“If his own train were wrecked, and this were yet no spur, then it would be she and he. Intimate in the half-light. She was the one who started, who hid, like her kind will. There is always more second wind, hidden or trapped in pockets below the earth, or in the trees, or in each other. You spread more whenever you shall sit down to write. That’s the difference between lives; try it, and there shall be some wind to move the death out of your path. Boneless mummified words sifted through your writing fingers will receive and hold the death there, present before you and even trapped. You turn over death and life, passing them back and forth through something like a window, and drive the death sentences through what you did not know ...”

*

I visit the camp again. It’s nearly deserted, and I’m thankful, but presently I come across a soldier who tells me our new orders will be delayed by about a week, according to the latest dispatch. That means there are orders, after all.

I spend several more days at the college. In vaulted cellars filled with a dense, clammy haze I watch from the visitor’s pew in a corner as ranks of students whisk through timed autopsies. The crews are ranked by speed and neatness on a chalk-smirched board; a grandly-whiskered instructor holds up a stopwatch the size of an apple. His round cheeks are red and shiny in an otherwise waxy, greenish face, and a variety of dissecting tools hang jingling from the front of his apron. Bodies are slung up onto the tables one after another, eviscerated and binned; Jil Punkinflake and his team are highly rated. Red hands pull open the body cavities and a meaty, excremental, liverish perfume is emitted; then he and Keen, their hands flitting here and there like birds hopping in the lane, isolate and remove each organ, handing them to Nectar. He plops them one by one into a produce scale hanging from the ceiling and notes their weights on his smeary clipboard.

Slack human bodies are bustled and tossed everywhere I look, sliding across the floor in low heaps, pushed along by oilskin-aproned dieners with slick rubber spades. As each fresh cadaver is positioned on the dissecting table, Jil Punkinflake takes the temples gently in his grisly hands and gazes down into the dead face with a look like mother love. That look trembles on every face in the room, their caressing knives part skin, muscle and fat, and the bodies seem to offer up their contents to these hands with blissful abandon like dreamers unhasping their grip on the brink and allowing themselves to drop away into deep, balmy waters.

Last glimmers of sun blaze in the narrow arch linking two terraced buildings. The sunset is turning the sky to red and orange sherbet, and a few lamps are already lit, swinging under the eaves of the buildings. Amber cones of light fall from the lamps and splash along the walls, wind scuttles in dry weeds, brings me a gust of smoke, dust, oil frying.