“I cannot help you,” she says, “unless you wish to make the journey yourself.”

She is the good ambassadress from the country of the dead, offering a passport and the means of getting there: a soothing anodyne that seamlessly transmutes sleep to rigor mortis, which is certainly preferable to impalement, the only other option I have.

Thoughts of my suicide freak me out. But even the self-slaughter of those with whom I had no more than a nonpersonal, perhaps idiosyncratic contact lather me in cold sweat. Like Val’s mother, in the photograph in the cluttered attic staring blankly at the camera as if for her passport. Like Thomas Chatterton, boy fuckup, eulogized by Coleridge as well as by Wordsworth, doing himself in at seventeen.

Now the voice of the drug lady pulls me back to reality, such as it is.

“Without the journey of the good sleep,” she says softly, “you are like the serpent bound forever to the earth. But with it, you will look inside yourself, you will fly like a great bird forever.”

Just a few weeks ago I would have been tempted. But I’m still alive. Perhaps there’s time (ten days? twenty?) before I’ll be made to fly on my own power off the roof and down to meet the bamboo stakes. Perhaps I might still puzzle out how to avoid the trip altogether.

“Forever is too long.”

“Ah.” She reaches back into the pouch and waves a palm leaf folded like an envelope in front of me. It catches the light of a million dust motes.

“Is it,” she asks, “that you wish the short time passage? To make the outward journey that is inward and come back to crawl the earth again? To break the cord that binds you to this world and become the dragon, master of the earth and the sky? Just for a while?”

“The dragon is the master?”

She nods. “The serpent with wings.” Again she waves the palm leaf. “The seeds of the dragon. Very good price. Five of your dollars.”

I give her five dollars for the house call and take the packet. I don’t want to be shamanized, boxed on drugs, blissed out when Valerie comes. But in case she doesn’t…

“Why is it,” she asks compassionately, “that you Tallow Faces have so much, and yet your hearts go on bleeding? Why is it that you do nothing to stop the blood except to run after the things that made you bleed in the first place?”

I have no answer for her.

THIRTY-SIX
THE SOLDIER

The people lined the street. An air of carnival washed over them, a tide of excitement that erupted at times in laughter and in sudden spurts and flurries, like a school of fish responding to an indiscernible stimulus. Above their heads a banner hung limply. COLONEL MENACHEM BEN ISH-CHAYL, it read, WELCOME.