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smokes and belches and there are hands reaching over the edge towards me.
    What is in there? The thin line is weak but curious. I have to send out my courage like a moon probe but as yet I cannot decode the incoming signal. I should have done this slowly slowly over the years. I should have learned a new language before I needed to speak it. But I never thought I needed a new language. The inner life has been just that; inner. Doesn't a healthy person look outwards? I forgot what my father said, my father in his dark coat and ringed hair, warning me to remember the serpent.
    Let the sun come. I shall have to take the nights more slowly. For now it is enough to find a tiny pattern, faithfully every day, that begins to spell my name.
     
    These matters compressed into my half-thoughts and comforted me in the second before I turned over in the half-bed. Then the gentle light of the sun was put out as my body hit a power station of pain. Is that me, voltaged out of life into one burnt smell of defeat? I read that those who are executed by electric chair retain a tiny proportion of consciousness, enough to know that they have been killed, before the final death of sense and mind.
    What is the moment of death? The moment when the heart stops? The rupture of command from brain to body? The soul climbing out of its dark tower?
    I come from a people to whom the invisible world is everyday present. A people for whom there is no death though death has followed them across history and continents. I come from a people who hope against hope, whose melancholy is the outer garment of their mirth. In their celebrations and in their mournings, the spirit is the same. I used to speak Yiddish and Hebrew fluently but I have not spoken either language for thirty years. What else have I lost?
    The moment of death, the moment of reckoning, whatever it was, the image that stopped you, at that moment the protective accumulations of life prove useless. The inner life, the other language is what I need and the room is empty and silent.
    I can't go back into the past and change it, but I have noticed that the future changes the past. What I call the past is my memory of it and my memory is conditioned by who I am now. Who I will be. The only way for me to handle what is happening is to move myself forward into someone who has handled it. As yet that person does not exist. She has not those resources. I will have to make her as Jewish legend tells how God made the first man: by moulding a piece of dirt and breathing life into it. The dirt I have in plenty. The life I will have to draw out of lungs unused to deep breathing.
     
    What kills love? Only this: neglect.
    I knew I was neglecting myself. Oh not in the ways taboo to modern religion: leaving my hair like the inside of a rabbit hutch; choosing clothes that hang as though they had started life as a horse blanket. My hands don't shake when I read the morning paper and when I take my make-up off I don't look like a red-eyed werewolf. When I put it on I don't look like a red-eyed werewolf either. I eat well, drink modestly, exercise to prevent my thighs from swimming into two seals. I read, think, work hard, and my blood pressure is average.
    Was there nothing else?
    There was: a woman whose face collides with mine in the mirror. I know she wants to speak to me but when she bends forward to whisper, she has no mouth.
    An older woman, short and strong, dark aspect and thick hands. When she comes close she tries to clutch me but as her hands shut around my body there is no body. I see her bent over the terrified air.
    And else? A man, younger than I am. I get a feeling of him now and then when I am zipping up my jeans. He seems to want to attract attention to his balls.
    When I told Jove about my occasional shadow-man, he served up Freud with the pasta and told me it was my inadequacy anxiety.
     
    ME: I don't feel inadequate.
    HE: Unconsciously you do. You need to compensate for my success.
    ME: His balls