When Caesar died, they say, many dire prodigies and apparitions augured the event. The black sky was suddenly pierced by ghastly light. Wild winds fanned storms of fire. The earth trembled and a lion stalked the temples of the Forum.

To compare myself with Caesar would be, even in my state of precarious balance, an act of indulgence beyond hyperbole. But strange things happen when a hero dies, and I am no less the hero of my life than great Caesar was of his. There is no grieving lion to presage my death, but there are lion-colored dogs howling in the street below my cell window, and dust devils that swirl in the high wind.

It begins with a crack!, unimaginably loud, of a rifle inconceivably large. The blast staggers me as if I’ve been struck by something big and altogether invisible, as if I were trapped in a wind tunnel struggling against a current so strong it seems solid, so loud it pops an ear. A runnel of blood sluices down the lobe.

My jailhouse rattles until I am sure not one brick will be left upon another. Darkness engulfs the sun and the earth shakes, thunder rumbles across the sky. Strange, for the morning storm subsided hours ago. Yet the thunder and the lightning slouch back hand in hand, and a thick gray spear of smoke rises up in the south, in the vicinity of Grady’s compound. Never before has a lightning bolt ignited anything, not with the deluge that accompanies and extinguishes every stroke.

If there’s an explanation for the display, it escapes me. True, my powers of observation are weakening. I see things as distortions, floating and weightless, as a straight twig underwater appears to be bent; still I know that something in nature has blundered and gone out of hand. I blink, shake my head, focus my gaze once more on Valerie’s statue in the square. But now I see it as a wavering, ghostly image across which sparkling silverfish swim, while tiny black nuns dart about like waterbugs. And then, between peals of thunder and the high wind, I hear the approaching splat of shoeless feet, and I know that at last they’re coming for me, that my time to be fed to those hungry stakes has come. Somewhere over the rainbow I see my bleak future—a perforated mote in infinity.

I pull my eyes from Valerie as the door of my cell rocks wide on its hinges. Standing there, in a mephitic cloud of heartburn, is Salim Nafi, the sponge-brained, fire-belching veteran of the grenade maneuvers. Expressionlessly, he stares at me.

“What’s going on?” I manage to ask.

His answer in stress combines the poetry of his ancestors with the vocabulary of his trade. “The gods shriek in the sky,” he says, “but something is all fucked up.” He turns and disappears, cloud and all. In his place is the narrow, empty corridor promising freedom.