Service was Dad’s favorite poet, he remembered. The graphics in the ad featured a man in fur hat and full length fur coat staring off across a roaring fire and frozen lake in the wilderness. Very impressive, in a way. There was an invisible sense of a dozen tethered malamutes in the background. Warlock deeply identified with the picture which was a glyph of Cain, or Ishmael, at full roam; doomed, haunted, but not boring. He had been trying to write a witty rehearsal for his belated phone call to Rabun, became exacerbated, and looked at the magazine. There was a lump in his throat that spread into dizziness, as if earth had increased the speed of its rotations. The panic increased and his breath was short with the ensuing vacuum of hyperventilation. The four walls billowed. He was homesick for Diana, the ritual of the Free Press, hours of thought, shopping and cooking dinner, watching Walter Cronkite, educational TV with rococo music, lovemaking, his own bed with its special pillow from his youth. A tear fell, then another. He was a child again with big hands, big head and big feet, but with no body. The anxiety waxed and waned for an hour, and was akin to waking and discovering you had twenty-two fingers. There were simply no options. He had been bound into a system more tightly constructed than Marx’s view of the working class. It took only a few minutes to flit like a chickadee through the entirety of his life. Did it only come down to this two hundred pounder weeping on a motel bed, consoling a dog that was worried about the master’s behavior? Did Diana really love him? His previously sublimated antennae made him know that a woman can only love weakness until she becomes bored with mothering it. Then she looks elsewhere out of superior sanity. Marilyn hadn’t wanted children and now she had two in Pasadena, California. Diana didn’t want children “just yet”—thinking that she might yet resolve her thwarted ambition to be a doctor. Had Marilyn and Diana, with female intuition, seen him as a bad bet on the future? Doubtless. Was the long repressed idea of Gauguin grabbing for his heart and mind? Doubtless. Had the pressure of a failed life increased exponentially to the point that it created that dream of the future? Doubtless. He knew it. Despite his disingenuousness he was no dummy. He was suffering a war of ghosts. Was that firelit Webelos ceremony, when he was twelve and became Warlock, preying on him now? Doubtless. Was it only a lame superstition, a toady bow to the darkness that surrounds us? Yes and no. Civilization certainly hadn’t panned out. Warlock frankly knew from the revived memory of a college mythology course that he was at the awesome crossroads where the hero must continue the quest or turn his back on it. Many are called, but few are chosen, the Bible said. Deep in the night the wandering hero peeks in the winter frosted window and sees the happy bourgeoisie at a laden table before a happy hearth. He turns away, with care sitting on his faded cheek…. There was a knock on the door. It was the Christian lady motel clerk.