I find nothing soothing in thoughts of death, particularly my own. But to die in compliance with the penal code of Assama—what a way to go. What they do—what they intend to do to me—I’m going to be prodded at spearpoint off a tower of shit and mud onto those impaling stakes a hundred feet below, and soon. But exactly when I haven’t an idea. When the British, the last of the Europeans, departed in ’48, leaving only the legacy of their language behind, the Assamans reverted to precolonial customs and institutions, which they found infinitely more appealing than those imposed by their Western rulers. They revived the stone-tipped whip for all manner of misdemeanors—that is, behavior that the sheikh did not condone. For serious offenses they preferred ganching to the British noose, possibly because a stout rope was difficult to come by, and in that climate prone to swift decay. The sentence carried with it a fiendishly cruel corollary: for a capital crime, an unspecific time of execution.

I am due to appear at the top of the tower sometime in the month of May. Today is the twelfth or maybe the fourteenth. Under these suspenseful circumstances, precise dates grow furtive. I can be fed to the stakes any time now; it is this lack of specificity—I wouldn’t wish it on a steer in a slaughterhouse—that scrambles the circuitry, sunders my peace of mind, and plays hob with my nervous system.

And now I hear the flat resonance of calloused feet padding down the corridor, each footstep falling like cowflop in a pasture. I listen in a trance of anxiety, straining to hear above the pounding of my heart. I have already been served my scummy breakfast bowl. It is too early for my scummy lunch. A sharp searing pain ricochets off my chest and tears like a raging Skilsaw through my shoulder and settles high in my left arm. Are those footsteps coming to get me? Is this the end of my muddle of a life, as short and unpredictable and insignificant as a sneeze?

The cowflop footsteps come closer. I cradle the agony in my arm close to my body. I turn my eyes, the pain prowling behind them, back to the window, to the statue of Valerie. I drink in her slow, assured beauty, those gently flaring hips—I can feel, I swear, the heat of her thighs.

She is, I suppose, all I ever wanted. All else is trumpery.

TWO
DIXIELAND