He is being pulled apart. Something is gently and painlessly severing him from himself. He has never fell anything like this before, not in the tent of the transtemporalists, not when taking any of the traditional psychedelics, not on kot, not on yipka: this is new, this is unique, a shedding of mass, a dropping away of the flesh, a liberation into weightlessness. He knows he is—

—dying?—

Yes, dying. that’s the commodity offered here, death, the actual experience of departing from life, of having life depart from oneself. He can no longer feel his body. He is beyond all exterior sensation. This is the true death, that ultimate sundering toward which his life has moved throughout all its days; no simulation, no hypnotic trick, but real and actual death, the going-forth of Shadrach Mordecai. Of course, on a deeper level he knows it is only a dream, a night’s amusement purchased for sport; but under that awareness lies the realization that he may be dreaming that he is dreaming, dreaming the talisman and the tent and the lioness-girl, that he may really have fallen through the illusion of an illusion and really is dying here tonight. It does not matter.

How easy dying is! There is a cool moist gray mist about him, and everything dissolves in it, Anubis and Thoth, Katya and the priestess, the tent, the amulet, Shadrach himself, invaded and interpenetrated by the grayness until he is part of it. He floats toward the center of the void. Is this what Genghis Mao fears so much? To be a balloon and nothing but a balloon, so much helium surrounded by a nonexistent skin, to put aside all responsibility and, liberated wholly, to float and float? Genghis Mao is so heavy. He carries so much weight. It may be hard to relinquish that. Not for Shadrach. He passes through the center and emerges on the far side, congealing nicely out of the mist and resuming his human form. He is altogether naked now, not even a scrap at the waist. Katya, naked also, stands beside him. At their feet lie their discarded bodies, relaxed, limp, seemingly asleep, even giving the appearance of slow rhythmic breathing, but not so: they are actually dead, truly and really dead. Shadrach Mordecai beholds his own corpse. “How quiet it is here,” Katya says. “And clean. They’ve washed the world for us.”

“Where shall we go?”

“Anywhere.”

“The circus? The bullfight? The marketplace? Anywhere?”

“Anywhere,” Shadrach says. “Yes. Let’s go anywhere.”

Effortlessly they float into the world. The lioness waves farewell. The air is mild and balmy. The trees are in bloom, fireflowers, little cups of flame spouting at the tips of the branches; they break loose and drift down, swirl about, approach them, touch them, sink sweetly into their bodies. Shadrach watches the passage of a blazing red blossom through Katya’s breastbone; it emerges between her shoulders, falls lightly to the ground, goes to seed, sprouts. A skinny sapling rises and bursts into flaming flower. They laugh like children. Together they stride across the continent. The sands of the Gobi sparkle. The Great Wall stretches before them, a wriggling stone serpent humping its back.

“Why, it’s Nigger Jim and Little Nell!” cries Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, who stands atop the Wall. He does a little dance of joy, doffing his silken black skullcap, letting his long elaborate pigtails wave about.

“Chop-chop,” Shadrach says. “Kung po chi ding!”

“Which way to the egress?” Katya asks.

“There,” says the First Emperor. “Past the chains, over the spikes.”

They go through the gate. On the far side of the Great Wall are flooded rice paddies glittering in rosy sunlight. Women in black pajamas and broad coolie hats move slowly through ankle-deep water, stooping, planting, stooping, planting. Invisible chorus off screen. Swelling crescendo of celestial sound. Katya scoops rich yellow mud and hurls it at him. Glop! He throws mud at her. Glip! They plaster each other with it and embrace, slippery and wriggling. What sweet slime! They laugh; they romp; they tumble and topple, landing in the rice paddy with a splash, and the Chinese women dance around them. Huang! Ho! Lindman legs grasp his hips. Thighs like clamps. She reaches for him. They couple to the mud like rutting buffalo. Gripping one another, rolling over and over. Snorting. Slapping flesh. Wallowing in the primeval ooze. Very gratifying. Nostalgia for the mud. Belly to belly. He does not perceive his rigid organ as anything that particularly belongs to him, but rather as something shared, an independent connecting rod that passes back and forth in swift reciprocations between their clasped bodies. Without reaching a climax they rise, bathe, move on to New York. A hot wind blows through this city of sky-stabbing towers. Confetti showers down upon them; it stings, it burns. Cheers of the inhabitants. Everyone has organ-rot here, but it is accepted; it causes no alarm. The bodies of the New Yorkers are transparent, and Shadrach sees the red lesions within, the zones of corruption and decay, the eruptions and erosions and suppurations of intestines, lungs, vascular tissue, peritoneum, pericardium, spleen, liver, pancreas. The disease announces itself in radiating waves of low-spectrum electromagnetic pulsations, hammering dully at his soul, red red red. These people are full of holes from fetlock to gunwale and yet they are happy, as why should they not be? Shadrach and Katya do a buck-and-wing down Fifth Avenue. Shadrach’s skin is white. His lips are thin. His hair is straight and long; it blows across his face, momentarily blinding him, and when he clears it he sees that Katya now is black. Flat broad flanged nose, splendid steatopygous ass, yards of chocolate skin. Ruby lips, sweeter than wine. “Poon!” she cries.

“Tang!” he replies. “Hot!”

“Cha!”

They dance on swords. They dance on pineapples. He sells her into slavery and redeems her with his first-born. “Are we dead?” he asks her.

“Really and truly dead?”

“Is it supposed to be this much fun?”

“Are you having fun?” she asks.

They are in Mexico. Frangipani, flamboyans. It is spring: the cacti are in bloom. Towering spiny green poles topped by crazy clusters of fragrant yellow petals. Loops and whorls of thotni-ness exploding in gaudy firecracker bursts of red and white. They sleepwalk through the prickly pears. They somnambulate among the pitahayas. The pace is frantic but restful. Often they make love. He could waltz all night. Crossing the Pyrenees, they meet Pancho Sanchez, squat and greasy, who offers them green wine out of a leather bota and giggles shrilly when they spill it on themselves. Pancho licks wine from Katya’s breasts. She gives him a merry shove and he somersaults into Andorra. They follow. Commemorative coins of high denomination are struck in their honor by the adoring populace. “I thought death would be more serious,” Shadrach says.

“It is.”

Dead, they can go anywhere, and they do. But the journey is an empty one and the food at the feast is mere spun air, less sweet than cotton candy. He wishes for more substance and the servants bring him stones. He is black again, and so is Genghis Mao, enthroned in a seat of glistening jade ten meters overhead. Ficifolia is black, Buckmaster, Avogadro, Nikki Crowfoot; Mangu is the blackest of all; but the black of their skins is not Negro-black, not African-black, it is black-black, ebony-black, the color of a dark closet, the color of the air between the worlds. Black as the pit. They look like beings from some other galaxy. Shadrach goes among them, slapping palms, touching elbows. They speak nigger-Mongol to one another, they laugh and sing, they shuffle and shake. Ficifolia is on guitar, Buckmaster on Jew’s harp, Avogadro on banjo; Shadrach plays the bongos, Katya the tambourine.