Fantastic Metropolis

“A nice woman,” said Henri after Jacqueline left, when he took her glass.

“The wife of a friend.” I refilled mine from the bottle. “But you’re right.”

“Bring her here again tonight, eh, Mr. Elwin. Musicians will be here at the Bellond. We have a lively time.”

“It’d be nice, wouldn’t it?” I said. “I’m already having a lively time.”

“You do have good times for an old man.”

“If you weren’t an old man too you wouldn’t say such things. I suspect you of having good times too.”

We laughed. It felt good not taking offense. I once did, in my forties. By my fifties, I felt the youthfulness implied by being called old.

Or it may have been the air in Talleil. Or the wall. It made people more alive, to be reminded so constantly of mortality.

When light fled across the sea to the west I descended from the hotel. The breeze felt damp against my cheek. To the east—the hotel sat west of the wall—a faint haze appeared in the air. It rapidly gained in solidity, and began to shed its characteristic, faint glow.

My course took me down Rue Calais to Germaine and St. Beauve. I passed beneath the overhanging buttresses of the Hotel Londres which ponderously looked over the sea. At the six-lane Chatelaine I paused out of habit, though it had emptied of all traffic save two cars I could see in the distance, moving westward away from the wall. Not many years ago I would have regarded this scene with alarm: the Chatelaine free of traffic at any hour? Astounding!

I had become accustomed to the silence, however. Crossing to the beach without running the street’s high-speed gauntlet made the visit to the shore the more pleasant.

One other soul braved the seaside at this hour, a darkened figure I could see pacing the cobble off to the left. The figure walked with hands locked behind his back, his feet moving in a composed manner in the opposite direction. Most people kept free of the area after dusk.

The wall did not greatly disturb me, however.

That is not to say it left me unaffected. To even the most stable—or jaded—of minds, the sight of the pearly whiteness blocking off a fair portion of the land and sky could be unnerving. The wall had a presence of its own, even without the added spectacle of the ghosts.

The stones of the beach made a pleasant sound underfoot, audible even against the waves which clattered pebbles together while receding from the high tide of an hour before. I turned my gaze firmly forward and upward, however.

The wall stretched from some distance out to sea, maybe half a kilometer, to a point above the top of a low mountain north of the city. The mountain had become a magnet for mystics who liked to sit near the diffuse phenomenon. Few apparitions erupted from the wall to disturb their meditations, there. The mystics apparently achieved marvelous trances. Some wrote popular books about their experiences.

The spectral people and animals, of which most were horses, emerged from random points across the white surface. Sometimes they appeared at ground level, where they could be inspected. Pearly white of color and of an oddly grainy texture, they would slowly separate from the general substance. At a distance of some two meters they would begin dissipating. The graininess simply increased until the image no longer cohered. They dispersed, leaving no residue of any kind. According to many in the public, the apparitions failed to entirely disappear, but instead became invisible: thus Talleil, to the fearful-minded, was host to invisible denizens countless in number and visible only for brief moments as they emerged from this extra-dimensional portal.

Not a theory to which I gave much credence.

As I walked across the beach I saw a number of ghostly figures appearing. All looked human, this time. Being at a distance, I could tell little about them. The darkness had grown enough that more forms emerged above the sea and the rock-covered shore. Near me, a trio of horses thrust from the whiteness, kicking and breaking free with more speed than did most apparitions, dissipating then with equal alacrity when they charged into the air over the beach. I held my breath at their appearance.

Above and to the right, two small human figures appeared, both female, holding hands. I had never seen any apparitions hold hands before.

I wondered sometimes if my curiosity stemmed from voyeurism. The figures all went completely naked, even if they usually showed less definition than the marble sculpture carved in some of these regions during an earlier age. Yet I took equal interest in the young and old forms, and the male and female. I cannot deny a certain glandular reaction to the naked female body—but standing beside the wall of ghosts, I never entirely believed these white bodies wholly human. Female, yes. Human—I felt less sure.

Yet these two held hands—so human a gesture. In my more pacifist reveries I wondered if the apparitions were victims of war—for the horses could have fallen to sword and arrow and bomb, just as the young and old, fit and unfit could have been claimed in battle. Yet did young girls hold hands in war?

They disappeared.

I looked up and glanced at the myriad forms appearing and vanishing elsewhere on the wall, and felt a familiar chill.

---

“Jenson,” Jacqueline said. “You don’t mind I’m married?”

“And to Beni,” I said. “It’s a mystery about him, isn’t it?”

She shrugged. Despite the weight of the topic it seemed a truthful gesture. “He’s been on the edge for a long time.”

“I guess I didn’t know.”

“I’m glad you called.”

“I am too. I don’t know what made me throw away the rest of my flight ticket and get off here. Memories, I suppose.”

“You knew him when he was younger, and better. You remind me of what he was.”

“Except I’m older.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said.

I gazed at her, enchanted. The folds and creases of skin around eyes tell much of a person. At least I have found it so. As I sat, regarding Jacqueline for the second time in the space of twenty-four hours over a glass of wine—we had shared a bottle together in the afternoon, making conversation in the absence of Beni—I found myself regarding not her eyes but the skin around her eyes.

She’d enjoyed both good times and bad, I could tell from those lines. Neither had she been entirely lonely in life, nor had she found full satisfaction, whether in family, friends, or lovers. Yet she was capable of much—of dealing with the unhappiness of others, or the happiness, and turning it toward the benefit of her own emotional state. Not a bad way to be.

Lines around eyes tell less than everything, however. I regarded her lips, which sat in a half-smile after having pursed to drink the wine. The wine deepened their redness. I wondered how recently they had touched Beni’s.

I noticed her hands were smaller than mine, but not disproportionate to her body size. They moved sometimes swiftly without nervousness. They adjusted strands of hair that fell across her forehead though not so frequently as to distract.

She appeared only modestly vain. You meet few who are not vain about something. Meeting those who are not overly vain, or at least not vain about trivial things, is enough.

I realized that about Jacqueline, looking at her over a crystal of wine: that she was enough. I am not a special human. My needs are not of anyone extraordinary or unusual. My needs are of a person lost in the world just as most people are lost. I have seen neither home nor family in many years and cannot state that either still exist, at least with enough certainty to believe myself if I did. The transitory nature of the cosmopolitan life—and we are all cosmopolitan, even those of us living poorly off chemical-burnt and sun-scorched lands in the Sahel or the sooty waste of the Black Forest, so long as we have felt the dislocations of time and space created by technology and technological media—that life of the cosmopolitan has diffused me and made it impossible for me, as with others, to escape the sense of loss, or the knowledge of being lost.

And being lost as are all others, I could be content with a woman like this.

She knew about leaving family behind, about leaving places behind, about leaving times behind. She had known men and had loved and hated, and found rapture and despair, and had probably discarded youthful hopes for interpersonal grace, to embrace the cosmopolitan theory of life on earth, that all people are dust only faintly stirred by the divine breath of nature.

I certainly believed it. Too much accident plays into the affairs of humanity to make any other faith possible. Humans are not special creations. It took religion thousands of years to convince various erratic portions of the world that the falsehood of special creation was so; and it took another thousand for the idea to grow so diffuse that people could start seeing through it. Once such an idea grows thin, and grows transparent, it must be denied: humanity and the process of special creation do not intersect, not in the universe of the big bang and red-shifted stars. They intersect only in the fantasies of rebirth after death and the second life hereafter, a saccharine idea promoted by robed scholastics who hardly achieved the first life.

Did Jacqueline evaluate me in these same moments? Wine is an opener. To drink it is to open the liquid, and split its essences free, making them available to the senses. And to open yourself. You open to things and people outside yourself. You listen with a different ear, see with a new eye. You touch with different skin and feel air move against hairs new and re-sensitized. A charge enters the mind and alters its orientation within the supple contours of the brain; it registers facts and fancies and sensations thus, rather than so.

I judged she did. That in itself comforted me. We were alike in that.

Jacqueline’s eyes strayed to the right, out of the booth. Her line of sight went past my shoulder to someplace deeper in the restaurant. A line of consternation appeared over her eye, then on the bridge of her nose. Her eyes hovered between glazing over and sharpening intensely.

I turned to follow her gaze even as the apparition came abreast of the table.

I say apparition out of belief it was not a boy. It had the form and face of a boy. No boy had the eyes of this creature, however. No boy had the hint of bright teeth beneath barely parted, rouge lips. No boy had skin as this, that appeared to be that of a mummy, irregular and covered with fine bumps, finely lined yet slightly gleaming as if rubbed with oil. He wore nothing but a dirty white shirt, unbuttoned, a size too large for his shoulders. The frame visible within was not emaciated, but still gave the impression of being tortured. You saw the ribs, but not because of starvation. The pelvis bones jutted within the skin, yet not with the uncompromising ugliness of utter destitution. Adequate flesh covered all those bones. But that flesh was not Northern European nor African nor any hue I had seen in human flesh. Corundum-dark almost to blackness, the boy would have passed invisibly into any shadow. The yellow-glazed lamps of the cafe slightly warmed the colors of his bald skull. His eyes turned to us. They had whites I had somehow expected, given the oddity of the skin. A nearly perfect chocolate brown color, flecked with spots of magenta and orange as if they were the eggs of an exotic species of tropical bird, they stared blankly. The centers sat like blisters, the roughness of the retinas almost three-dimensional, surrounding the dark foci with crevasses and crumpled highlands that folded up and bent and plunged into the iris.

His glance may have lasted one, two seconds. Time froze. Once I turned his direction all stopped save his movement across the parquetry between red table covers and black-painted wire chairs. Something fiery burned within his constitution, judging from the set of the head and the lines upon the face. It might have been the peak of all emotions that blazed within that leathery skin, for where the shirt parted before his groin I saw his penis, dark and scaled with odd folds of flesh, standing stiffly erect, unmoving even as he marched past us.

It did seem almost a march: military, high-stepping steps would have taken him past as quickly.

He disappeared with such suddenness I doubted he had been there.

Jacqueline’s gaze met mine.

We sat in such silence that the waiter must have noticed, for he appeared beside our booth.

“Do you lack for anything?” he said. He was a tall, broad-shouldered youth who took great pride in the neatness of his uniform and the perfection of his speech.

“Who was that boy?” said Jacqueline.

“What boy?”

“The one who just walked by.”

“There is no boy in here. I would not let in a boy at this hour.”

“He just walked by in nothing but a shirt.”

“I will shoo him out.” He looked back up the length of the restaurant, making it apparent he saw nobody. “I will find him and shoo him out,” he said to us, nodding his head confidently. “Anything else? More wine?”

---

Time disordered itself in my mind. I gazed upon Jacqueline and knew I had known her forever. I knew equally that I would know her forever. Yet we hardly knew one another. I felt exquisitely strange.

We walked the four blocks from the restaurant to my hotel. I remembered Henri’s invitation to return to his cafe, to hear the music. I rolled the idea of music through my thoughts, and felt Jacqueline’s touch. In my room, she held herself against me eagerly—she was almost my height—and drew me into a series of long kisses. I normally thought of kisses as being not so much pleasurable in and of themselves, but as being preludes or postludes to other pleasures. To these, sufficient unto themselves, I surrendered myself. I could have remained contented there, cushioned in her arms and upon her lips.

As I considered the option a thought disturbed me, a thought from nowhere.

I remembered that my ex-wife floated upon a bed of laboratory gelatin in the adjoining room, the one with the window looking out over the street. She floated there bathed in moonlight.

I pushed myself away from Jacqueline and looked through the door into the other room, and turned on the light. I saw nothing. My wife had never been here. She had never seen Talleil. I had last seen her years ago.

Jacqueline approached behind me, then reached past me and turned off the light in the other room. With her other hand she traced the slight curve of my back. She kissed the side of my neck. She turned me toward herself, caressing me even as she was pulling my clothing looser.

I thought, for some reason, of my first time with a girl, when I was fourteen, when Suzy, a neighborhood girl with braided hair and blue coveralls and a shirt that had unbuttoned more quickly than I could ever have believed, her small breasts with pink aureoles and her rough lips that were just learning to kiss as she taught me not only kisses but the secret recesses of the female. I comprehended the moment only dimly. I failed to realize what was occurring. At times I regarded it as dream. You can live dream, for moments at a time: you are awake, you are conscious, you are thinking, but what takes place around you is dream. Suzy became a friend and lover in a dream, and the place I entered when I entered her, where I took a step away from boyhood, was a place of dream.

I had forgotten much of that quality, of that first love. I had forgotten it till this moment. The unadorned walls and carpeting of the hotel room took on magical quality. In their very plainness wonder resided. Faint light emanated from every surface. Most radiant of all, Jacqueline’s face hung before me and pressed close and merged with mine in an eerie glow cast by her own flesh.

I would not say the light was entirely visible. I feel closer to truth in saying she cast invisible light, and that I grew sensitive to radiations normally beyond perception. I beheld the wondrous creature that love had made, and called her by name, and held her as she held me, slowly warming in the knowledge that in love I too had become a wondrous creature, an impossible creature that could exist now, at this moment in the barely furnished hotel room, because the space we occupied partook of dream. We hardly floated toward bed—we walked—but where we walked, we trailed dream behind us and threw it before us.

When she touched me my flesh flushed. Where her clothes fell away, warm landscapes arose inviting exploration, and promising that even while discovered, they would remain undiscovered; even while explored, they would remain untouched; even while reached, they would vanish from reach. I would never find these places again yet could venture near by different paths again and again, if I so to choose.

Her hand rose along my thigh as we pressed into the bed, and tightened and pulled me closer. My head burned.

I became aware of a family of dead tenants, poor people who had lived in an old ruin in this spot centuries ago, who stood in the other room. They stood silently, staring at one another while Jacqueline and I turned upon the bed. Dead people, long gone, they were as dimly aware of us as we were of them. They would not interfere, I knew. Jacqueline and I wrapped ourselves in a rite of sanctity.

I felt the dream shift like a fog that might lift and burn away beneath uncongenial light.

The bed beneath us lurched, edging toward the apartment’s door.

---

The ball of crystal floating above me I had bought in Turkestan, from an old trader blind in one eye, wearing ratted coat and dirty silk trousers.

I could still hear him: “It’s pure crystal, utterly pure, this one without a flaw, look through it, you can tell a good stone, Mr. Elwin, you can tell craftsmanship, this one polished by hand, can you tell that, Mr. Elwin, in your years, have you seen so fine a one?”

I had seen many as fine.

The sphere hung over me while I lay in bed. Perfectly clear, it allowed me to see through it, even with eyes closed: opened, my face stared back.

I saw the face I see in the mirror, not the face of normal days but of the worst days. You know the face. The face of days you doubt if you are alive, the face of days you wonder how many months or days or minutes are left to you on Earth: in the mirror you see your mortality, you realize how tightly that pallid skin clings to the skull underneath, how readily that skull would rise to sight with the peeling back of that thinnest membrane.

To see the approach of death in one’s own face: that is the horror of aging without confidence that one has accomplished anything in life. When it takes the contours you thought were uniquely your own, when it appropriates your cheekbones, your jawline, your hair, your stubble, your neck, your shoulders, your adam’s apple, your tongue, your nostrils, your ears, and your eyes, especially your eyes with the textures and colors of their retinas and whites, then you perceive what a personal entity death is, for it comes in the guise that means the most to you, the guise that above all you would never give to another being on earth or in the universe. That violation occurs in a split moment and shakes you to the bottom of your being. You have no defenses: none, against yourself. You realize how close that fate is. It is upon you. It is around you. It clings to you as that pale, vein-lined flesh clings to the rounded bones of the skull. It is within you. You realize it is not in the mirror at all. For that mirror reflects back on you, and you realize with clarity, even when it is impossible to think of any other thing at all, that the picture in the mirror is the true picture, the picture that you have avoided seeing all your life, the one that speaks not of what you are at that precise moment but what you have been and, worse, what you will be. It shows you that all falls away: the flesh is nothing, the hair is nothing, the eyes are nothing: and the mind contemplating itself in horror—that, too: nothing.

It stared at me out of the sphere carved of rock crystal, hanging above me in the hotel room.

Me, myself. I hung in air, the papery skin of death making mockery of my features, the glowing eyes screaming not of life’s triumphs and acquired wisdom or the consolations of experience but of death, of the death of flesh and the death of the mind, of the end to wisdom and the cessation of all consolations and the termination of memory.

I shrieked.

Within my mind, at the very least, I shrieked. I cannot say if my mouth opened, or if Jacqueline turned to stare at me in my momentary agony: but somewhere within me, if not everywhere within me, I shrieked.

The bed inched again nearer the door of the apartment.

I shook my head, kissed Jacqueline when she turned her head, pushed myself to the bedside table and opened the brandy, poured a small glass and sipped it, found myself sleepy again, sipped more, and slept, then, troubled by odd dreams of childhood.

---

A slowly-turning wheel of light and shadow appears over the small crater lake of Chambon, beyond Saint Nectaire-le-Bas; and pale light plays across the leaves of the region’s beeches, faintly illuminating their white trunks. In the region between Etampes and Fontainebleau, globes of light travel among the fields and float between outcroppings of dark rock. Across the Rhine from Valence, against the cliff bearing the ruins of Crussol, small, intensely-shining figures move, as of gracefully gliding gulls crossing the river in darkness.

Jacqueline, when she left to attend to her position in a hotel in the morning, left me a specimen of her writing. It gave one of the more interesting rationales I have encountered for the spectral turn of events in the world.

She lived the character of her greatest writing, by day, creating a Jacqueline Lefort of tranquil exterior, a woman apparently happy yet miserable inside at her success—at her ability to make good in a crass, commercialized world, while her truer nature and artistic ability withered within her. By night, she wrote short stories and prose poems: footnotes to the novel she lived.

Older than I first thought, she had reached her mid-thirties, only some sixteen years younger than me. She grew up in the region between Dordogne and Garonne, in the Entre-deux-Mers kingdom of the vine: her childhood memories, she told me, were of a neatly kept village constructed around the square contours of a Middle Ages bastide, and of dusty roads that connected well-spaced white houses and the organized landscapes of vineyards. Even the gardens of the villas, she remembered, followed the pattern of undulating rows seen in grape fields that seemed endless and enchanted to her as a child. She never saw a sky that same color anywhere else, nor a soil that texture or smell. As a teenager she sought her fortune along the Mediterranean coast and found it, after a fashion.

She wrote the following while I prepared a breakfast for the two of us, making an omelet to accompany the bread a maid brought on a tray, with tea.

“Pascal,” wrote Jacqueline, “told us how we dissemble happiness—how we cannot avoid hoping for happiness—how we distract ourselves with ways of making ourselves happy—simply because of a failure—a failure to do anything about unhappiness. Our parents put us in this world where death is irrevocable, where other parents have spawned others who know nothing beyond their noses, where despair seems the rational response. So we try to be happy.

“And all those diverted thoughts–
“They go toward the bright and the good and the cheerful.

“And those others–
“Those thoughts from which we divert ourselves–
“Where do they go?

“Do they have a place?

“If it is not too absurd, imagine a binary stellar arrangement:

“I mean a star, shining, and its neighbor, a depression of gravity, a lightless pit, a black hole. The two revolve around each other, the one radiant and visible across the galaxy, the other one invisible. The invisible one slowly steals the light and fire from its dancing partner. So heavy is the dark star that it attracts the very light rays of the bright one. It eats light. It circles the nuclear brilliance of the companion, and steals all it can. It is a dull bird gathering bright pieces of foil. It is the ragged urchin pinching jewelry. It is a dark star eating light. It eats, eats, eats.

“Such things as these exist.

“We know how they came to be. Such a mass of matter existed at one time that it collapsed into itself. Is it a universal law, then, that nothing can be made so great it cannot fall into its own attraction?

“What then of our thoughts–
“Those thoughts from which we have so long diverted our eyes–
“Those dismaying thoughts of misery and ignorance and death–

“Yes, those: the thoughts untended to, undealt with, undisposed of;

“Suppressed, dismissed, subsumed;

“Yes, those thoughts.

“They have remained with us beneath our veneer of contentment, gathering force, gathering the kind of mass that only thoughts and feelings can amass–
“And they have collapsed on themselves.

“They have become so huge they have fallen into their own gravity. The fears of death and inner convictions of misery—these have expanded over the centuries, growing as the numbers of people have grown, expanding as the population has expanded–
“And they have collapsed to become these, our dark stars, the glowing structures in the night, stealing the happiness we so effortlessly produce. The happiness we thought had no cost produces phantoms.”

---

“Beni’s mind failed,” she said. “That’s why he disappeared. He couldn’t face being around people with his mind like that.”

“How could his mind fail?” said Edwin, the Englishman who always managed to find himself here at Henri’s. “He never had one.”

“He had a good one,” I said. “Just always off on new tangents. Couldn’t keep his mind anywhere.”

I gazed at Jacqueline as we spoke, treasuring her glances. Tonight I noticed her eyebrows. They had a superlative naturalness. They sat upon her face, arched but not in a pronounced way, only slightly darker than her hair. I hoped Beni would never return.

“I knew Beni,” said Madd, the other American. “A lost man.”

“Lost?” said Edwin. “I gathered from what you said earlier that everyone’s lost. That’s the first thing I’d agree with you on, even if it’s cliché. Or maybe because it’s cliché.”

“I mean I saw him disappear,” Madd said. “He told me he was going to walk into the wall, and he did so.”

“You just told us you don’t believe the wall exists,” I said. “And now you’re saying you saw Beni go into it?”

“The wall doesn’t exist,” Madd said. “As far as I’m concerned. I can’t see it. I’ve tried. I’ve gone down to the beach at night and walked up and down, and I’ve gone through the spot where people say the wall is, and I can’t see anything and I don’t feel anything. I go right through. I sincerely wish I could see it. You’d think a science fiction writer would be privileged to be able to see something when no one else can, but it seems to be exactly the opposite thing. I can’t see what everyone else sees. In fact I’ve traveled to see some of the other spots where miraculous ghosts appear along the Mediterranean and I don’t see a damn thing anywhere. All I see is people acting like fools about something that isn’t there.”

“But you saw Beni disappear.”

“I sometimes think some of the receptors in my brain are burnt out,” Madd said, ignoring what I said. “I saw God once, but it felt like a scientific experience. During a trip, I won’t say what kind of trip I was taking, or where, I contrived a mechanism for testing the existence of God by means of presenting bait He couldn’t refuse. He fell for it, and I witnessed the act of God eating a soul. The entire event had all the warmth and life of the death of a loved one wearing white hospital clothes in a white hospital room surrounded by people dressed in hospital white. But the experiment was unrepeatable, despite the scientific feeling of it all. Lack of affect. I think that’s what I have, an inability to feel affect, not effect. I feel effect all too well. Maybe that’s why I concluded that God doesn’t exist, after all, even having seen Him. Would God have left me without a sense of affect if He existed at the point in time when I saw Him?”

“You mean any sense of feeling?” Jacqueline said.

“Maybe it’s that simple. I fear it isn’t,” Madd said, his eyes focused on the wine bottle.

It had gone quickly. I raised my hand to Henri, who understood without coming nearer the table.

“You certainly have feeling,” she said.

“Not of the normal variety.”

“But what about Beni,” Edwin said. “If you lack affect, and if lack of affect makes you not see the wall, then you saw Beni go into something that must have been pure affect.”

“Of course,” said Madd. He greeted the arrival of the new bottle of wine with a smile, and filled whichever glasses were empty. “I was with him at the time. We were in our cups, totally over the edge of the cliff, drowning in our own good will, and we drifted down to the beach to splash the water of the sea on our faces. That water has redeeming value, you know. It’s seen most of what’s worthwhile about the human race, and a lot of what isn’t worthwhile, and it’s a variety of invoking the goddess to splash your face in it.”

“I take it you don’t extend your disbelief to all deities,” I said.

“I’m selective,” he said, smiling. “I find it easier believing in the principle of the feminine. It has true existence for me.”

I remembered seeing young devotees at his reading earlier in the evening. They would have followed us to the bar had Madd not dissuaded them. As it was a few had followed anyway and made a show of getting soused at another table with friends they had drummed up out of the shadows. The girls showed in their faces that they certainly found affect in Madd. Since all youths belonged to one lost generation or other, I supposed Madd had to serve as legitimate prophet, speaking as he did of all the things mysterious in this world.

“In fact, I think it was the feminine that swallowed Beni. I’m not certain, but I believe it to be so.”

“But you said it was the wall.”

“I didn’t see the wall. He said he did, and that he was going to walk into it. He announced to me that the wall was ahead of us, and that he was determined this night to go through it. He’d wanted to for a long time. A lot of people are like that, I suppose. When they have a strange thing presented to them that doesn’t make sense, they embrace it immediately as if it were some kind of divine sign. That was Beni. He was drunk. Since I didn’t see the wall, I didn’t see how it could do any harm that he walk in a particular direction along the beach.”

“What did you see?” said Jacqueline. I looked at her, to see if she revealed any feelings. Her face showed little. Her eyebrows sat lower over her eyes, and her expression might have been darker than at other times; but nothing in her expression told of deep sadness or regret about the situation. Maybe Madd was right about the wall, in a way. Maybe no one believed in the wall. Maybe Jacqueline could acknowledge that Beni disappeared within the wall without seeing the event in fatal terms. She would see no reason to grieve.

“I saw him walk down the beach and disappear, and that’s all,” said Madd. “I walked immediately after him, curious where he’d gone to, but I didn’t see any sign of him. To the best of my knowledge I followed exactly in his footsteps. No, I shouldn’t say I saw nothing. Maybe I did, because I dreamed almost in a nightmare of what I did see. It was a crone, a figure of extreme age, standing on the beach. In my dream I saw Beni walk toward her and as he closed distance with her, her jaw dropped. It kept dropping lower and lower as he came nearer her, until her mouth had grown so large that he simply stepped into her mouth. She shut her mouth, which instantly returned to normal size. Then she turned and walked into the waves. But that was a dream, later.”

“Your goddess,” said Edwin.

“I’d never exactly pictured her that way,” Madd said. “I suppose it’s no different. I saw a crone. Beni saw a wall. I just find it interesting that Beni was living in consensus reality, because he was seeing what everyone else was seeing, and he had the power to disappear into something that everyone but me could see. Even in my presence he could do it.”

“Whereas to us it’s amazing that you didn’t disappear as well.”

He shrugged. “Maybe I did. Maybe I disappeared into this world, and you are the people on the other side of the wall.”

“You never cease to amuse, Madd,” Edwin said.

“We’re ready for a new bottle already,” Madd said, holding the bottle with a look of surprise.

“I think I need to go to bed,” Jacqueline said. “I have to work early.”

“Let me walk you back,” I said.

“No, no, you stay. You don’t have to work tomorrow morning, do you?”

I saw the change that had come over her face, and saw I would be unwelcome to any familiarities tonight beyond a parting kiss, which I accepted with good grace. She was feeling the loss.

“This is comfort, too,” Madd said, holding up the third bottle when it arrived.

I offered my glass in mute agreement.

“I propose an outing,” said Edwin. “To the beach.”

---

Madd said nothing as he paced back and forth, his feet kicking occasionally at larger cobble to send it skittering among smaller rocks. Edwin and I sat on one of the wave-polished logs pushed up almost against the wall that protects the sidewalk and street from any unusually high water. We had done justice so far to half the third bottle. At our feet in the sand sat a fourth, bought before leaving Henri’s as insurance against the length of the night.

“Listen to this,” I said. “I’m beginning to see something. It’s maybe what you’ve been talking about.”

“Hell, Jenson, I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“You do, in your crazy way, Madd. Listen to this. The secret of the universe. Not really. But it’s pretty good. Just think of us, humanity, becoming such a huge thing upon the globe, such an encompassing thing, such a fertile, ever-burgeoning thing, and we’ve remade everything we can. We’ve remade the world in a billion ways, we’ve changed the shape of the land and the content of what it holds and the taste and flavor of its air and waters. So what I’m saying is this lousy, stupid thing.”

“Jenson’s become a philosopher,” said Madd.

“Jenson’s become a drunk,” Edwin averred.

“Tell us your lousy stupid thing,” Madd said.

“I hope you’ll laugh,” I said. “Then I’ll know you’re taking me seriously. This is it. Do you ever think about dream? Sometimes I think we enter dream, even when we’re awake. And I think when people are together, they can enter dream together. I was reading something Jacqueline wrote and maybe that’s what crystallized this. A moment ago I was going to credit you, Madd, but maybe it was Jacqueline.”

“Your goddess,” he said.

“But I wonder if this all, this world, has been changed into a place of dream. First we had to physically make it the place of dream, with buildings and roads and cities and countries appearing out of bare places where there was only life before. All those things came out of minds. We built them. But we’ve gone a step farther. Because our heads are out of control. Now we’ve made the whole fucking world into one big dream. A place of dream. One huge fucking dream. The world wasn’t enough as it was, and we’ve dreamed it into a whole new state.” I had been this drunk—when? As a kid, surely.

“There was only life before we came along!” said Edwin. “My god, maybe you are still an American, you damned Yankee.”

“Quick,” said Madd. “Look down the beach. Do you see anything? Is the wall there? Do you see it now?”

“You’re standing in my way! Get out of my way!” I could see nothing.

“He’s goddamned blind drunk, Madd,” Edwin said, laughing.

“You both are! Give me that bottle!” said Madd.

He grabbed the remainder of the wine and ran down the beach toward the waves. Stopping just beyond the reach of the water he took a deep drink and then held the bottle up against the night sky. “Crone!” he called out to the waves. “Crone! Crone! Crone!” He repeated the word, shouting at first and then uttering it with the sound almost of a cow lonesome in a field, or of a lover calling for a hiding, playful partner, or of a besotted Falstaff crooning to his woman barkeep. Edwin and I almost collapsed in our laughter. My eyes watered as my body shook.

Then Madd tossed the nearly empty bottle as far as he could into the waves. By all rights the crone should have accepted the offering from her supplicant and given him the pleasure of rising in all her great, ugly glory above the midnight sea, and driving the three of us into gibbering madness through the sheer blasphemy of her appearance.

But through the tears in our eyes we saw only dark waves, stars above, and the far, curving horizon where the night sky met the rolling waters.

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“The Face of Days” appeared in Leviathan 1 (Ministry of Whimsy, 1996), edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Luke O’Grady.