The slave took his garter and stockings off and stood in pitiful drawers.

The men made a half-circle.

One officer took that big platter and raised it over all the empty cups and remnants of food and he held it aloft amid the men.

The girls bent and moved at their end of the room, not once looking at the men but shifting their rosebud breasts and small hips and swivelling so all the men could get a good look at what they had. The boy let his drawers slide to the floor so that he had no clothes on, and then the men held their members and swelled them—their faces bloomed redder and redder and they pumped themselves until one by one they ejaculated into the big glittering dish. Then that officer of Blakeney’s measured the amount of wet in the dish with a measuring stick and wrote figures down in a green notebook.

—

I DON’T DIVULGE MY MILITARY RANK to civilians as a rule. But swimming with Harold—for that was the name of the yellow man—was like swimming with strangers at Bath: men spoke their hearts and no one had his guard up. Naked, water lapping around us, our words slipped free.

In the azure echoing pool Harold drew my shame out of me.

I told him things I’ve never told Sophie, or that Sophie, in the name of what she calls tough love, ridicules or chooses not to believe.

Unlike Sophie, Harold did not cajole me to remain in the present.

He did not admonish me to get real.

He realized exactly who I am in the inner man.

I suppose I stared at his eyes, trying to see how they could have gone from blind to sighted overnight. I was dying to ask but couldn’t bring myself to do it. He saw my hesitation.

“I didn’t make it up, my story,” he said. “I’m not crazy.”

“I believe you…you had vision before you were four, but not after that. Not until yesterday. I know you’re not crazy. But…how did such a thing happen?”

“I’ve been working with a neuropsychologist for years. Yesterday he brought me to a place where I no longer need to block out my surroundings for fear of any horror they hold. He convinced me my surroundings are safe. What I can hardly believe is how beautiful they are. The sky. The clouds. People. Everything is so incredibly beautiful that I don’t think anything can ever bother me again. I was down by the river all morning. Have you seen that river?”

Had I seen the river!

How could anyone who had not been with me at Quebec City in the year of my death understand about the Saint Lawrence River’s profound migrations of geese, its estuaries, its fire-ships at night?

“I’ve seen it,” I told him. “But mostly miles downriver, a long time ago…”