Out on the river the rain lashes: the rapids can now be heard approaching, still impossible to see, but real, and inevitable. And the doubles both experience an odd, ticklish fear now that perhaps they are really lost, and that there is really no camera on shore behind the fine gray scribbling of willows… all the crew, sound-men, grips, gaffers have left… or never even arrived… and what was that the currents just brought to knock against our snow-white cockle shell? and what was that thud, so stiffened and so mute?

Bianca is usually silver, or of no color at all: thousands of times taken, strained through glass, warped in and out the violet-bleeding interfaces of Double and Triple Protars, Schneider Angulons, Voigtländer Collinears, Steinheil Orthostigmats, the Gundlach Turner-Reichs of 1895. For Greta it is her daughter’s soul each time, an inexhaustible soul…. This scarf of an only child, tucked in waist-high, always out vulnerable to the wind. To call her an extension of her mother’s ego is of course to invite the bitterest sarcasm. But it’s possible, now and then, for Greta to see Bianca in other children, ghostly as a double exposure… clearly yes very clearly in Gottfried, the young pet and protégé of Captain Blicero.

“Pull down my straps for a moment. Is it dark enough? Look. Thanatz said they were luminous. That he knew each one by heart. They’re very white today, aren’t they? Hmm. Long and white, like cobwebs. They’re on my ass too. Around the insides of my thighs….” Many times, afterward, after the blood had stopped and he had put on the alcohol, Thanatz would sit with her lying across his knees, and read the scars down her back, as a gypsy reads a palm. Life-scar, heart-scar. Croix mystique. What fortunes and fantasies! He was so exalted, after the whippings. So taken away by the idea that they would win out, escape. He’d fall asleep before the wildness and hope had quite left him. She loved him most at those moments, just before sleep, her own dorsal side aflame, his little head heavy on her breast, while scar-tissue formed silently on her, cell by cell, in the night. She felt almost safe….

Each time the lash struck, each attack, in her helplessness to escape, there would come to her a single vision, only one, for each peak of pain. The Eye at the top of the pyramid. The sacrificial city, with figures in rust-colored robes. The dark woman waiting at the end of the street. The hooded face of sorrowing Denmark, leaning out over Germany. The cherry-red coals falling through the night. Bianca in a Spanish dancer’s costume, stroking the barrel of a gun….

Out by one rocket site, in the pine woods, Thanatz and Gretel found an old road that no one used any more. Pieces of pavement were visible here and there among the green underbrush. It seemed that if they followed the road they would come to a town, a station or outpost… it wasn’t at all clear what they would find. But the place would be long deserted.