One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living… and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he’s been now losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry… .

Kevin Spectro did not differentiate as much as he between Outside and Inside. He saw the cortex as an interface organ, mediating between the two, but part of them both. “When you’ve looked at how it really is,” he asked once, “how can we, any of us, be separate?” He is my Pierre Janet, Pointsman thought… .

Soon, by the dialectic of the Book, Pointsman will be alone, in a black field lapsing to isotropy, to the zero, waiting to be last to go… . Will there be time? He has to survive… to try for the Prize, not for his own glory, no—but to keep a promise, to the human field of seven he once was, the ones who didn’t make it… . Here’s a medium shot, himself backlit, alone at the high window in the Grand Hotel, whisky glass tipped at the bright subarctic sky and here’s to you then, chaps, it’ll be all of us up there onstage tomorrow, Ned Pointsman only happened to survive that’s all… TO STOCKHOLM his banner and cry, and after Stockholm a blur, a long golden twilight… .

Oh yes once you know, he did believe in a Minotaur waiting for him: used to dream himself rushing into the last room, burnished sword at the ready, screaming like a Commando, letting it all out at last—some true marvelous peaking of life inside him for the first and last time, as the face turned his way, ancient, weary, seeing none of Pointsman’s humanity, ready only to assume him in another long-routinized nudge of horn, flip of hoof (but this time there would be struggle, Minotaur blood the fucking beast, cries from far inside himself whose manliness and violence surprise him)… This was the dream. The settings, the face changed, little of it past the structure survived the first cup of coffee and flat beige Benzedrine pill. It might be a vast lorry-park just at dawn, the pavement newly hosed, mottled in grease-browns, the hooded olive trucks standing each with a secret, each waiting… but he knows that inside one of these… and at last, sifting among them, finds it, the identifying code beyond voicing, climbs up into the back, under the canvas, waits in the dust and brown light, until through the cloudy oblong of the cab window a face, a face he knows begins to turn… but the underlying structure is the turning face, the meeting of eyes… stalking Reichssieger von Thanatz Alpdrucken, that most elusive of Nazi hounds, champion Weimaraner for 1941, bearing studbook number 416832 tattooed inside his ear along through a Londonized Germany, his liver-gray shape receding, loping at twilit canalsides strewn with debris of war, rocket blasts each time missing them, their chase preserved, a plate etched in firebursts, the map of a sacrificial city, of a cortex human and canine, the dog’s ear-leather mildly aswing, top of his skull brightly reflecting the winter clouds, into a shelter lying steel-clad miles below the city, an opera of Balkan intrigue, in whose hermetic safety, among whose clusters of blue dissonance unperiodically stressed he’s unable to escape completely because of how always the Reichssieger persists, leading, serene, uncancelable, and to the literal pursuit of whom he thus returns, must return time and again in a fever-rondo, until at last they are on some hillside at the end of a long afternoon of dispatches from Armageddon, among scarlet banks of bougainvillea, golden pathways where dust is rising, pillars of smoke far away over the spidery city they’ve crossed, voices in the air telling of South America burned to cinders, the sky over New York glowing purple with the new all-sovereign death-ray, and here at last is where the gray dog can turn and the amber eyes gaze into Ned Pointsman’s own… .