but mostly it had gone the other way, and it was still like that. He requested advice, and Luke said: Well. I can tell you what I’d try not to do, not that I’m very good at doing what I’m supposed to. You’ve collected a lot of stuff in your life. Why not get rid of it?

I’m trying to phase it out in stages, he replied.

I’d say that’s very sane.

How are you feeling? he asked again.

I have good days and bad days. Being dead isn’t all that great, but it’s not terrible. I try to appreciate what I can, like the earthlight on the snow over there. Where I’m heading there should be much more snow.

Then the wind began to hiss, whistle and shriek. Luke lowered his head, walking steadily into it.

The watcher hovered behind, as he had in life, perceiving now how steep and shadowed was that place between the rock-teeth. Here was he and there was Luke, with death snow-shadowed between them. There was Luke, going up into the blue sky of space. When the dying man departed the viewing room, he felt slightly ashamed that on his face Mr. Murmuracki could probably discern that loneliness, as if he had sat too long by the shore of that writhing lunar lake, while everyone else went about the business of living or being dead; he thought: Oh, no, to be lonely forever! and a high cold wind rushed down from the Mountains of the Moon.

When he found the little red book in which he had written his morbid poems, he felt revulsion and resistance. It was this object which caused Victoria to leave him. His final lover’s letter to her was enclosed, carefully and viciously marked up by her. Setting it aside, he took the red book back into his hand. Pulling open the cover with his thumb was more unpleasant than it would have been to lever the slab off Victoria’s grave. But he did it. The poems, of course, were very badly written, in an unhappy seventeen-year-old’s unaware imitation of the Decadent manner. But it was worse than that — what had he been thinking? They described someone who looked like her, yet was dead and rotten. It was bad enough that he had written them; but why had he sent them to her? What had he supposed would happen? Now for a moment he excavated the grave of that pallid, skinny seventeen-year-old boy who had understood neither Victoria nor himself. The boy stared up at him. A beetle crawled across his spectacles. His desire to ask the boy anything fell away, for the boy knew nothing. He replaced the slab. Asking himself how he would feel if some woman wrote him poems like these, he answered: I would think her very sick. I would fear she meant me harm. I would get away from her — far away, forever.

There is a desert in your blonde-white hair

With lions sleeping in the sun.

Your eyes are wide and deadly pools

That draw me under blue.

Pretty bone-teeth glisten savagely

Veiled by the currents of salt-red blood, your lips.

You watch me always, hungry;

Your smile is a tomb-sweet lure,

and on and on, more gruesomely. He felt ashamed; he longed to destroy the book; it was horrible to him. But he had kept it so long, even if without looking at it.

It made him sick.

Now through the night-whipped trees I passed with silent tread, creeping through lakes of moldering leaves, filling myself with unspeakable etheric fires, whatever those might have been. The grave awaited me, just as it now truly did, when he went to visit the true Victoria, who was truly dead but not hungry for him and whose smile was no lure to anything horrid, or was it? The grave awaited me. The sweet-smelling soil about it was repulsively soft, and I tunneled through it with loathsome ease, no doubt because that summer he had been reading the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. Through the soil, a green-white hand, blotched and cold, came groping in search of me.

Now he remembered that for years he had suffered from nightmares of this sort, nearly every night. He must have been very ill. — Why hadn’t he killed himself? — Women had saved him, one after the other. — Hadn’t he hoped that Victoria would do the same? — She could have said: I’m waiting for you, and here’s my hand; my hand’s alive, and my smile’s alive and I love you. — But who could have loved something like him? Eagerly I scraped the earth aside…

Flushing, he closed up the hateful book again and reinterred it in the envelope. He could bear no more of it today.

He chewed his pain pills. Then he lay down and waited for the syrupy narcosis to comfort him. He dreaded to meet Victoria’s eyes.

He felt better. There was the envelope, lying on his father’s desk. He longed to put it away in the drawer. Rising, he picked it up — and the red book broke through the brittle yellow edge. — Shame, shame, as pitiless as sunlit revelations of grime in spiderwebs!

Coasting over the lunar surface at a very low altitude seemed to improve his spirits, so he now did that nearly every afternoon, especially when it was too hot and bright to visit the cemetery: browsing across the moon map as if he were peering through leaf-holes into the light, loving the white shinings on the black and silver moon, searching for a certain unknown thing in craters on the night side of the terminator, while weary old Earth arose as jewel-green as a new oak gall. Whatever else was written in that red book of poems might if he were sufficiently fortunate be equally valuable. Consider the eighteen-year-old patient of Jung’s who, having been preyed upon by her brother and a schoolmate, discovered that sorrow is a labyrinth of translucent glass, whose passageways gain in weariness and bewilderment by half-showing the adjacent ones, which may be their own turnings, and which continue even deeper into that green dimness of sea-glass; until she began to believe herself to live upon the moon, where all women and children had to be sequestered underground, in icy fissures in the grey moon-bone, in order to protect them from a certain vampire. Volunteering to kill this monster, she caused herself to be placed on a high tower in the middle of Lacus Mortis (45˚ N 27˚ E); and they gave her a knife before departing with protestations of admiring grief. Thus far in this tale, although it has been wisely called the last receiver, being the entity which communicates all rays and causes from the superiors to the inferiors, the moon seems no very pleasant place. But even before the dark predator came winging over the half-lit lunar canyons, she must have been lubricated by what prudes call curiosity; for she kept begging herself: Let me just find out what he looks like beneath his lush-feathered wings. Afterward I’ll stab him. — Muffling his face in his black shoulders, contracting into his own long spine, like a folding umbrella, the vampire now settled silently onto the parapet, close enough for her to touch his elbow had she wished to. With extreme caution and delicacy, like a fisherman setting up his lures, he reopened his wings. His features attracted her far more than she could have imagined. Drinking in the sight of his beautiful eyes, she hesitated a trifle too long, so that he seized her and bore her off, through the dark grooves and into a pretense of brightness: green and orange swales, the roar of water dulling down the piping screams of death. What happened between them next Jung never reports, but I think it fair to suppose that there was kissing, sucking and tickling involved, for she soon considered the moon so lovely a place that she struggled against being cured and was thereby condemned to dwell on earth. What if the skinny, shy seventeen-year-old boy who loved Victoria had been of the moon-woman’s type? In other words, what if he could have dug down through the cemetery loam and liked it? In his spirit he dreamed over his moon map. It also soothed him to sit at his father’s desk and gaze at Victoria’s letters, even without reading them; today he wasn’t well enough for that. From the middle of the heap he withdrew a new one and placed it in an old pouch that he had, in the expectation of carrying it with him around his neck for several weeks, his joy in it slowly swelling — not at all the desperate joy which had inflamed him like longing when he was seventeen and she calmly slipped another note into his hand in the high school corridor, then rushed off to her chemistry class, or when a new letter lay in a slim white envelope in his family’s mailbox, bearing a thirteen-cent Liberty Bell stamp or that butterfly or an American eagle gripping sheaves and arrows in its claws — and always her sweet name or initials greeted him on the return address, which she very occasionally typed but mostly wrote in her very slightly forward-slanting script: a new treasure to add to his hoard; ever so carefully he slit open the lefthand edge of the envelope. How his heart used to pound at seventeen! The pleasure he felt nowadays was a fiery, peaty spirit which had aged in an oak cask until its sting had grown capable of clothing itself with knowing discretion within sweet smoothness. Who could say which was better? Good boy, he drank whichever was available. Sometimes his loving pleasure in Victoria brought water to his tired old eyes.

It was a hot and utterly silent day. Smiling, he took the envelope in his fingers as gently as he could and kissed it. Just as some Saxons used to place a coin in a corpse’s mouth, to keep it content with gnawing on that, so he clutched this letter of hers, and withheld other aspirations; but then the aspirations came anyway. Desire rose up gently within him, and he gave himself over, pulling the letter out of the envelope with much the same smoothness which had once informed his unhooking of women’s brassieres (although in Victoria’s case, his first, he had made several attempts, too flustered and ignorant to understand how the hooks went, until she finally undid them for him; and he kissed her delicious armpits). Now the letter lay undressed but still folded in his hands. He coaxed the folds apart. She loved him; she loved him; now she would say she loved him.

I can’t really assure you that I didn’t undergo some “psychic rape.”

As usual, he didn’t remember this at all.

I can assure you that I am doing much better. The first four days afterward were confusing. No desire to eat or sleep; everything about me deteriorated. I am now, in fact, a slim size 7, a considerable difference as you probably are aware. I was not affected for life. For me, at this time, I am just happy enough to go on living. No more emotional roulette. This will hurt you, because a part of our relationship was and is caught up in this spinning wheel. This is not saying we don’t have a relationship, or that I’m negating what we previously established. Sometimes it seems that what we established isn’t valid anymore. Maybe it still is but it will take time to know. I won’t tell you what happened.

He had no idea how worried about her and selfishly anxious for himself this communication would have made him at seventeen. Now he felt sorry for her, of course. And as to whether or not they had engaged in a “relationship,” how could that even be a question? This seventeen-year-old girl might assert herself all she chose, rejecting and raging, alluring and denying, but this old man, almost too old now to be her father, would not stop loving her; nor could she desist from loving him, for she was dead.

Of course she did right to leave me; all I cared about was keeping her; I couldn’t have understood her, or been a patient, trustworthy pivot for her flitterings.

But I wonder how unhappy she was? I have been, I believe, very happy, although that may not have been apparent to others. (No, perhaps I have not been happy.)

At least she had her children. Very possibly she felt happy in those middle years when we didn’t know each other.

And what happened to her, to make her write that letter? Should I ask next time I go to the cemetery? She might tell me now, but it must be a bad memory for her — best to leave it buried in the ground.

She did not love me. She did not love me.

But one thing I’ve definitely learned in life is recognizing when I’m not wanted. Victoria still wanted me then, even if only to gratify herself by keeping me dangling. — No, that’s unfair; neither one of us knew ourselves, much less each other. And she wants me now — doesn’t she?

Thus he overcame his disgust, grief and dread at his red book of poems, over and over again.

Whenever night came and he dressed to go to the cemetery, shaving himself carefully for Victoria, he felt anxious, excited, half-tempted to stay home, with an undercurrent of cocky desire just as when he used to set out to find prostitutes — but he was old now; all these feelings were weakened down a significant portion of the way to extinction; he didn’t actually care so much; if he undressed again and lay down in bed it wouldn’t be the end of the world — and something scary might happen at the cemetery; somebody or something might hurt him — but the prospect of sweetness awaited him, and he was so lonely; he yearned for an adventure; and even if something bad happened, how much could he lose? And if he stayed home, what did that make him? Once upon a time he used to go downtown to seek out women in the streets; and before that he used to get dressed for this date or that date; usually the girl ruled him strange long before the end of the movie; within ten minutes he knew she wished to escape him; it was to avoid that misery that he had hired or inveigled promiscuous women, who like him would settle for the satisfaction of the moment; so perhaps the same impulse now drove him to haunt a ghost-woman in the cemetery, who again would probably not be so choosy as to reject him. Something dark blue like an oil slick over black water slowly flashed between gravestones, hunching its dark shoulders; perhaps it was a lunar vampire, or one of Victoria’s new friends (if she had any), or some animal. He decided not to mention it to her. He likewise declined to bring up the red notebook.

Victoria was waiting, sunning herself beneath the moon. He rolled out the blue-and-yellow blanket she had wished for, and she smiled. Her fingers were as white as her teeth.

He asked what it had been like for her on the first occasion when he called her out of her grave, and she hesitated, then said: I didn’t know what to say; I was so excited about talking to you…

His heart began stupidly pounding; he grew nauseous. He said: Victoria, how do you feel about me now?

She quietly replied: I need to love someone, and so I’ve fixed on you.

Testily he cried out: Why didn’t you love me when we were seventeen? You were my first; you know that. I still don’t even know if I was yours; well, actually, of course that means I wasn’t. I was so faithful and loyal to you; I worshipped everything you did—

Pityingly, the ghost stroked his hair. It felt like the slightest breeze; he could have been imagining it. She said: Well, I did love you sometimes.

I’m sorry; please forgive me; I… And it’s just as you wrote me at the end: We would have left each other anyway.

But I do admit, he continued, laughing a little even as he rubbed his eyes, that even though I know that, I don’t completely believe it. If you hadn’t left me—

And if I hadn’t died.

Yes.

And if you weren’t going to die…

They both burst out laughing.

A moment later, he saw tears in her eyes. At once he took it upon himself to comfort her, soothing her, kissing the moonlight where her mouth should have been and promising to do whatever she might wish.

Later that night he was sitting beside Victoria on her grave when panting rapid footfalls came up the gravel walkway by the lake. Any instant, whoever it was would come into sight. Victoria vanished silently into the earth. Rising, he withdrew behind Mr. Arthur J. Bishop’s tomb, leaning on the arms of the cross. The sounds got louder. He felt dread. Presently a chalky-featured man appeared, glaring straight ahead, running and gasping with his arms straight out. The man did not appear to see him. He kept still. The man ran out of sight. For a time he could hear him. Then, just as he had returned to Victoria’s grave and was on the verge of trying to coax her out of the ground, he heard those evil, frantic footfalls coming back. This time, thanks to the configuration of the cemetery, he could see the man sooner and more clearly. His face was, in fact, horrible. As he approached, he seemed to scent something in the direction of Victoria’s grave, for he glared up toward the two of them, showing his teeth. As yet he was some distance away, and not until he reached the stairs in the hill would he become a definite threat; all the same, it seemed best to retreat over the crest and down, which he did. Now he was temporarily out of both sight and hearing of that ghoul, who might, however, come loping around the hill in some unexpected direction, and so, hating to show his back to the darkness but not daring not to, he ran (in his own estimation) nearly as well as a young man, his heart tolling in his breastbone, and finally reached the hole in the fence and the single wan streetlight. He unlocked his car, entered it, started it, turned on the headlights and saw through that hole in the fence the hateful greenish-white face staring at him. Surely it would not come out here. There was a sharp cramp in his chest. He locked all four doors. Then he backed the car a good long block, until the hole could not be seen. He longed to live; he knew that now. So he had better organize himself. His way lay past the hole. He shifted the car into drive, then pressed the gas pedal halfway down, speeding back alongside the cemetery fence — and in the middle of the street stood that emissary from MANSIONS ABOVE, waiting for him with its mouth open and its arms stretched wide. He knew that if he slowed down in order to return to reverse, he would be in the thing’s power. So he floored the gas, aimed right at the monster and ran it down. It panted and scrabbled even then; its long greenish hands broke off both windshield wipers, trying to pull itself up onto the hood. He kept driving, not knowing what else to do, whipping the steering wheel left and right until he had dislodged the thing. It was still squirming on the tarmac when he sped away, rounding three corners before he began to feel safe, slowing then to legal speed just before he passed the eternally shining sign, flickering with mosquitoes and midges, of Hal Murmuracki’s Chapel of Flowers.

He got home, locked the door, and lay down gasping like his enemy, feeling nauseous in his belly and pained in his chest, with death’s vomit choked through him like gravel, from deep in his guts right up to his tonsils.

He dreamed that the moon was a round bright pool in the sky which now rapidly increased in size until he fell into it, and he was swimming. Now he perceived that only part of it was bright. There he swam in mellow gold. But the instant he reached the shaded zone, the water or whatever it was became almost stingingly cold, and he seemed to see something like a low stone statue grinning at him.

Awakening into another stifling, nauseous dawn, he opened his eyes and saw the pale blue sky, which was in itself sufficient reason to have lived. He might have slept four hours. His mind was clear. It pleased him to be nearly alone in this new day. Perhaps death might be as fine as this, if he could only guard himself against the thing with the greenish-white face. He had not been afraid until now. Rising, he went out into the day.

Something was moving; something was watching him from behind his back yard hedge. It could have been a woman, or a man. Then he saw it no more. Why should it have been Victoria — and not something worse? Then he seemed to hear something creeping through the branches — well, actually, this is merely a metaphor for what he felt whenever he forced himself to withdraw another of her envelopes from the pile on his father’s desk. Where was that greenish-white entity which seemed so desperately to desire him? What if it came inside the house?

After that, he began to dread reading her letters almost as much as he did returning to the cemetery at night knowing that that dead thing called Victoria awaited him; he had imagined that it was he who summoned her with the green liquid, but now he knew all too well that she whispered and murmured to him from under the ground and inside his desk until he grew helpless to employ the green liquid on anybody but her, or it, or whatever Victoria should rightfully be called. In truth there was probably no Victoria at all, but a nameless entity of unwholesome intentions.

Discovering the thirteen-cent checkerspot butterfly stamp and the thirteen-cent flower-and-mountain Colorado stamp, he felt fondness again and kissed the envelope. But he hesitated to learn whatever the thing in the cemetery might be whispering to him. No, she wasn’t that, not then! Although this was a lengthy letter, she had denied herself the typewriter, in order to think before she said anything; this was sweet, not to mention reassuring. Your longer, rational letter and the shorter, emotional one are in my mind. Your emotional one was what I thought I needed until my mother brought me down hard. How could he imagine anything monstrous about his Victoria? I’m tired of struggling between my guilt (and desire to be realistic) and my urgent inclinations toward fantasy and the unusual. I’m tired of thinking about our relationship. It is clear to me that it will have to be limited to paper for quite awhile; I don’t even know about Christmas. If we survive all that I imagine we’ll have our garden and breakfast in bed. That leaves us absolutely nowhere. Except that I’m rather emotionally involved and in love.

That made him love her. In the dark, hoping that she was there and also that she was not, in which case he could run away with honor, he forced himself to enter the hole in the fence, then tiptoed through the forest of tombstones, sick with fear. All was silent.

Bending over her headstone, Victoria, Victoria! he called in a whisper.

Nobody answered.

Suddenly something pale rushed toward him from the black thicket of crosses farther up the hill. He leaped to his feet, deathly sick with terror. It was the ghoul; he would die now.

Boo! giggled Victoria. The pale blur had been her hair.

You scared me, he muttered.

Victoria laughed and danced. Her insides resembled black water silvered with thistledown.

What was that thing that chased me the other night?

It didn’t chase you. You ran. That was how it noticed you.

Then it tried to attack me. I’m afraid I didn’t kill it.

Of course you didn’t. It’s dead, just like me.

Whose side are you on?

Listen, she said suddenly in a low voice. I think it knows you’re here. You’d better go now. I’ll get in big trouble for telling you this.

I’ll come back tomorrow.

Go now. I love you. Run.

He rushed away as quickly and quietly as he could, not knowing whether he was escaping the thing or approaching it, and fearing above all that it would be waiting for him at the hole in the fence — which of course it was. He saw it before it saw him. He burst out in a sweat. But he was relieved not to have it behind him. Very quietly he backed away, knowing enough not to return to Victoria’s grave; sooner or later it would hunt for him there. First what he longed for was an open mausoleum to hide in. Then even a culvert would have done. Ducking down toward the lake, he soon spied the thing on the low hill he had vacated. Just as during an adagio movement a conductor’s upside-down shadow clings to the podium’s edge, its arms endlessly parting from and rejoining its sides with the same steady determination as a long-distance swimmer’s, so this new graveyard thing stroked the belly of the night, glowing like a jellyfish. Fortunately it did not seem capable of scent-tracking like a hound. His heart pounding, he sidled behind a monument, then quickly ascended a narrow lane between tall dark tombs, realizing that he was nearly or already lost and therefore seeking the landmark of a tall narrow cross-crowned mausoleum which at a certain moment of each cloudless summer evening became as blonde as Victoria’s hair; perhaps its cross would catch the moonlight a bit. But it didn’t, and soon he was definitively lost among the graves. His belly ached. Around him the earth sweated out loathsomeness. He pressed himself in a shallow doorway and stood until the moon declined. It was the hour when frogs screech like birds.

In the almost-darkness, beneath the silhouetted trees, a glowing oval rose up, elongated and began to expand. He realized that it was coming toward him, and from its sureness it must see him. He had never before felt such terror. He tried to console himself by thinking: I ought to treasure this feeling. That means I still want to live, and therefore my life is valuable — in which case I should get away from her. Oh, please let me live, let me escape that thing—

Then Victoria’s ghost rose up before him and said: You can go. It’s all right now. Please; I’m tired—

Thank you, he said a little stiffly. How was he supposed to feel toward her? As he strode back to the hole in the fence, he realized that he didn’t even care anymore whether the ghoul was there, perhaps merely because he believed that it would be gone, as indeed it was.

He slept until late in the morning. When he returned to the cemetery late in the afternoon, his belly sore from vomiting, a lawnmower was wandering through the hollow, which had formerly been a pleasant nineteenth-century pond where bereaved families picnicked. Here they were trimming the grass nearly to the roots, doubtless for the sake of hygiene. He saw the caretakers working around Victoria’s grave. The grass had been torn up as if by some large animal.

He walked away, returning at night through the hole in the fence.

Don’t ask me anything, she said.

Then he finally remembered that the caretakers must have removed the blanket he’d given her.

He did ask her, that time and the next; he pointed out, very reasonably in his own judgment, that since he came all this way to visit her, with his health not being of the best, it was only right that she inform him how much danger he might be in.

Well, I’ve already told you one secret thing, which isn’t to say I gushed with confidentialities.

And you won’t tell me anything more?

I don’t want to be part of this.

Then I’d say you hold me pretty cheaply, he said, and maybe I won’t come again. I have to say, Victoria, I feel disgusted…

Are the leaves back by now?

Can’t you see them?

You know I can’t! What is it you want of me? Why is everybody so demanding? All I want to do is be alone.

Then be alone; I’ll go—

No. Listen. Promise to keep another secret.

I promise.

All right. I made him understand. Do you believe me?

Sure.

He stays under the lake. Go down there and — but he’s not to know I told you.

Won’t he figure it out?

He doesn’t exactly think.

I’m afraid.

So am I, she said. — I’ll hold your hand.

Will it hurt me?

I asked him not to.

What happens if we don’t go?

He’ll come here every night until he corners you. We’d better go now.

Why are you afraid, Victoria?

Please… I said I love you. Isn’t that enough?

Elongating toward him in an ecstasy of avarice, the foul thing simpered expressionlessly. It sprang; he could hardly bear the horror. Sniffing him all over like a dog (its own odor almost unendurably foul), it drooled, dribbled and moaned. It afflicted him as relentlessly as a stench. When it got to his belly, it began to whine eagerly. Then it grunted. It sprang a few paces backward, then studied him, grinning. Its eyes reminded him of blue light-shards in black water. Victoria released his hand.

Shimmering like spiderwebs in a thick elderberry bush at dusk, the ghosts whined quarrelsome round and round their graves, much as Canada geese in autumn overcircle black swamp water, searching for what we do not know. No doubt he had imagined them. Victoria must know them all. He wished to ask what it was like underground, but this appeared to be another of her private secrets. Come to think of it, perhaps she didn’t know anything. Why was she here and not on the moon? If he inquired as to the whereabouts and identity of the husband of this Mrs. Emilia Woodruff, on whose grave he and Victoria sometimes sat, would he be answered? If not, would Victoria’s whims be to blame, or something else? During this last summer, wondering anything had become so considerable an effort that he felt guilty doing it and not doing it. There had been much sweetness in his relationship with Victoria; he had lived for her, and become better as a result, but now he could not tell whether the wrongness lay in her or him or both of them. When she had shut him out before, that felt different; he had been courting her. Perhaps even then he might have felt desperate and jealous when she kept something from him, but probably not; jealousy had never been his favorite vice. Nowadays what could be interpreted as a pattern of rejection still wounded him, coming from her; but being excluded from any particular thing left him indifferent. He was no crackshot astronomer, to map out her orbital period. Often he already seemed to be remembering both this summer and the other from some rainy, windy country. The whining of the ghosts, or insects, or whatever they were, made him look up from himself. Not seeing anybody else, not even Victoria, who had told him that tonight she wished to play by herself, he set out to find the green-faced thing again. After all, it was his dog.

Just as in the swamp he frequented he sometimes observed ripples starting and stopping in one place, then a darkness rising in the green water, a fin or narrow turtle-head showing itself before falling again, bubbling whitely as it vanished within its ripples, so it came from under the lake.

This time he felt more revulsion than fear. It somehow struck him that the thing was intelligent as well as sensitive, although he could not have defined its awareness or capacities. It grinned and grinned. He forced himself to stroke its head.

Victoria’s blonde hair glared luridly against Mr. Arthur J. Bishop’s black granite tombstone; she was sitting against it, running her left hand through her hair. She said: Tell me what it’s like where you go, in the day.

Well, until I got sick I used to spend too much time at home. Now I can’t even recall exactly what I did there. I lie down a lot now, of course, but when I’m not feeling too bad I try to go out. There are some reeds in the swamp down the road, and I love their jade-green color. Sometimes I think nothing’s as beautiful as the silver-blue slime they grow from—

Except for me, of course.

That’s right. Do you miss the sun?

The sun is horrible, she said quickly. Sometimes when I’m down in the ground, even as far as I can go, I feel it picking at me, rotting me and making everything worse. When my children and my husband all needed me at the same time, or— Anyhow, this is much more annoying than that. But there’s not much I can do about it.

I love the sun.

Well, you’re still alive. I suppose I did, too.

When I remember you, I think of summer. It seems as if it was always summer when we—

That’s because we were only involved for one summer.

It was longer than that!

No it wasn’t; my letters afterward didn’t count. But what else do you do with your days? Why don’t you have another womanfriend?

She died.

Did you love each other?

Very much.

Why did you call me up instead of her?

I don’t know.

What was she like?

You know, Victoria, it would be one thing if you cared to tell me about your family, not that I’m even so interested except that I’d like to know everything about you, while you—

Let’s not fight.

Speaking of daytime, is there somewhere you’d like me to go where you can’t, so I could come and tell you about it? For instance, I—

No.

Whatever you say.

But do tell me more about your friend Luke. What did he look like?

You know what he—

Before he died, silly.

When he was young, he was an extremely handsome man. After his first tumor he aged quickly. Unlike me, he was never fat. He had brown hair and greenish-blue eyes with twenty-ten vision. He was very strong, with great endurance, and he used to be a mountain climber. He took care of himself in more ways than I did, so it’s strange that he went first.

I wonder if he would have liked me?

I saw you with him.

What do you mean?

In the viewing room—

What do you mean?

Anyhow…

Maybe I would have made it worth his while.

No doubt. You have your charms.

Too bad you were never handsome. I might have stayed with you then, or at least stayed with you longer.

I hope you got what you wanted with your other men.

Did I hurt you just now?

Not at all. I’ve had harder lovers than you. But you haven’t answered me. Did you get what you wanted?

Mostly. But it didn’t mean as much to me as it should have. Maybe you were better off.

You think I got less?

You didn’t get me!

Yes I did.

I’ll bet you don’t even remember me! I’ll test you. What size was I?

Seven.

That was just for awhile, after a certain thing happened. I guess I have to give you half-marks. You did try, I admit. I don’t know how I felt about that.

I loved you so much.

Why?

You were my first. Isn’t that the best reason?

I demand that you destroy all my letters.

Why should I? What will you do in return?

I’ll tell you bright new stories and sing you all the ghost songs I know. Ha, ha! I actually don’t know any ghost songs.

Then tell me a story.

And you’ll destroy my letters?

Not yet. But—

Here’s your story: When I was seventeen, I used to wish for a big brass bed with someone in it to watch me combing my hair. And it had to be a brass bed that wouldn’t squeak! I was always very particular.

This is your bed, Victoria. I’ll sit here and watch you comb your hair whenever you like.

Well, I’m not seventeen now. Now I’d rather make friends with the sun again, which I actually can’t. I like what you said about the reeds in the marsh. Are there many flowers?

It’s too late in the season.

I wish I could stay up all day, see the sun and dance on my grave.

Will you dance with me now?

Did you ever learn how?

Not really, but I could try.

You were the worst dancer of any of them. Not only did you try to get too intimate, but you never learned my timing. That’s why I only let you dance with me once.

I must be worse now. Old men with stomach cancer aren’t known for their fancy moves.

Never mind. I wish my grave had a porch that we could eat dinner on.

You and me?

Yes.

It makes me happy that you would say that.

Well, don’t get spoiled or I’ll be bitchy again. I quite enjoy being bitchy.

And you’re my favorite dead bitch both spoiled and decayed.

What do you like for dinner these days?

Nothing now. Before I had cancer, I used to sauté catfish with whatever green vegetables were in season. I had a girlfriend who taught me how to cook fish.

Was she good in bed?

Excellent.

As good as me?

I don’t know.

It used to make me sad, the way I could wrap men around my little finger. I knew exactly what to do to drive them crazy. The only thing I didn’t know was how to feel it.

Then I’m sorry for you, Victoria. I always felt it.

Well, we’re both beyond that now, aren’t we? It’s nice to just be domestic.

Next time I’ll bring two paper plates so we can eat together. I’ll pretend to eat a little something to be companionable, and I’ll set fire to your portion, so it can be a burnt offering, and you can hover over the smoke.

That sounds like fun! Will you burn incense to me? Then I’ll perform a snake dance.

With or without clothes?

Whatever you like, darling.

You know what I like.

Of course I do. You’re no different from the others.

Once upon a time in that swamp he liked to visit, a lost black crayfish on the path, seeing his approach, extended its pincers in what he presumed to be a terrified threat. The ghoul’s attitude of menace now struck him as nearly as ludicrously innocuous as that. Nearly every night it rushed toward him, burying its snout in his belly. He thought: This is how it must have been for Victoria when I came to her, back when we were seventeen.

But when he was all alone at home, he frequently imagined that the thing would come bursting through the front door. Then he would hear it rushing up the stairs. He lay in bed watching the bedroom door and knowing that in an instant it would fly open and the ghoul would come leaping at him with its mouth already wide open to bite. Wishing to domesticate not only the thing itself but also his dread of it, he reminded himself that it was, so it seemed, his future. Perhaps he would learn to be fond of it, and then it would take him to laugh with the fat green people who lay on their backs beneath the ground, rolling from side to side and kicking like infants.

It was August. Behind the well-known headstones lurked other strange old beings which were actually familiar; by September, should he live that long, he might be able to make pets of them also. Each time he vomited, he felt freer. He no longer opened the hospital’s invoices or returned the doctor’s automated calls. He often lay on his back all day, imagining that he was thinking, and never lonely, thanks to the pain. He assured himself: Although I now belong to death, I can nonetheless own my death, just as I can own my memories of Victoria no matter who she was or is. And when I do take possession of and perhaps even love my death, then the other death which once corrupted me when I was seventeen, seeping out in my shyness and hideous poems, will be tamed, like this ghoul. — In point of fact, learning about himself had become ever more sinister; but since he was dying he lacked any obligation to continue this education.

In one of those lengthening nights when his belly was pregnant with foulness the ghost rose tall and narrow in the twilight, like an egret’s neck, and said: When we were seventeen and my mother started reading your letters, I felt like a little girl who had her hands slapped. I knew that once I got away from her I would never want to come back.

Well, has she caught up with you yet?

She’s looking for me, but I’m still hiding. We’re both losing strength—

I can’t understand the rules here.

You’re making progress—

It’s not very pleasant, is it?

I’m not brilliant, but I have so many friends even here. In the 1950s I could have been called the typical golden girl. Jane’s temper, Mary’s psychological problems, Cornelia’s issues with her mother, they get to be too much sometimes, but they’re all so self-centered that they don’t listen to each other, and so I’d feel useless if I didn’t listen. And there’s someone else here who needs me. It embarrasses me to say so; he’s passionate, and the things he says—

Who is it?

Your friend Isaac.

He smiled at that; he would have laughed but then his stomach would have hurt.

Does that offend you? she demanded. He said things to me that I wish you would have…

Which things? he asked, wearily pitying her.

If I told you, it wouldn’t be the same.

Things I should have said when?

When you were seventeen, of course. You don’t count now.

But I didn’t count then, either.

Your interpretation disturbed me at the time.

My interpretation of what? I—

Listen: I had sex with you not for some quest or even curiosity but because I enjoyed it, I really did! It was just the right place and the right time. I didn’t expect to find anything in what I did with you. I would have done it again if the opportunity arose. Actually I wouldn’t have, you know — not with you. You were too… But I certainly did it with others.

I know, Victoria. And do you remember them all?

Actually I didn’t sleep with as many people as you, so…

For an instant he could have been her age and coming closer, trembling with excitement, kissing her hard round breasts. Then he said: Victoria, I forget some things. It was awhile ago—

Of course you remember. Don’t you love me? Aren’t we seventeen?

Sure.

I’ll skip over the first part. From there on, your analysis is fairly correct. It’s a sad way to see me, though. I don’t see myself that way. I see myself as one shallow but interesting person in a slump, rotting away until she gets up enough nerve or disgust to rouse herself.

And go where?

Smiling slowly at him, knowing that he would be captivated, she replied: To the moon, of course!

You’re teasing me.

Maybe I am.

She parted her lips, and her pallid arms went up around his head like wind-whipped branches. When he sought to kiss her, he seemed to taste the cool breath of the ground.

So that was his last summer, summer vines growing as eagerly down into the sunlight as a certain seventeen-year-old poet had once imagined himself digging up his dead Victoria, while the lives of people he no longer knew streamed away through the evening, and his tumor blossomed with its own claim to life; he lacked the right to cut it short, lacking, indeed, much to live for, because Victoria had loved him only superficially and Luke was dead. Now he was entirely alone, in a world of water over muck and half-closed flowers, half-closed flowers of sorrow. Turning away from the evening sun to seek something for which he had no definition, some gleam in the blackish-green water between reeds, he cried out to himself: What did Luke teach me? Maybe he can save me. He…

But he used to tell Luke: You’re my best friend. — And Luke did not answer.

That mattered, but not sufficiently to ruin anything. Once he accustomed himself to the fact that Luke was his best friend but he was not, or not necessarily, Luke’s, he found the situation much easier than he had adoring the flittery Victoria when he was seventeen. For after all, Luke had steadily, loyally loved him. When his girlfriend Beatrice left him, Luke phoned every day, his love reaching like sunflowers. And perhaps Luke had known how to live, more than he had, or differently, or something. — Was Luke happy? — Not especially. So perhaps my life was not a failure, either. But what if it was? What would Luke say?

Luke was brave; he went away.

Isn’t Victoria brave, then? Or can’t she go away?

Returning to Mr. Murmuracki, he said: I’d like to visit Luke, if that’s possible.

Of course. He’s in the viewing room.

He asked himself: How could Luke have left me, when he was my best friend? But I wasn’t his, or at least he would never say so, and therefore I… — Tears rushed down his cheeks, because when Luke was still alive he had not told him enough how much he loved him. More than Victoria, and… The touch of his fingers against each other astonished him; he wasn’t yet dead! What should he be doing with the time?… Luke’s greatest failure as a friend was that he had nearly always said no. And his greatest failure to Luke was… Well, who was he, but a wispy ghost like Victoria, good for nothing but mist?

Do you remember the way, sir?

I think so.

Then go the other way. It’ll be your second left. By the way, Luke was a good man like your father. Take your time. I’ll be in my office.

The door opened by itself. The viewing room was darker than any moon crater. How he loved the sweet loneliness of the moon! As soon as he had seated himself, the velvet curtain rose. Through the ground glass he saw a rock-maze on a steel-blue plain of moonsand — which of course was not to say that the cemetery’s configuration could be overlaid upon some moon landscape. Now he seemed to be floating down a soft grey slope which shone with white boulders; he must be passing across the terminator. The moon was as rich as Victoria’s shoulders when she was seventeen and eighteen and thirty-six and a rotting ghost. The moon was lovely-black like the shadow side of a boulder.

He saw snow along the razor-ridges of a desert range, all grey and ocher-grey down the canyon-outlined mountain-triangles in that midday glare, and then along the sandy basin rose a narrow snout of red earth-monster, still for so long that it might not have been alive, concealing everything above its neck in a sprawl of honeycolored sandstone mounds. Luke and Raymond had gone that way, over the monster’s neck; and Raymond returned alone.

While he awaited them he felt that he could see time whole, as a rock with marvelous cracks. Every cleavage became a pattern or rune. It seemed to him that because the present travelled continually with him, it never ended, perhaps not even at death. This moment was ineradicable; therefore, so was he. It appeared that his present could never extinguish. Whether or not that was so, it scarcely mattered to him, although he did not know why it did not.

If anyone clambered up the moon-beast’s snout, it disguised itself by means of simple immensity, so that its scaly wrinkles become ravines, its deep folds canyons, its bristly pores chalky-green squiggles of saltbush. The lid of its cunningly shut eye was nothing but sand. One tramped like a fly across its rocky brow.

Upon a rock, another fly, a black one, busily drummed with all six legs, then gripped with two and kicked with two, like an apprentice swimmer holding onto the side of the pool, and finally rushed loudly away.

By late afternoon, the long chocolate-red beast was purplish-black: nearly as dark as the crow which flew over, and the lake-line was now dull and inconspicuous; the western mountains were reddish-purple, their crests, snow and triangles alike all going shades of blue; and suddenly time began again.

Then it came twilight, the time of desert colors. Raymond, as calm as if he were in his apron, with his magnifying goggles pulled down into place as he bent over the grinding wheel (every woodenheaded gouge in its place, flat edge up, the many pliers claws-up against the window), arrived and said: He stepped off the path.

Well, he wanted to go.

Raymond nodded. He was half retired, slowing down; soon he too would die.

They told Stephanie that Luke fell.

Now the moon-beast was below him, the lunar surface sweeping eternally toward and behind him, and the complete blackness of a white-rimmed crater passed beneath him, while far off to his left he saw a spaceship like a golden firefly hovering on its tail not very high above the violet-grey plain. Here came another crater; he remembered the smooth dark dimple in the moon of Victoria’s belly when she was seventeen. Thus all the moon lands, cold and white.

His father once bought him a set of compact binoculars, laughing with delight at the clarity of the lenses. The middle-aged son, who had never been able to see well or far, dully thanked him for the gift. He was grateful, but feared that his father had wasted money, for how could the son’s useless eyes ever be worthy? He nearly felt as if he had cheated his father. From time to time, and more so after his father’s death, he packed them along on his journeys, but frequently forgot to look through them. When he did remember to raise them to his tired eyes, he was not always certain what to zoom in on. It was always good to focus on a deer or a bear, of course; and at times they were capable of inciting in him the same pleasure he felt in handling a certain knurled chisel of Raymond’s. When he left them at home, he felt regretful, even guilty; how could he be so inconsiderate of his father?

(The reason that he had declined to use the witch’s green potion to bring back his father was this: He might bore his father. Surely his father was better off without him.)

There came a time when he returned the binoculars to one of the pigeonholes of his father’s desk, and left them there. Perhaps he was already getting sick by then. One night he dreamed that he took up the binoculars again and looked through them, only to discover that they were two grave-wells, except that one lens showed nothing but dirt and darkness while the other revealed, far down the black shaft, a silver sprinkling of stars.

If there could be a place where one desired nothing, by virtue either of eternally shining joy or of nothingness itself, then it must be (so he supposed) a place where one would no longer learn anything, and therefore evidently a place choked with dirt and darkness if not with distracting light; anything without an end to it sounded nauseating. In which of the two wells would it lie? And where would Victoria be? Although she never seemed to blame him for calling her up, and nearly every night told him some new tale of the quotidian, prairie dog life of the cemetery’s inhabitants, what if this spiderweb of other consciousnesses in which she seemed to exist were no more than the plausibly burrowing roots of one of those half-minute dreams which as we awake quickly grow down back into the past, so that for awhile we imagine that we dreamed for many hours? And why would she never tell him whether she had come from the dirt or the dark sky?

Now here in Mr. Murmuracki’s viewing room he seemed to see farther and better than he ever had — perhaps nearly as well as Luke once did. But Luke did not come.

All the same, he knew that Luke had loved him and was loyal.

He remembered Luke saying: What I want is to be free. I don’t want freedom from anything. I want freedom for everything.

At that time Luke was sitting in the kitchen, with a tear running down his face, because he was dying, and perhaps because he and Stephanie were not getting along.

When my neighbor awoke, he looked once more within the envelope which said amusing enclosures and Inside are pictures!!!!! and there behind the picture of her at the zoo was a new photograph of her which he had never before seen; she was nude and smiling at him, and she was a beautiful old woman. Her wrinkled white breasts hung down uncut by any surgeon, and her blonde hair had gone greyer than his. She stood stretching her hands to him. Her body was the white trunk of a flowering tree, growing out over its reflection in the brown-green water stained by the rainbow of mud-spirits beneath.

It was so humid in the light that he could barely breathe. As soon as he strode into the shade, he realized without comprehending it that the evening went on forever.

However that might have been, no summer goes on forever; and only a very few more nights swam by, like water-birds uplifting their lovely heads, until two culminations arose — one in regard to Victoria, of course, and the other having reference to his sickness. He passed some days in bed, terrified of being alone with his death; he would rather have been attacked by the ghoul-thing than lie in his bed; but he would rather have died alone than to return to the corporation which called itself his hospital; very early one morning the disease momentarily opened its claws, permitting him to dress and drive out behind the cemetery. First the fear lifted, then the sadness; no matter that neither would keep away from him long. Two blocks past the stoplight he pulled over, got out and leaned across the hood, vomiting easily and almost pleasantly, freeing himself. Then he returned to the driver’s seat, feeling not much weaker, and drove on, ignoring the cramp in his chest. There was a silver sheet of mist on the brown fields. Victoria must be sleeping by now. The upper edge of the mist kept rising up like spray, the mist itself creeping ever thicker and whiter beneath the orange sun, and now he passed Mr. Murmuracki’s establishment, following the stripe of white mist beneath the grey trees, the rising widening silver mane of mist. When he reached the edge of the swamp and parked, the lower half of the sun’s vermilion disk was darkened but not concealed by the mist. The air stung his nostrils. The reeds were silvered with dew, and a spiderweb cut with painful distinctness through the dawn fog. He strolled down into the murky dark, spiderwebs fingering his face, but already it was not dark anymore, the sun a ball of spiderwebs in the mist, the sparkling sunglow low through the dark trees. Here lay the long straight shadow of an oak tree across its own fallen leaves, which now glowed ever more red and coppery, as if they were metals heated from underground. The curlicues of oak leaves’ edges grew more definitive as the light increased, and he thought about Victoria, not that his thoughts converged on any conclusion — rather the opposite; for just as when the sun makes ray-shadows in widening diagonals down through the mist, bluish-dark and whitish-grey, thus his so-called thoughts spread out across the world, doubtless accomplishing deeds of inestimable value. All the summer’s cattail-down had now given way to spiderwebs. He began to feel unwell again. The line of shadow remained more than halfway up the reed-wall, but the sun was rising rapidly, so that tiny white droplets on the reeds suddenly came to life, as the sweat on Victoria’s face once did when he was kissing her passionately; and the many little fingers of certain oak leaves were already bleeding; soon those leaves would fall. A thick plinth of gold-lit grass rose up around the base of an oak from a plain of flattened grass which was still silvered by shadow and dew, and on that tree was a single gall, rosy in the light. The day looked to be as lovely as the slough’s scum, which was turquoise-green yet peculiarly reminded him of Victoria’s moist young skin, because the way it bore those flame-tongues of brighter yellow-green light where the morning sun reached it created an impression of resilient firmness. Around him rose the water-metal songs of birds. He pressed on as if he were going somewhere, emerging into the wet warm golden grass which was horizoned by the shadow of the railroad embankment, two spiderweb-suns glowing in midair, pallid insects and thistle-motes flitting across them like microplanetoids, the geese calling overhead, the sun comforting his tired neck.

Now he could never get enough of gazing down into the dark water, with its greenbladed stalks paling as they went deeper. He peered and studied as earnestly as if one could truly understand the difference between water and air, which one needed to comprehend in order to determine where the downgrowing reflections of reeds might truly be, if they were anywhere. He thought to spend hours, perhaps the rest of his life, watching these water-pictures, which lived more active lives than their tangible upward-growing shadows, for as the water trembled, or a fish-moon arose in their mist, they altered as their doubles could not.

Perhaps it was in this place beneath the flocks of crying geese that he should have sought Victoria all along, rather than in her grave; for wasn’t it merely the rotting part of her in the latter place, and isn’t a ghost necessarily unclean by being chained to its carrion? A ghost, perhaps, might claim otherwise; but in any event, here amidst the paling reeds seemed as close as he could ever get to the lost bright part of her, which if it had been anything like his (not that he knew) must have died long before the rest.

He felt very ill now. When he breathed, the stinging air seemed to ripple around his nostrils, as if he were lying on the bottom of one of those sloughs where the sky puddled across the ground like mercury, and dark water were streaming across his face as he gazed upward, never to know who or what might be lying in any of those blackly bright pools around him. — He said to himself: I need to take stock here, and…

Unlike most of his other friends, Luke had always been able to understand the benefit of doing inventory; and when he told Luke that he had discovered this or that thing or act which he could sell, Luke approved, understanding the meaning of labor. If Luke were here now, and preferably still possessed of his superb vision, which had deserted him in his early fifties, then some of this might get categorized and even saved — for instance, these young cattails lying down together, their necks broken, their heads heavy with dew. Luke would have known what to do. In this Raymond had resembled him, for what could be more organized than the many shelves around Raymond’s shop, and all his many cabinets, some with pull-out metal basins to catch shavings, wax dust and loose diamonds, and Raymond’s various lamps, his footrest drill, the chisels all in place? Once he had been alone at Raymond’s, the grinding wheel slowing down from a whir into a wheeze, and there had been silence, and before that, when he was seventeen, he was kissing Victoria, kissing her so greedily and gratefully; don’t let the grinding wheel slow down. So what would Luke have said? He would have pretended to say something else, disguising his advice as valueless. Shivering, either with fever or with emotion, he thought about his best friend’s death, and then Victoria’s, although it was not as if he thought, much less had “learned,” anything in particular about them, the dark little swallows rising on either side of him, the breeze refreshing yet somehow also hurting him, chilling his fevered face, his chest aching, a single monarch butterfly hanging on the tip of a reed, opening and closing its wings, jittering its antenna while the reed swayed in the breeze; and slowly, finally the insect expanded its wings. He thought about Victoria, his thoughts of her like dark swallows speeding away, the day resolving into reed-fingered sky-pools as his fever increased, and he glided over the grass. A fish snapped in the water. He sought to cool himself by touching a reed, whose chill stung his fingers and made him shiver without relieving him from burning. A half-torn formation of swallows swayed and twisted in the air until he grew nauseous. Wandering away from them, he forgot his own existence until the muck-perfume which he had been smelling since daybreak inexplicably called attention to itself, and he found the sun now high in a dark oak like a pure white gall. A dewdrop on a leaf twinkled whitely and vibrated. Sun-shards whitely cut the darknesses of various other leaves, while others were backlit entirely or in part, and many remained silhouetted. He could not understand any of this. Spills of sun-milk on the silver-red shadow-grass further baffled him. He vomited, although no blood came up. To pass here without even knowing why, in the tang of rot, the licorice of anise, as a meadowlark’s notes bubbled up through water which was in fact air, this was his reward for having once been seventeen. Luke was right. It was better off to die alone, passing in and out of the sun, and perhaps when it happened he would even be grateful. All of his experiences had become lovely reeds around him. Craving the shock of coldness from them, he took up another of Victoria’s long unread letters in his hands; he was standing over his father’s desk, struggling against another cramp in his belly; now he was lying on the bed, chewing up a handful of pills. Silver lichens and withered berries hung inside his eyelids. Victoria’s letter lay across his heart. After awhile the pills began to help him, and his sorrows sped away like morning swallows.

He lay on his back, his limbs as still as certain white bubbles on the black water; and now he allowed himself to remember his last meeting with Victoria.

Will you stay up all night talking with me? she had said. I feel so lonely.

I’ll try, if my stomach doesn’t bother me too much.

Don’t bother if you don’t want to; I don’t care.

I hope you do.

Well, I like the feeling that there’s someone here right next to me. That’s what I always wanted. It didn’t matter who it was. Don’t get hurt; I’d rather have you with me right now than almost anyone—

Who would you prefer? Your children?

No, not them. They’d feel too sad here.

Victoria, what would it be like if I came down to you?

I’d hate it; I couldn’t stretch out. That’s how I always used to feel in college when some man spent too many nights in my bed.

Well, when I die—

I’d hate it, I said!

Then what did you get married for?

Oh, I wanted children. And he was right for me — very soulful, more intelligent than you, generous, a little detached — although he later did become jealous, especially when I took up writing you at the end.

He loved you?

They all did, or thought they did.

You must have been good in bed.

I wasn’t totally sure about men at first. But after I realized I could fake anything, I did as I pleased. If they’d only known! But they gave me what I wanted and it was pretty easy to give them what they wanted, so I used them and never felt used.

Congratulations.

You never got to find out, but anyhow I was very good at it.

I’m glad, he said wearily. I did find out a little, since you and I—

Were you good at it?

Yes. Yes, I think so. I’ve gotten compliments—

Compliments don’t mean anything, Victoria informed him with a smile. They’re just something that women do.

Well, maybe some were more sincere than you.

Please, please don’t get irritated! We’re only chatting—

Were you ever my girlfriend?

Certainly not, the dead woman giggled.

I thought you were…

Listen. I keep telling you: Our physical encounters were very limited. I placed very little emphasis on them, but I came to see that you felt differently. You took them in their proper light, not as a game the way I did.

But since I took them in their proper light, then maybe—

I’ve never cared to feel obligated.

When you talk like that, I can’t decide whether I’m alone with you or just alone.

When we were seventeen, I used to think you never got irritated.

Victoria, how old are you?

Seventeen.

I’m your past, she said after awhile, but you’re almost nothing to me. Why am I saying this? What makes me so cruel? I don’t understand myself anymore.

You didn’t hurt me; I wish I could help you.

I believe in following my heart, even if it’s dead and rotten. Even when I don’t understand myself—

What do you mean?

I don’t know. I see your tumor shining.

What color is it now?

Green. It’s hurting you; you’d better go.

Will you allow me to visit you again?

Thank you for being a gentleman, said Victoria. Yes. I allow you.

Why can’t I make you feel better?

Nothing can change me! laughed the lovely seventeen-year-old girl, her tears shining silver in the moonlight.

I don’t believe that.

Do you want me to claim you?

Then what?

You just lost your chance. When you were seventeen you would have given yourself to me without any questions.

Victoria, you’re such a tease! Do you want me to claim you? I offered to dig you up and keep you in a flowerpot. Didn’t that happen to somebody’s head in the Decameron? But he was murdered. Well, so were you — by cancer…

I want you to lie down with me.

She reached toward him, and he saw moonlight in her eyesockets. He knew that he truly was almost nothing to her, just as had been the case when they were seventeen. All she had ever desired, perhaps, was a partner with whom she could play again at the game of life. So he hesitated. When he began to turn away from her, he felt cold between his shoulderblades, as if something evil might reach for him. But what could harm him now? Moreover, why should her aspirations be judged unworthy merely because he signified little to her? And who had she ever been to him? The girl to whom he had written those morbid poems had certainly not been Victoria, but his own figment. He rose up from her grave. She said nothing, but a cold foul gust blew up around him from behind, stinging and numbing his lips. Now the back of his neck began to tingle as if spiders scurried on it. Perhaps she was angry. What did anything matter? All his memories — of her, Luke, his life and even the moon — resembled midges streaming up out of the sweating grass: at intervals the cloud of them took on certain provisional shapes which might have meant something, whereas the solitary insect which he squashed against his cheek had been so arbitrarily itself that his interpretative apparatus could not distort it into anything. Admitting that his life had been as meaninglessly active as bright green sedges writhing in the river wind impelled him into a consoling valuation of meaninglessness. The women who had passed over him like cool river waves over greenish sand, and certainly Victoria herself, what had they signified — for what did anything, when no life could be seen whole and coherently except by something which outlived it? This thought, self-serving as it might have been, he swallowed like one of his pain pills. Returning to her, he knelt down again, expecting to surrender himself to the mercy of some unclean thing, but there was nobody.

Victoria, Victoria! he whispered.

Slowly then she oozed back out of her grave, her face sparkling with silvery tears. He bent down low to kiss her, and as he approached her face he grew overwhelmed again, as he had at seventeen, by its loveliness, with the long blonde hair flowing over the blurred skull in semblance of a waterfall photographed in a lengthy exposure so that the impression of droplets and foam was retained in a statistical sort of form although there was only white haze; she smiled at him, and her bone-claws reached up through the dirt to rest lightly upon the back of his head as she drew him down to her, her wormy mouth widening until he drowned in her face.

Close upon dawn, exhausted, joyful, sad and nauseous, he seated himself on Mrs. Emilia Woodruff’s headstone and said: Did you like it?

I found it very satisfying, thank you. But listening to the moon eats me up. Can you hear it?

No.

I shouldn’t scorn you for that, but I can’t help it. Does that hurt your feelings?

On the other side of Victoria’s grave, the ghoul lay on its belly with its arms and legs splayed like a lizard’s, and it watched him grinning and breathless. He felt something between pity and affection for the thing; doubtless they would soon become better acquainted. Perhaps it knew where treasure lay (another broken pot with tarnished ovoid coins).

Remembering Victoria’s question, he replied: Not anymore.

Then I won’t tell you what the moon says.

The ghoul fawned on him, grinning ever more widely until its rotting lips began to split. It smelled even worse than she. He said: Victoria, I’m not feeling good—

Well, you don’t have much longer. I’m grateful that you choose to spend so many nights with me.

And after I—

Will you please stay until sunrise?

If you want me to. Do you see that thing over there?

Don’t speak of it.

Maybe you don’t care…

No, I enjoy these conversations, she whispered. But I feel at a loss.

Why?

What you said to me last time, I cherished that, I really did. But I don’t know you!

What did I say?

Actually, right now I’m so bored and tired; I wish I could retreat farther down, deep down under the clay. I could…

You could what, Victoria? Victoria, is there something you’d like me to do?

Don’t come anymore. Now that we’ve—

All right.

Why did you agree so easily? I wanted you to say—

I won’t say it. As you reminded me, I don’t have much time left. If you want me to go, I—

I’m sorry; I get cruel when I’m bored.

Then shall I go?

She did not answer.

Smiling wearily at her, as if he were the dead one and she a child exciting herself with grief and anger over an imaginary injury to her favorite doll, he asked: Victoria, why are you that way?

What do you expect? I’m thirty-six going on seventeen.

He began to shiver; he was only feverish. Dawn came.

I don’t need anyone very much, she remarked. It’s a cold feeling, a feeling where I know I should be crying and I can’t.

Victoria, he said, I wish, I wish…

Well, goodbye, she said.

Bitterly he rose and turned his back on her. The sun was in his eyes.

In his last year, just before he declined to undergo surgery again, Luke had said: Sometimes I want something just because I used to want it. And if I think that through, then I don’t have to want it anymore.

He had doubly cheated his witch lover, firstly by not using the green liquid to call her back, and secondly by saving a few drops of it, just in case. Now that he had no use for it, he poured it idly and thoughtlessly upon the earth-eater’s grave. This is what he heard:

I can’t forget Mama and Papa going away. Dear Jesus, help me forget! Papa had his new top hat on.

They prayed over me and he stood up, and he was leaning on his cane as if he’d turned much older; I was always his favorite. Every time he sobbed in his throat, I thought my heart was beating. What was that hymn they sang? It used to be my favorite. Carry on the Calvary, but I disremember the rest. He was holding Cornelia’s hand; she was learning how to walk again, after her polio. And Mama had to keep telling Susie not to tease her. I don’t know why she didn’t just… Mama looked just like a black waterfall in her veil. And she turned her face away from me. Then they went walking together down that gravel path; I was hoping that Papa would look back at me, but he never did. He was too sad. The path’s gone and so are the trees.

Not a word came from Victoria’s grave. That was how it usually was when someone abandoned a lover. She had withdrawn from him absolutely. As for him, he was leaving her alone to be dead forever. When he died he would not see her. His stomach hurt. At the gate of the cemetery he wished to fall to his knees like a seventeen-year-old boy, but thought better of it — for now he felt angry with her for leaving him alone with the burden of life. Then he went home and unlocked his desk beneath the setting moon. All was silent. He took her letters in hand. They were very much out of order. The last one said: So that’s the bad news, but I won’t die. I’m getting aggressive chemotherapy. I’ll lose my hair. I just cut it really short. I’m still blonde. Something will grow back. I’ll live because I want to live. I’m doing everything I can to live.