Caruso stepped into the bright Mombasa morning.  Sing to us, Enrico! we shouted.  Sing “Pagliacci!” we cried.   We were hungry for song  – for melodies we could understand after so many years spent listening to tribal drums.  To savage and inscrutable chanting.  They were always there  – the drumming, the chanting, the prayers to wooden gods  – at the door of our minds and, after a time, in the vestibule, throbbing, insinuating their rhythms ever deeper until they seeped into our subconscious, subtly coloring it and (who knows?) changing us in ways we could not guess  – altering the shape and chemistry of our brains.  (I had lately begun to doubt the accuracy of my observations, influenced as they must be by Africa!)  For God’s sake, sing to us! we pleaded.
     But he would not sing.
     He turned from us and went back inside the hotel.
     To hide.  Because of his anxiety.

“His anxiety is different from yours,” Freud explained as we took our customary booth in the Mombasa Hotel Bar.  “Yours is acquired  – the result of having lived too long in Africa.”
     I nodded.
     He snipped the end of a cigar with a small instrument used in lobotomies  – souvenir of his days as a medical student at the University of Vienna.
     “Caruso’s stems from the San Francisco Earthquake.  It has traumatized him.”
     The great tenor had been thrown violently from his bed in the Palace Hotel during the cataclysm.  It was not the sort of public demonstration he had come to expect  – even in the rough-and-tumble American West.
     Freud lit his cigar, studied its slow fire, then continued:
     “He carries religious metals; but still he is frightened by the possibility of disappearing, like Alice, down a hole in the ground.”
     Caruso had come to Mombasa in the hopes of recovering his nerve.
     “He needs a retuning,” Freud joked, sending a cloud into the room that made the twinkling siphon bottles above the bar grow dim.  “Africa is not the place.”
     Caruso had made the mistake of so many other great men I had entertained in Africa: believing that, in the absence of civilization and its discontents, he would find contentment.  Rest.  Serenity.  But Africa is not the place to convalesce.  The hyperactive agents of imagination and desire at work here, its ceaseless transformation, the feeling of claustrophobia that besets one in the wilderness, the bewildering diversity of forms  – these are enough to agitate even the most robust minds.  Freud discovered, in Africa,  captivating dementia and made them his constant study.
     “An interesting case,” he concluded.  “I will take him on if he wishes.”  He opened his wallet and handed me his card.  “Tell him to come see me on Thursday, at 10.”
     And then, after delicately separating the ash from the end of his cigar, he went to sleep.

I went to my room and listened to my Caruso recordings.  I drew the curtains and sat in the dark to be alone with the Voice.  From time to time I was moved almost to weeping  – because of the beauty of the Voice and because of the memories that came flooding back: of Anna in the Hamptons, her dear face as it looked looking out the window to the sea.  I saw myself at her side, undoing the buttons of her blouse.  I saw myself young and not yet undone by Africa.  Why had I come here?  Was it to wear a white linen suit and pith helmet and be called “Bwana”?  Was it to lounge in the street with the Persian traders or be pulled about in a rickshaw by a sweating Sikh?  Was it  – as we declared over our gin and bitters in the Mombasa Hotel Bar  – to settle the land with white, Christian men; to raise the natives out of savagery; and light the beacon of civilization in the heart of the Dark Continent?  I lit the gas and looked at myself in the mirror: my face had a sickly, greenish cast.  It must be the gaslight, I said to myself.  I turned off the gas and opened the curtains.  The tropic sun poured into the room.  The shadows rolled back beneath the furniture, jumped up the walls, and shrank into the room’s farthest corners.  I put on my white linen jacket, my collar, and measured out a drink “in case.”  I saw myself in the mirror  – a figure in a badly wrinkled suit, stained by drink, soiled by travel, singed here and there by my pipe’s volcanic spew.  No, I did not look well.  I had drunk too much and worried too much and slept unsoundly for too long.  At that moment I doubted myself and all men like me who come to Africa.

 “Sing to us, Enrico  – sing!” the people shouted from the windows and verandas of the pleasant houses of the pleasant town as Caruso walked its streets in search of who knows what balm.   He went cautiously  – not hugging the house fronts (afraid they might topple on him) nor keeping to the middle of the street (lest it open and swallow him), but along the very edge of the sidewalk.
     “Won’t you please sing to us, Signor Caruso?” begged the Mayor, who longed for the ornaments of European culture.
     “Please, sir!” seconded the Chief of Police, who believed the mere sound of the Voice would quell the dark initiatives he sensed behind the expressionless faces of the natives.
     But Caruso shook his head and, with ears cocked for overtures of tragedy, passed forlornly through the town.

Meeting Caruso outside his hotel, I gave him Freud’s card.
     “I cannot,” he said, letting the card fall from his hand.
     “Why not?” I asked.
     “I do not wish to give up my secrets,” he whispered.
     “What secrets?”
     “I cannot tell you.  I cannot tell anyone.”
     He hung his head piteously.
     “Freud is a doctor,” I said brusquely, “and is forbidden to betray a patient’s confidence.”
     Caruso shook his noble Neapolitan head (a head I could not believe harbored shameful secrets).
     “I do not care to be hypnotized,” he said shortly.
     The Bishop stepped out of the sunlight in whose blinding noonday glare he had been concealing himself.
     “Freud does the devil’s work!” he shouted.
     I thumped the Bishop, knocking him down.  His crosier clattered on the pavement.  Ours was an ancient enmity, stemming from his denunciation of my “outrageous and insatiable lust,” to which I had responded with a sack of fresh elephant dung.  He was alluding to my affair with Mrs. Willoughby, whose husband, Mr. Willoughby, was away, more often than not, managing the railroad.  Neglected and unsatisfied, she had gone through a gang of lovers, most recent among them Vladimir Ilich Lenin, who had come to Africa to study colonialism.
     Caruso helped the Bishop to his feet, smoothed his ecclesiastical skirts, and straightened his miter.
     “It is wrong to abuse a priest,” Caruso said with an exaggerated solemnity.
     I whistled nonchalantly.
     “Care for a sweet?” the Bishop asked as he took Caruso’s hand and led him towards the bishopric.
     “I am afraid to fall into a hole,” said Caruso, trembling as they left the safety of the sidewalk.
     The Bishop lifted a beringed finger into the air and intoned:
     “It is better to fall into a hole in the ground and be crushed upon the rocks than to fall into error and lose all hope of eternity.”
     (Oh, how I should love to kill him!)
     “I doubt it!” cried Caruso as he broke away from the Bishop and raced pell-mell for the harbor.

Caruso sat in a native dhow, at anchor, a little way from shore. I swam to him through the blue water, heedless of what might lie hidden at the weedy bottom: the shark, the barracuda, the crab.
     “What do you want?” he asked.
     “To help you,” I replied, clambering wetly aboard the narrow boat.
     “Careful, you’ll scuttle us!” he shouted.  And then, throwing his arms wide in an histrionic embrace of the invisible, he said: “The world is fractured, and through the seams they come for me  – for Caruso!”
     Melodrama may be fine on stage, but in life it is contemptible.  Much annoyed, I shook him  – “in order to bring him to his senses,” I later told Freud, who frowned at my unscientific approach to the treatment of hysteria.
     “Why should you wish to help me?” Caruso asked.
     “I adore you,” I said, stroking his boot ingratiatingly.  “Your voice.”
     “I’ve lost it,” he lamented.
     “Because of your anxiety.”
     “Because of my fear,” he said.
     “Because of the earthquake.”
     “Yes,” he admitted, much ashamed.  “Fear is unbecoming in a man.”
     I urged him to talk to Freud  – the Talking Cure  – wonderfully efficacious  – miraculous even!  – his office on Queen Victoria Street an island of calm  – the furnishings tasteful  – the light behind the blinds dim and restful  – the couch so very comfortable!  One is soon lost in a labyrinth of cigar smoke.
     “I’m in therapy myself,” I told him, lying down on the bottom of the boat.  “For my anxiety, which is considerable; for my dreams, which are lurid and unsettling.  I assure you, I have been helped!  I have slept soundly on that couch!”
     “I intend to sleep here,” he answered.  “On the dhow.”
     “Won’t you be uncomfortable?” I asked, studying the sky for portents.
     “I can’t sleep on land anymore,” he mourned.
     “Aren’t you afraid of drowning?”
     He looked into the distance  – at the edge of the bay breeze-blackened and trimmed in white sails, where the sea enters the harbor and the sky, disentangled of hills and houses, soars.
     “The ocean is beautiful,” he said shyly so that I sat up to regard him.
     “Yes, Enrico, it is beautiful,” I agreed.
     “A long thread runs through the water from Naples to Mombasa  – to this dhow.  See?”  He dipped his hand into the water, and I seemed to see a thread; but it may have been a trick of sunlight on the tilting bay.  “From the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean  – a thread.”
     We were silent for a time, watching the white steamships unravel in the distance.  The white sails.  The clouds.
     I held his hand for friendship’s sake.
     “It is my nerve,” he said, “which was lost.”
     “And now will you sing, Enrico?”
     He shook his head wistfully.  His anxiety may have slept in the ocean’s wet folds, but he knew that he must return to land where the thread would break and the sky tangle in the trees and houses on the hill. 
     “I will hum for you,” he said.  “‘Ch’ella mi creda libero.’”
     Let her believe that I have gained my freedom.

 Roosevelt put up at the Mombasa Hotel with his son Kermit.  They had come to Africa to forget the election  – “my abdication,” T. R. called it.  They would hunt the big game species.  They would study the flora and fauna of Africa.  They would “rattle about the bully bush” and live the life of a man – and “to hell with politics and the Wall Street crooks!”
     “May I see your Times?” I asked Teddy as he laid his newspaper on the bar and prepared to leave.
     “Help yourself,” he said.  “Though I warn you: the news is all bad.”
     He glanced at Freud, who had joined me for an afternoon cocktail.
     “May I introduce my friend, Dr. Sigmund Freud?  Sigmund, this is Theodore Roosevelt, former President of the United States.”
     Teddy nodded warily; Freud nodded warily in return.  They gazed at each other a long moment, taking each other’s measure.
     “I do not approve of you, sir,” Teddy said finally.  “Hysteria’s nonsense  – women’s nonsense!  A strenuous, outdoor life will soon drive the vapors from your patients’ heads.”
     “Balls,” Freud replied.
     Teddy’s mustache bristled.
     “I will see you again, sir!” he sniffed.
     (He would, too – in therapy, in Freud’s Queen Victoria Street practice after Teddy’s nervous collapse in the wilderness.)
     Freud sat in wounded silence while I rattled about in the newspaper.
     “Look!” I said, pointing to a picture in astonishment.  “Caruso!  In the Times!”
     Freud looked.
     “It’s a review of his performance in Fanciulla del West on December 10th at the Metropolitan!”
     I put the paper down in perplexity.
     “So?” said Freud.
     “He was in Mombasa on December 10th!  That was the day I thumped the Bishop.”
     Freud took off his spectacles, fingered the bridge of his nose, put his spectacles back on.
     “His body may have been in New York, but his mind was in Mombasa,” he said.
    I didn’t understand.
     “The mind wanders,” he said, “and, more often than not, it wanders to Africa.  Not the real Africa  – whatever that might mean  – but the shimmering image, the emblem of desire.  Africa of the green hills and the lion ... the hippos among pink and purple lilies ... the endless strings of flamingos above the river.”
     “And women whose skin is the color of night,” I added, my voice thickening.
     Freud nodded.
     “For every man, a different Africa,” he said.
     “So Caruso is not here?”
     “Here and not here ...”
     He fell silent while he studied the coffee grounds at the bottom of his cup.
     “And you?” I asked.
     “I’ll know for sure when I’ve finished my self-analysis.  But I suspect I’m in Vienna, having coffee and pastries with someone far more alluring than you.”
     “And me?” I asked doubtfully.
     “In the Hamptons with your Anna, perhaps.”
     (But I had fled that life, or so I believed.)
     Suddenly desperate, I jabbed my leg with a fork and yelped.
     “A dream of pain,” he sighed.

I went to the harbor to see Caruso.  Tied up to the dock, the dhow was empty.
     “If you’re looking for that Italian, he’s not here,” a dockhand said.
     He was leaning against a bollard, smoking his pipe in the quickly falling dark.
     “Where did he go?”
     “He went with the Moroccan pirates,” he replied, knocking the dottle into the bay.

I sat in my room and listened to my Caruso recordings.  Where are you, Enrico? I said.  On the beautiful ocean following your thread away from the terror of annihilation  – out into the Indian Ocean, then on, to the Mediterranean and Tyrrhenian Seas  – to Napoli where once you sang with insouciance and no thought of art?  Are you singing to the Moroccan pirates in gratitude?  Is it for them you have been saving your voice?  Will they use you, like a siren, to lure innocent ships into the mist where they will board them with drawn swords?  Or have you already charmed the pirates into civility?
     I turned off the gramophone and went out into the town, onto the empty, dark streets.  Through the windows of the houses I saw women dressed in light, moving dreamily towards unseen rooms, following the taut thread of desire. 
     Anna, I ought not to have let you go in Kampala after the lion had surprised you among the wild olive trees!
     I began to run, frightened by the sudden emptiness that loomed just beyond the rings of gaslight.  I felt the old anxiety returning.  The nervousness.
     Sigmund! I shouted, and the stillness shattered like glass.  Sigmund! I shouted all the way down Queen Victoria Street, to Freud’s office where I hammered on the door till the askari policemen dragged me away.
 
 

He was sad, he said.  “Triste.” I was moved  – by his sadness and that he should tell me it in French, a language he mistrusted.  I touched his shoulder, tentatively, in case he should misunderstand.  “Triste,” he repeated.
     “What is your sorrow?” I asked, replenishing his drink.
     “I have lost my place in history,” he said.
     “You’ve had a brilliant career,” I replied, wanting to console him.
     “I have had my crowded hour.”
     I tapped on the window for Kermit.  He was outside in the street, dealing with the askari policemen, who were demanding bribes.  Kermit paid them off and came into the barroom.
      I indicated his father, who was slumped over a plate of small, roasted birds.
     “What is wrong?” Kermit asked, removing his hat.
     “He is in despair,” I told him.  “Over his place in history.”
 “Damn the fat man!” he snarled, alluding to Taft, who had succeeded T. R. as President in 1908.
     “I told him his place is secure,” I said.
     “Father ...” 
     Kermit laid his hand on Teddy’s.  I was again moved  – this time by the young man’s tenderness.
     “He will feel better once he’s killed something,” I promised.
     “How am I to be remembered?” cried Teddy, his anguished voice muffled in his arms.

We bore the former President into the jungle.  He was listless, indifferent  – refusing all food and drink.  His head wobbled inside the palanquin that rested on the broad, black shoulders of the porters.  The flag, which he had brought from America to decorate his triumphs in the bush, was drawn up under his chin.
     “My shroud,” he said in a small voice.  “The red, white, and blue.”
     I laughed, hoping to revive his famous good humor.
     “Black Care has caught up with me at last,” he said plaintively.
     His son Kermit brought him a roasted elephant heart to “put the iron back in the old man," but Teddy would have none of it, preferring  – he said  – to remember “better days.”  And then, as if to put himself in a fitting frame of mind, he rolled from the palanquin into a ditch.
     This proved too much for Kermit.  It was  – he would later say  – as if a national monument, a sacred instrument, a faith had been besmirched by the African dust.  He tossed his portion of elephant heart (an excellent tidbit, by the way, which I greatly miss)  – tossed his morsel into the bush and ran away so that we might not witness his grief at the wreck of his once mighty father.
     “I have lost my bully pulpit,” mourned Teddy.

Onward.
     Teddy carried by the porters.
     Past the last outposts, hoping to leave his Black Care behind.
     Teddy once again in the ditch.  This time because of a defection of porters who had left him there unceremoniously while our eyes were closed.
     The palanquin taken up by Carlson and Captain Slade.
     The journey resumed.  Halted.
     Our encampment on the banks of the Guaso Nyero where only the year before Georges Méliès had transfigured the African night with Halley’s Comet and his cinematic art.
     Strange cries offstage.
     Trompe l’oeil shadows.
     The beating of invisible wings.
     The impenetrable wilderness, which we, nevertheless, were penetrating with each step forward.  (Or perhaps the wilderness parted like the Red Sea of old in order to drown us unawares in midstep!)
     Sudden fear followed by fervent prayers to Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, and savage household gods.
     A rumor of war reaching us even here, from time blown backward on the wind of history (which is usually at our backs but had somehow gotten ahead of us).
     “Send the gunboats; the Hun is massing!” Teddy shouted in his delirium.  (But who in 1911 was listening?)

“My dear Mr. President!”
     Dale Carnege was in Africa, exercising the power of positive thinking. 
     “My dear Mr. President!” he repeated, pressing a yellow pamphlet into his hands.
     “What do you want here?” I asked gruffly, having taken an instant dislike to him.
     “I wish to make a present of my enthusiasm.”
     While enthusiasm was certainly in short supply, I didn’t care to accept his and told him to keep it.  There was something unctuous in his manner that put me in mind of hair oil.
     He took no offense.  He smiled, handed me a tract, and withdrew into the  – as yet  – tractless wilderness to make friends and influence the indigenous people there.  Secretly, I hoped they would persuade him into one of their large cooking pots  – the type reserved for officious missionaries for which Africa is famous.
     “The century will belong to men like him,” said Kermit, who had returned to our little expedition with his grief in check.  “To salesmen.” 
    As if on cue, a hyena laughed mockingly.
     “Care for a cigarette?” I asked, holding out my packet of Abdullas.
     Kermit accepted one with extreme cordiality, and we passed a pleasant quarter of an hour discharging our rifles at small mammals.
     His ague having spent itself, Teddy slept, covered with the flag whose stars looked fine against the gloomy jungle backdrop.
     “Your father belongs to a more heroic age,” I said.
     Kermit nodded.
     “It would have been better if he had died leading the charge up San Juan Hill,” I said.  “Rather than come to this.”
     “His war was cut short by a too-quickly sued-for peace,” said Kermit.
     “The Spanish were certainly a disappointment,” I agreed.
     “Perhaps the Germans will oblige him with a war worthy of the name.”
     (Had he, too, heard the rumor?)
     “Worthy of him!” I asservated.
     (They would not.  Alas, it was to be that Princetonian’s war  – “Mr. Wilson’s War,” not Roosevelt’s.  Teddy would miss the boat for this, the bloodiest century in history.)
     “It’s getting dark,” Kermit observed.
     “We are close to the heart,” I said.  “The heart of the Dark Continent.”

 “Alice!” cried Teddy.

We entered the darkness at a little past 6 o’clock (AM or PM  – it was impossible to tell).  Immediately, we were met with “Semper Fidelis” clamorous in the immaculate silence of the wilderness at dead center.
     I detested military marches, but for Teddy’s sake did nothing that would spoil his triumphal entry.
     The music grew to the verge of the lines that imprison it, went a step or two beyond, then fell silent as the last notes decayed into the immensity. 
     We helped Teddy into a recently constructed bandstand.  Sweeping away excelsior, I recalled the surveyor’s words at the beginning of my journey: “He will come once the country is safe.”  How little he knew Sousa!  The country was far from safe; but here was the March King in his natty dress uniform and mustache, tucking his baton under his arm to acknowledge Kermit’s applause.
     “Bravo!” I called for form’s sake.
     “What’s happened to Teddy?  Has he been gored?” Sousa inquired after saluting his former Commander-in-Chief.
     “He has lost his bully pulpit,” I said.
     “It is the nation’s loss,” Sousa remarked, bowing his head.  “And the fat man?” he inquired, meaning Taft.
     “Flourishing,” I said.
     Kermit spat his contempt into the bush.
     “Where is the band?” I asked, looking around me for the first time and seeing no one else.  “Where are the instrumentalists?”
     “Hiding,” Sousa answered.  “Behind the trees.  They are afraid of the coming war.”
     Teddy roused himself from his neurasthenic “vapors” and shouted, “Charge!” 
     But the Rough Riders were in America, growing old; and in the war to come, men would dig inside the earth or drown under a green-gas sea.

Teddy slept.
     Kermit slept.
     Carlson and Captain Slade slept.
     The porters, whom we had suffered to return, put down their burdens and slept.
     (It was not the sleeping sickness; it was something else  – a profound weariness, like a hand upon the heart.)
     Freud hunted for Thanatos among the trees.  In the black water.  Among the fever ticks.  He hunted for death in order to understand its seductiveness.  Its fascination.  Its irresistible beauty.  Already he was learning that death, not desire, lies behind all things visible and invisible.  That it is death that men love, although he will suppress this knowledge for years to come.
    “Anna!” I shouted into the stillness.
    The stillness broke like a piece of glass.
    Anna was asleep in the Hamptons.  She did not know me anymore.

I could not sleep.
     I walked farther still.  Further still, into time.  The wind shrieked inside me; the rain drizzled through the tree of my blood.  The starry night was an x-ray film showing the sickness of the world.  Marie Curie dazzled by radium computed the arithmetic of decay on the abacus of her bones. Box cars heavy with wretchedness rolled towards smoking towers.  Albert, whom I had once guided through the impossibilities of Africa, covered his bare head under a strange rain.  The dead who had died in the century that was to come tugged at my sleeves. 
     I tried to cry out a human name, but my mouth was stoppered up against me.
     It was then I found The Book of Casualties.  Who kept it, in whose neat hand the entries had been painstakingly recorded  – I cannot tell.  I never saw the bookkeeper, only the book.  Its pages were lead, the entries in red grease-pencil.  History, it seemed to say, is cold and indestructible; men, an impermanent mark of rent flesh and spent blood.
     I read a while in the history of slaughter.  In panic I hunted for my name among the lost; but the names were all of places unknown to me: Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele, Anatolia, Guernica, Auschwitz, Babi Yar, Hiroshima ... each followed by a number whose magnitude abolished the very idea of a single human life.
     I tried to close the heavy book, but it would not close.

At the end of history is a small stage.  The curtain is drawn; the house lights are turned off.  Happy to rest, I sat down in the empty theater and waited.  I thought how nice it would be if Anna were here ... or Mrs. Willoughby.  I slept.  And woke.  And thought I ought to look behind the curtain.  What I saw there must be instructive; at the very least it would give me something intelligent to contribute to the cocktail conversation at the Mombasa Club (I, who am usually so silent and embarrassed), or reconcile Albert to Africa with an explanation for its unsettling roguishness that would satisfy his demand for a unified theory.  You owe it to yourself to investigate, I told myself  – now that you’re here, after coming such a long way.  But I was suddenly indifferent to what might lie behind the curtain.  A lassitude such as I have seldom experienced possessed me.  I cannot explain it: I had only to get up out of my seat, walk a few steps down the aisle  – past the pit  – reach out and twitch the curtain aside.  But I hadn’t the strength.  Or the curiosity despite the music coming from the other side, which sounded like a Sigmund Romberg operetta.  It was easier to sit and do nothing and be glad I was alone.

I had gone as far as I could go.  It wasn’t weariness or apathy that stayed me now (I had revived after leaving the theater), but a lack of  options: there was no place, not even an impenetrable one, in which to continue the journey.  I had come up against an intractability.  A coagulation of matter.  A goo.  I searched for a door, but there was none.
     I turned and started back.  The return journey unwound at unholy speed so that only blurred and jittery images of what had gone before were apparent: 
     The terrible book.
     The strange rain.
     Marie Curie glowing in the dark like a watch dial.
     The shattered stillness reglazed.
     Freud among the trees.
     The expedition asleep.
     The bandstand deconstructing, the excelsior flying back into the board.
     Carnegie’s nauseous enthusiasm.
     Rumors of war become screams.
     Teddy in the ditch.
     An advertisement for Vinolia Otto Toilet Soap, soap of choice aboard R.M.S. Titanic  – “Standards of Toilet Luxury and Comfort at Sea”  – which had blown out of someone else’s history and fallen like a wind-tossed newspaper into mine.
     Teddy slumped over a plate of roasted birds.
     Kermit arguing with the askaris in the street.
     Back further and farther until once more I stood on the shore of Lake No with Ross, irresolute, afraid to cross, wishing I were home in the Hamptons with Anna or, better still, outside history, the grim history, the terrible history  – a boy in Cincinnati, dreaming of Africa.

We stood at the window of her apartment and watched the lights tremble on the East River.  Night pressed against the window.  Shadows oiled the floor.  Sigmund Romberg’s The Desert Song played on the gramophone.  Fay turned her head and looked at the Empire State Building rising into the sky  – stars confused with the lights of its upper stories.
     “It’s like a gigantic penis  – isn’t it?” she said nervously.
     I blushed profoundly.
     “I would ask Freud, but we’re no longer on speaking terms,” I said.
     “I’m afraid,” she whispered.
     “Of Kong?”
     “No, the Empire State Building.  Merian won’t use a double even though he knows I’m scared to death of heights.”
     “It’s all about death,” I said, gulping my gin.  “Even sex is about death.”
     Fay shivered, and I took her in my arms, awkwardly because of the gin.  Conscious of her slim body through the crepe of her dress, I was aroused in a way I had not been since making love to Anna in the back room of the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop.  The gramophone had not yet wound down; The Desert Song played softly.  I wondered at the long and tortuous path that had led me to Fay’s apartment, at my own history which had not yet ended, and of the casualties that were not written down in any book.  Then I thought of the sweetness of the woman in my arms, there if only for this one evening.
     I sniffed her perfumed neck as I had once seen Kong do to Mrs. Willoughby’s and was suddenly afraid.
     “Beauty atones for the long death,” I whispered and almost believed it as I caught sight of a dark shape crouched outside the window.

NORMAN LOCK has published additional "histories of the imagination" in many American and European journals, such as Archipelago, The Barcelona Review, The Cream City Review, elimae, The Iowa Review, The Literary Review, NEeuropa Review, The North American Review, The Paris Review, Lo Straniero.  He was awarded the Aga Kahn Prize given by the Paris Review in 1979.  Two extended prose sequences  –Joseph Cornell's Operas and Emigres  – are published in one volume by Elimae Books.  Lock also has written for the American and German stage and radio.  The Los Angeles Times voted his play, The House of Correction, one of the ten best of 1988 and, for its revival, of 1994.  It was called the best new play of the 1996 Edinburgh Theatre Festival.  He is a Fellow of the New Jersey Council of the Arts.