What I’m technically visualizing is the looks on the faces of the Japanese actors in old Godzilla films, and one look and one face in particular: the look—which I seem to remember from these movies’ crowd sequences, whenever a mob of people is stampeding down a street with their backs to the camera—is that of the inevitable ‘Lot’s Wife’ (that is, the one man or woman who cannot forbear glancing back at what it is they are fleeing, and so who break off from the rest of the pack to pause briefly, turning their head over their shoulder toward the camera, just to steal a glimpse up at Godzilla, for which glimpse they pay a ghastly price indeed, not only because the sight is horrific [the expression on their face is always one of abject terror, the mouth hanging open in a mute howl and the eyes widened in shock ((though occasionally the howl is not mute at all, but shrill and diphthongal—a sustained ‘Aieeeeeeeee!’—often accompanied by a pointing finger))] but also because even the second or two that it takes for them to glance at Godzilla is enough time for Godzilla to catch up with them, that is, to be bearing down on them at that very moment, such that this poor Lot’s Wife has no time to do anything but stand there paralyzed, like a pillar of salt, looking their death in the face, as they wait for the shadow of Godzilla’s taloned foot to race down and consume them [when the foot itself races down, unceremoniously squashing the actor beneath it, I seem to remember that the accompanying foley effect was a ‘splat’ or ‘squish’ noise. That is doubtless what the people in the fleeing crowd would hear, along with Godzilla’s iambic da-DOOMing, and the sound of it would be like a whip at their backs: by the sound of each squash, they would know now not to turn around like Lot’s Wife, not to steal even the least glimpse of the giant lizard that was pursuing them; and so, unseen, Godzilla would be—in effect and in a manner of speaking—a giant, invisible lizard, this Death whose victims cannot look at it, at least not until they are already in its jaws]). At any rate, that is the expression that I imagine on the faces of the dots on my windowpane, the Lot’s Wife expression (the sight of which terrified me almost as much as Godzilla himself when I was a child, and which, for a while, I assumed all corpses bore on their faces [even years later I was unable ((last summer, at his funeral)) to look down into the coffin at my father’s face]). Nor would the dots’ Lot’s Wife expressions be unjustified, for even as they close slowly in on my own cheek, Godzilla—lumbering in the general direction of my face as well—closes in less slowly on them. But no: they may not be headed toward my cheek at all. For I notice, for the first time in many minutes, that that brown moth—the moth that had, earlier tonight, fatigued itself in stationary flight in the air beyond my window—is still poised in the exact same place on the glass, far to the left-hand side, such that it is in its direction that the men are fleeing and that Godzilla is moving.