title

 America's imperialist past and present is more obvious than ever, and so parts of the nation are either in denial or openly embracing the fascist ideologies that always drove that machine. After over a century of exterminating socialists and anti-imperial movements around the globe, we have no one left to kill but ourselves, and we invent new bogeymen to fear every decade.

We're sliding into the future, but also rehashing the same struggles that occurred right on the home turf around the start of the 20th century, when robber barons were the norm, and the working class had to fight openly in the streets for every right they take for granted now.

Songs About Drifters

    From the window of an airliner, the clouds always look like palaces in the sky to me, where people could live eternally aetherial, changing forms but always made of the same matter. This was what was probably going through my head on the very long flight to Seoul, assuming I had the window open. I usually did if it was light out. The parabola of a trans-Pacific flight took us across the endless miles of tundra. It was hard not to imagine being stranded down there in the white, where a lifetime of walking would not take me to any place different even if I could stand the cold.
    I was on this flight as a way to escape from Chicago, and I guess I had been in Chicago as a way to escape from whatever came before that. There was an open apartment if I wanted it, and my unemployment checks could just barely cover the rent, if I sold a few of my CDs at the record store down the block. I holed up in there for a while. It was a city. A real city.
    We set off fireworks by dropping them from the rooftop on the fouth of july. Down into the alleyway, but there was a homeless guy down there sleeping, and when he woke up he and his friends yelled at us from the street. There was some sort of language barrier.
    I remember little of this time. I hung out with my roommate's cat, played video games, did other things, my god this is boring to write about.
    Chicago was a paradise of poverty. A panhandler in front of every bank, a Mexican restaurant on every corner, overpriced thrift shops and furniture stores alternating with the bars that both employed and serviced my generation - new ciders every week, and a free pizza with every beer. The El was convenient, comforting and filthy. Parades of underpasses and abandoned factories gave way for naked cyclists pedaling fiercely against the wind. When the blizzard hit, the streets were ours for a whole weekend. Tramping through the snow that shut down my street, the lights spun across my eyes and illuminated the concrete geometries that belonged to me at night, when the suits and cops had all gone home.

    He intentionally left the narrative behind for a time because it was as dull as dull could be. Endless parades of animals ran through his brain, and he could only speculate as to the reasons for them. When his cat disappeared and his other cat died, he imagined them frolicking through the sky together, laser beams firing from their eyes, annihilating the world below and leaving only the sky palaces where they might live forever.
    I used to stalk the streets of my campus in the small hours of the morning, drunk and smoking cigarettes, enjoying the lamplit fog, imagining for some reason bursts of flame and glass from the upper stories of the dormitories, I guess because it was something exciting, and everything was dull dull dull.
    I would go to parties at local bars and drink beer. I would sit on patios at restaurants and drink beer. I would send my job search reports to unemployment. I would occasionally go to parties because of my roommates. I would meet very few people, more when I began volunteering at a tutoring center.
    I can't say why we're talking about this now. I want to imagine a world below our own, where the corridors reshape themselves by the day so there is always something new to explore, traps and beasts and treasures, and waterfalls beneath the earth, and all the other beings sightless in the dark, from the dark, so they cannot see me crawling through the halls.
    If God were to exist, I would imagine him lurking in this place, on the lowest level, at the center of the Earth, making notes, flipping switches, fiddling with dials and levers that controlled sea levels and magma pressure, solving formulas in his head pertaining to how his adjustments might affect the insigificant but entertaining life on the surface, which he would monitor from a series of godly satellites connected by towers to wires that ran down beneath the surface into this megastructure, through switchboards manned by the gnomes whose daily activities really ran the universe, or at least the nuts and bolts parts of it that big idea men like God couldn't handle on their own.
    Is this what I thought about while sitting in that plane over the Pacific? Maybe, but maybe it was just about how I couldn't get any sleep for 40 hours straight, and how the food on international flights was actually pretty good. It wasn't my first overseas flight, but it would be my first in a long series, as flying back and forth over the Pacific became a regular fact of my life from then on. While travel became a more mundane activity, flying did not in the sense that I always expected to die on these flights, probably by being crushed when a seat in front of me came loose and took off my head as our fuselage crumbled to dust.
    More likely these were the thoughts I was having while sitting there buckled into that seat. Or imagining thrombosis in my legs while watching a movie on someone else's screen, trying with all my might not to touch the fat hairy arm next to me, or ignore the fat, hairy breathing from the fat, hairy man it was attached to. I drank and ate whatever was offered, and once or twice, I even tried ordering some alcohol. I was a drinker in those days, would be even more of one in the days to come, as that was what people did in Seoul, especially people like me. But there on the flight, drink just made things worse. Being confined to my seat made it no fun, and only exacerbated the sleep loss into something sublime and eldritch whose tentacles reached from my brain into my lungs and spine, taking over my body and turning it into something that no longer required sleep or even food, but ran on pain instead.
    That's how I was still awake when we landed and I hopped in a van to my new apartment, passing from the airport toward the city along a thin peninsula where towering tombstones disappeared into the mist. We ventured into the mountains beyond and into the countless streets, where the van broke down on a steep incline, and we had to get out and push. This sent the van rushing downhill where it plowed directly into a parked car. At this point I had ceased to particularly care about anything other than sleep loss. I scratched my head and had no thoughts or feelings about the van shattering the headlights of the car down the street, or the fact that it was November and I was cold and wet. Another car picked us up, and then I found myself in an empty apartment with no heat.
    Before that, though, it was probably Friday night in this place that  I now was, now that time existed again, and my coworkers were going out on the town. I was so far from sleep that it no longer existed and so I went with them, ate meat and drank as much as I could put down. We drank from shallow cups of milky liquid and shouted in our two languages which combined into wordlessness. I was asleep, had been asleep, had never slept. Then I was home, and there was nothing to do, not even shower or change clothes. There was no heat and no clothes, because my luggage was missing. I put socks on my hands and held them over the electric stove, wearing everything that I owned.
    I used to drink when I wrote, or rather write when I drank, and the results were jazzier. Not much jazz in this. I've replaced it with caffeine, and I don't know what that does other than give me pains in my chest and stomach.
    I'll keep going because the music is still playing, but I'm starting to get tired of this. My brain wants to change the channel. My attention span is 15 to 30 minutes, maybe less depending on the day. Go man, go.
    Never once in my life had I the courage to sit down and tell the truth, but I could lie endlessly in this format. I had a hamster once, when I was a child, and a bad person. I would hold his front paws in the air and watch him dance. I would scare him with my toy cobra. I'd like to think that he tolerated it, but I have no idea what really went throug his hamster brain. One day, he began to fart a lot, and another day he died, then I think he was buried somewhere.
    I didn't know how to speak Korean or the bus schedule, which was how I ended up miles from my apartment, not only in a different neighborhood, but far enough from the city that I could see its lights and towers on the horizon, drowning out everything else until the space around me was only ground and darkness. I remember walking against the wind down a highway, holding my jacket close in the November cold. I remember stopping in a convenience store and trying to borrow a cell phone from a man who just shrugged repeatedly at me until I left. I eventually found a taxi. The end.
    Talking of the day in and day out realities that followed may prove difficult. It was very normal. The heater was one day fixed, and then the floor was toasty, and I could finally take the socks off my hands. I laid down on the floor after coming in from the cold. I dried my clean clothes on the floor because the heat dried them faster, and the air did not dry them at all. But I had a sizeable space and a flat screen TV and a bed with a heavy blanket. My CRT was back home in a garage or a storage space, along with the furniture I would later sell because I had no more use for furniture in my life after Chicago. Itinerants do not carry furniture on their backs. I lived with what I could carry on my back, and whatever televisions happened to be at my destination, which was none after this single flat screen monitor.
    The city did not sleep, so neither did I. The high school students went home from cram school at 10 pm, and we went "home" after that, by which I mean to the club. Or a club. Any club. There were so many. We drank and ate and drank and danced and drank, and then I would fall asleep at 5:30 in the morning then wake up at 3 pm to go back to work. Have a little narrative summary, because my memories beyond that are too frazzled and fragmented for more. Sometimes I'm amazed I remember anything at all.
    Unbeknownst to me, I had decided to fall in love with two women that year, rather than the usual one. One was short and stocky but _sculpted_, in that she looked as if she had chiseled herself out of clay in front of the mirror every morning, crafting her own jawline, nose, and bust from scratch each day to perfectly suit her. The other was a reedy, pasty manic pixie dream girl, but the real kind, the kind that sometimes drinks too much wine and barfs in your lap, or changes attitudes at the drop of the proverbial hat.
    In the dark nights of prepubescence, I listened endlessly to Robert Plant sing about wandering to find his lost love. The Tolkien references were lost on me at the time, but I did envision a land of green spaces and distant mountains, mysterious cabins deep in the woods, and across them all a wandering, tragic figure hiking, following a shadow across my eyelids. An old casette tape single had a water-damaged cover of a bearded, cloaked man with a bundle of sticks on his back. Was this a fellow wayfarer, someone met on the road, even the man himself? It didn't matter, because the horizon was waiting in the background.
    If I was searching for anything, it was probably the same thing that fellow in the song was. I dreamed about a girl that was far away, who changed with the years to fit my own circumstances. Sometimes she had brown hair, sometimes red, sometimes green eyes or light blue or brown. Sometimes she was far to the West, sometimes to the East, but always beyond sight, beyond the road, the sun, in the sky.
    November rains were cold and fierce, and flooded the alleyways of downtown, running into the soles of my sneakers, flushing dead rats from the gutters, kept away in plastic tents where the smells of fish broth and smoke predominated. I met my friends in front of the convenice store by the train station, just down the hill from the ancient palace whose wall still ran along the edge of the neighborhood, shorter than it once was when it probably repelled or fell to invading armies. I don't know, I didn't retain much history of the place.
    I had thought I would be a musician in between writing sessions, but finding groups of like-minded artists becomes more difficult out in the real world of work. I switched from so many hours high and drunk playing every note I could think of with any drummer who would sit down behind the kit, to playing the notes in my room for myself, plugged out or plugged into my own headphones, listening only to my own sounds and regressing as an artist as a result. Instead I watched every season of The Office, staying up until well past sunrise, then staying up some more.
    There was a man who would fight you for a dollar, which really meant he would bob and weave while you tried to land a drunken punch, because those were the kind of people who wanted to fight someone so much they would pay for it. Or you could find a streetside arcade with a boxing machine, pads that would register your hits and give you back a score. There were motorcycles everywhere, veering over the sidewalks and around the crowds. The lights made the nights brighter than the day, which was perfect for me because I had never adjusted to the hues of the sun. They hurt my eyes and made me tired. They were the hues of work and serious business. Night was the time that I owned, and that others in the city owned with me, because cities were built for the night, when the colored bulbs and neon could decorate and disguise the ugly, grey facades and turn them into magic.
    There was a neighborhood made of trash. The train stop was still intact, but all of the other buildings had been condemned, and so they were filled with trash, and were themselves trash. The place fascinated me. A trash neighborhood is a place where anything could exist, because a non-trash neighborhood can only produce things of market value, or things that do not offend by their appearance or smell. Trash buildings could contain anything, and all of it could be up for grabs if you just hop the fence. I dream that one day the Pacific trash will form solid islands with their own unique ecosystems: creatures and plants and spores all adapted to the detritus of humanity. I will be there in my gas mask and trash gown spearing three-armed fish and collecting mushrooms to take my back to my trash igloo and my trash-powered stove. My life will be short, because what ruining the environment really means is that we've ruined it for ourselves, but the spores will be fine. You cannot kill the environment, it will environ no matter what you do.
    The old district around the ancient palace even had its own trash piles, at the back of traditional houses,where stray kittens played and whined and hissed at each other atop the mounds of garbage.

Unimagined

 
    Unfortunate ladies in the sky sprouting metal wings that cut clouds into tiny, bite-size pieces which you might taste like marshmallows drifting down your gullet, finding their way between your ribs as one might the rafters of an old unused attic, there to bloom forever as spiritual second and third hearts that keep you forever dreaming, forever light and airy and asleep, and wishing for something else so hard that you drift between cities and countries searching for it.
    This was I suppose how you became who you are, an event that took place before the advent of conscious thought, reinforced over time by your deep dives into this or that universe, the realms of countless other dreamers expressed on pages and screens and through sound waves. You listened and read and watched and then saw your room lift itself off the ground and grow legs and run you down the street, straight through a plate glass mirror beyond which were realms unimagined by the unimaginative.
    And so you lurk now in the places between these realms, peering in, dipping your toes in, wading up to the waist, but always leaving to stand outside watching from Elsewhere. Elsewhere, where the rainbows glow and the nights are as deep as the ocean. Elsewhere, where sheep bounce over the meadows hunting wolves, and candy is poisonous and mushrooms taste like candy. Elsewhere, where a loaded gun is always handy but never necessary.
    Your name is Gherritt. You stand beyond the mirrors in your sleep. Lifting weightless weights, planning, plotting, waiting for the day you might wake and cease to be Gherritt, to become someone else.
    The city is a series of sewers. Sew enough buildings together and what you have is one big burrow, housing all that is human in its spiritless halls, where sewage flows ever downward, but is ever produced anew. You are somewhere in this endless building, still sleeping beyond the mirror.
    You have a six-legged cow named Bertha. You keep a box of mints in your pocket, something that you think of as mints because they taste nice, but they also make your brain explode with every bite.
    Over the hills, grasses wave as tall as treetops hiding gods.
    I fiddle with dials on your bed, keeping you alive and kicking. You kick aginst the mirrors, but they are made of material harder than stone.

    The sensation of floating is real. This is your actual physical state. What is not real is your sense of control over it. The sense of floating where you like rather than in one specific spot.
    Beyond the stone mirrors there is only glass, if you could just reach beyond them with the ball of your foot and shatter it, the dreams might flow out into a putrid puddle on the floor and leave you there gasping air and feeling for the gun that was always handy, but is now absent and necessary. You do these things and then there are shouts in the hallway. through the blur in your eyes, you see that the hills do not exist, there is only the corridor. You have arrived in one specific place at last and no longer have the ability to leave and go elsewhere. Perhaps you are awake, and perhaps you are just having a nightmare, one that you cannot immediately exit from.
    Outside this room is a train station in the dead of night, a switchyard enclosed in a series of tunnels, darkness out beyond the platforms twitching with unease, uncomfortably aware of its own endlessness. Cold breath drifts in out of the nothingness, drying out your skin so that it feels too tight. You flex your fingers expecting your knuckles to split open like sausage casings.
    Somewhere in this building is a city, but for now it is only the station and the sewers, bereft of any life except for the uniformed men who search for you with their flashlights cutting the dark of the many outcrops and unused gantries of this place.
    You reach into your pocket and find something round and squishy, studded with probosci. When you squeeze it, it squeaks like a chew toy. The noise attracts the flashlights and so you place it back in your pocket and huddle, draw the darkness around you until the lights go away. The shouting voices fade with them, and then you are alone, far from the rainbows and the sheep, alone with your squeaky toy and the clothes you are wearing, which you have never seen before but must belong to you.

the Plains of the Other

 who are these blank-faced
    dolls marching in an out of officetels
    and boutiques
    in their catalogue clothing
    and purchased hair?
    how many times can i
    eat a hamburger before
    i wish to die

    we build a series of cages
    and tell ourselves
    this is all we are
    and nothing else
    
    where am i
    in this mess
    can i call myself
    my self?

    Lift me out of this morass in a tin spaceship,
    to a dark sky where the dark ones live.
    Place me in the eye of Jupiter
    where my flesh is stripped by the wind
    
    I am a blood storm now
    sailing where i wish
    tell me, oh dark ones
    of the great Plains of the Other
    where I can rain on the endless hills
    and suck the xeno-cattle into my eye
    to be turned also to blood
    none of them wear clothes or talk about the weather
    no
    they range and devour and fuck and die
    they are stupid and mad with brain disease
    they see the red world pass by their eyes
    no home to keep, no appointments
    unscheduled days of stripping the hills
    of all they create
    in a world that renews and destroys
    that fertilizes itself with their
    desperate entrails
    while I feed the flowers from my blood storm
    drinking every last drop
    they grow teeth and desires
    they eat the cattle who eat them back
    both are enraged, engorged, filled to bursting
    with hate and love for the other
    the colors of these feelings
    fill the air, and i dispel them with my own
    even as they leak into me

    even as they crystallize into forests
    that cannot be cut down
    that will colonize with their creepers
    the bones of the cattle I leave behind
    forming morbid hives towering above the hills
    home to hornets of bad intent
    with fire in their bellies and sex in their hearts
    they dream naught of peace and comfort but only struggle
    they are choked by the vines and storms of blood
    but they asphyxiate vibrating, bearing erections for the ages
    voluminous, cavernous, harboring mysteries
    deep within their swollen labyrinths
    where Theseus weeps
    at the unsurpassing beauty
    of the Minotaur

A burst of spring

 A burst of spring
    recalls the endless time lost
    between moments of years that leave no imprint
    on the mind's eye
    drifting beyond the veil of consciousness
    without so much as a whisper
    to my elder self

    who sits drying out in his chair
    probably clutching at the arm rests
    with arthritic fingers
    longing for the days
    when he could grip instead of clutch
    longing for the phantasmic colors
    remembering they existed
    but unable to recall
    a hue or shade to his mind
    which looks like
    the deserts dreamt
    in younger days
    like portents of the empty hours to come
    as the sand buries all things
    so too would time erase even the sand from his dreams

    Visually, in terms of color composition, I prefer the jungle.
    Thematically, spiritually, I prefer the desert.
    It calls to me, like the hearth of home in the depths of winter.
    If only it would rain, it would be perfect.
    Rain on the dessicated earth.
    The soil so packed that every droplet can be heard
    on impact

    I could drink every last ounce
    the sky could produce
    and still be desolate
    impenetrable

In the Bones of Giants

---
Jinn's Tale

    She had always led a quiet life. She had managed this for many years and saw no reason why anything should change. Each part of her life was crafted for stability. She lived in the very center of a large village. The village was surrounded by farmland. If there was a bad harvest, the hunters could still provide enough for everyone. If the hunters failed, she had her own garden, which she worked to keep consistent in its output. Her husband's trade was safe and reliable - making tools for the hunters. Her children were afraid of the outside world. She had instilled them with enough fear to keep them in line and close to home. The climate was harsh but consistent, and she had it all figured out.
    As happens, a day arrived when all of this changed. It arrives for everyone, except those for whom it does not. It was still early in the morning. She had risen to look at herself in the mirror next to the bed. It was an antique, certainly, as no mirrors were made in the village. Her own father had bought it from a merchant a lifetime ago. She had looked in it every day since, measuring the gap between the top of her head and the top of the mirror, making sure to always stand at the same distance from it in order to get an accurate reading. When her mother had placed a rug beneath it, she moved the mirror herself and flipped the rug out from under it to make sure its height remained the same. Of course, she had reached her tallest height years ago, still inches from the top of the mirror, but the ritual remained. In the past ten years, she had switched from measuring her progress toward being a woman to admiring the woman she had turned into. Her face was full and round like the rest of her. She still had some of the weight of her last pregnancy on her, the product of which began to wake at that moment. This is how the day began, as innocuous as all other days, to be quickly sent awry without even giving her the courtesy of time to reflect on these changes.
    The first sign was the cry of a horn in the distance, echoed by two others from two other directions. She left her bedroom and continued out the front door and through the garden, listening. The cries of horns became the cries of her people, also from three directions. This was the second sign that something was not as usual, and more troubling than the first. The third turned visible just as the cries rose in volume, a tree of black smoke to the North. This was worrying, because she had no contingency in mind for it. She had taught her famiy how to respond to a fire, but she sensed that this was something else. In fact, what she felt was an overwhelming wind that rushed from behind her, the same feeling one gets as the waters are pulled back from the ocean's edge to form the wave rising above. Beneath her feet, through the air, in the sky, and all around her there was a tide of history rising to submerge all her plans. Her youngest son approached and stood beside her. She put her hand on his head, felt his hair beneath the tide, felt that he was about to die.
    The cries followed the black smoke, fading in the East and South, but still approaching from the North. Her husband appeared, jogging up the lane to stop before the garden where she stood. "We need to run," he said. "All of us."
    She nodded, but said, "We can't run."
    He looked her in the eyes with fear. "We must."
    So she did. She ran back inside and shouted, not sure what she was saying, only calling to her family. All of them knew how to run but the newborn. She ran back into the room and grabbed her out of the crib next to the mirror, took one final look at herself and the quiet life she had built, then ran out the front door.
    When she did, they were already there. The cries, the smoke, and those who inspired both, on horseback galloping up and down the street, the cries emanating from those they dragged behind. She could not take her eyes from one of these, could not stop trying to recognize it; its snarling face, its teeth drawn too far back, looking as inhuman to her as the armored horsemen. One of these galloped from the opposite direction, slicing her along the neck as he went.
    She fell still watching the creature being dragged, still clutching the infant to her chest. The child began to cry, its cries lost in the torrent of sound that washed over the village from North to South. Then later it began to sleep. When Mabibwi arrived from the day's hunt, Jinn and everyone else was dead. Yet still she saw. She could not remember his name, but recognized him as human and knew his face. He carried a giant egg in his backpack. She tried to lift her arms to hand him the child as it woke, but they would not move. She tried to move her lips to speak the child's name, but no breath passed between them. Everything was quiet, had been quiet for so long. She wanted only for sound to break forth from the world, to break from her into the world. As she still struggled, she watched Mabibwi reach down and close her eyes with his fingers, felt the infant being lifted from her grasp while she spoke its name only to herself. While she spoke her own name to anyone who could listen. Jinn.   

---
Mabibwi's Tale

    Mabibwi trudged, the child slept or cried from its sling across his chest. When the winds died, the temperature cooled. This brought the familiar sigh of evening. Beyond the village, the sun began to melt. Its color cooled with the air as dark set in. He began later than he should have to look for a place to camp. It was then that he came upon a spot hidden on three sides by weathered stone. He approached it from the open side, which faced toward the setting sun, and found that it was occupied by a man who was a lizard. This lizard man watched him silently with his head turned to the side. Mabibwi raised a hand in greeting, both of his hands in fact, to show that they were empty. The lizard man flicked its tongue and copied the gesture, whether in mockery or not. Regardless, he sat down across from the stranger, a pile of bones between them where a campfire should have been.
    The lizard man turned its head from side to side and watched him, then spoke. "What is that?"
    "What?"
    "That." It pointed to the baby slung over his chest.
    "Oh. That's a baby."
    "Where is the mother?"
    "She's dead."
    It studied him. "Did you kill her?"
    He shook his head. "She was already dead."
    "My condolences," the lizard man said.
    "It's okay. It's not my baby."
    It studied him again. "Are you going to eat it?"
    "Eat what?"
    "That." It pointed to the baby again.
    "Um. No."
    "Then why do you carry it with you?"
    "To care for it, I guess."
    "No offense..." It turned its head and flicked its tongue before continuing. "But if a mother asked me to care for her baby, I would eat it."
    "None taken." Mabibwi could think of nothing else to add. It occurred to him that it was quite impressive that the lizard man could speak a human language when its lips and mouth were so poorly suited to the task. "She did not ask me."
    "Just the same. What will you feed it? I've been told that human children feed on their mothers."
    "I'm not sure." Mabibwi put his finger in the baby's mouth to check something. "It has no teeth."
    "Would you like me to eat it for you?"
    "The baby?" Mabibwi thought for a moment. "No."
    "Suit yourself. It is yours. Where will you go?"
    "What do you mean?"
    "You must go somewhere, yes?"
    "I suppose I must."
    "Then where are you going?"
    "I don't know." He shrugged. "I know of no place but the place I came from, and I cannot go there."
    The lizard scratched his chin with a claw and made a face. Mabibwi could not tell what it was meant to express. "There is a city to the East. A long walk for a human, but perhaps you could make it."
    "That sounds good."
    The two of them sat for a bit. The lizard man did not offer him food, and had clearly already eaten its own supper. It seemed to be turning its head to bask in the setting sun, and made no motions that Mabibwi interpreted as hostile. They struck up stilted conversation throughout the evening, during which Mabibwi learned that the lizards were solitary creatures. Upon maturation, a lizard man (or woman, Mabibwi assumed, though the speaker made no distinction) would leave his nest and travel. If he found a suitable place in the world that no living lizard had claimed, he would settle. It could be an empty plot of land, or the former home of a lizard now deceased. He would hunt, improve the land, and live out his days there. They joined together only for reproduction and funerals, at which each attendee would devour a piece of their dead relative, and then go their separate ways.
    Mabibwi thought it seemed a lonely life, though his companion did not seem troubled by it. It explained that it was now in this wandering stage, searching for a home. It explained that it was on its way to the coast, to find a human ship of suitable size. It would then eat the crew and take over the ship, setting sail for uncharted waters. This was the first Mabibwi had heard of lizard pirates.
    When the sun had set, he found himself uneasy about sleeping near this creature, though it had assured him it would not eat him or the baby while they slept. All things considered, though, he was too tired to think of any alternatives, or to care much what happened to himself or his charge. He fell asleep, still crouched by the bone pile.

    He dreamt he was in a city. He had never seen a city, yet it was vivid. Sprawling onion domes twisted into the clouds. Market stalls seemed to grow from the walls. The sky was full of bridges. As he walked down the middle of the street, people burst into flame. Their eyes and then skin would glow like hot coals, sparks would shoot from their mouths, the hair fizzle away like a dynamite fuze. They would dance and scream. Colored lights flickered in the windows from which the music flowed. Ecstasy was welling out from the deepest part of his brain. It filled the channels and buoyed his skull till he was just a balloon trailing legs and arms, drifting on the breeze through the onion domes.
    It was all gone when he woke. So was the lizard man. The baby was still there, strapped to his chest.


    On the second day, it began to cry constantly, no doubt hungry. He tried his best to ignore the sound, but there wasn't much to hold his attention. The ground was flat and featureless, barring a few plateaus on the horizon and the occasional pile of carrion. Mabibwi laughed at their situation. On his back was a meal large enough to feed several families. On his front was a creature unable to chew or digest that meal. He had no way to prepare it, anyway. The further he went, the more they strayed from the old hunting grounds and into the heart of the desert. He wondered allowed if he perhaps should have stayed at home. But how could one man bury a whole village? Or fend off the scavengers if he did not.

    On the second night, he met a man wearing armor like none he had ever seen, neither the man nor the armor. He was pale with a long, white mustache. The helmet sitting next to him reflected the glow of the campfire.  
    The fellow stared in the direction of the child. "I saw a man eat an infant much like that one only a few days gone."
    "What is it with you people and eating children?" By reflex, he held his arms around it, in case the stranger thought to skewer it with his longsword.
    The other man shook his head. "Not my taste, I assure you. I could not stomach it in any sense." He paused and fidgeted. His hands shook on the hilt of his sword, which he held with its point to the ground like a walking stick. "Tell me about your gods, stranger."
    "Gods?" Mabibwi wondered at the purpose behind this line of questioning.
    "You have gods, do you not?"
    "Many of them."
    "My god offers eternal life to the man who wars against the infidels. What do your gods offer?"
    "They offer us nothing, only strike us dead from the sky or devour us beneath the Earth." He paused to search for the right words to express something he had always taken for granted. "Death is our rest, as Father would have said."
    "A grim philosophy. Tell me about one of your gods."
    Mabibwi picked the one closest to the top of his mind. "Watanga. The beast of the Underhells."
    "Watanga." The man seemed to be testing the name, riffling through the sounds it made. "What is the Underhell?"
    "Underhells. There are many. Together they are the world below our hell."
    "Our hell?"
    "Yes." Mabibwi waved his hand at the desert.
    "Do you mean....we're in hell now?"
    He scratched his head. "Of course."
    Roland shuddered and twitched the bars of his mustache. "Tell me about this Watanga."
    "It is unsafe to describe him beyond the name, even in dreams."
    But the stranger was interested now. "Tell me about him, and I promise not to kill you." He flexed his fingers on the sword hilt before him. The blade was the shiniest thing Mabibwi had ever seen, seeming to be made of the same fire that burned between them.
    Mabibwi had not considered himself in danger before. But he needed no additional convincing. It seemed like a fair deal. "Watanga is a great beast of many legs. He stalks the halls of the Underhells, feeding on those who venture too deep."
    "Why would anyone do that?"
    "The Underhells are filled with treasure. And Watanga grants wishes for a price."
    "What price?"
    Mabibwi shrugged. "I don't know. A price you shouldn't wish to pay, I suppose." There was a pause. The knight seemed to be mulling over this new information. "What are your gods like?"
    He lowered his eyes from the sky. "There is but one god, named God. He controls and is all things. When we die (if we prove worthy), we become one with him to live eternally, as masters of the universe."
    "What is your home like?"
    "My home?" He searched the fire for his memories. "I come from a great city called The Mausoleum. Crumbling spires surround us on all sides, spanning both sides of the river mouth. The ground is made of stone, the streets lined with travellers from all lands. At night, the forge fires keep the darkness at bay." Other memories came to him, but did not make it to his tongue. He went silent.
    Mabibwi cleared his throat. "No, I meant....what is the weather like? The world."
    "The world? The weather? Much like this, I suppose. But cooler."


    The third day was so much like the second that he forgot it was the third. By the time he saw a silhouette shaped like a house on the horizon, he assumed he was hallucinating. Smoke drifted from what was either a chimney or a geyser. The house or geyser stood atop a shallow hill that ran for a mile in every direction, textured with evenly spaced shadows that he took to be plants. If this was a hunger dream, it was an elaborate one. As he moved up the path, the house was unobscured by the hill on which it stood, revealing lantern light in a window. Night arrived in force as he examined the scene, his head tilted to one side as if we were musing or mulling. But no thoughts accompanied the gesture. He only looked at the house and the backdrop of stars that was forming behind it, slowly rotating as if the house were the axis of the world.
    He shook himself and did have a thought then. He wondered how to approach a strange home all alone in the countryside, himself a stranger. Not approaching was out of the question. He saw no movement but the stars and the sway of food plants in the breeze. He considered calling out from a distance, but announcing himself when he was still under cover of darkness seemed a method for the guilty. There was nothing for it but to knock on the door. He resolved to make sufficient noise as he approached up the path, careful not to stomp, but scraping the dust and stones with his feet loud enough to present audible footsteps. This he did, then knocked on the door, too quietly at first, then louder. The door opened immediately, the light that spilled out framing a man of beastly proportions. "Speak, stranger," he said.
    Mabibwi began to, and instead toppled forward across the threshold, either fainting or falling asleep on the spot.

    He awoke to laughter, rotund and jovial. He awoke to firelight bouncing off the sandstone interior of the house. He felt at peace, considered shutting his eyes again to stay in that feeling. He knew nothing of his host, or what they might do when he woke. But the room was warm, and he ached. It was the return of hunger that convinced him to open his eyes and sit up.
    "THERE he is," said the same voice as before, still with the same laugh in its tone. A hand clapped him on his back before he even saw the speaker. He turned his head to the left to see him, still of the same proportions but no longer beastly. He was clean-shaven, even his hair cut short. Mabibwi's first thought was that the man's skull was enormous, and closer to the surface of his face than normal. He was quite handsome in spite of or because of this. "Glad you're not dead, or planning to sleep through your stay. Eat, my friend." The fellow removed his hand from Mabibwi's back and reached out to pull a table toward them, where they sat on a small bench. Mabibwi looked at the table, or at the food on the table. It was a feast, far too much for one man. Numerous dishes in concentric circles, some half-empty; what was left after a meal. Still enough for three or four Mabibwis.
    The dishes were only half-visible in the firelight, chunks of what could be meat or fruits or vegetables in dark sauces. He ate from all of them without distinguishing anything from anything else. Rainbows burst in his mind and he held back tears as he ate. When his eyes could focus beyond the table, he examined the rest of the room. Before the fireplace across from them, a woman, smaller but also of similar stature to the man, sat in a rocking chair nursing an infant. The firelight danced on her bare chest, her neck, thighs, the left side of her face. Her eyes were dark and half-hidden in shadow. Unable to do otherwise, he took in every part of her and was instantly aroused. He looked away and focused on the food. There was a bowl of fruit that suddenly looked round and supple, feminine, as if her shapes had been transferred onto it, and he had to look away from that, too.
    "Thank you," he stammered. He breathed and took control of himself. "I've never tasted any meal to compare with this."
    "You're welcome." Her voice suited her. He resolved to reflect on why this was so. He did not look up, but felt her examining him.
    "I'm not surprised," said the man. "You look as if you haven't eaten for weeks."
    He continued to eat between responses. "Days, not weeks. But I am starving."
    The man laughed again. "Well. Perhaps someone was underfeeding you before then. Eat all you like, and there is more to be had if needed."
    He bent over the dishes on the table, but could not stop his eyes from drifting back to the woman before the fireplace. He watched her nursing for what could've been a fraction of a second, but felt like far too much time to him. Then he realized something, felt at his own chest by reflex. "Thank you," he said again, this time addressing her directly, and he pointed to the infant nestled against her chest. It was his. Well, not his, but he thought of no other way to refer to it.
    She nodded, still inspecting him. "You are welcome. She certainly needs it." She looked down at the child, smoothed what little hair was on its head.
    He looked away again. "It is a she?"
    "Yes. IT is a she. Is she not yours?"
    "Yes. I mean no. Our village was attacked. I found it. Found her lying there, crying." He felt defensive, for some reason. "I found no one else living. It seemed best to leave."
    "You're lucky to have found us when you did."
    He could not disagree with that. He nodded, still eating, finally beginning to taste the individual ingredients.
    The man cleared his throat, and his voice boomed with an energy like laughter. Mabibwi thought it must be how he always spoke. "Well, I think introductions are in order. I.…am Ketanka!" He snapped his hand across his face as if twitching a curtain aside. "This is my wife, Khalisi. The children are under strict orders to sleep, but you can meet them in the morning. What were you called at home, friend?"
    He stopped chewing long enough to speak. "Mabibwi. I do not know the child's name."
    "Mabibwi..." Ketanka said. "It has a ring to it." As if they were brainstorming names for him. "Perhaps you should name the child. Or I could name her if you like."
    "You," said Khalisi, "should not be allowed to name any child ever again."
    "Nonsense!" He lit his pipe for emphasis, and perhaps to avoid arguing with her.
    Mabibwi's furious dining had slowed to the point where he was able to examine his surroundings at the same time. The interior was smooth sandstone: floors, walls, and ceiling, though much of the floor was covered with rugs of varied patterns. The chimney was a hole in the ceiling above the open fireplace, which blazed with hot coals and provided much of the room's light. A few candles burned on shelf or table. These were the mundane backdrop for the dreams which decorated the walls, and every flat surface but the floor. Objects which he could not categorize or even recognize in many cases. A skull shaped like a horn that ended in a mouth full of fangs, covered in holes along its length; eyes, nostrils, something else, he could not tell. There was a box of some unknown material sat on a shelf, one side made of glass but not reflective enough for a mirror. A long contraption of wood had a spearhead on the end of it, but the rest was covered in metal parts that looked like they were meant to move. There was a dagger, but shaped like a flowing river. A human face peered down at him from the wall, too realistic to be artificial, too shiny to be natural. He shuddered.
    "That one bothers Khalisi, as well," said Ketanka, noting what he examined. "I can see why. But there is something about it I like. Something...ethereal."
    "What is all this?"
    Ketanka rose to his feet and stabbed the air with his pipestem. "The spoils of adventure, my friend! To the north of here lies an ancient city, long abandoned, most of it buried beneath the sands." He sat back down and grinned. "Most of it looted long ago, as well. But I've found a few corners that still hold something worth seeing. And some worth bringing back."
    "That place will be the death of you." Khalisi sounded angry but weary.
    "Death is the last stop on the road to legend, my dear!"
    "Just so," she said. "You will make a fine legend."
    He bowed in her direction, pipesmoke describing an arc to match, cleft in two by his own forehead. Then he sat and turned to Mabibwi. "And you, friend! You seem to be out on an adventure yourself."
    "I am?"
    "Of course! A lone wanderer, a mysterious infant, a whole village to avenge..."
    "I hadn't thought to avenge them."
    "She is just an orphan, not a mystery," Khalisi said, lowering her head to gaze at the mystery latched to her nipple, nearly asleep. Her curls fell across her face. Mabibwi stared a moment too long again.
    "Harrumph!" said Ketanka, twin streams of smoke curling from his nostrils. "Do not lack for the imagination to see your life as it is. Man is ever a story -- or Woman --" he gave his wife a nervous glance. "Every woman or man is a story to be told, lived from quiet hour to seconds of no consequence; but a teller makes it brilliant. You, however, will already shine brighter than most. I can tell these things."
    Mabibwi felt lighter for the words, though unsure if he believed them. He liked this strange, giant man. But he also watched the subtle expressions of Khalisi, whose thoughts he coveted, and noticed the twist of disapproval on her lips. He felt heavier. Belying her expression, her speech danced playfully across each syllable: "Do not project your delusions onto him, husband. He is just a man doing what must be done in the face of misfortune." He felt much, much lighter.
    Ketanka himself smiled at this, raising the caterpillars he used for eyebrows onto his massive forehead. "That is just it, my dear. That is exactly it." He leaned back where he sat, grinning with satisfaction, stretching his arms behind his head.
    The conversation continued in fits, synchronized with the slowing tempo at which he ate. He resolved to ask what he was eating if there was a next meal. And hoped dearly that there was for several reasons. Ketanka's rambling pronouncements began to rush by his mind unseen, though still heard and responded to when bidden. Exhaustion took hold of him, along with the most contented warmth he could remember. Anxiety drained and his head began to nod, still chewing, still listening, still talking, but also dreaming. A dream in which he was a wandering legend, broad-shouldered as Ketanka, stopping for an evening to rest by a stranger's fire. He was an infant clutching Khalisi's heroic breast in his arms; then he was her husband, the child between them through the night as they slept, his skull reaching toward the front of his face as if it wanted to merge with hers, directly in front of him. Her lashes parted, her eyes opened, and in them were ruined towers at midnight, sandswept, white as ivory in an ocean of ink. When he drifted from her eyes to half-awake, he was lying just where he had sat by the table, a leather blanket over him, the coals still glowing, crackling amid the silence of a warm place out of the wind. He shut his eyes and waited for his brain to tell him another story.

    In the morning, the children were up. Everyone was up, but the children made themselves known. They were screaming in the background, and in the foreground. He heard them before his eyes opened, saw his village under attack, every person open mouthed wailing including the invaders, who were all plastered with the faces of lizards, or white-mustached men in armor. Then he opened his eyes and the screams were laughter. The only ones not screaming were the three standing right in front of him, staring with blank expressions. Two almost identical girls, long of limb and hair, and a small boy with an oversized head. When he sat up, the boy shrieked and ran away. The two girls stood watching him as he watched back, challenging him to be the first to speak. Only when the silence stretched did they turn away as one and disappear toward the back of the house.
    When they moved, he could see Khalisi before the fire, preparing breakfast. It was then that he noticed the monstrous egg shell cast onto the floor at her side, split in two. An iron pan to match hung over the fire. The contents of the egg he had carried for so long filled the entire pan. She had not asked him, but he could think of no reason why she should have. His stomach rattled in its cave and he began to salivate. Hunger took him, and something else, called to the fore by seeing her standing in the light for the first time. He stomped whatever that was into the background and let his hunger take over, as it was the one he could do something about. He wished to see up close what she was doing to his egg, and this would require him to move up next to her.
    He did so. The egg white bubbled and shook like a cloud of lava. Dark brown oil curled up around its edges. She was pulling chunks of sausage out of a wooden bowl and tossing them into the pan. Peppers, leaves, and some unknown fruit were already sinking beneath the egg, along with pieces of a doughy flatbread. Spices assaulted him where he stood. Even so close to the fire, he felt that he could sense her body warmth, and the combination of it all made his head swim. "I've never seen an egg this size," she said.
    "They nest west of our village."
    "How do the birds taste? Or whatever lays something like this."
    "Birds. I don't know. We do not try to hunt them. Only the eggs, when the nests are unoccupied. That smells amazing."
    Ketanka stooped through the curtain and into the room, wearing fresh clothes and eyes. "Mabibwi! Sleep well? Join me in a wake up drink!" He took two cups from a shelf, and the gourd sitting next to them. "Do you like gilanthus wine?"
    "I've never had it."
    "Aha! Then you are in for a treat." With the cups and the gourd palmed in one hand, he picked up the dining table with the other and placed it next to the bench where Mabibwi had slept. They sat. "My dear, will you join us?"
    "No." She carried on.
    "Then we must drink her share as well. Cheers to that, and to welcoming a traveller into our home. It must be good to rest a bit, eh?"
    He could think of no way to describe just how true that was, so he said nothing, only bowed from his seat, tapped his cup on the table in imitation of Ketanka. The wine was sweet, so sweet he thought his tongue might shrivel and retreat down his throat. He coughed.
    "A devil's nectar, is it not? It's easier once it gets to your head. Drink up." He poured another for them both. "In honor of your stay, I have an idea."
    "An idea?"
    They tossed off another one. It was already proving easier. "That's right. You are going to tell us a story."
    The response from the children was instantaneous. "A story!?"
    "That's right," said Ketanka.
    "I'm not much of a speaker, let alone a narrator."
    "Then make it a long story, so we can see you improve as you go. Normally, I would tell a story in the morning, but this is a special occasion." He rapped his cup on the table again. A strand of liquid leapt out, curling in the air, then snapped back. "Drink up! And let the words flow like wine."
    Everyone watched him, including Khalisi. A radiance was leaking from his temples to the sides of his neck, across his shoulders and down his arms. "Should I tell MY story?"
    "It could be your story. It could be any story. Trust me, this is not a discerning lot." The two oldest girls frowned at him and he laughed. "Well, a couple of critics in the house, perhaps. But the rest will cheer you on."
    "A story, eh?" Mabibwi tried, subconsciously, to adapt a bit of Ketanka's manner. He needed some manner but his own, if he were to string so many words together. "Now let's see here..." He set about adapting the truth to their expectations.

---
Mabibwi's Tale (as told by Mabibwi)

    Once there was a man named...Mabibwi. Is that an okay beginning? Don't ask me, you're the story teller. Hmm. Once there was a man named Mabibwi. A young man named Mabibwi. He was returning from the hunt, prize in tow. Should this be in first person? It won't sound like a legend anymore, but there's something forceful in it that draws me onward. I was returning from the hunt, prize in tow. Lines in the soil led to the horizon, jagged with home, clouded with miasma leaking into the sky. I began to run, my burden weakening my knees until I thought they might buckle under the strain. Toes sinking into the soil with every stride. How often had I played amid the grain stalks when they still rose above my head? Now they were only to my waist, and a new world towered above, made of smoke. I ran to the center of the village as if something there might answer my questions. The signs lay all around. Dried blood, burst and scrambled people, the hum of kingflies feasting. Is this appropriate for children? Don't worry, they've heard worse. They are tough little warriors, all. Of course. I stalked the streets, examining the remaining faces one by one, searching for those I recognized. I saw none, and scrubbed them desperately from my memory. They were dolls cast aside, playthings of vengeful giants, the refuse of a festival in honor of someone else's god. I could find not one left alive. Except the child. Out of the chants of the kingflies rose a tiny, ragged voice down the street. I saw her right then, open mouthed and pointed to the sky. I ran. She was clutched in the arms of a young woman whom I wanted to lift off the ground and out of the road, but I feared she would fall apart in my arms. The infant was intact though, not leaking but for drool and tears. I took her from her mother's grasp, careful to be sure she would let go when I did, felt the first feeling but numbness. Panic. I had to do something. Had to help, had to go somewhere. Who had done this and why, and where were they? This is an awfully long story, isn't it? Not at all, we are just getting involved. From where I knelt I rose, stood over the remains of my beloved Kalini and swore vengeance unto my dying breath. Stormclouds joined the smoke and kingflies: wind and rain, a vortex that wiped what was left of home from the face of the Earth, even as I stepped from it into the wild, my two charges in tow. Little child, all that remains of my beloved, you are my divining rod now. Point me to the villains, that I might repay them.
    Even as the last blood of my kin was washed away in a tempest, the sun ahead bled onto Earth and softened it as I passed. We hadn't even a chance to name you, little one. Let us call you Ariala, then. Ariala of the Tempest. Ariala, baptized in blood. The heat beat down upon us as the day wore on, sands giving way to jagged spires and sudden rents in the landscape. Refusing to give up the prize of my hunt, I scrambled over the land and suffered for it. Bending my ankles on uneven soil, straining to clamber over the gaps in the path on which you led us.
    As the sun bled out, I happened upon a cove in that sea of spires. I rounded the edge of this rock formation in search of shelter, discovering a path that led downward into the Earth. The light faded but gave way to a ghostly glow ahead. There was a cave where the rock itself gave off light. And in the center, a burning pyre of human remains warmed a dragon.
    As I approached, weary and hoping to share the fire's warmth, he raised his head. "What do you carry, human?"
    "An orphaned child," I said, seating myself across the flames from him.
    He regarded me with one eye that glittered gold in the light. "Give her to me."
    "I will not."
    "Do you not wish to ease your burdens, weary traveler? Give her to me, worry not, and leave this cave with a light heart and an open future."
    I knew then that the beast could see into the darkest corners of my soul. "I will do no such thing. The burden is mine to bear, for some god wills it."
    On the side of his face turned toward me, the corner of his mouth cut up to his eye in a grin, revealing fangs with the gore of his last meal on them. He chuckled. The roof of the cavern shook. "There are no gods here, little man. There is only me. You may say what you wish, but that is all. If I want to take her from you I will do so, and you will be glad that I did in spite of yourself." With that, he sighed and placed his head atop his claws, still smiling. "Luckily for her, I have already eaten too much." A pillar of smoke exhumed itself from his nostril, glowing orange at its base. "Rest, human. I shall not eat you or your charge this night. But I suggest you be gone with the sunrise."
    In my current state, I had little choice but to do as he suggested. I slept lightly and fitfully, Ariala dozing against my chest in the sling I had fashioned for her. Dreams of waking in the dragon's jaws woke me each hour, and on the hour when the cave mouth was lit. I left as quietly as I could, leaving the beast still slumbering, not having moved from its position. Its snoring shook the walls, yet the same golden eye was still open all the while.
    When I returned to the surface, the storm had caught up with us. The rumble of a sleeping dragon gave way to thunder. The wind howled and picked up the sand, pushing me onward. Yet already, the sun began to warm my back from where it sat below the clouds, and I felt renewed despite the night's unsavory conditions...

    Mabibwi spun his tale through the morning, spurred by the wine and the wide eyes of the children. He came to his arrival at their house, and was relieved to fall silent at last. It was nearly lunch time. Then it would be time to move on, and Ariala with him. He was about to attempt to pawn the child off on Khalisi, but the disapproval in her eyes when he began to speak was more than he could bear.  

 
    On the third or fourth day, the wind brought him a memory. When he'd been a younger and more inquisitive man, a traveler had once stopped at the village. He was covered in robes and cloaks, each of them compensating for the parts missing from the others. A thick coating of grit clung to them and to his beard. He carried a walking stick about his own height and a collection of rusted canteens that must have travelled as far as he. Mabibwi had asked the man what sand was.
    "What is sand?" he said.
    "Sand," the old traveller said, "is the bones of a hundred million giants ground to dust beneath the weight of the world."
    He still remembered looking at his toes digging into the earth, then looking up into the stranger's eyes. They were sad. He asked a child's question. "Why?" The old man did not respond, but lowered his eyelids and went to sleep where he stood.

Nostrum

1 - The Mountaineer and the Witch

    It was early in the spring that Aleister Crowley put up his feet in the leather chair in my drawing room, still weighted heavily with the tools of his trade: a motley collection of ropes, hooks, ice picks, hand axes, regular axes, lanterns, pots, pans, and several of the beards one only obtains in the Wild Lands. I think he had been somewhere in the Indies, but I'd forgotten to ask. He was gaunt beneath his curly, sun-kissed hair and his skin appeared to be a single human-shaped callus.
    "How do you feel?" I said. The spring rain - still frozen - beat softly on my roof and leaked in through the casements.
    He puffed up and then exhaled. "At peace. You should go. Before you get too old."
    "Sure. But what about the apothecary?"
    He laughed. "Well, you'd have to close it, of course. Life calls, you know?"
    "Yes yes."
    "Surely you want something more than this." He waved at the room in an effeminate, dismissive way. I was uncertain whether to take offense at how easily he brushed off everything that defined my life.
    "I expect I do."
    "What is it you want, Gerald? ...If you didn't have the apothecary."
    "Honestly?"
    "It's me."
    "I'd kind of like to live forever."
    He cackled. "Most wouldn't say it's a calling, but I'll give it to you." He filled his pipe with a plant I'd never seen before and lit up. "Well, no time like the present to start working that out. You still have your health and most of your wits left. Not a bad vessel in which to set sail for eternity."
    "I suppose I do have a few wits left to expend." He passed me the pipe.
    It wasn't long before the bookshelves began to bend. Aleister launched into a lenghty recounting of his mountaineering escapades, of which I remember little. There were frozen limbs, natives amorous and vengeful by turns [Aleister has always inspired either love or hatred in everyone he meets. I was perhaps an exception to this rule.], betrayals, lost comrades, and anything else that might fit neatly in the pages of a romance. I listened with skepticism, yet knew that it was all true anyway.
    I admit to an acute sense of the smallness of my own life, trapped in my apartments with only the detritus of my studies and trade. Much as I preferred things this way, I told Al how I wished to expand into the universe, physically if possible. He was quite positive, of course. "What you want is transcendence, right? It comes in many forms, each with many avenues of pursuit."
    I knew well what he was trying to say, and I began to map them in my head. Circuits of passage were forming, transits around an across a great sea. I filed away certain items of my own collection to refer to later that very night. My gaze drifted down to the gloved fingers of my right hand. "Aleister..." I said. There was a silence while I searched for the words. "Do you remember the point in your life when you became who you were?"
    He scratched his cheek for a moment. "I...think I know what you mean." He attempted to fold his legs beneath him, realized they were too long for the chair, and simply leaned forward instead. "I do, in fact, remember the moment when I became myself."
    "When was it?"
    "When I realized that no one was going to help me get what I want." Beyond the windows, the rain intensified.
    I nodded. It was an answer I would have to process on my own.
    "That reminds me," he said. "I brought gifts!"
    "Gifts?"
    "Yes. Curios, souvenirs. Gifts." He removed a parcel from his pack and untied the twine. The cloth fell open. "This is a book."
    "I can see that."
    "I know how much you like books."
    "Everyone does."
    "This book....is said to be a thousand years old."
    He handed it to me. It was only just larger than my hand, bound in treated wood, with pages of animal hide. I opened it. Carefully, of course. "How did you come across such a thing?"
    "It was given to me by a Sumatran merchant."
    "Given to you? Just like that?"
    Aleister puffed on his pipe again and shrugged. "He said he wanted it out of his collection, and no one was interested in buying. I don't suppose he knew many collectors of old English works like yourself. I was able to bargain him down to the reasonable price of nothing."
    "Old Welsh. It looks fascinating. Thank you, Aleister."
    "Wait until you see the rest!" He held up a tooth longer than his own skeletal fingers.  "This comes from an aquatic animal of some sort."
    "Not a shark tooth?"
    "Definitely not a shark. This bastard reared up over the starboard railing right in the middle of a storm, and closed its jaws over the torso of the man next to me. I drove my cutlass straight into its writhing gums! All that did was drive it back into the sea, sailor in tow. It left a couple of teeth behind, though." I looked on with interest, still running my finger across a page of the open book.
    "This!" he said, picking up a glass case of herbs. "Is one of the finest plants ever to pass through my pipe. We're only smoking the second finest tonight. And I know you like plants."
    "Almost as much as books."
    "Quite right!" He set the case down and picked up a glass bead of a brilliant purple. "This one is....just a glass bead..."
    "I doubt it is just anything."
    "....given to me by Queen Supayalat."
    "As a keepsake, clearly. Perhaps you should keep it."
    He frowned and looked beyond his years for a moment. "You should take it." He handed it off to me immediately as if it were burning his fingers. I did not argue. It was unusual not to hear a story from Aleister when it was clear that one lurked within. This one was only for himself, apparently.
    With a blink, he covered his melancholy and was his outward self again. "Last one on the list! I've saved the best for last, though I sense that book may be your personal favorite."
    "You have my undivided attention," I said, the open book still in my lap.
    "This--" he paused longer than usual before holding up a chunk of crimson gemstone, "is a fragment of the Philosopher's Stone."
    I laughed. "How much did you pay for this nonsense?"
    He grinned right back. "Pay? Nothing. I stole it."
    I took it from him and held it up to the light. "Now this one, you will have to tell me."
    "But of course: At the center of the Karakum Desert, we happened upon a tribe of zealots who had taken up residence in an ancient temple...."
    I listened on into the night, my right hand still resting on the book.

    Aleister had left long after the midnight oil, when the weed and spirits were finally gone. I could not resist the urge to test out this supposed finest plant, and it seemed only right to include him. It did not disappoint. My friend's tales were told with contagious enthusiasm, not the least because I sensed in Aleister a deep affection for humankind; a passion which I myself lacked. He was a complement to my own personality in that I could latch on like a remora and appreciate the journey of those passions from a safe distance. What he got out of my friendship, I'll never know.
    Hours later, still awake and with no thoughts of sleep in my head, the rain reached my ears as a glittering static held at bay by the walls of my library. I sat amidst several stacks of alchemical treatises and volumes on Mediterranean history; yet two items were of the greatest concern. The book. As far as I had read at the time, it appeared to be the diary of a young woman; one whom I had already classified as a natural philosopher, based on the many drawings and diagrams contained within. [My heart jumped toward the volume on seeing an illustration of adenium obesum, beautifully rendered from taproot to petals.] The second item of concern, I had told no one about. I had taken to wearing gloves at all times to hide the streaks of black flesh that stretched out onto my right hand, swelling the skin around them. Whatever it was, the flesh glittered like scales in the lamplight, and sometimes I thought I could see it pulse out of the corner of my eye.
    Until well after sunrise, I tasked myself with translating the first section of the diary. I will include it here, in its heavily modified form. You will, I hope, forgive me any liberties I take with the prose. Though the point is moot, as none but me have access to the original text. Nevertheless, I will do my best to preserve her voice within my own, as much as any middle-aged, 19th century man can hope to imitate the style of a young woman of the 7th century.

The Diary of Gwen

    Gildas is an imbecile. A pious man; but a horrid, feckless bore. But things being as they are, he has managed to rile up the rest against me. Hardly a difficult task, when they listen to whoever speaks loudest. And that man is a fat, fleshy-legged war horn, braying about sin all night and day. I wish Maelgwn had the guts to shut him up for good.
    This is all because Bergam relapsed and, of course, blamed it on me. Same fever again, sames sores as before, but this time it was because I cursed him, not because he's a sickly bastard who can't remember to take his medicine. And somehow that creep got a look at the dark spots that have been spreading up my side these past weeks, that I keep covered at all times, and that have been seen on no one else and are clearly not contagious. So yesterday, there was a crowd gathered outside my door, Gildas at their head shouting as always. Calling me a witch, shouting that I was the lost child of black-faced Gwyn of the underworld, and whatever other streams of nonsense occurred to him. It's when he started talking about Mother that I almost cut his throat right in front of that crowd.
    Granted, I did put a hex on him, but it didn't seem to take, and no one's complaining about that. The man is constantly shedding what's left of his hair, so it was easy enough to pluck some from my own floor and boil it with a bit of rabbit intestine.
    I'm back, now that the crowd has disappeared, long enough to gather my things and be gone before they decide to hang me. There is little to take. I cannot just leave Mother here. I gathered a vial of dirt from her grave, right by the white brook of my namesake, possibly at the same exact spot where Father died.
    I must leave the flock. I can take one kid with me, but the rest will likely be eaten when the town finds me gone. I will disperse them into the woods as much as I can, and hope they can make it on their own. Perhaps my reputation will be enough to save them from slaughter. Cadfael will come with me. He is my favorite if I must choose. He can walk on his own, and is still small enough to sling over my back if necessary. His horns are just starting to come in. If I'm honest, he isn't much use to me. I have measured my own worth to my satisfaction, and concluded that I will die before eating him. But perhaps we can find a better place for him. I could do with a little company in the coming weeks.
    I am ready to leave this blighted home behind for good. And I already know where to go.
    I've spotted the spots on my arm, now. Not on my hand, so they are easy to hide, but up and down my forearm. I do not understand. I feel right as rain, and there is no pain or even irritation in their vicinity. Only in the past couple days have they begun to glitter like polished oyster shell turned to soft flesh. I almost feel that if I looked long enough I could see something within them, but then I must turn my eyes away in disgust. Best to forget about them for the time being. I am only reminded when I must bathe. Then, a vague fear grips me that they might burst open and bring something forth into the world, though they are clearly not blisters or anything of the sort.

---

    You can understand why this last bit grabbed me so. The description she gave of her affliction was all too familiar, and the coincidence struck me with the night's last peal of thunder. My mind sparked with anticipation even as my body finally drifted to sleep, still perched in an armchair. My dreams were seeded with the imagery Gwen had evoked, swirls of fog and howling faces escaping from the sores on my arm, seizing control of my fingers. A restless sleep, though none of the dreams woke me. They were also fascinating, regardless of their content. The personal fears of a stranger who had been dead for a thousand years had become my own dreams. Miraculous. As I woke, it was easy to believe what I had once been told by a wise (but quite rude) acquaintance; that language was the only true alchemy.
    The next morning, Crowley called early and found me as I was headed out the door. My mind was occupied with Gwen's diary and what I might glean from it. But there were other things that I had promised myself I would take care of. Best to get them out of the way early, and reserve more of my day for the important work (reading). In any case, it was easy to pass my errand off as a mundane house call, on which I was glad of Aleister's company. And having just returned home, he found himself idle. No doubt an alien feeling for one such as him, so used to being surrounded by whirlwinds of activity. We walked the streets slowly, and found ourselves discussing what we saw; myself as a long-term resident who lived in it, and he having just returned from foreign shores, and prone to fits of moral pontification and moral outrage. The streets of broken brick and puddles of mud. The worn or abandoned houses scattered among the rest. The degrading air quality. The number of sickly people in the streets, and the carriage drivers who cracked whips at their heads just as they would at a herd of cattle. All of which led inevitably to the society behind, above, or around them.
    "Real change will happen only when we reach a critical mass of dissatisfaction," he was saying. "Regardless of public opinion, there are too many of us who still sup at the teat of injustice. We will not risk losing that meal. It must be taken from us first."
    "I'm amazed at you, Aleister. How you can wine and dine with queens in one sentence, then sound as if you want their heads removed in the next?"
    "It is not the queens, or even the kings, my friend. They are people just like us. Not blind to injustice, like us. But also like us, they are beholden to the machine that feeds them. Only with a larger portion size."
    "From whence comes evil, then?"
    "From you, from me, from none of us. The evil is inherent, arriving from all sources yet embodied in none. No cognitive dissonance necessary."
    "That sounds…difficult to fight against."
    "It is that."
    "I notice you choose to include yourself in those who benefit from the state of things you wish to change."
    "Of course. If I'm to speak of it at all, I must include myself." His exhaustion disappeared for the second it took him to wink and doff his hat at a passing lady. "It's the only way I can get these fools to listen to me, instead of puffing up like roosters."
    I laughed aloud. "And just like that, the mask has slipped."
    "Only for you, my friend. Only for you."
    In this way, we arrived at the morning's call; a dwelling between a fishmonger and a pub that surely housed the used of society, not the users. It was a tall and gangly apartment building that looked to hold together because it could not be bothered to fall down. A trail of smoke, as wan as the building itself, twisted from the chimney, giving the impression of being an extension of the design; suggesting that the whole thing might be nothing but ash particulates, banding together and congealed into a familiar shape, by chance or malign purpose. Aside from ourselves, the one person I saw enter this trap was just as insubstantial. Part of the mirage, no doubt.
    I took a moment to explain my visit to Aleister, and that he might wish to stay out in the street. An elderly woman was quite ill and quite contagious. I myself donned a plague mask and already wore my gloves. He was amenable to the idea of not dying of a horrible disease. "That public house looks lively." He gestured to the building next to the house of smoke. "Find me there when you're finished."
    "It's a bit early. What is that, a morning cap?"
    "I've been in town nearly twelve hours without setting foot in one. Far too long, if you ask me."
    "I'll try to be quick, then."
    The interior hallways of the tenement were as dark and dreary as expected, though at least more substantial than the patient I was calling on. She looked as if the first draft to enter her room would disperse her like a cloud of dust. Fortunately, no air seemed to flow in or out of her apartment. I began to sweat beneath my mask almost immediately.
    I cannot now recall her name, only that she was old and widowed, and as sunny as one might expect. As I arrived, and as I departed, she sat in a chair by the only window as if waiting for something to occur. I examined the sores across her arms with as professional an air as I could muster; struck through as it was with a cringing sort of empathy that I struggled to keep from tipping into revulsion. Anyone in her situation could use a friendly presence, and I needed my bedside manner to make up for the countenance the mask presented. Bedside manners, or manners more generally, are not my strong suit.
    The truth was, neither of us expected anything good from this visit. It was a formality, but one I had kept up as the sickness had swept through the neighborhood over the preceding months. We both knew I could do nothing for her, yet we could believe that the practice would yield positive results in the future. Just not in her future...
    The other truth was that I had an ulterior, more personal reason to be there: the arm that I kept hidden. I needed to know what was happening to me. Though there were some similarities in the symptoms, and I could think of no point of comparison but the plague, there were too many differences. Other symptoms were lacking entirely. The sores were completely different, I felt none of the pain that the victims I interviewed complained about, and most died in a matter of weeks; whereas my own ailment had started months ago. Around the same time the pandemic had arrived in the city. And though I asked in roundabout ways, poked circuitously at the subject, none complained of nightmares that were out of the ordinary (for someone with a terminal illness).
    I could not say the same for myself. This was the note repeatedly scribbled in the margins of my other notes on every patient. I could not say the same for myself.