Then everything was suddenly interrupted, a shift as of wet sand slipping from the upper bank, a deep dark substance suddenly scooped out, leaving a thin deceptive crust of gleaming white on which the unwary foot would tread and crash to doom.

An interim of little deaths, all painless, as though the senses were so many organ stops and a hand, invisible and beneficient, had absent-mindedly choked off the air.

Now she is reading aloud—familiar passages from a book which I must have read. She is lying on her stomach, her elbows bent, her head cupped in the two palms. It is the profile of her face which she gives me and the white opacity of the flesh is gloved and fragrant. The lips are like bruised geraniums, two perfectly hinged petals that open and close. The words are melodiously disguised; they issue from a sound box made of duveteen.

It is only when I recognize that they are my own words, words that were never put on paper but written in the head, that I notice she is not reading to me but to a young man lying beside her. He lies on his back and looks up into her face with the attentiveness of a devotee. There are just the two of them, and the world has no existence for them. It is not a matter of space which separates me from them but a world chasm. There is no longer any possibility of communication; they float in space on a lotus leaf. We are cut off. I try desperately to send a message across the void, to let her know at least that the enchanting words are from the embryonic book of my life. But she is out of bounds. The reading continues and her ecstasy mounts. I am lost and forgotten.

Then, for just a flash, she turns her full face towards me, the eyes revealing no sign of recognition. The eyes are turned inward, as though in deep meditation. The fullness of the face is gone; the contours of the skull become pronounced. She is still beautiful, but it is no longer the allure of star and flesh; it is the phantasmal beauty of the smothered soul emerging with crest and dye from the prism of death. A fleeting cloud of remembrance passes over the empty map of her sharp features. She who was alive, incarnate, a tormented flower in the crevice of memory, now vanishes like smoke from the empire of sleep. Whether she had died in sleep, perchance in dream, or whether I myself had died and found her on the other side, asleep and dreaming, I could not tell. For an interminable instant of time our paths had crossed, the union had been consummated, the wound of the past had been healed. Incarnate or discarnate, we were now wheeling off into space, each to his own orbit, each accompanied by his own music. Time, with its endless trail of pain, sorrow and separation, had folded up; we were again in the timeless blue, distant one from another, but no longer separated. We were wheeling like the constellations, wheeling in the obedient meadows of the stars. There was nothing but the soundless chime of starry beams, the bright collisions of floating feathers churning with scintillating brilliance in the fiery sound track of the angelic realms.

I knew then that I had found bliss, and that bliss is the world, or state of the world, where creation reigns. I knew another thing, that if it were merely a. dream it would end, and if it were not a dream...

My eyes were open and I was in a room, the same room in which I had gone to bed the night before.

Others would be content to call it a dream. But what is a dream? Who experienced what? And where and when?

I was drugged by the vanished splendors of the phantasmal voyage. I could neither return nor depart. I lay abed with eyes lightly closed and reviewed the procession of hypnagogic images which passed like ghostly sentinels from station to station along the tenuous frontier of sleep. Recollections of other waking images crowded in, leaving dark stains across the bright track made by the passage of the autochtonous ghosts. There was the Una to whom I had waved goodbye one Summer's day, the Una on whom I had turned my back, the Una whose eyes had followed me down the street, and at the corner when I turned I had felt those eyes piercing through me—and I knew that no matter where I went or how much I would try to forget, those two beseeching eyes would be forever buried between my shoulder blades.

There was another Una who showed me her bedroom —years later when we met by chance on the street in front of her house. A changed Una, who blossomed only in dream. The Una who belonged to another man, the Una surrounded by the spawn of wedlock. A recurrent dream, this pleasant, trivial, comforting. It recurred obsessively in a configuration almost mathematically exact. Guided by my double, George Marshall, I would stand in front of her house and, like a Peeping Tom, I would wait for her to come out of the house with sleeves rolled up and take a breath of air. She was never aware of our presence, though we were there as large as life and only a few feet away from her. That meant that I was privileged to observe her at leisure, even to discuss her points with my companion and guide. She always looked the same—the matron in full bloom. I would have my fill of her and then quietly take my leave. It would be dark and I would make a desperate effort to remember the name of the street which somehow I never could find unaided. But at the corner, looking for the street sign, the darkness would become a thick pall of black. I knew that then George Marshall would take my arm and say, as he always did, «Don't worry, I know where it is... I'll bring you back again some day.» And then George Marshall, my very double, my friend and traitor, would suddenly give me the slip, and I would be left to stumble about in the grimy purlieus of some odious quarter which reeked of crime and vice. From bar to bar I would wander, always looked on askance, always insulted and humiliated, often pummeled and kicked about like a sack of oats. Time after time I would find myself flat on the pavement, the blood trickling from mouth and ears, my hands cut to ribbons, my body one great welter of bruises and contusions. It was a terrible price I always had to pay for the privilege of watching her take a breath of air. But it was worth it! And when in my dreams I saw George Marshall approaching, when I heard the promise which his reassuring words of greeting always contained, my heart would begin to pound furiously and I would hasten my steps to arrive in front of her house at just the right moment. Strange that I could never find my way alone. Strange that George Marshall had to be the one to lead me to her, for George Marshall had never seen in her anything more than a pleasing bundle of flesh. But George Marshall, tied to me by an invisible cord, had been the silent witness of a drama which his unbelieving eyes had repudiated. And so in dream George Marshall could look again with eyes of wonder; he too could find a certain contentment in rediscovering the junction where our ways had parted.

Suddenly now I remembered something I had completely forgotten. I opened wide my eyes as if to stare across the stretch of distant past and capture the angle of an empty vision. I see the back yard, as it was during the long winter, the black boughs of the elm trees laced in ince, the ground hard and barren, the sky splotched with zinc and laudanum. I am the prisoner in the house of misplaced love. I am August Angst growing a melancholy beard. I am a drone whose sole function is to shoot spermatozoa into the cuspidor of anguish. I pull off orgasms with zygomatic fury. I bite the beard which covers her mouth like moss. I chew fat pieces out of my own melancholy and spit them out like roaches.

All through the winter it goes on like this—until the day when I come home and find her lying on the bed in a pool of blood. In the dresser the doctor has left the body of the seven month tooth-ache wrapped in a towel. It is like a homunculus, the skin a dark red, and it has hair and nails. It lies breathless in the drawer of the dresser, a life yanked out of darkness and thrust back into darkness. It has no name, nor has it been loved, nor will it be mourned. It was pulled up by the roots, and if it shrieked no one heard. What life it had was lived and lost in sleep. Its death was only a further, deeper plunge into that sleep from which it never awakened.