“Ahh, do I see your cock growing, Nguarorerue? … no, no, perhaps you are only thinking of someone you loved, somewhere, long ago… back in Südwest, eh?” To allow the tribal past to disperse, all memories ought to be public record, there’s no point in preserving history with that Final Zero to look forward to… . Cynically, though, Ombindi has preached this in the name of the old Tribal Unity, and it’s a weakness in his pitch all right—it looks bad, looks like Ombindi’s trying to make believe the Christian sickness never touched us, when everyone knows it has infected us all, some to death. Yes it is a little bit jive of Ombindi here to look back toward an innocence he’s really only heard about, can’t himself believe in—the gathered purity of opposites, the village built like a mandala… . Still he will profess and proclaim it, as an image of a grail slipping through the room, radiant, though the jokers around the table be sneaking Whoopee Cushions into the Siege Perilous, under the very descending arse of the grailseeker, and though the grails themselves come in plastic these years, a dime a dozen, penny a gross, still Ombindi, at times self-conned as any Christian, praises and prophesies that era of innocence he just missed living in, one of the last pockets of Pre-Christian Oneness left on the planet: “Tibet is a special case. Tibet was deliberately set aside by the Empire as free and neutral territory, a Switzerland for the spirit where there is no extradition, and Alp-Himalayas to draw the soul upward, and danger rare enough to tolerate… . Switzerland and Tibet are linked along one of the true meridians of Earth, true as the Chinese have drawn meridians of the body… . We will have to learn such new maps of Earth: and as travel in the Interior becomes more common, as the maps grow another dimension, so must we… .” And he tells too of Gondwanaland, before the continents drifted apart, when Argentina lay snuggled up to Südwest… the people listen, and filter back to cave and bed and family calabash from which the milk, unconsecrated, is swallowed in cold whiteness, cold as the north… .

So, between these two, even routine greeting does not pass without some payload of meaningfulness and the hope of Blitzing the other’s mind. Enzian knows that he is being used for his name. The name has some magic. But he has been so unable to touch, so neutral for so long… everything has flowed away but the name, Enzian, a sound for chanting. He hopes it will be magic enough for one thing, one good thing when the time comes, however short of the Center… . What are these persistences among a people, these traditions and offices, but traps? the sexual fetishes Christianity knows how to flash, to lure us in, meant to remind us of earliest infant love… . Can his name, can “Enzian” break their power? Can his name prevail?