Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

REVENANT

• • • • • • • • •

Reynolds bustles into the living room, carrying two pillows. An indeterminate number of years ago, those two pillows billowing upward from Rey’s encircling arms like two plump, inflatable breasts, soft but firm, would have suggested to Gavin the real breasts, equally soft but firm, that were hidden underneath. He might have hammered together a clever metaphor incorporating, for example, two sacks of feathers, and, by way of them, two sexually receptive chickens. Or possibly — because of the bounciness, the resilience, the rubberiness — two trampolines.

Now, however, these pillows recall — in addition to the breasts — an overdone avant-garde production of Richard the Third they’d seen in a park the previous summer. Reynolds made them go; she said it was good for Gavin to get out of his rut and be in the outdoors and expose himself to new concepts, and Gavin said he would rather just be in the outdoors and expose himself, and Rey nudged him playfully with her elbow and said, “Bad Gavvy!” It was one of her kittenish tropes to pretend that Gavin was a dysfunctional pet. Not so far from the truth, he thinks bitterly: he hasn’t yet taken to crapping on the carpet and destroying the furniture and whining for meals, but close.

On their expedition to the park, Reynolds took a packsack with a plastic sheet to sit on and a couple of car rugs in case Gavin got chilled, and two thermoses, one of hot cocoa and one containing vodka martinis. Her plan was transparent: if Gavin complained too much she would dose him with alcohol and cover him up with the car rugs and hope he’d go to sleep so she could immerse herself in the deathless bard.

The plastic sheet was a good idea, as it had rained in the afternoon and the grass was damp. Secretly hoping for more rain so he could go home, Gavin settled himself onto the car rug and complained that his knees hurt, and also he was hungry. Reynolds had foreseen both of these areas of disgruntlement: out came the RUB A535, with Antiphlogistene — one of Gavin’s favourite examples of meaningless words — and a salmon salad sandwich. “I can’t read the fucking program,” said Gavin, not that he wanted to. Rey handed him the flashlight, and also a magnifier. She’s up to most of his dodges.

“This is exciting!” she said in her best Miss Sunshine voice. “You’re going to enjoy it!” Gavin had a twinge of remorse: she has such a touching belief in his innate capacity to enjoy himself. He could do it if he tried, she claims: his problem is that he’s too negative. They’ve had this conversation more than once. He’ll reply that his problem is that the world reeks, so why doesn’t she stop trying to fix him and concentrate on that? And she will reply that reekiness is in the nose of the sniffer, or some other exercise in Kantean subjectivism — not that she’d know Kantean subjectivism if she fell over it — and why doesn’t he take up Buddhist meditation?

And Pilates, she’s strongly urging Pilates. She’s already lined up a girl Pilates instructor who’s willing to give him private sessions, contrary to her usual practice, because she admires his work. This idea is dismaying: having some estrogen-plumped babe a quarter of his age contort his stringy, knobbled limbs while comparing the dashing protagonist of his earlier poems, replete with sexual alacrity and sardonic wit, to the atrophied bundle of twine and sticks he has become. Look on this picture, then on this. Why is Reynolds so keen to hook him up to the Pilates torture apparatus and stretch him upon it until he snaps like an outworn rubber band? She wants to know he’s suffering. She wants to humiliate him and feel virtuous about it at the same time.

“Stop trying to pimp me out to all these groupies,” he tells her. “Why don’t you simply rope me into a chair and charge admission?”

The park was pullulating with activity. Kids played Frisbee in the background, babies yowled, dogs barked. Gavin pored over the program notes. Pretentious crap, as usual. The play was late starting: some spasm in the lighting system, they were told. The mosquitoes were gathering; Gavin swatted at them; Reynolds produced the Deep Woods Off. Some fool in a scarlet unitard and pig’s ears blew a trumpet to get them all to shut up, and after a minor explosion and a figure in a ruff sprinting off in the direction of the refreshment kiosk — In search of what? What had they forgotten? — the play began.

There was a prelude showing a film clip of Richard the Third’s skeleton being dug up from underneath a parking lot — an event that had in fact taken place, Gavin saw it on the television news. It was Richard all right, complete with DNA evidence and many injuries to the skull. The prelude was projected onto a piece of white fabric that looked like a bedsheet, and probably was one — arts budgets being what they were, as Gavin commented to Reynolds, sotto voce. Reynolds dug him with her elbow. “Your voice is louder than you think,” she whispered.

The soundtrack led them to understand — over a crackling loudspeaker and in lousy iambic pentameter Elizabethan pastiche — that the entire drama they were about to see was unfolding post-mortem from inside Richard’s battered skull. Zoom to an eyehole in the skull, and then right on through it to the inside of the cranium. And blackout.

Whereupon the bedsheet was whisked away and there was Richard in the floodlights, all set to caper and posture, to flounce and denounce. On his back was a preposterously large hump, decorated in a jester’s red and yellow stripes — like Mr. Punch, the program notes had explained, who himself was derived from Punchinello; for the director’s vision was that Shakespeare’s Richard was modelled on commedia dell’arte, a troupe of which had been playing in England at the time. The largeness of the hump was deliberate: the inner core of the play (“As opposed to the outer core,” Gavin had snorted to himself) was all about the props. These were symbols of Richard’s unconscious, which accounted for their enlargement. The director’s thinking must have been that if the audience members were staring at outsized thrones and humps and whatnot and wondering what the fuck they were doing in this play, it wouldn’t bother them so much that they couldn’t hear the words.

So in addition to his gigantic, varicoloured, metonymous hump, Richard had a kingly robe with a sixteen-foot-long train attached to it, carried by two pageboys wearing outsized boar’s heads because Richard’s coat of arms had a boar on it. There was a huge butt of malmsey for Clarence to be drowned in and a couple of swords that were as tall as the actors. For the smothering of the princes in the Tower, performed in dumb show like the play within the play in Hamlet, two enormous pillows were borne in on stretchers like corpses or roasted suckling pigs, with pillowcases that matched the motley of Richard’s hump, just in case the audience missed the point.

Death by hump, thinks Gavin, eyeing the approaching pillows borne towards him by Reynolds. What a fate. And Reynolds as First Murderer. But that would be fitting, all things considered; and Gavin does consider all things. He’s got the time for it.

“Are you awake?” says Reynolds brightly as she clacks across the floor. She’s wearing a black pullover with a silver and turquoise belt cinched around her waist and tight jeans. She’s getting a little flubber on the outsides of her thighs, which otherwise have the heft and contours of a speed skater’s. Should he point out those pockets of flubber? No; better to hold them back for a more strategic moment. And maybe it isn’t flubber, maybe it’s muscle. She works out enough.

“If I wasn’t awake before, I would be now,” says Gavin. “You sound like a wooden railroad.” He dislikes those clogs, and he’s told her so. They do nothing for her legs. But she doesn’t care what he thinks about her legs as much as she used to. She says the clogs are comfortable, and that comfort trumps fashion as far as she’s concerned. Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds — who used to be a passionate Yeats fan — is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were different, and in actual fact Yeats is dead.

Reynolds tucks the pillows in behind Gavin, one behind his head, one at the small of his back. This pillow arrangement, she claims, makes him look taller and therefore more impressive. She straightens the plaid car rug that covers his legs and feet, and which she insists on calling his nap blanket. “Oh, Mr. Grumpy!” she says. “Where’s your smile?”

She’s taken to renaming him according to her own analysis of his mood of the day, or his mood of the hour, or his mood of the minute: according to her, he’s moody. Each mood is personified and given an honorific, so he’s Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Sleepy, Dr. Ironic, Sir Sardonic, and sometimes, when she’s being sarcastic or possibly nostalgic, Mr. Romantic. A while back she used to call his penis Mr. Wiggly, but she’s given up on that, and on her attempts to revive his non-existent libido with unguents and sex jellies that taste of strawberry jam and invigorating ginger lemon and toothpaste mint. There was also an adventure with a hair dryer that he would prefer to forget. “It’s quarter to four,” she continues. “Let’s get ready for our company!” Next will come the hairbrush — that’s one thing he’s managed to hold on to, his hair — and then the lint brush. Dog-like, he sheds.

“Who is it this time?” says Gavin.

“A very nice woman,” says Reynolds. “A nice girl. A graduate student. She’s doing her thesis on your work.” She herself had once been doing her thesis on his work: that had been his downfall. It had been very seductive to him, then, to have an attractive young woman paying such concentrated attention to his every adjective.

Gavin groans. “Thesis on my fucking work,” he says. “Christ defend us!”

“Now, Mr. Profanity,” says Reynolds. “Don’t be so mean.”

“What the fuck is this learned scholar doing in Florida?” says Gavin. “She must be a moron.”

“Florida’s not the hick town you keep saying it is,” says Reynolds. “Times have changed; they’ve got good universities now and a great book festival! Thousands of people come to it!”

“Fan-fucking-tastic. I’m impressed,” says Gavin.

“Anyway,” says Reynolds, ignoring him, “she isn’t from Florida. She’s flown in from Iowa just to interview you! People all over are doing work on your work, you know.”

“Iowa, fuck,” says Gavin. Work on your work. Sometimes she talks like a five-year-old.

Reynolds gets going with the lint brush. She attacks his shoulders, then takes a playful swipe in the direction of his crotch. “Let’s see if there’s any lint on Mr. Wiggly!” she says.

“Keep your lustful claws off my private parts,” says Gavin. He feels like saying that of course there’s lint on Mr. Wiggly, or dust at any rate, or maybe rust; what does she expect, because as she is well aware Mr. Wiggly has been on the shelf for some time. But he refrains.

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use, he thinks. Tennyson. Ulysses sets out on his last voyage, lucky him, at least he’ll sink with his boots on. Not that Greeks wore boots. One of the first poems Gavin had to memorize in school; he turned out to be good at memorizing. Shameful to admit, but that’s what turned him on to poetry: Tennyson, an outmoded Victorian windbag, writing about an old man. Things have a habit of coming full circle: a bad habit, to his mind.

“Mr. Wiggly likes my lustful claws,” says Reynolds. How gallant of her to put that in the present tense. It used to be a game of theirs — that Reynolds was the seductress, the dominatrix, the femme fatale, and he was her passive victim. She’d seemed to enjoy that scenario, so he went along. Now it’s no longer a game; none of the old games work. It would only make both of them sad to attempt to revive them.

This isn’t what she signed up for when she married him. She most likely envisioned a fascinating life, filled with glamorous, creative people and stimulating intellectual chit-chat. And that did happen some, when they were first married; that, and the flare-up of his still active hormones. The last kaboom of the firecracker before it fizzled; but now she’s stuck with the burnt-out aftermath. In his more lenient moments, he feels sorry for her.

She must be finding consolation elsewhere. He would if he was her. What does she really do when she goes out to her spinning classes or off to her so-called dancing evenings with her so-called girlfriends? He can imagine, and does. Such imaginings once bothered him, but now he contemplates Reynolds’s possible transgressions — not only possible, but almost certain — with clinical detachment. She’s surely entitled to some of that: she’s thirty years younger than him. He probably has more horns on his head — as the bard would say — than a hundred-headed snail.

Serves him right for marrying a youngster. Serves him right for marrying three of them in a row. Serves him right for marrying his graduate students. Serves him right for marrying a bossy, self-appointed custodian of his life and times. Serves him right for marrying.

But at least Reynolds won’t leave him, he’s fairly certain of that. She’s polishing up her widow act; she wouldn’t want it to go to waste. She’s so competitive that she’ll hang in there to make sure neither of the two previous wives can lay claim to any part of him, literary or otherwise. She’ll want to control his narrative, she’ll want to help write the biography, if any. She’ll also want to cut out his two children — one from each ex-wife, and hardly children any longer, since one of them must be fifty-one, or maybe fifty-two. He hadn’t paid much attention to them when they were babies. They and their pastel, urine-soaked paraphernalia had taken up so much space, they’d attracted so much attention that ought to have been his, and he’d decamped in each case before they were three; so they don’t like him much, nor does he blame them, having hated his own father. Nevertheless there’s sure to be some squabbling after the funeral: he’s making sure of that by not finalizing his will. If only he could hover around in mid-air to watch!

Reynolds gives him a final stroke with the lint brush, does up his second-from-the-top shirt button, tugs his collar into place. “There,” she says. “Much better.”

“Who is this girl?” he says. “This girl who’s so interested in my so-called work. Got a cute butt?”

“Stop that,” says Reynolds. “Your whole generation was obsessed with sex. Mailer, Updike, Roth — all of those guys.”

“They were older than me,” says Gavin.

“Not much. It was sex, sex, sex with them, all the time! They couldn’t keep it zipped!”

“Your point being?” says Gavin coolly. He’s relishing this. “Is that bad, sex? Are you a little prude all of a sudden? What else should we have been obsessed with? Shopping?”

“My point being,” says Reynolds. She has to pause, reconsider, rally her inner battalions. “Okay, shopping is a poor substitute for sex, granted. But faut de mieux.”

That hurts, thinks Gavin. “Faut de what?” he says.

“Don’t play dumb, you understood me. My point being, not everything is about butts. This woman’s name is Naveena. She deserves to be treated with respect. She’s already published two papers on the Riverboat years. She happens to be very bright. I believe she’s of Indian extraction.”

Of Indian extraction. Where does she pick up these archaic locutions? When she’s trying to be properly literary she talks like a comic lady in an Oscar Wilde play. “Naveena,” he says. “Sounds like cheese food slices. Or better — like a hair-removal cream.”

“You don’t have to disparage people,” says Reynolds, who used to dote on the fact that he disparaged people, or at least some people; she’d thought it meant that he had a superior intellect and an informed taste. Now she thinks it’s merely nasty, or else a symptom of a vitamin deficiency. “It’s so knee-jerk with you! Running them down doesn’t make you any bigger, you know. Naveena happens to be a serious literary scholar. She has an M.A.”

“And a cute butt, or else I’m not talking to her,” says Gavin. “Every halfwit has an M.A. They’re like popcorn.” He puts Reynolds through this every time — every time she trots out some new aficionado, some new aspirant, some new slave from the salt mines of academe — because he has to put her through something.

“Popcorn?” says Reynolds. Gavin flounders momentarily — now what did he mean by that? He takes a breath. “Tiny little kernels,” he says. “Superheated in the academic cooker. The hot air expands. Poof! An M.A.” Not bad, he thinks. Also true. The universities want the cash, so they lure these kids in. Then they turn them into puffballs of inflated starch, with no jobs to match. Better to have a certificate in plumbing.

Rey laughs, a little sourly: she has an M.A. herself. Then she frowns. “You should be grateful,” she says. Here comes the scolding, the whack with the rolled-up newspaper. Bad Gavvy! “At least someone’s still interested in you! A young person! Some poets would kill for that. The ’60s is hot right now, happily for you. So you can’t complain of being neglected.”

“Since when have I done that?” he says. “I never complain!”

“You complain all the time, about everything,” says Reynolds. She’s reaching the fed-up moment; he shouldn’t take it any further. But he does.

“I should have married Constance,” he says. That’s his ace: plonk! Right down on the table. Those five words are usually very effective: he might score a barrage of hostility, and maybe even some tears. Top marks: a slammed door. Or a projectile. She winged him with an ashtray once.

Reynolds smiles. “Well, you didn’t marry Constance,” she said. “You married me. So suck it up.”

Gavin misses a beat. She’s playing impervious. “Oh, if only I could,” he says, with exaggerated longing.

“Dentures are no impediment,” says Reynolds crisply. She can be a bitch when he pushes her too far. The bitchiness is a thing he admires in her, though reluctantly when it’s turned on him. “Now I’m going to get the tea ready. If you don’t behave yourself when Naveena comes, you won’t get a cookie.” The cookie ploy is a joke, her attempt to lighten things up, but it’s faintly horrifying to him that the threat of being deprived of such a cookie hits home. No cookie! A wave of desolation sweeps through him. Also he’s drooling. Christ. Has it come down to this? Sitting up to beg for treats?

Reynolds marches out to the kitchen, leaving Gavin alone on the sofa gazing at the view, such as it is. There’s a blue sky, there’s a picture window. The window gives onto a fenced enclosure in which there’s a palm tree. Also a jacaranda, or is it a frangipani? He wouldn’t know, they only rent this house.

There’s a swimming pool that he never uses, although it’s heated. Reynolds plunges into it occasionally before he wakes up in the morning, or so she says: she likes to flaunt such examples of her physical agility. Leaves fall into the pool from the jacaranda or whatever it is, and also spiky prongs from the palm. They float around on the surface, swirling in the slow eddy caused by the circulation pump. A girl comes by three times a week and skims them out with a net on a long handle. Her name is Maria; she’s a high school student; she’s included in the rent. She lets herself in through the garden gate with a key and moves over the tiled and slippery patio noiselessly on rubber soles. She has long dark hair and a lovely waist, and may possibly be Mexican; Gavin doesn’t know because he’s never spoken to her. She always wears shorts, light blue denim or darker blue denim, and she bends over in her denim shorts while skimming out the leaves. Her face, when he’s able to see it, is impassive, though verging on the solemn.

Oh Maria, he sighs to himself. Are there troubles in your life? If not, there soon will be. What a trim ass you have. All the better to wig and wag.

Does she ever see him watching her through the picture window? Most likely. Does she think he’s a lecherous old man? Very probably. But he isn’t exactly that. How to convey the mix of longing, wistfulness, and muted regret that he feels? His regret is that he isn’t a lecherous old man, but he wishes he were. He wishes he still could be. How to describe the deliciousness of ice cream when you can no longer taste it?

He’s writing a poem that begins, “Maria skims the dying leaves.” Though technically speaking the leaves are already dead.

The doorbell rings, and Reynolds clatters into the hall. There are female greeting sounds from the entranceway, that cooing and come-inning and pigeon oodle-ooing that women do nowadays. They’re going over each other with the woo-woo ooo sounds as if they’re best friends, though they’ve never met. The contact was through email, which Gavin despises. He should not have despised it, however: handing over control of his correspondence to Reynolds has been a mistake, because it’s given her the keys to the kingdom: she’s now the gatekeeper to the Kingdom of Gavin. Nobody gets in unless she says so.

“He’s just been having a nap,” says Reynolds, using that mock-reverential tone she slides into when about to display him to third parties. “Would you like a peek at his study first? Where he does his writing?”

“Oh, ooodle-oo,” says the voice of Naveena, which must indicate delight. “If it’s all right.” Clickety-click down the corridor go their two pairs of shod feet.

“He can’t write on a computer,” Reynolds is saying. “He has to use a pencil. He says it’s a hand-eye thing.”

“Awesome,” says Naveena.

Gavin hates his study with a rancorous hatred. He hates this study — which is only a temporary one — but especially he hates his real study, back in British Columbia. It was designed for him by Reynolds, and has quotations from his most-anthologized poems stencilled on its kidney-coloured walls in white paint; so he has to sit in there surrounded by monuments of his own decaying magnificence while all around him the air is thick with shreds and tatters of the stellar poetic masterpieces he’d once revered: the shards of well-wrought urns, the broken echoes of other men’s wit and scope.

Reynolds tends both of his studies as if they’re shrines and he their graven image. She makes a production of sharpening his pencils and blocking all phone calls and shutting him in there. Then she tiptoes around outside as if he’s on life support, and then he can’t write a word. He can’t spin straw into gold, not in that mausoleum of a study: Rumpelstiltskin, the malicious dwarf who’s the most likely shape of his Muse these days — tardy Rumpelstiltskin never shows up. Then it will be lunchtime, and Reynolds will gaze at him hopefully across the table and say, “Anything new?” She’s so proud of how she protects his privacy, and fosters his communion with his own poetic juices, and enables what she calls his “creative time.” He doesn’t have the heart to tell her he’s dry as a bone.

He needs to get out, out of here; at least outside the study, the two studies, with their arid scent of embalmed pages. In the ’60s, when he was living with Constance in that cramped, sultry steam bath of a room where they stewed like prunes, back when they had no money and he certainly had no la-de-dah study, he could write anywhere — in bars, in fast-food joints, in coffee shops — and the words would flow out of him and through the pencil or the ballpoint onto anything flat and handy. Envelopes, paper napkins; a cliché, granted, but it was true all the same.

How to get back there? How to get that back?

Clickety-click, heading in his direction. “Right through here,” says Reynolds.

Naveena is ushered into the living room. She’s a beautiful little creature, practically a child. Big, shy dark eyes. She has earrings in the shape of octopuses, or octopi. You’ve got seafood on your ears, he might begin if he was intending to pick her up in a bar, but he doesn’t try that now. “Oh, please don’t get up,” she says, but Gavin makes a show of hauling himself to his feet so he can shake her hand. He holds it — deliberately — a little too long.

Then the pillows must be rearranged by Reynolds, doing her competent-nurse act. What would happen if Gavin were to grab the black-pullovered tit that’s being thrust into his eye and use it as a lever to flip Reynolds over onto her back like a turtle? A jolly thriving wooer. Screaming, recriminations, the Saran Wrap ripped off their bowl of marital leftovers, in front of a galvanized audience of one. Would that kind of uproar get him out of this bush-league interview?

But he doesn’t want to get out of it, not yet. Sometimes he enjoys these ordeals. He enjoys saying he can’t remember writing that piece of word salad, whatever it may be; he enjoys blowing off the poems these sentimental kids produce as their favourites. Crap, drivel, trash! He enjoys telling tales on his erstwhile poet buddies, his erstwhile rivals. Most of them are dead, so no harm done. Not that harm done would stop him.

Rey inserts Naveena into the easy chair where she can get a full frontal view of him. “It’s such an honour to meet you,” she says, deferentially enough. “This is nerdy, but I feel as if I, like. . as if I kind of actually know you. I guess it’s because of studying your work, and everything.” She may be of Indian extraction, but the voice is pure Midwest.

“Then you have the advantage of me,” says Gavin. He leers like a troll: it can throw them off their stride, that leer of his.

“Pardon?” says Naveena.

“He means that although you know a lot about him, he doesn’t know anything about you,” says Reynolds, interposing herself as usual. She casts herself as his interpreter; as if he’s an oracle, spouting gnomic sayings that only the high priestess can decipher. “So why don’t you tell him what you’re working on? What part of his work? I’ll go and make us some tea.”

“I’m all ears,” says Gavin, holding his leer.

“Don’t bite her,” says Reynolds with a parting twitch of her tight jeans. Good exit line: the possibility of biting, so double-edged, so vague as to location and intent, hovers in the air like an aroma. Where would he begin, if biting was on offer? A gentle nibbling at the nape of the neck?

It’s no use. Even this prospect fails to stir him. He stifles a yawn.

Naveena fidgets with a miniature gadget that she then places on the coffee table in front of him. She’s wearing a miniskirt that rides up over her knees — displaying patterned stockings like lace window curtains dyed black — and also painfully high-heeled boots with metal studs. It makes Gavin’s feet hurt to look at the boots. Surely her toes must be squashed into wedges, like bound Chinese feet in sepia photos. Those deformed feet were a sexual turn-on, or so Gavin has read. Guys would slide their Mr. Wigglies into the moist orifice formed by the recurved, stunted toes. He can’t see it himself.

She’s wearing her hair in a bun, like a ballerina’s. Buns are so sexy. They used to be a treat to take apart: it was like opening a gift. Heads with the hair pulled back into buns are so elegant and confined, so maidenish; then the undoing, the dishevelment, the wildness of the freed hair, spilling down the shoulders, over the breasts, over the pillow. He enumerates in his head: Buns I have known.

Constance did not have a bun. She didn’t need one. She more or less was a bun: neat and contained, and then so tumultuous when unleashed. His first live-in, Eve to his Adam. Nothing could ever replace that. He remembers the ache of waiting for her in their cramped, stuffy Eden with the hotplate and the electric kettle. She would come in through the door with that supple but luscious body of hers and the remote, contradictory head on top, her face pale as a waning moon, with the floss of her light hair escaping from around it like rays, and he would enfold her in his arms and sink his teeth into her neck.

Not into, not in actuality; but he’d feel like doing that. Partly because he was always hungry then, and she’d smell of Snuffy’s fried chicken. And because she adored him, she would melt like warm honey. She was so pliable. He could do anything with her, arrange her as he pleased, and she would say yes. Not just yes. Oh yes!

Has he ever been adored like that since, purely adored, with no ulterior motives? Because he wasn’t famous then, not even famous with the moderate in-group fame accorded to poets. He hadn’t won anything, any prizes; he hadn’t published any thin, meritorious, envied collections. He had the freedom of a nobody, with a blank future unrolling before him on which anything at all might be written. She’d adored him only for himself. His inner core.

“I could eat you all up,” he’d say to her. Mmm, mmm. Rrrr, rrrr. Oh yes!

“Excuse me?” says Naveena.

He snaps back into the present. Was he making a noise? A yum-yummy noise, a growling noise? And if so, so what? He’s earned his noises. He’ll make all the noises he wants.

But soft you, the fair Naveena. Nymph, in thy glossaries be all my puns remembered. Some more practical remark is called for.

“Are those boots comfortable?” he says cordially. Best to ease into this: let her talk about something she knows, such as boots, because pretty soon she’ll be in over her depth.

“What?” says Naveena, startled. “Boots?” Is that a blush?

“Don’t they pinch your toes?” he says. “They look very fashionable, but how can you walk?” He would like to ask her to get up and prance across the room — it’s one of the functions of high heels to tilt the woman’s pelvis so that her butt curves out behind and her tits thrust forward, lending her the serpentine curve of beauty — but he won’t ask her to do that. She is after all a total stranger.

“Oh,” says Naveena. “These. Yes, they’re comfortable, though maybe I shouldn’t wear them when there’s ice on the sidewalks.”

“There isn’t any ice on the sidewalks,” says Gavin. Not too bright, this nymph.

“Oh no, not here,” she says. “I mean, it’s Florida, right? I meant back home.” She giggles nervously. “Ice.”

Gavin, watching the television weather, has noted with interest the polar vortex gripping the north, the east, the centre. He’s seen the pictures of the blizzards, the ice storms, the overturned cars and broken trees. That’s where Constance must be right now: in the eye of the storm. He imagines her holding out her arms to him, clothed in nothing but snow, with an unearthly radiance streaming out from around her. His lady of the moonglow. He’s forgotten why they broke up. It was a trivial thing; nothing that should have mattered to her. Some other woman he’d gone to bed with. Melanie, Megan, Marjorie? It wasn’t really anything, the woman had practically jumped on him out of a tree. He’d tried to explain that to Constance, but she hadn’t understood his predicament.

Why couldn’t the two of them have gone on and on forever? Himself and Constance, sun and moon, each one of them shining, though in different ways. Instead of which he’s here, forsaken by her, abandoned. In time, which fails to sustain him. In space, which fails to cradle him.

“Florida. Yes? What’s your point?” he says, too sharply. What was this Naveena nattering on about?

“There isn’t any ice here,” she says in a small voice.

“Right, of course, but you’re going back soon,” he says. He must show her that he isn’t drifting away, losing the plot. “Back to — where is it? Indiana? Idaho? Iowa? Lots of ice there! So if you do fall, don’t put out your hand,” he says, assuming an instructive and fatherly tone. “Try to hit with your shoulder. That way you won’t break your wrist.”

“Oh,” says Naveena again. “Thank you.” There’s an awkward pause. “Could we maybe talk about you?” she says. “And, you know, your, well, your work — when you were doing your early work. I’ve got my tape recorder; can I turn it on? And I brought some video clips we could maybe watch, and you could tell me about the, about who, about the context. If you wouldn’t mind.”

“Fire away,” he says, settling back. Where the crap is Reynolds? Where’s his tea? And the cookie: he’s earned it.

“Okay, so, what I’m working on is, well, kind of the Riverboat years. The mid-’60s. When you wrote that sequence called Sonnets for My Lady.” She’s setting up some other technical doodad now: one of those tablets. Reynolds has just bought a green one. Naveena’s is red, with a cunning triangular stand.

Gavin puts his hand in front of his eyes in mock embarrassment. “Don’t remind me,” he says. “Sonnets — that was apprentice work. Flabby, amateur garbage. I was only twenty-six. Can’t we move on to something more substantial?” In point of fact those sonnets were noteworthy, first of all because they were sonnets in name only — how daring of him! — and secondly because they broke new ground and pushed the boundaries of language. Or so it said on the back of the book. In any case, that book snagged his first-ever prize. He’d pretended to view it with indifference, even disdain — what were prizes but one more level of control imposed on Art by the establishment? — but he’d cashed the cheque.

“Keats died when he was twenty-six,” Naveena says severely, “and look what he accomplished!” A rebuke, a palpable rebuke! How dare she? He was already middle-aged when she was born! He could have been her father! He could have been her child molester!

“Byron called Keats’s stuff ‘Johnny-wet-your-bed poetry,’” he says.

“I know, right?” says Naveena. “I guess he was jealous. Anyway, those sonnets are great! ‘My lady’s mouth on me’. . It’s so simple, it’s so sweet and direct.” She doesn’t seem to realize that the subject is a blowjob. Very different from “My lady’s mouth on mine”: back then, “me” in such a context was a disguised reference to “cock.” The first time Reynolds read that mouth line she laughed out loud: no such pure-mindedness in his very own festering lily.

“So you’re working on the ‘Lady’ sonnets,” he says. “Let me know if there are any points you’d like me to elucidate for you. Something from the horse’s mouth, to flesh out your thesis. As it were.”

“Well, it’s not exactly them I’m working on,” she says. “They’ve been done quite a lot.” She looks down at the coffee table; now she’s blushing in earnest. “As a matter of fact, I’m doing my thesis on C. W. Starr. You know, Constance Starr, though I realize that Starr wasn’t her real name — on her Alphinland series, and, well, you knew her at that time. At the Riverboat, and all of that.”

Gavin feels as if cold mercury has been poured through his veins. Who let this creature in? This defacer, this violator! Reynolds, that’s who. Was treacherous Reynolds aware of the harpy’s true mission? If so, he’ll pull out her molars.

But he’s cornered. He can’t pretend this matters to him — to be cast as a mere secondary source in the main action, the main action being Constance. Constance the fluffball, with her idiotic gnome stories. Constance the flake. Constance the bubblehead. To show anger would be to reveal his soft underbelly, to pile more humiliation upon the primary humiliation. “Oh yes.” He laughs indulgently, as if recalling a joke. “And all of that is right! So much all, and so much that! It was all and that from morning to night! But I had the stamina for it then.”

“Excuse me?” says Naveena. Her eyes are shining: she’s getting some of the blood she came for. But she won’t get all of it.

“My dear child,” says Gavin. “Constance and I lived together. We shacked up. It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. And though that age hadn’t fully dawned, we were very busy all the same. We spent a lot more time taking our clothes off than putting them on. She was. . amazing.” He allows himself a reminiscent smile. “But don’t tell me you’re doing serious academic work on Constance! What she wrote wasn’t in any way. .”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I am,” says Naveena. “It’s an in-depth examination of the function of symbolism versus neo-representationalism in the process of world-building, which can be studied so much more effectively through the fantasy genres than in its more disguised forms in so-called realistic fiction. Wouldn’t you say?”

Reynolds clacks in, carrying a tray. “Here’s our tea!” she announces, in the nick of time. Gavin can feel the blood pounding in his temples. What the fuck was Naveena just saying?

“What kind of cookies?” he says, to put neo-representationalism in its place.

“Chocolate chip,” says Reynolds. “Did Naveena show you the video clips yet? They’re fascinating! She sent them to me in a Dropbox.” She sits down beside him and begins to pour out the tea.

Dropbox. What is it? Nothing comes to mind but an indoor cat-poo station. But he won’t ask.

“This is the first one,” says Naveena. “The Riverboat, around 1965.”

It’s an ambush, it’s a betrayal. However, Gavin cannot choose but look. It’s like being drawn into a time tunnel: the centrifugal force is irresistible.

The film is grainy, black and white; there’s no sound. The camera pans around the room: some amateur starfucker, or was this shot for an early documentary? That must be Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee onstage, and is that Sylvia Tyson? A couple of his fellow poets of those days, hanging out at one of the tables, in their period haircuts, their downy, defiant, optimistic beards. So many of them dead by now.

And there he is himself, with Constance beside him. No beard, but he’s got a cigarette dangling out of his mouth and an arm casually draped around Constance. He isn’t looking at her, he’s looking at the stage. She’s looking at him, though. She was always looking at him. They’re so sweet, the two of them; so unscarred, so filled with energy then, and hope; like children. So unaware of the winds of fate that were soon to sweep them apart. He wants to cry.

“She must be tired,” says Reynolds, with satisfaction. “Check out those bags under her eyes. Big dark circles. She must be really whipped.”

“Tired?” says Gavin. He never thought of Constance as being tired.

“Well, I guess she would be tired,” says Naveena. “Think of all she was writing then! It was epic! She practically created the whole Alphinland ground plan, in such a short time! Plus she had that job, with the fried-chicken place.”

“She never said she was tired,” says Gavin, because the two of them are staring at him with what might possibly be reproach. “She had a lot of stamina.”

“She wrote to you about it,” says Naveena. “About being tired. Though she said she was never too tired for you! She said you should always wake her up, no matter how late you came in. She wrote that down! I guess she was really in love with you. It’s so endearing.”

Gavin’s confused. Wrote to him? He doesn’t remember that. “Why would she write me letters?” he says. “We were living in the same place.”

“She wrote notes to you in this journal she had,” says Naveena, “and she’d leave it for you on the table because you always slept in, but she had to go to her job, and then you would read the notes. And then you would write notes back to her that way, underneath hers. It had a black cover, it’s the same sort of journal she used for the Alphinland lists and maps. There’s a different page for every day. Don’t you remember?”

“Oh, that,” says Gavin. He has a dim recollection. Mostly he can remember the radiance of those mornings, after a night with Constance. The first coffee, the first cigarette, the first lines of the first poem, appearing as if by magic. Most of those poems were keepers. “Yes, vaguely. How did you get hold of that?”

“It was in your papers,” says Naveena. “The journal. The University of Austin has the papers. You sold them. Remember?”

“I sold my papers?” says Gavin. “Which papers?” He’s drawn a blank, one of those gaps that appears in his memory from time to time like a tear in a spiderweb. He can’t recall doing any such thing.

“Well, technically I sold them,” says Reynolds. “I made the arrangements. You asked me to take care of it for you. It was when you were working on the Odyssey translation. He gets so immersed,” she says to Naveena. “When he’s working. He’d even forget to eat if I didn’t feed him!”

“I know, right?” says Naveena. The two of them exchange a conspiratorial look: Genius must be humoured. That, thinks Gavin, is the kindlier translation: Old poops must be lied to would be the other.

“Now let’s see the other clip,” says Rey, leaning forward. Mercy, Gavin pleads with her silently. I’m on the ropes. This teen princess is wearing me down. I don’t know what she’s talking about! Bring it to an end!

“I’m tired,” he says, but not loudly enough, it seems: the two of them have their agenda.

“It’s an interview,” says Naveena. “From a few years ago. It’s up on YouTube.” She clicks on the arrow and the video starts to play, this time with colour and sound. “It’s at the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto.”

Gavin watches with mounting horror. A wispy old woman is being interviewed by a man dressed in a Star Trek outfit: a purple complexion, a gigantic veined skull. A Klingon, Gavin supposes. Though he doesn’t know much about this cluster of memes, his poetry workshop students used to attempt to enlighten him when the subject came up in their poems. There’s a woman onscreen too, with a glistening, plasticized face. “That’s the Borg Queen,” Naveena whispers. The wispy oldster is supposed to be Constance, says the YouTube title line, but he can’t credit it.

“We’re thrilled to have with us today someone who, you could say, is the grandmother of twentieth-century world-building fantasy,” says the Borg Queen. “C. W. Starr herself, the creator of the world-famous Alphinland series. Should I call you Constance, or Ms. Starr? Or how about C. W.?”

“Whatever you like,” says Constance. For it is indeed Constance, though much diminished. She’s wearing a silver-threaded cardigan that hangs on her loosely; her hair’s like disordered egret plumage, her neck’s a Popsicle stick. She peers around her as if dazzled by the noise and lights. “I don’t care about the name or any of that,” she says. “I only ever cared about what I was doing, with Alphinland.” Her skin is oddly luminous, like a phosphorescent mushroom.

“Didn’t you feel brave, writing what you did, back when you started?” says the Klingon. “That whole genre was a man’s world then, yes?”

Constance throws back her head and laughs. This laugh — this airy, feathery laugh — was once charming, but now it strikes Gavin as grotesque. Misplaced friskiness. “Oh, nobody was paying any attention to me then,” she says. “So you couldn’t really call it brave. Anyway, I used initials. Nobody knew at first that I wasn’t a man.”

“Like the Brontë sisters,” says the Klingon.

“Hardly that,” says Constance, with a sideways glance and a self-deprecating giggle. Is she flirting with the purple-skinned, veiny-skulled guy? Gavin winces.

“Now she really does look tired,” says Reynolds. “I wonder who put that awful makeup on her? They shouldn’t have used the mineral powder. How exactly old is she, anyway?”

“So, how do you go about creating an alternate world?” says the Borg Queen. “Do you make it up out of nothing?”

“Oh, I never make anything up out of nothing,” says Constance. Now she’s being serious, in that ditzy way she had. This is me being serious. It had never convinced Gavin at the time: it was like a little girl wearing her mother’s high heels. That seriousness, too, he had found charming; now he finds it bogus. What right has she to be serious? “You see,” she continues, “everything in Alphinland is based on something in real life. How could it be different?”

“Does that go for the characters too?” says the Klingon.

“Well, yes,” she says, “but I sometimes take parts of them from here and there and put them together.”

“Like Mr. Potato Head,” says the Borg Queen.

“Mr. Potato Head?” says Constance. She looks bewildered. “I don’t have anyone of that name in Alphinland!”

“It’s a toy for children,” says the Borg Queen. “You stick different eyes and noses onto a potato.”

“Oh,” says Constance. “That was after my time. Of being a child,” she adds.

The Klingon fills the pause. “There’s a big bunch of villains in Alphinland! Do you get those from real life too?” He chuckles. “Lots to choose from!”

“Oh yes,” says Constance. “Especially the villains.”

“So for instance,” says the Borg Queen, “Milzreth of the Red Hand is someone we might meet walking along the street?”

Constance does the thrown-back-head laugh again; it sets Gavin’s teeth on edge. Someone needs to tell her not to open her mouth so wide; it’s no longer becoming; you can see that she has a couple of back teeth missing. “Oh my goodness, I hope not!” she says. “Not in that outfit. But I did base Milzreth on a man in real life.” She stares pensively out of the screen, right into the eyes of Gavin.

“Maybe some old boyfriend?” says the Klingon.

“Oh, no,” says Constance. “More like a politician. Milzreth is very political. But I did put one of my old boyfriends into Alphinland. He’s in there right now. Only you can’t see him.”

“Go on, tell us,” says the Borg Queen, smiling fit to kill.

Constance turns coy. “It’s a secret,” she says. She looks behind her, fearfully, as if she suspects there’s a spy. “I can’t tell you where he is. I wouldn’t want to disturb, you know. The balance. That would be very dangerous for us all!”

Is this getting out of hand? Is she, perhaps, a little crazy? The Borg Queen must think so because she’s cutting this off right now. “It’s been such a privilege, such an honour, thank you so much!” she says. “Boys and girls, a big hand for C. W. Starr!” There’s applause. Constance looks bewildered. The Klingon takes her arm.

His golden Constance. She’s gone astray. She’s lost. Lost and wandering.

Blackout.

“Wasn’t that great? She’s so amazing,” says Naveena. “So, I thought maybe you could give me some idea. . I mean, she practically said she wrote you into Alphinland, and it would be really a big thing for me — for my work — if I could figure out which character. I’ve narrowed it down to six, I’ve made a list with their different features and their special powers and their symbols and coats of arms. I think you must be the Thomas the Rhymer character because he’s the only poet in the series. Though maybe he’s more of a prophet — he has the second sight as his special power.”

“Thomas the what?” says Gavin coldly.

“The Rhymer,” says Naveena, faltering. “He’s in a ballad, it’s well known. You can find it in Childe. The one that was stolen away by the queen of Fairyland, and rode through red blood to the knee, and wasn’t seen on earth for seven years, and then when he came back he was called True Thomas because he could foretell the future. Only that isn’t his name in the series, of course: he’s Kluvosz of the Crystal Eye.”

“Do I look like someone with a crystal eye?” says Gavin, straight-faced. He’s going to make her sweat.

“No, but. .”

“Definitely not me,” says Gavin. “Kluvosz of the Crystal Eye is Al Purdy.” This is the most delectable lie he can think of. Big Al with his poems about carpentry and working in a dried blood factory, being stolen away by the queen of Fairyland! If only Naveena will put that into her thesis he will be forever grateful to her. She’ll work the dried blood into it, she’ll make it all fit. He keeps his mouth still: he must not laugh.

“How do you know it’s Al Purdy?” says Reynolds suspiciously. “Gavvy’s a liar, you do realize that,” she says to Naveena. “He falsifies his own biography. He thinks it’s funny.”

Gavin bypasses her. “Constance told me herself. How else?” he says. “She often discussed her characters with me.”

“But Kluvosz of the Crystal Eye didn’t come into the series until Book Three,” says Naveena. “The Wraith Returns. That was way after. . I mean, there aren’t any documents, and you didn’t know Constance any more by then.”

“We used to meet secretly,” he says. “For years and years. In nightclub washrooms. It was a fatal attraction. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other.”

“You never told me about that,” says Reynolds.

“Baby,” he says. “There’s so much I never told you.” She doesn’t believe a word of this, but she can’t prove he’s fabricating.

“That would change everything,” says Naveena. “I’d have to rewrite. . I’d have to rethink my central premise. This is so. . so crucial! But if you aren’t Kluvosz, who are you?”

“Who, indeed?” he says. “I often wonder. Maybe I’m not in Alphinland at all. Maybe Constance blotted me out.”

“She told me you were in it,” says Naveena. “In an email, just a month ago.”

“She’s going scatty,” says Reynolds. “You can tell from that video, and it was shot even before her husband died. She’s mixed everything up, she probably can’t even. .”

Naveena bypasses Reynolds, leans forward, widening her eyes at Gavin, dropping her voice to an intimate almost-whisper. “She said you were hidden. Like a treasure, isn’t that romantic? Like those pictures where you have to find the faces in the trees — that’s how she put it.” She wants to jig and amble, she wants to lisp, she wants to suck the last slurp of essence out of his almost-voided cranium. Avaunt, wanton!

“Sorry,” he says. “I can’t help you. I’ve never read any of that crap.” False: he has read it. Much of it. It’s only confirmed his opinion. Not only was Constance a bad poet, back when she was trying to be one, but she’s a terrible prose writer as well. Alphinland: the title says it all. Aphidland would be even more accurate.

“Excuse me?” says Naveena. “I don’t think that’s a very respectful way of. . that’s an elitist. .”

“Can’t you find a better use for your time than trying to decipher that turgid puddle of frog spawn?” he says. “A fine specimen of womanhood like you going to waste, your cute butt withering on the vine. Getting any?”

“Excuse me?” says Naveena, again. It’s evidently her fail-safe: the plea that she be excused.

“Any scratch for your itch. Any humpety-hump. Any sex,” says Gavin. Reynolds digs him in the ribs with her elbow, hard, but he ignores her. “There must be some jolly thriving wooer who’s putting it to you. Much better a good healthy fuck for a beautiful girl like you than wasting your eyesight footnoting that drivel. Don’t tell me you’re a virgin! That would be preposterous!”

“Gavin!” says Reynolds. “You can’t talk to women like that any more! It isn’t. .”

“I’m not sure my private life is your concern,” says Naveena stiffly. Her lower lip is quivering, so maybe he’s hit it right. But he won’t let her off.

“You have no scruples about delving into mine,” he says. “My private life! Reading my journal, rummaging in my papers, sniffing around my. . my ex-girlfriend. It’s indecent! Constance is my private life. Private! I don’t suppose you ever thought about that!”

“Gavin, you sold those papers,” says Reynolds. “So now it’s public.”

“Bullshit!” says Gavin. “You sold them, you double-crossing bitch!”

Naveena closes up her red tablet, not without dignity. “I think I should go,” she says to Reynolds.

“I’m so sorry,” says Reynolds. “He gets like that sometimes,” and the two of them are up, up, and away, ooing and oodling and so-sorrying their way down the hall. The front door shuts. Reynolds must be walking the girl to the taxi stand in front of the Holiday Inn a couple of blocks away. They’ll be talking about him, no doubt. Him and his tetchy outbursts. Maybe Reynolds will be trying to repair the damage. Or maybe not.

It will be a frigid evening. Bets are that Reynolds boils him an egg and then plasters on a glitter face and goes dancing.

He let himself get angry; he shouldn’t do that. It’s bad for the cardiovascular. He needs to think about something else. His poem, the poem he’s writing. Not in the so-called study, he can’t write in there. He shuffles into the kitchen, retrieves his notebook from the drawer in the telephone table where he likes to keep it, locates a pencil, then makes his way out the garden door and down the three tiled steps to the patio and carefully across it. The patio is tiled too, and can be slippery around the pool. He achieves the deck chair he’s been aiming for, lowers himself down.

The fallen leaves revolve in the eddy; maybe Maria will come in silently in her denim shorts with her skimmer and skim them out.

Maria skims the dying leaves.

Are they souls? Is one of them my soul?

Is she the Angel of Death, with her dark hair,

with her darkness, come to gather me in?

Faded wandering soul, eddying in this cold pool,

So long the accomplice of that fool, my body,

Where will you land? On what bare shore?

Will you be nothing but a dead leaf? Or. .

No. Too much like Whitman. And Maria’s just a nice, ordinary high school girl making a few extra bucks, dime a dozen, nothing special. Hardly a nymphet, hardly the beckoning sapsucker from “Death in Venice.” How about “Death in Miami”? Sounds like a TV cop drama. Dead ends, dead ends.

Still, he likes the idea of Maria as the Angel of Death. He’s about due for one of those. He’d rather see an angel at his dying moment than nothing at all.

He closes his eyes.

Now he’s back in the park, with Richard the Third. He’s had two paper cupfuls out of the martini thermos, he needs to pee. But it’s the middle of a scene: Richard, in leather gear and carrying an outsized whip, is accosting Lady Anne, who’s escorting the bier of her murdered husband. Lady Anne has been costumed in an SM fetishist outfit; while performing their venomous duet they take turns setting their boots on each other’s necks. It’s preposterous, but when you come to think of it, it all fits. He skewers her husbuddy, she spits at him, he offers to let her stab him, and so forth. Shakespeare is so kinky. Was ever woman in this fashion won? Check the box for Yes.

“I’m off to take a leak,” he says to Rey when Richard has finished bragging about his conquest of Lady Anne.

“It’s back there by the hot dog stand,” says Reynolds. “Shhh!”

“Real men don’t piss in porta-potties,” he says. “Real men piss in the bushes.”

“I’d better come with you,” Reynolds whispers. “You’ll get lost.”

“Leave me alone,” he says.

“At least take the flashlight.”

But he declined the flashlight as well. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. He ambles off into the darkness, fumbles with his zipper. He can hardly see a thing. At least he’s missed his feet: no warm socks this time. Relieved, he zips and turns, ready to navigate back. But where is he? Branches brush his face: he’s lost track of the direction. Worse: the foliage may be filled with thugs, waiting to mug such a witless target. Shit! How to summon Reynolds? He refuses to wail for help. He must not panic.

A hand seizes his arm, and he wakes with a start. His heart’s pounding, he’s breathing quickly. Calm down, he tells himself. It was only a dream. It was only a larval poem.

The hand must have belonged to Reynolds. She must have followed him into the shrubbery, with the flashlight. He can’t remember, but that’s how it has to have been, because otherwise he wouldn’t be here in this deck chair, would he? He would never have made it back.

How long was he asleep? It’s twilight. Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower. Just a song at twilight. What a Victorian word; nobody says twilight any more. Still to us at twilight comes Love’s sweet something or other.

Time for a drink.

“Reynolds,” he calls. No answer. She’s abandoned him. Serves him right. He didn’t behave very well this afternoon. But it was enjoyable, not behaving well. You can’t talk to women like that any more. Sod that, who says he can’t? He’s retired, he can’t be fired. He chuckles to himself.

He levers himself out of the deck chair, points himself towards the steps up to the house. Slippery on the tiles, and it’s so dim out here in the yard. Crepuscular, he thinks: it sounds like a crayfish. A spiky, hard-shelled word, with pincers.

Here are the steps. Lift the right foot. He misses, cascades, impacts, abrades.

Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?

“Oh my God!” says Reynolds when she finds him. “Gavvy! I can’t leave you alone for a minute! Now look what you’ve done!” She bursts into tears.

She’s managed to drag him onto the deck chair and prop him in place with the two pillows; she’s wiped off some of the blood and stuck a wet dishtowel onto his head. Now she’s on the phone trying to locate an ambulance. “You can’t put me on hold!” she’s saying. “He’s had a stroke, or else. . This is supposed to be an emergency service! Oh fuck!”

Gavin lies between the pillows, with something neither cold nor hot trickling down his face. It isn’t twilight after all because the sun’s just setting, a glorious pinkish red. The palm fronds are waving gently; the circulation pump is throbbing, or is that his pulse? Now the field darkens, and Constance is hovering in the middle of it; the old, withered Constance with the mask-like makeup job, the pale, wrinkled face he saw on the screen. She looks at him with bewilderment.

“Mr. Potato Head?” she says.

But he pays no attention to that, because he’s moving through the air towards her, very quickly. She doesn’t get any nearer: she must be flying away from him at the same speed. Faster, he urges himself, and then he closes the gap and zooms right up close, then in through the black pupil of her blue, bewildered eye. Space opens up around him, so bright, and there is his Constance, young again and welcoming, the way she used to be. She smiles happily and opens her arms to him, and he enfolds her.

“You got here,” she says. “At last. You’re awake.”