In this charmed circle, Will grew up; grew strong. The plague was not yet upon them, and in hindsight this would come to seem a Golden Age of hedonism and excess, which Will, by an act of equilibrium that still astonished him, managed to both observe and indulge in. Soon, though he didn't know it, death would come and start to lay its fatal fingers on many of the men he photographed; an arbitrary culling of beauties and intellects and loving souls. But for seven extraordinary years, before the shadow fell, he bathed daily in that queer river supposing it would rush like this forever.

iii

It had been Lewis, the insurance man turned poet, who'd first talked about animals with him. Sitting on the back porch of Lewis's house on Cumberland watching a raccoon raid the trash cans, they'd fallen to talking about what it would be like to inhabit for a time the body and spirit of an animal. Lewis had been writing about seals, and was presently so obsessed with the subject, he said, that they entered his dreams nightly.

'Big, sleek, black seals,' he said, 'just hanging out.'

'On a beach?'

'No, on Market Street,' Lewis said with a giggle. 'I know it sounds stupid, but when I'm dreaming it they look like they belong there. I did ask one of them what they were doing, and he said they were checking out the lie of the land for when the city drops into the ocean.'

Will watched the raccoon efficiently sorting through the trash. 'I dreamt about this talking fox when I was a kid. . .' he said softly. Maybe it was Lewis's hashish - he never failed to find good ganja - but the memory was crystalline: '... Lord Fox,' he said.

'Lord Fox?'

'Lord Fox,' Will replied. 'He scared the fuck out of me, but he was comical at the same time.'

'Why'd he scare you?' Will had never spoken about him to anyone, and even now - though he liked and trusted Lewis - he felt a twinge of reluctance. Lord Fox was part of a much bigger secret (the great secret of his life), and he was covetous of it. But gentle Lewis was pressing for further explanation. 'Tell me,' he said.

'He'd eaten somebody,' Will replied. 'That's what scared me about him. But then I remember he told me this story.'

'About what?'

'It wasn't even a story really. It was just a conversation he'd had with a dog.'

'Yeah?' Lewis laughed, thoroughly engaged.

Will repeated the substance of Lord Fox's exchange with the dog, amazed at how easily he could recall it, though it was a decade and a half since he'd dreamed the dream.

'We hunted for them, we herded for them, we guarded their brats. And why? Because we thought they knew how to take care of things. How to keep the world full of meat and flowers'

Lewis liked what he heard. 'I could get a poem out of that,' he said.

'I wouldn't risk it.'

'Why not?'

'He might come after you for a slice of the profits.'

'What profits?' Lewis said. 'This is poetry.'

Will didn't reply. He was watching the raccoon, who had finished scavenging and was scampering away with its booty. And while he was watching, he was thinking of Lord Fox; and of Thomas the painter, living and dead.

'You want some more?' Lewis said, handing the nub of the reefer back to Will. 'Hey, Will? You listening?'

Will was staring into the darkness, his thoughts as furtive as the raccoon. Lewis was right. There was a kind of poetry in the story Lord Fox had told. But Will wasn't a poet. He couldn't tell the story with words. He had only his eyes; and his camera, of course.

He took the extinguished reefer from Lewis's fingers and re-ignited it, pulling the pungent smoke deep into his lungs. It was powerful ganja, and he'd already had more than usual. But he was feeling greedy tonigh

'Are you thinking about the fox?' Lewis asked him.

Will turned his blurred gaze in Lewis's direction. 'I'm thinking about the rest of my life,' he replied.

In his own mythology of himself, the journey that would take him out into the wildernesses of the world, to the places where species were perishing for the simple crime of living where they felt the need to live, began that night on Lewis's porch, with the reefer, the raccoon and the story of Lord Fox. This was a simplification of course. He'd been bored with chronicling the Castro for a while, and was ready for a change long before that night. As for the direction that desire might point in, it did not come clear in the space of a conversation. But over the next few weeks, his idling thoughts returned to this exchange several times, and he started to turn his camera away from the throngs of the Castro, towards the animal life that coexisted with people in the city. His first experiments were unambitious; late juvenilia, at best. He photographed the sea lions that congregated on Pier 39, the squirrels in Dolores Park and the next door neighbour's dog, who regularly stopped the traffic by squatting to take a dump in the middle of Sanchez Street. But the journey that would in time take him very far from the Castro, and from squirrels, seals and defecating dogs, had begun.

He had dedicated Transgressions, his first published collection, to Lord Fox. It was the least he could do.

i

Arianna came to visit, unannounced, the morning after he got back nto the city. Brought a pound of French Roast from the Castro Cheesery and zuccotto and St Honore's cake from Peverelli's in North Beach, where she'd now moved in with Glenn. They hugged and kissed in the hallway, both a little teary-eyed at the reunion.

'Lord, I've missed you,' Will told her, his hands cupping her face. 'And you look so fine.'

'I dyed my hair. No more grey. I will have this hair colour at a hundred and one. Now what about you?'

'I'm better every day,' Will said, heading through to the kitchen to brew some coffee. 'I still creak a bit when I get up in the morning, and the scars itch like buggery after I've had a shower, but otherwise I'm back in working order.'

'I had my doubts. So did Bernie.'

'You thought I might just slip away quietly?'

'It crossed my mind. You looked very peaceful. I asked Bernie if you were dreaming. He said he didn't know.'

'It wasn't like dreaming, it was like going back in time. Being a boy again.'

'Was that fun?'

He shook his head. 'I'm very happy to be back.'

'You've got a great place to come back to,' she said, wandering to the kitchen door and surveying the hallway. She'd always loved the house; more than Will, in truth. The size of the place, along with the intricacy of the layout (not to mention the excesses its stylishly underfurnished rooms had hosted) lent it a certain authority, she thought. Most of the houses in the neighbourhood had seen their share of priapics, of course, but it wasn't just high times that haunted the boards here. It was a host of other things: Will's rages when he couldn't make the connections, and his howls of revelation when he did; the din of excited conversation around maps which had upon them an exhilarating paucity of roads; evenings of debate on the devolution of certainty and drunken ruminations on fate and death and love. There were finer houses in the city, to be sure; but none, she'd be willing to bet, more marinated in midnight profundities than this.

'I feel like a burglar,' Will said, pouring coffee for them both. 'Like I broke into somebody's apartment and I'm living their life for them.'

'You'll get back into the groove after a few days,' Adrianna said, taking her coffee and wandering through to the large file-room where Will always laid out his pictures. The length of one wall was a noticeboard, on which over the years he'd pinned up exposure or printing errors that had caught his eye; pictures too dark or burned out to be useful, but which he nevertheless found intriguing. His consumptives, he called these unhealthy pictures, and had more than once observed, usually in his cups, that this was what he saw when he imagined how the world would end. Blurred or indecipherable forms in a grainy gloom, all purpose and particularity gone.