He is a lion, this man, ego-mad—but despite everything, Katje likes him. “But if he were still alive—”

“No way to know. I have letters he wrote after he left your city. He was changing. Terribly. You ask what he could matter to me. My slender white adventurer, grown twenty years sick and old—the last heart in which I might have been granted some being—was changing, toad to prince, prince to fabulous monster… . ‘If he is alive,’ he may have changed by now past our recognition. We could have driven under him in the sky today and never seen. Whatever happened at the end, he has transcended. Even if he’s only dead. He’s gone beyond his pain, his sin—driven deep into Their province, into control, synthesis and control, further than—” well, he was about to say “we” but “I” seems better after all, “I haven’t transcended. I’ve only been elevated. That must be as empty as things get: it’s worse than being told you won’t have to die by someone you can’t believe in… .

“Yes he matters to me, very much. He is an old self, a dear albatross I cannot let go.”

“And me?” She gathers that he expects her to sound like a woman of the 1940s. “And me,” indeed. But she can think of no other way offhand to help him, to allow him a moment of comfort… .

“You, poor Katje. Your story is the saddest of all.” She looks up to see exactly how his face will be mocking her. She is stunned to see tears instead running, running over his cheeks. “You’ve only been set free,” his voice then breaking on the last word, his face brushing forward a moment into a cage of hands, then uncaging again for a try at her own gay waltztime gallows laugh. Oh, no, is he about to go goofy on her too? What she needs right now in her life, from some man in her life, is stability, mental health and strength of character. Not this. “I told Slothrop he was free, too. I tell anybody who might listen. I will tell them as I tell you: you are free. You are free. You are free… .”

“How can my story be sadder than that?” Shameless girl, she isn’t humoring him, she’s actually flirting with him now, any technique her crepe-paper and spider-italics young ladyhood ever taught her, to keep from having to move into his blackness. Understand it isn’t his blackness, but her own—an inadmissible darkness she is making believe for the moment is Enzian’s, something beyond even the center of Pan’s grove, something not pastoral at all, but of the city, a set of ways in which the natural forces are turned aside, stepped down, rectified or bled to ground and come out very like the malignant dead: the Qlippoth that Weissmann has “transcended,” souls whose journey across was so bad that they lost all their kindness back in the blue lightning (the long sea-furrows of it rippling), and turned to imbecile killers and jokers, making unintelligible honks in the emptiness, sinewed and stripped thin as rats—a city-darkness that is her own, a textured darkness in which flows go in all directions, and nothing begins, and nothing ends. But as time passes things get louder there. It is shaking itself into her consciousness.