He closes his eyes, turns his torso, his hands in the air before his chest as though he were playing a piano, showing how he turned.

“I saw a star far above me and ahead. There he was. He was in the light. It can only be seen there, on the bridge. It shines all around the ship, though—” he cups his hands in the air as if he held the ship like a ball, “—and kills whatever comes near.”

“And him?”

“The captain ...? He’s part of it!” Thrushchurl is excited. “It shines through him, and he inured to it. He has to stay in it—he can’t leave it and live—he stays in it to stay alive!”

“Did you get a good look at him? Did you see his face?”

Thrushchurl thinks, and nods, not looking at Silichieh.

“I saw him! I didn’t come close, but I saw him through the light, and it was as if I stood right by him. He was sitting at a table by the window, looking down over the trees toward the mouth, from high up. He was all washed out, and naked. His skin was like powder; I could see the muscles, everything, through it. His muscles were grey, like parboiled horseflesh.”

Again Thrushchurl smiles. He shakes his head admiringly, and gasps a little.

“Did he say anything?”

“No,” Thrushchurl looks disappointed. “I don’t feel he could speak.”

*

The giant, the slovenly glutton who has his straw stuck down into my chest, sucks idly at me with a rattle in the tube, and my whole body is weighted down like under a lead blanket. He swings his tassles back from his head; he has a mouth of fishhook teeth in swollen satiny gums, an unearthly inhuman voice, the haunting, disembodied third-person talk that never stops slobbering. “The book of life.” It always needs an avenue like that.

He eyes me sadly and explains, with hopeless malice, “This isn’t my true language, or even the language I’m speaking to you now, you know. My real language is fo di spurdzem mo mon fi litourn ap—”

And where I had lain paralyzed all this time now I struggle wildly to escape this gibbering, as if it were the quintessence of all horrors, all my strength rising in me only to be consumed instantly ...

A blizzard—snow falls from my face like soap bubbles, as though I were fizzing away—and everything screams memory memory at me, but it’s as though memory doesn’t work unless it’s all in one piece, so that one memory depends on all the others like a house of cards. This one, now, doesn’t. This is somebody else’s memory—it is someone else’s memory of being me.