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which ascended from Earth to heaven, and he had, in that awful instant as he rolled doubled-up in agony, glimpsed the Persons at the top end of the spear, those who held the pole that bridged the two worlds. Three figures with warm but impassive eyes. They had not twisted the gaff within him; They had simply held it there until, in his pain, he had begun by slow and gradual degrees to become awake. That was the purpose of this sting: to wake him from his sleep,the sleep of all mankind, from which everyone would one day, in the twinkling of an eye, as Paul had said, be roused. “Behold,” Paul had said, “I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep but shall be changed, in the twinkling of an eye.” But oh, the pain. Did it take this much to awaken him? Must everyone suffer like this? Would the gaff pierce him again sometime? He dreaded it, and yet he recognized that the three figures, the Trinity, were right; this had to be done; he had to be roused. And yet—
    He now got out a book, opened it, and read aloud to Lurine, who liked to be read to if it wasn’t too long and declamatory. He read a small, simple poem, without telling her the author.
    Mother, I cannot mind my wheel;
    My fingers ache, my lips are dry;
    Oh! if you felt the pain I feel!
    But oh, who ever felt as I!
    Closing the book, he asked, “What do you think of that?”
    “’Sokay.”
    He said, “Sappho. Translated by Landor. Probably from one word, from a ‘fragment,’ But it reminds one of Gretchen am Spinnrade—in the first part of Goethe’s
Faust
” And he thought,
Meine Ruh ist hin. Mein Herz ist schwer
. My peace is gone, my heart is heavy. Amazing, so much alike. Did Goethe know? The Sappho poem was better, being shorter. And it, at least as done by Landor, was in English, and he, unlike the SOWer Father Handy, did not delight in strange tongues; in fact he dreaded them. Too many ter-weps had come for example from Germany; he could not forget that.
    “Who was Sappho?” Lurine asked.
    Presently he said, “The finest poet the world ever knew. Even in fragments. You can have Pindar; he was third-rate.” Again he inspected the display of pills; what to take, what combination? To strive by means of these to reach that other land which he knew existed, beyond the gate of death perhaps.
    “Tell me,” Lurine said, smoking away on her cheap Algerian briar pipe—it was all she had been able to purchase from a peddler; the U.K. rose briars were too dear—and watching him acutely, “What it was like that time you took those methamphetamines and saw the Devil.”
    He laughed.
    “What’s funny?”
    “It sounds like,” he said, “you know. Forked tail, cloven hoof, horns.”
    But she was serious. “It wasn’t. Tell me again.”
    He did not like to remember his vision of the Antagonist, what Martin Luther had called “our ancient foe on earth.” So he got a glass of water, carefully selected several assorted pills, and swallowed them.
    “Horizontal eyes,” Lurine said. “You told me that. And without pupils. Just slots.”
    “Yes.” He nodded.
    “And he was above the horizon. And unmoving. He’d always been there, you said. Was he blind?”
    “No. He perceived
me
, for instance. In fact all of us, all life. He waits.” They are wrong, the Servants of Wrath, Pete thought; upon death we can be delivered over to the Antagonist: it will— may—not be a release at all, only the start. “You see,” he said, “he was so placed that he viewed straight across the surface of the world, as if the world were flat and his gaze, like a laser beam, traveled on without end, forever. It had no focus point, such as a lens creates.”
    “What did you take just now?”
    “Narkazine.”
    “Nark has to do with sleep. Zine is a stimulant, though. Does it stimulate you to sleep?”
    “It dulls the frontal lobe and permits the thalamus free activity. So—” He quickly swallowed two tiny gray pills. “I take these to hold back the thalamus.”