Osbie is at home, anyway, chewing spices, smoking reefers, and shooting cocaine. The last of his wartime stash. One grand eruption. He’s been up for three days. He beams at Katje, a sunburst in primary colors spiking out from his head, waves the needle he’s just taken out of his vein, clamps between his teeth a pipe as big as a saxophone and puts on a deerstalker cap, which does not affect the sunburst a bit.

“Sherlock Holmes. Basil Rathborne. I was right,” out of breath, letting her bag fall with a thump.

The aura pulses, bows modestly. He is also steel, he is rawhide and sweat. “Good, good. There’s the son of Frankenstein in it, too. I wish we could have been more direct, but—”

“Where’s Prentice?”

“Out scouting up some transportation.” He leads her to a back room fitted out with telephones, a cork board with notes pinned all over, desks littered with maps, schedules, An Introduction to Modern Herero, corporate histories, spools of recording wire. “Not very organized around here yet. But it’s coming along, love, it’s coming.”

Is this what she thinks it is? Wakened from how many times and pushed away because it won’t do to hope, not this much? Dialectically, sooner or later, some counterforce would have had to arise… she must not have been political enough: never enough to keep faith that it would… even with all the power on the other side, that it really would….

Osbie has pulled up folding chairs: hands her now a mimeographed sheaf, rather fat it is, “One or two things, here, you should know. We hate to rush you. But the horse trough is waiting.”

And presently, his modulations having flowed through the rooms in splendid (and for a while distracting) displays of bougainvillea red and peach, it seems he has stabilized for the moment into the not-quite-worldly hero of a lost Victorian children’s book, for he answers, after her hundredth version of the same question, “In the Parliament of Life, the time comes, simply, for a division. We are now in the corridors we have chosen, moving toward the Floor….”

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Dear Mom, I put a couple of people in Hell today….

—Fragment, thought to be from
the Gospel of Thomas
(Oxyrhynchus papyrus number classified)