It looks from left to right guiltily as it advances. It seems to be heading for a dead leaf lying a few feet away: the deck is littered with crisp brown discards from the vines threading the trellis overhead, and you watch as the lizard closes in on—then crawls on top of—this one. Its toes grip the papery surface. Once it has established its fourfold foothold it pauses, standing perfectly still. Its body tenses, as if every pore in its pebbled skin were a straining ear, listening. And then that green skin begins to fade. For a moment you assume that a shadow has passed over its body, the way that the air will dim when a cloud crosses the sun. But soon you see that the lizard is changing colors: its skin yellows at first, then descends through gradations of brown, until finally—after having slowly darkened through bark tones and the pale beige of wood chips—it reaches the exact same shade as the leaf. In the space of a few seconds, the lizard has traversed the color spectrum of two seasons: it has crossed that chromatophoric infinity, passing from green to brown just as—in the preceding months—the leaf had. The lizard has synthesized September in its skin. You cannot stop staring at the lizard. Was that what your brain looked like, you wonder, as it learned to mimic the mental apartment? While you sat perfectly still at your desk, did your brain embrown like this, blending gradually with its surroundings, flushing itself with darker and darker thoughts until, in the end, you could barely distinguish your apartment-colored consciousness from your apartment? The lizard, too, has grown indistinguishable. You can still make it out on the leaf, but you know that if you had not been watching this entire time—if you had just arrived in the courtyard and glanced down at the deck—your gaze would have swept across the floor without registering it. It has merged that completely with the dead leaf. Its body has all but disappeared into the deadness, grown invisible against a background of brown decay. It is, you imagine, a form of ontological camouflage, no different from a possum’s playing dead. The anole is disguising itself from predators by absenting itself altogether from the world of predators and prey, of beings and being, retreating instead into the nonbeing beneath the leaf. Maybe, you imagine, that is why it had to pause there so long, with such concentration: maybe it had to draw the death out of the leaf, absorbing autumnal energies into its body, growing brown from this bloodmeal the way that a mosquito’s belly will redden as it drinks. By standing on the leaf, you think, the lizard is drilling down into death. The leaf is just the visible vein of that invisible world. And at this thought you suddenly want—you do not know how—to warn the lizard. Do not do that, you want to tell it. Do anything but that. For you know, as the reptile does not, what the price of entering a radical closure is.