Little by little his memory of that last rocket-firing on the Heath grows clearer. The fevers fire-polish, the pain removes impurities. An image keeps recurring—a muddy brown almost black eyeball reflecting a windmill and a jagged reticule of tree-branches in silhouette… doors at the sides of the windmill open and shut quickly, like loose shutters in a storm… in the iris sky one cloud, the shape of a clamshell, rises very purple around the edges, the puff from an explosion, something light ocher at the horizon… closer in it seems snarling purple around a yellow that’s brightening, intestines of yellow shadowed in violet spilling outward, outward in a bellying curve toward us. There are, oddly (not to cut this picturesque scene off, but) oddly enough, get this, no windmills on the Lüneburg Heath! Thanatz even checked around real fast just to make sure, nope, no windmills, O.K., so, how come Blicero’s eye, looking out on the Heath, is reflecting a windmill, huh? Well, to be honest, now it isn’t reflecting a windmill, it’s reflecting a bottle of gin. No bottle of gin out here on the Heath either. But it was reflecting a windmill. What’s this? Could it be that Blicero’s eyes, in which Greta Erdmann saw maps of his Kingdom, are for Thanatz reflecting the past? That would be strange. Whatever went on on those eyeballs when you weren’t looking would just be lost. You’d only have fragments, now and then. Katje, looking back over her shoulder at fresh whip-marks. Gottfried in the morning lineup, body all Wandervogel-limp, wind blowing his uniform in great ripples back from the bough-curves of his thighs, hair flying in the wind, saucy sideways smile, mouth a little open, jaw forward, eyelids down. Blicero’s own reflection in the oval mirror, an old face—he is about to don a wig, a Dragon Lady pageboy with bangs, and he pauses, looking in, face asking what? what did you say? wig held to the side and slightly lower so as to be another face in heavy wig-shadows nearly invisible… but looking closer you can see bone-ridges and fat-fields begin to emerge now, an ice-glaze white bobbing, a mask hand-held, over the shadows in the hollow hood-space—two faces looking back now, and Thanatz, are you going to judge this man? Thanatz, haven’t you loved the whip? Haven’t you longed for the brush and sigh of ladies’ clothes? Haven’t you wanted to murder a child you loved, joyfully kill something so helpless and innocent? As he looks up at you, at the last possible minute, trusting you, and smiles, purses his lips to make a kiss just as the blow falls across his skull… isn’t that best of all? The cry that breaks in your chest then, the sudden, solid arrival of loss, loss forever, the irreversible end of love, of hope… no denying what you finally are… (but so much fear at taking it in, the serpent face—at opening your arms and legs and letting it enter you, into your true face it’ll kill you if it—)