Their cilia propel them slowly, though, and it will be a few minutes yet before the nearest of them reaches my right cheek. For its part, the gecko seems to have given up the chase. Or perhaps it is only resting a moment to digest. It stands now in the middle of the pane, its four feet planted firmly against the glass. Its sides expand and deflate in a shallow breathing, and its heart, again frantic, is visible once more beneath the lilac of its skin. It has fed well. I fold my hands behind my head and lean back in my chair, putting an extra foot of perspective between the gecko and me. Looking at it like this, I find that I’m unable to keep seeing it through the mites’ eyes. When it is not hunting the mites, the gecko (so far from resembling a Deathlike reptile) seems harmlessly small, stuck to my window like a stick-on star. Its stomach, chewy-looking and pale, is shrunk to gummi-gator size again. My attempts at magnifying it don’t seem to be working anymore. Which is a shame, for I had been growing—almost despite myself—hypnotized by the horror unfolding on my windowpane. It was as if a miniature kaiju film had been arranged for my private viewing: as if the mites were men, flooding the streets of an imperiled city; and as if the gecko were Godzilla, a nuclear lizard twice as tall as a skyscraper. Except now that it is impossible to believe that the mites are conscious and panicking, or that they are even aware of the gecko at all, the gecko cannot be construed, from any creature’s point of view, as monstrous. For me to feel any frisson at the gecko’s feeding, I realize (for the gecko to continue to incarnate Death), I would need to go further than simply anthropomorphizing the mites, pretending that they’re conscious like men. I would have to pretend that they are men, regarding each gray dot on my windowpane as a human life. Then, when I watched those dots fleeing the gecko, I might be able to experience some of the catharsis that I felt during Godzilla, when I could watch actual human beings fleeing an actual giant lizard. Now, as the gecko resumes its ruthless pursuit of the dots, I try to pretend that that is what I am watching: that Godzilla (the gecko) is pursuing humans (gray dots), all of whom only appear to be small (to be a gecko and gray dots) due to some virtual distance between us. It takes great imaginative discipline for me to sustain this illusion, and I find that, in my sympathies for the gray dots, I keep wavering, regarding them as men one moment and mites the next. What this instability and, indeed, double aspectuality of the dots (their toggling back and forth, I mean, between mites and men) reminds me of is that famous line from King Lear, which I was assigned to read in high school and haven’t read since, though I remember both the line in question and the juvenile marginalia that I scrawled beside it.