Its ribs make a tiny cage around them, like a canoe of glued-together toothpicks, and in its chest its heartbeat is visible, its pulse tent-poling the skin with quick, furtive fidgets (it looks like a fist beating off beneath a bedsheet). Meanwhile, as I’ve been watching, the gecko has finished crawling onto the windowpane, so now its tail is visible as well: as it tapers, the tail darkens, turning a merlot purple at its tip, and the whole thing lies plastered against the glass like a strand of wet hair. Having climbed onto the windowpane, the gecko seems content to pause there, as if catching its breath. Though just when I think that the gecko is at rest (just when I think that it might even be falling asleep, when I am certain that it has nodded off and is dreaming on its feet [but do geckos dream?]), its head darts forward, taking a quick dig at the darkness. No other part of its body flinches (not even its tail), yet its head thrusts forward, like a snapping turtle’s, and snaps, its jaws opening and shutting in a swift bite, as if feeding, although I can’t see what—aside from the black air lying behind it in the night beyond the windowpane—it could possibly be feeding on, and yes, as its head darts, there it is, at last, its left eye, briefly visible and turned directly toward me, the lidless membrane turbid and pale, nor is there any question that the gecko saw me, for it was looking directly at me, unblinking, with its lidless, milk-white eye. No sooner has it retracted its head from this first jab, however, than the gecko darts it in another direction, snapping its jaws at the darkness again, and then again in another direction, and again, stabbing its triangular, spade-shaped head here and there in the night. It almost looks as if the gecko is stabbing its spade head into the night, as if the gecko were trying, with the tip of its blade, to dig into the dense night air, dark as garden dirt, and so as if it were trying, with the troweling of its snout, to loosen the night’s granules of packed blackness, to break the night up into clumps, as if digging a deep hole into the night. Again and again the gecko darts the blade of its spade head and retracts it, shoveling heap after heap of darkness, indefatigable as any gravedigger, as if what the gecko had to do—via the jabbing of its own head—was dig a grave in the night air. And this turns out to be not very far from the truth, as it so happens. For I see now that what the gecko is actually jabbing its spade-shaped head at are the little graynesses on my windowpane. Where the gecko’s head darts, a dot of dirt disappears from the glass. So the gecko is feeding: it is feeding on the dirt of my windowpane. It is devouring the dirt, not of the night air, but of my windowpane, and so it is digging a grave not in the night air but in my windowpane, digging a grave with its face in my windowpane. (And is this what my own face could be said to be doing?