Beneath the cities of the interior flowed many rivers carrying a multitude of images... All the women she had been spread their hair in a halo on the surface of the river, extended multiple arms like the idols of India, their essence seeping in and out of the meandering dreams of men...

Djuna, lying face upward like a water lily of amniotic lakes; Djuna floating down to the organ grinder's tune of a pavana for a defunct infanta of Spain, the infanta who never acceded to the throne of maturity, the one who remained a pretender...

As for Rango, the drums would burst and all the painted horses of the carnival would turn a polka...

She saw their lives over and over again until she caught a truth which was not simple and divisible but fluctuating and elusive; but she saw it clearly from the places under the surface where she had been accustomed to exist: all the women she had been like many rivers running out of her and with her into the ocean...

She saw, through this curtain of water, all of them as personages larger than nature, more visible to sluggish hearts being in the focus of death, a stage on which there are no blurred passages, no missed cues...

She saw, now that she was out of the fog of imprecise relationships, with the more intense light of death upon these faces which had caused her despair, she saw these same faces as pertaining to gentle clowns. Zora dressed in comical trappings, in Rango's outsized socks, in dyed kimonos, in strangled rags and empty-armed brooches, a comedy to awaken guilt in others...

...on this stage, floating down the Seine toward death, the actors drifted along and love no longer seemed a trap...the trap was the static pause in growth, the arrested self caught in its own web of obstinacy and obsession...

...you grow, as in the water the algae grow taller and heavier and are carried by their own weight into different currents...

…I was afraid to grow or move away, Rango, I was ashamed to desert you in your torment, but now I know your choice is your own, as mine was my own...

...fixation is death...death is fixation...

...on this precarious ship, devoid of upholstery and self-deception, the voyage can continue into tomorrow...

...what I see now is the vastness, and the places where I have not been and the duties I have not fulfilled, and the uses for this unusual cargo of past sorrows all ripe for transmutations...

...the messenger of death, like all adventurers, will accelerate your heart toward change and mutation...

...if one sinks deep enough and then deeper, all these women she had been flowed into one at night and lost their separate identities; she would learn from Sabina how to make love laughing, and from Stella how to die only for a little while and be born again as children die and are reborn at the slightest encouragement...