For one thing, the reflection of my face, as I have already described, appears to be floating not in or on the windowpane but three or four feet beyond it. That is to say, my own face deepens the glass by four feet: its reflection constitutes a four-foot-deep hole in the glass; my face is digging a hole four feet deep into the glass. Now, a four-foot-deep hole is by no means necessarily a grave. But the only thing needed would be for me to back up my chair an additional two feet from the desk, and then the hole that my reflected face would be digging into the glass would be six feet under. In which case anything that I touched to my face—a hand against my cheek, for instance—would perforce be thrown down into that grave: the hand’s image would tumble six feet deep into the windowpane, entombed in my face’s reflection. In this way, my face would be both the gravedigger and the grave at once, and it would be the coffin, too, for that matter, since it too would lie at the bottom of the reflection, at the very bottom of the six feet that it digs and that it is, deep in the windowpane where—being my reflection—its eyes would stare back at me. From the bottom of its plot, my face would seem to beseech me, unblinking and grim like a corpse’s in its coffin. For all these and other reasons I come to believe that my face is digging a grave in the windowpane, though admittedly in a different way than the gecko’s spade-shaped head, which—unbelievably—is still darting, feeding on the dust that speckles the dirty glass.) But no: the little graynesses on my windowpane aren’t dirt or motes of dust, as I have all this time been imagining. For I see now that many of these particles are actually moving, inching their way to the left-hand side of the window. What the gecko is really feeding on are living organisms, bugs too small even to be identified as bugs—mites maybe, or monads. Well, I say that the little graynesses are too small to be identified as bugs, but what I mean is that they are too small to be identified by the human eye, or at least let us say by my eye, my naked eye, for the gecko’s eye—its lidless, turbid eye—has certainly had no trouble identifying them, both as bugs and as sustenance, and in this respect the gecko’s eye has, unblinking, missed nothing. As it darts its snout at them, the bugs flee and scatter, barely escaping its bite. Squinting, I can just begin to make out (or imagine that I can just begin to make out) how legs radiate from all sides of the gray dots, how the monads unfold around themselves these ciliated fringes of hair, which (either by whipping like flagella, or undulating in that underwater way of swaying seaweed, or [in the case of one mite] rotating back and forth, clockwise then counterclockwise, like the buffers at a carwash) propel their bodies in leftward panic across the windowpane, away from the gecko, away from the face that is digging their graves, and toward the reflection of my own face.