Sometimes the soul lifts you up And other times, ahh, it slows you down. Carrying it up and down stairs, in and out of subway stations Lugging it along into public bathrooms And standing it up awkwardly between the seats in a restaurant. Sometimes the soul glows with a luminescence relentless and opaque Other times it appears to remain inert for weeks. But still you carry it; you never know when you might need it. The soul is about six feet long And shaped like a sugar snap pea, or a slightly more tapered football, Or even the oddly jewel-like pupae of certain pustulent flies, Depending on your mood. Its color is the pastel green of a luna moth’s wing. It is smooth, leathery in texture, impenetrable, and devoid of any sort of handhold Or rock-climber’s notch. It can be hefted above one’s head, but it scarcely balances. Or it can be dragged, but eventually it slips out of one’s hands and must be regathered from a stooping position that irritates the lumbar area. Most find it suffices to carry the soul under one slightly overbowed arm, where it herniates against the bicep and must periodically be shimmied back into place with the knee on the same side, while balancing on the other leg. So you carry the soul, like an upright bassist totes his instrument, Although his instrument has a clear purpose and regular use, A use, furthermore, that is improved in a very linear and predictable manner By diligent practice. You carry the soul, waiting for the times it abruptly enlightens or perhaps inspires you, like a goddess visitating with you through some sort of video screen or magic window. These visits are brief and disquieting But seem somehow irreplaceable. Like the soul itself, Because when they issued it to you, you were told several times that this was in fact a one-shot deal, Even caused to sign papers to that effect. You carry it until, in your travels, you come across a narrow, narrow bridge. On the other side of the bridge there are mountains, and they are made of gold. Although some of them are so far away that they, like mountains, appear purple. They may not all be gold; some of the debris that comprises them could be rhino horns, or wampum, or small shells. Anything of value in the world. You could get there, and bathe in it. The bridge is negotiable. It’s made up of human beings, shirtless and twined together like ants, holding fast to one another’s ankles and wrists. They are strong enough, probably, to hold fast while you step cautiously across their sweaty backs. The comic Eddie Murphy once crossed a chasm like this, after ingeniously drinking a glass of water so that he would not spill a drop. You, too, can bridge this chasm. But not carrying the soul. I’ll buy that off you, a voice says. And at this point you’re just so, so weary. Your arms are sore and you’re starting to develop tendinitis in your wrists. You would sell it cheap, you think, like an ugly lamp at a tag sale. A dollar? Forty cents? Well, really, it’s more about turning presence into space, isn’t it? Leaving room for other more desired objects. Who cares about the money, really? So you do the deal. And now you want it back.

Before she was born, her mother Like many women who become pregnant, Experienced strange mercurial cravings for things. At first the cravings were for food: Cheese pizza covered with a very specific jarred strawberry preserve; Chocolate morsels, melted and fried in a bit of bacon grease. Watermelon. Just watermelon. Then came the day that her senses Became strengthened on the cosmic level. Upon stepping outside onto the front porch She exclaimed ‘I smell bleach. Does anybody smell bleach?’ The bleach smell was from a tanker of chlorine Spilled in a highway mishap in Waterbury Seventy-four miles away. It was about that time that the really strange symptoms began. She heard a ringing in her ears Which resolved teasingly into the warbling of a gospel choir That wasn’t there. She would only wear the same pants, washing them until the seams started threading out. And when her husband, like a city inspector, Examined and replaced the batteries In every single thing in the house that had batteries Found his way to the big yellow flashlight in the hall closet, Her eyes fixed on the large, square battery he had removed. It sat there on the kitchen counter Black and angular like a massive and block-shaped soda can. Three days it sat-for some reason he had forgotten to throw it away- So when the moon rose in the wee hours of the third morning, she crept downstairs, Hefted it And swallowed it whole. That was the last thing she craved before the child was born. It would have been better if she had waited, tried something else. Chalk, for example, or maybe the rawhide lace of an old boat shoe. Those things, potentially, could have been chewed And passed. The battery, quite unfortunately, had nowhere to go besides the baby. When she was born she had this huge battery inside her. Eight pounds, four ounces she was, but probably a good three quarters of a pound of that was metal. Nobody noticed. The other organs, blood vessels, politely moved out of the way. What other choice did they have? She did not have a happy childhood. Her mother thought the battery was just a dream. Her parents were good to her and she had friends and she did fairly well in school. She played the oboe in the school band. She attended sleepovers and once landed the lead role in the school play. Once, hiking with her aunt and cousins, she saw a wild mountain lion. But was something missing? It seemed to be. She paced nights in her room, staying up sometimes until dawn, then falling asleep and having to be dragged out of bed forty minutes later to make the bus. When she got into high school her grades fell off. She built a dugout in the woods and covered it carefully with plywood And cloistered herself there by herself for hours and days until a hunter and his dogs fell into it. The man broke his hip and she was forbidden to go there again But did so anyway This time making a platform up the ladderlike branches of a white pine tree. Searching for ways to separate from her parents, she actually joined a street gang, but became disillusioned When she realized that their activities consisted of unimaginative graffitos done late at night Beneath unpoliced underpasses which no one saw or cared about. She found boyfriends, each more surly and useless than the one before. Her parents threw up their hands. She grew; she attended college for six-sevenths of a semester As a poetry major Her parents still welcomed her home for Thanksgiving and even Christmas So she dropped out And attended a program in pharmacy Then moved to Alaska Then Memphis. She chose her friends, her lovers, her jobs and her cars haphazardly, often with predictably awful results. Finally, at 28 years of age, taking what money she had and tying it in a handkerchief, She began riding the rails Because motorcycles seemed too dangerous even for her minor death wish. But you can’t hold your money like it’s money in these situations; somebody will notice. Someone did; he pulled the wad of cash from her, and, with a practiced and completely unnecessary shove, just as a matter of form, lashed out with a spindly arm And broke his knuckles on the black flashlight battery just below the skin to the left of her sternum. Some of us are curious and have peeled back the metal skin And found that these batteries consist of other batteries…eight D-cells Or 64 triple-As. In her case it was the triple-As. They burst and spread through her body Like the individual balls of flame in fireworks. She threw them up for a month Shat them out for almost two Even sneezed out two Behind a Walmart, penniless and starving in Houston. What remained, the black twisted skin and the few straggling dark cylinders Were absorbed, their greater surface area finally exposed. Things were better after that.

In time I grew wise And I came to see That my thoughts were only my thoughts My feelings were only my feelings And not the way things are In my heart I have a sweet spot for everything Because everything has a sweet spot Like the transmission in my car has a sweet spot Like a baseball bat has a sweet spot Like a woman has a sweet spot Like a man has a sweet spot In my heart I have a sweet spot for everything Because everything has a sweet spot Everything except for you

When people say that something is a matter of perspective What they are talking about is the relative size of things When people talk about gaining perspective, What they are trying to achieve Is the ability to calibrate their senses to actual size, Objects neither closer nor further than they appear, But rather exactly as they appear. When this perspective is attained, one will not rip a cupboard door off of its hinges because one dropped a mug commemorating the Thanksgiving Fun Run, 1998. When it is attained, one will probably not utter the vilest blasphemies Over missing a stoplight on the way to a purely casual appointment. That’s having perspective. But no one has this. For example, in my world, the faces of my wife and my children press close, filling up the horizon. My dog looms like a sphinx. A black Halifax Ls Paul replica provides the spine of the world, and a basketball the size of the moon Blocks off a swath of the night sky. Your vision sees disease. Bacilli like city buses. House-engulfing amoebas. Spirochetes and spirilla that thrash the forests. Coliformes, blocking traffic. Allergens, too: dust mites chewing and tearing at the rotting walls of tenements Peanuts and tree nuts studding the landscape like glacial erratics. And above them and beyond them, There’s me, Glowering from space My horned helm gleaming with the light of a hundred stars, My gut engorged by the vanquished humanoid souls of far nebulae, My jaw, an alloy of bismuth and palladium Biting off a piece of Asia like the ogre and demigod, Galactor.

She had been married twice to and divorced twice from the same man. Then another marriage, to a different man, and another divorce. When I got divorced myself, I asked this colleague to recommend an attorney, figuring she would know. I used the guy, and he sucked. But he’s dead now, so I shouldn’t speak further ill of him. Anyhow the colleague refused to get married a fourth time, being in her fifties and quite fed up. But she did have a common-law husband with whom she had lived for some time. A third man. He had inherited a property in the woods in Maine, and planned to move there once and for all when they had fixed the place up, and figured out a way to quit their jobs, which they both hated passionately. Once past this common ground, however, there were some issues with their association. My colleague was fond of sharing them with me, which I have since come to learn is part of the reason that marriages fail. They enjoyed many of the same things, they pulled their own weight, and there was no cruelty in their house, but she was emotionally baffled by this man. “When his father died, he didn’t cry. But when Dale Earnhardt had that fatal crash at Daytona, he was inconsolable. Cried like a baby. Took two days off from work. His father? The funeral was on a Saturday. Worked Friday, worked Monday. I will never understand that.” And of course the gentleman said little to shed further light on it, not being one for long bouts of introspection. We used to get beaten for that, you know, being men. Today, in many quarters, we just get ridiculed for it. In any case, I heard this complaint and thought, that doesn’t sound so strange. But I couldn’t put my finger on why. It took me a long time to figure it, after not seeing this woman for some years. Turns out she and the improperly-grieving partner moved to Maine after all, agreeing, apparently, to ignore one another’s foibles or at least tolerate them. Meanwhile the conversation stuck with me. Why Dale Earnhardt? I mean, there were probably millions of grown men crying over Dale. Every Hell’s Angel with twenty-four-inch biceps probably has a pit bull he’d gladly die for, or a beloved grandmother in front of whom he talks and acts like a choirboy. This phenomenon needs a theory and here it is: Everybody, I mean everyone in the world, has mixed feelings about his parents. They could be literally perfect and this would still be the case. And nearly everybody has unfinished business with them. Even if you’re on good terms, have dinner at the diner together every Tuesday, there’s a part of you that’s still wondering: did the cat really run away, or did Mom take him to the pound? And why did Dad stay in that hotel across town for two weeks when I was seven? At many points in your history, your parents seem to you like the only obstacle to your greatness, when in all likelihood they are the only barrier to your destruction. Your father is your teacher, your warden, your moral compass, and your oppressor. Most fathers are extremely patient with these fleeting perceptions—thank goodness. But nobody has mixed feelings about Dale Earnhardt. I mean, you either love him or hate him. Like Natalie Merchant, or the New York Yankees. And from the remove at which you must perceive him, if you fall in the “love” column, his faults are blameless, his triumphs divine and untainted. He can be all hero. And a hero’s fall is cause for a pure, unsullied, uncomplicated grief. No regrets. No guilt. No blame. A real person, a loved one, someone you really know, no matter how heroic he may be, can never do that.

The sun is a devilish God, hovering overhead, hosing the surface of the Earth with nuclear radiation until all life is extinguished So that child cannot go outside Not without a hat And sunglasses (-only the kind with the loopy thing so she’ll keep them on) (-only the expensive kind with the rubberized nosepiece and the soft pliable earsocks, did you know they were called earsocks, that’s what they call the part that goes over your ears, so she’ll keep them on, the dollar store sunglasses are awful) Oh, and sunscreen Sunscreen Sunscreen All over her face And ears And feet And arms, although they’ll be sheathed in cotton And legs, although they, too, will be sheathed in cotton It doesn’t matter if the sun’s not up. It will come. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first thing in the morning, and I am sleeping with athletic socks tied in my hair and snoring, and you are walking with the baby in the dawning light, the dawning light of that demon sun! That child will burn, burn! Even when the light slants through the trees weakly from a point barely surmounting the horizon, she will burn. It doesn’t matter if you’ll be under the trees, the dense, dense trees, in the pine grove where the pines grow close and the tight weave of needles blocks all light so that you feel you’re passing through the Pevensie’s wardrobe, because those weak and scattered dapples of light are the sun! Going swimming? Water is even worse. It magnifies the light so that in moments, mere moments, that child will be scorched and disfigured, cooked like a rabbit on a spit. Even if she’s black. She could be darker than a raven in July, and she would still burn. And we wouldn’t even know; she would be so dark already. It doesn’t matter if it’s at night and the sun is on the other side of the earth. Don’t you know that the sun spits out neutrinos that fly right through the earth’s crust like bullets through white bread? It doesn’t matter if you’re spelunking in a cave. Even in France. Even at midnight. She will only be safe In a place miles below the ground Swaddled in lead aprons Strapped with a welder’s mask Her arms covered by oven mitts Finally free And healthy And loved.

A long time ago I worked in a store The store sold sneakers and sports jerseys And nobody who buys these things Wants to see a dirty animal that has fallen from the ceiling and broken its spine And is writhing and twitching underneath the headbands and wristbands, Unable to turn itself over The animal was a mouse. It had been driven out of hiding by the sound and vibration of hammerdrills Which were being used to make holes in concrete so that the mall could be expanded. A quadra- or at the very least paraplegic mouse was living its final moments directly in front of our cash register. I slid some shipping cases in front of him as a few customers approached. I took my multitool and cut through the zip ties holding a genuine Michael Jordan replica jersey to the metal rack. I put the jersey in a bag. I took payment. When the customers were gone I went to him again and moved the shipping cases away, hoping he was dead, but he was unchanged, helpless and still squirming, wondering why nothing was working. And as I leaned close I could see that he did have, in fact, a little control over his right paw. The paw twitched and shivered, and, unmistakably, motioned me to come in even closer. So I knelt by his side and put my ear as close as I could to his tiny, grey, whiskered snout. I heard him breathing, quickly: Huh Huh Huh Huh And he said: don’t leave me like this, homes. I can’t feel nothin’. Fortunately, the mouse was packing. And his little automatic was lying on the orange carpet a few inches away. I unbent a paper clip and fitted it in front of the small trigger. I crossed myself. I took aim. Tap tap. And it was done. Rest in peace, homie.

The musicians and software developers had created something called The Highly Ass-Expansible Environment Engine, also known as HAEEE And while the significance of this event was being explained to me One of them was slipping something into my Pepsi Something which would shortly thereafter cause me to suspect that I was being followed by robots, robots which had in fact replaced all of the people around me with exact robot duplicates who were for some reason plotting my demise Causing me to seek refuge in my station wagon, arming myself with a large sharpened screwdriver, and later, to relentlessly question my friend Jason to ascertain whether he was still a human, by means of a series of queries the answers to which only he would know. They smoked incessantly And played an esoteric chess game in which catalyzing elements of art and drugs, friendship and sex were moved around an imaginary board, the goal of the game being failure But a failure which culminated in some coruscating explosion of messy energy, something that could be harnessed or distilled into a purely artistic element, something poured into a leaden vessel and handled at a distance, with tongs, like Tony Stark building his first arc reactor. In my case they observed like white-coated laboratory assistants, chalking values on clipboards as I descended into a brief and wholly unwarranted madness. I would forgive them this trespass, feeling that in some way I had been prepaid by the ascendant sun of their company. And the vessel belched orange sparks. Later this element would cool and harden into a song.

Pretty much all the humans were dead And more than half of them either deserved it or were better off The thing was that lots of other things also were dead, All of them, in fact, in some cases, And they for the most part were innocent of any significant role In what had transpired. And many of these were not better off. The globe, more or less spoiled, The seas yellow, And the cities flattened like the trees of Tunguska, Homes folded in on themselves like empty cardboard boxes. In a well-catacombed pile of trash that had once passed for a city of men An old, old man of forty years, a cowering, cringing hetman, Whose body had been failing for more than a third of its life, Finally toppled over and died. But he died after bequeathing to a boy the most valuable thing he possessed: He had taught the boy to read. And now the boy, whose body had been his only possession, Inherited a secret warren of books. He kept it hidden, piled trash against the door at night when not even he could see what he did, felt for the door’s edge in the black to ensure it was unseeable. He visited there, also by night, excavating like a rat to peel his way in, reading in a square of moonlight admitted by a broken pane high in the corner, lying on his belly on a tarp covering some ancient machinery until his legs were numb. His sessions were punctuated and often delayed by the grim occupation of staving off death. Which horseman would run him down first? Was it famine? Plague? Or the violence of his fellow men, their faces drawn taut and toothy by want, faces driven by madness into screeching ricti that made a pack of coyotes look like professors on a country stroll. But when he had time, he read. And had the patience to persevere, laboring through tomes both weighty and ridiculous, at first innocently and then critically. Finally came the wit and wisdom to distill what others had found, feeling the patterns of knowledge as a spider blindly strums the spokes of her web, locking associations into place between sources like intertwining gears. Whenever he could, even when hunger seemed about to gnaw a hole in his stomach, he read. * If you have ever become serious about anything, anything at all, you know that all progress is built on a few simple laws. Without them only can be born hacks and dilettantes, their alleged discoveries trite and undisciplined. Each pursuit comes with its own laws, laws learned from the best teachers on the very first day of apprenticeship, then relearned over and over again, painfully, burned into the very grey matter of the brain by countless crumbling failures. If you are a chef you might say, cook the food until it’s done. Wash everything. Get rid of things before they go bad. Above that foundation lies the art, but without it the art is useless. If you are a mother you might say, let them know they are loved. Make no idle threats. Give to them whatever trust they earn. Could it be that simple? Without this foundation you are raising sputtering monsters, stamping and shrieking until they are appeased. The boy in the labyrinth of trash found his laws. They were in every book in his bequest, cross-referenced, echoing, proved here by their absence and elsewhere by their unspoken primacy. Do as little damage as possible. Plan what you are going to do before you start. Try to reduce the suffering in the world. He started with the very house that held his books. It took months of planning ahead, because the part of his brain that took care of planning ahead would have given atrophy a bad name. It was nearly squeezed out and at all times drowned out by the shrill cries of the larger part, the part screaming run away or punch someone in the face. Pick one! Do it now! But eventually he did it. He pulled the house up straight. He bracketed it with crosspieces so it would stay where he had put it. It sat square on the ground like nothing else for a thousand miles, favoring no compass direction. Its vertical lines were plumb. Its tower pointed at the very footpath of the Christ. Then he painted it. He scraped and primed and made the house bright. Twice the barbarians came to destroy it, because destroying was the only word in their language and the house made them want to speak. He fixed it. Others stood around watching, even imploring him to exert himself, while impotent to assist him as though they lacked hands. After a long time, some of them pulled their own houses straight. By this time there were lines of corn in the streets and some of the herds that roamed the clearings were all of the same color. And when people had ideas they were brought to the group and the ones that seemed likely to do no harm were pursued. And the ones which promised great potential for harm were discarded by agreement. There was a universe of other ideas, many of them mostly benign. Entropy is a physical process and its opposite an act of will. Fliers and magazines and letters requesting money come into your home, a by-product of a dumb and blind organic proceeding. Only determined thought stops them from filling your house to the rafters. The grown man gets fat until he adopts routines to constrain his swelling belly. You set your mind in motion and the ripples move in every direction. Who says those ripples can’t lap over the planet? It was not done soon or easily. The lemming march of the insane had to be led to the cliff; just like that, one third of those souls who survived were gone. With some there could be no peace. The rest resisted until they stopped, because determination is stronger than apathy and time is on its side. There came a time when man and his cousins suffered no more, and that time came when the sun still had a few hundred millions years of hydrogen fuel in its bunkers. And man finally put down his tools to review his work. His gaze climbed up beyond the rooftops and the neatly-trimmed rows. He saw the stars as though for the first time, this time not with avarice but with a burning love that sought for both kinship and light. He arose, both falling and flying, at last a divinity. And the eons fizzled and flared beneath him.

You know that in my twenties all I wanted to do was to be a performing musician, and I did play out quite a bit, in my own band and with others. So I knew a lot of musicians and from time to time I was asked to play on other people’s recordings. At that time I lived with a couple of roommates: Dickie, a guitarist, and Tommy, a bass player. Tommy was hooked up with this folk-rock group that was getting some pretty big-time gigs, and they’d decided to put a record together. Their problem was that their singer, stage name Sheba, was a lousy guitar player. She could strum a few chords, and could sing fine, but for a real studio recording you’ll need a little lead guitar. So Tommy asked if I’d rehearse with them, write a few parts, and add my bit to the recording, and I said of course. Well, I sat around my room with Sheba’s demo, writing out the chords and trying to work out some tasteful lead lines. The group rehearsed two or three times at this ice-cold warehouse space they were using. They had a drummer named Bill who seemed like he’d played with everybody in town. There was a long weekend and the band had booked time at this studio in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and Sheba had a friend in the area who was out of town and had offered us her house for the weekend. So I packed up my rig and we threw our gear in an old Chevy truck. The pickup truck had a cap, but only one bench seat up front. Sheba drove, since it was her truck, and Billy the drummer called shotgun. That left me and Tommy riding under the cap in beach chairs, facing backwards. It was fun; we told jokes and talked about music, like musicians do, and just hoped we didn’t get pulled over. It was early evening when we got there, deep in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. It’s an odd area, very rural, with the populace a mixture of hillbillies and rich vacationers from New York and New Jersey. We stopped at a little country store in the woods to stock up on food. White bread, pasta, lots of sliced ham and roast beef, canned chili with beans. The bug-eyed girl behind the counter was talking to a thirtyish guy with puffy sneakers about UFO’s. “Yeah, me and the boys are gonna go up to the rock and see ‘em. Bud says they fly over about dusk. There’s room in the back of the truck if you wanna come.” Tommy and I shared a grin. Not much else to do out here, apparently, but pick up girls and hunt aliens. We paid for our things and started up the narrow road toward the house we were using. It was a modern home, with wood siding and nice landscaping. It had a windowless library room full of books and a small deck above a walk-out basement. There were four modest bedrooms upstairs. The deck had a little hibachi grill and looked out over a brushy hillside sloping up to the rolling Berkshire peaks beyond. “Enjoy the place! Call with any questions!” read the note on the kitchen counter. We were just polishing off our sandwiches and getting ready to turn in when a rumble of motors and a riot of honking horns drove us all out to the front steps. Sure enough, gangs of young adults, many of them sitting in the beds of pickup trucks, went roaring by, hooting and hollering. Some of them had telescopes, or binoculars slung around their necks. We had a good laugh, then retired to the library to read and talk quietly until it was time to sleep. It was probably about three in the morning when I sat up in bed, bewildered, unsure of what had woken me. At about the same moment that my feet hit the carpet in the dark bedroom, I heard it: a loud, metallic boom, coming from somewhere below. A light flicked on in the hallway. I peeked out. Sheba, her head wrapped in a scarf, poked her head out. “Someone…at the door?” she suggested. But it didn’t sound like knocking to me. Boom, boom, boom. Steady and regular. Now Tommy and Billy came out of their rooms, too, and Billy was holding a wooden bat. “Where did you get that?” I started to ask, but the boys were already making their way, quickly but stealthily, down the carpeted stairs. There was no more booming. Sheba and I followed them down. In moments, every light in the place was on, even the lights out back and on the front steps. We combed the place. We searched the basement. Was someone banging on the aluminum ductwork? Maybe the metal door of the bulkhead exit? There was nobody. Not even shadows moved out on the lawn; just a few moths swinging in orbit around the electric lamps. Finally, everyone’s adrenaline had receded enough to go back to bed. “Big day ahead,” Sheba reminded us. “Basic tracks at 10am. G’night, everybody.” Her door clicked shut. I was about to step into my bedroom when movement caught my eye. At the end of the hall, past Tommy’s room, there was a little jog in the hallway and a lavatory around the corner. I blinked twice to be sure my eyes were working right. I watched the tail of a lion, an African lion, tawny with a little brown tuft at the end, disappear around that bend. I let out a shout which brought everyone else out once again, and although I felt true terror, I ran toward what I’d seen, desperate to know I wasn’t crazy. There was nothing in the lavatory, of course. How could there be? The window was open, just a crack. There was nothing outside on the lawn. “Guess I’m just jumpy. Thought I saw something.” “Jesus, Joe,” said Tommy. The rest of the night passed without incident, thank goodness. In the morning, with the dewy light coming in above the trees and the birds in full song, we sat in the kitchen dissecting what had happened. “Mechanical noise, like an air handler cooling off,” was Billy’s suggestion. “Naw, there wasn’t any air conditioner running. I’m telling you, someone was pranking us. Maybe those UFO kids,” Tommy added as he went to grab something to read. But I thought about the lion’s tail and shuddered a little bit. From the library, Tommy called over his shoulder, “Okay, Bill, this has to be you. Good prank! You had me going for a second.” But Bill looked perplexed. The rest of us debarked to the library to see what Tommy was on about. In the library, every second book had been pulled out about two inches. And this in a library that had four walls covered with books, floor to ceiling. We’re talking several thousand titles, probably. And all arranged in the same pattern. It must have taken two hours, maybe more. “Come on! It had to be you, Bill. You were the first up.” But Bill held up his hands and shrugged. Conversation sort of chilled out at this. We got our act together and headed for the truck for the day’s session, Billy twirling a drumstick in one hand. Of course the day’s session took all our attention and energy. When we got back to the house it was darkening once again. Sheba put on a pot of pasta. We laughed and ate and discussed our tracks, which ones were working, which ones needed something. I pulled out an electric and strummed on it, unplugged, showing Sheba some parts I’d been thinking about. Everybody gradually filtered back to their rooms. After a while all the lights were out and we slept. Boom. Boom. Boom. Three in the morning again and it started up. This time I hustled straight to the hallway, only to find Billy and Tommy (Billy once again armed with the Louisville Slugger) charging down the stairs, slipping on the carpet in their haste. Lights flicked on below. Instead of following, I stayed in the room, peering out into the yard as the outside lights came on, trying to catch a glimpse of some hooligan scampering off into the night. Again we searched. Again we found nothing. Nobody. I almost didn’t want to look as I went back to bed, but finally my head turned toward that lavatory as though on its own. No lion. Nothing there. Of course. Sunday morning came. All business; we had one more day to record our vocals, lead guitar and incidental percussion. Back to the studio and another long day. By that evening, we were all pretty tired and the whole thing with the midnight noises seemed like a big joke. Nothing else had happened in the house. I suppose everybody had mentally hung the blame for the library prank on someone else in the band. I thought it was Tommy, and intended to get it out of him later, since we lived together. That night, our sleep was undisturbed. Whomever our night tormentor might have been, he had apparently given up. In the morning, Sheba draped thick slabs of country bacon over the grill on the hibachi, determined to use up our last grocery store rations during our last meal at the house. I scrambled a few eggs in the kitchen, threw them on toast, and added some of the salty meat as garnish. We were generally pleased with the session; everyone had played their best and the recording sounded great. Today we’d pick up the master tapes from the studio and head home. Then Sheba, crouched over the sizzling grill, stood up, tall and rigid, staring out into the backyard. The others turned to look. I turned too, to face the cut brush on the hillside, the larger trees beyond. Strolling slowly through the tall grass, one enormous padded foot in front of the other, was a tawny-coated, chocolate-maned African lion. Six hundred pounds of muscle and bone. He climbed the hillside, picking his way carefully through the tall weeds and the remnants of ancient stone walls. He turned back to look at us once, empty yellow eyes gazing East, over the house and over us. Then he turned and the woods swallowed him. I was there, and that’s what happened. The others? They may not all agree, who’s to say? They’re all still around, all still playing. You can track them down and ask them, if you want.