My veins and arteries are turning to glass bundles and my muscles are cold as ice, the bones under them ache as though they’ve been hammered out on an anvil. My shivering is painful, and for a moment I wonder if there are wasps inside. Every few moments an unbearable feeling, like a cold tissue crumpling, flares across me. Just ahead of me, a spot of no particular importance lights up brilliantly, as though a gigantic bull’s eye lantern had illuminated it from directly above.

One by one, spots in the landscape light up, and now I’m looking at an irregular streak of clear, colorless light in circles, some overlapping, looking like the sun shining through a leaf that’s been bored by caterpillars. There’s a smell in my nostrils like jasmine, if it came from an animal and not a plant, from a fragrance gland. Like the glandy saliva of a flower-eating animal. And a deep, delicious warmth cracks in a little seam across my chest, starting just above my breast bone on the right side and tearing down toward my abdomen. My arms and legs tingle and the bursting feeling fades. I raise my hands and flip the fingers, relishing the fine control I have of these many joints. I bend my knees easily, and become ecstatic. I get to my feet, and the blood pounds hot in my temples, my whole head goes hot and I stagger. The rest of me feels light and insubstantial.

Like a ghost, I turn and enter the cave where my lamp and supplies are. Lighting the lamp, its glow falls across an oozing paper face, a figure hunched against the far wall opposite the cave mouth. It has come to help me, at my summons. It speaks viscously through its clogged mouth and its words sound in my mouth; I speak, the words flying from my mouth at the top of my lungs. Though they are loud, I don’t hear them, but only feel bright flashes against my ears. In my hand I take the stylus and I write the letters of Pepedora’s alphabet.

*

I put the roll in the tray.

“That’s my end.”

He pulls it toward him on a cord, so that the tray rolls on the loose kernels without disrupting their perfect distribution. His hand shakes in the light.

“Don’t look at it all at once. That’s advice I would give anyone.” I add in Alak, “Did you take the treatment?”

“Yes,” he says, in Alak, reaching for the roll.

“Then don’t look at more than the first character. I set it on a line by itself. You can’t be all that strong yet.”

I hear the roll open. Then silence, for a long time.

At last, I hear a long, irregular exhalation. I don’t ask whether or not the work is satisfactory.