They held hands. Thanatz wore an old jacket of green suede, with patches on the sleeves. Gretel wore her camel’s-hair coat and a white kerchief. In places, pine needles were drifted across the old roadway, so deep as to silence their footsteps.

They came to a slide where years ago the road had been washed away. Gravel spilled salt-and-pepper downhill toward a river they heard but couldn’t see. An old automobile, a Hannomag Storm, hung there, nose-down, one door smashed open. The lavender-gray metal shell had been picked clean as the skeleton of a deer. Somewhere in these woods was the presence that had done this. They skirted the wreck, afraid to come too near the spidered glass, the hard mortality in the shadows of the front seat.

Remains of houses could be glimpsed, back in the trees. There was now a retreat of the light, though it was still before noon, and the forest grew no thicker here. In the middle of the road, giant turds showed up, fresh, laid in twists like strands of rope—dark and knotted. What could have left them?

At the same instant, she and Thanatz both realized that for hours now they must have been walking through the ruin of a great city, not an ancient ruin, but brought down inside their lifetime. Ahead of them, the path curved on, into trees. But something stood now between them and whatever lay around the curve: invisible, impalpable… some monitor. Saying, “Not one step farther. That’s all. Not one. Go back now.”

It was impossible to move any farther into it. They were both terrified. They turned, feeling it at their backs, and moved away quickly.

Back at the Schußstelle they found Blicero in his final madness. The trunks in the cold little clearing were stripped of bark, bleeding with beads of gum from the rocket blasts.

“He could have banished us. Blicero was a local deity. He wouldn’t even have needed a piece of paper. But he wanted us all to stay. He gave us the best there was, beds, food, liquor, drugs. Something was being planned, it involved the boy Gottfried, that was as unmistakable as the smell of resin, first thing those blue hazy mornings. But Blicero would tell us nothing.

“We moved into the Heath. There were oilfields, and blackened earth. Jabos flew over in diamond shapes, hunting us. Blicero had grown on, into another animal… a werewolf… but with no humanity left in its eyes: that had faded out, day after day, and been replaced by gray furrows, red veins in patterns that weren’t human. Islands: clotted islands in the sea. Sometimes even the topographic lines, nested on a common point. ‘It is the map of my Ur-Heimat,’ imagine a shriek so quiet it’s almost a whisper, ‘the Kingdom of Lord Blicero. A white land.’ I had a sudden understanding: he was seeing the world now in mythical regions: they had their maps, real mountains, rivers, and colors. It was not Germany he moved through. It was his own space. But he was taking us along with him! My cunt swelled with blood at the danger, the chances for our annihilation, delicious never knowing when it would come down because the space and time were Blicero’s own…. He did not fall back along roads, he did not cross bridges or lowlands. We sailed Lower Saxony, island to island. Each firing-site was another island, in a white sea. Each island had its peak in the center… was it the position of the Rocket itself? the moment of liftoff? A German Odyssey. Which one would be the last, the home island?