“It isn’t really this good,” Shadrach tells Katya. “We’re fooling ourselves.”

“It has its points.”

“I can’t help feeling suspicious.”

“Even dead you can’t really let yourself go, can you?”

She takes him by the wrist and pulls him along with her, through a desert of sparkling sands, through a river of leaping white water, through a thicket of dense aromatic brambles, into the ocean, the great salty mother, and they lie on their backs, looking up into the sun. He is utterly becalmed.

“How long does it go on?” be asks.

“Forever.”

“When does it end?”

“It doesn’t.”

“Really?”

“Nature of the state. Death is nothing but a continuation of life by different means.”

“I don’t believe it. Dopo la morte, nulla.”

“Then where are we now?”

“Dreaming,” he says.

“Sharing the same dream? Don’t be a fool.”

The snouts of sharks poke through the gentle surface of the sea. Toothy jaws gape. Shadrach practices fearlessness. These beasts can do him no harm. He is, after all, dead. He is also a doctor of medicine. He gulps ocean until the shining sandy floor is laid bare and the sharks, beached, morosely flop about, munching on crabs and starfish. Shadrach laughs. Death is real, death is earnest! Out of the north come frosty winds, roaring down the flanks of the Himalayas. Indefatigably they continue the ascent of the North Cwm, clawing up the rocky face piton by piton, staring constantly at the formidable tapering peak rising like a giant whelk at the head of the valley. They shiver in their parkas; they clutch their ice-axes with weary hands; their oxygen tanks press inexorably against their aching shoulders; and still they climb, now into that giddy realm above seven thousand meters, where only the splay-footed snowmen dare to go. The summit is in sight. Vast crevasses loom, but they have no meaning; where crampons and pitons will not serve, Shadrach and Katya simply launch themselves into great sky-spanning leaps. It is too easy. He had not thought death to be so frivolous a place. Indeed now the sky is darkening, the pace is slowing; he hears solemn music, he experiences a lessening of the frenetic urges that have driven him thus far, he settles into a glacial calm, an Egyptian timelessness. He is one with Ptah and Osiris. He is a twanging Memnon beside the mighty river, waiting out the eons. Katya winks at him and he scowls his disapproval. Death is serious business, not a holiday. Ah, yes, now he has it, the proper pace, He is wholly absorbed by the task of being dead. He does not move. Vital signs nil; intellection nil; he has reached the core of the event. Hic jacet. Nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet. Mors omnia solvit. Let there be trombones, please. Missa pro defunctis. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. It is very quiet here. When they speak at all, they speak in Sanskrit, Aramaic, Sumerian, or, of course, Latin. Thoth himself speaks Latin. Doubtless other tongues too, but the gods themselves have whims. How sweet it is to be immobile and to think, if at all, only in languages one no longer understands! Nullum est jam dictum quod non dictum est prius. What a good sound that has! If you would, a little more volume on the basset horns:

Gradually the voices diminish. The music becomes subdued and abstract as it fades; the sound of the instruments now is hollow, a mere outline of sound, blank within, the idea of sound rather than sound itself, and the chorus, far away, sings the terrible words of the ancient prayer in a faint, cluttering, rustling, elegant tone, poignant and penetrating:

And then all is silent. Now he is at peace. He has reached the essence of the dream-death, an end to striving, an end to seeking.

The chase is over. He could go, if he wished, to Bangkok, Addis Ababa, San Francisco, Bagdad, Jerusalem, traveling with no more effort than it takes to blink an eye, but there is no reason to go anywhere, for all places have become one, and it is better to remain here, at the still point, motionless, swaddled in the soft sweet woolly fleece of the grave. Consummation est. He is in perfect equilibrium. He is finally, truly dead. He knows he will sleep forever.

Instantly he wakes. His mind is clear, tingling, painfully alert. Passion inflames his penis, passion or else the blind force that comes over men in dreams; at any rate it juts shamelessly against his loincloth, making a little pyramid out of his lap. Katya lies not far away, propped up on her elbows, watching him. Her smile is sphinxlike. He sees her broad fleshy bareback, her firm meaty buttocks, and instantly the tranquility of dream-death is gone; lust rules him. “Let’s go,” he says hoarsely.

“All right.”

“It isn’t far to the lovers’ hospice.”

“No. Not there.” She has already begun to dress. The lioness-guide is across the aisle, greeting newcomers. The brightness of the air leaves Shadrach dazzled. Anubis and Thoth still lurk somewhere nearby, he is convinced. He struggles to regain that vanished equilibrium, to find his way back to the still point, but he knows it will take many more dream-death sessions before he can reach that calm place on his own.

“Where?” he says.

“At the tower. I hate making love in rented rooms. Didn’t you know that?”

So he must stifle his longings another hour or two. Perhaps that’s the lesson of dream-death: delay gratification, purify the spirit. Or perhaps not. It is a jolt, stepping from the radiant ambiance of the dream-death tent to the darkness without, and the night is cold, very cold even for the Mongolian May, just a hint of snow in the air, a few hard little flakes whipping on the breeze. Riding the tube-train back they say almost nothing to each other, but as they approach the Ulan Bator station he says, “Were you really there?”

“In your dream?”

“Yes. When we met Pancho Sanchez. And the First Emperor. And when we went to Mexico.”

“That was your dream,” she says. “I was having other dreams.”

“Oh. Oh. I wondered. It seemed very real, talking to you, having you beside me.”

“The dreams always seem that way.”

“But I’m surprised at how playful it was. Frivolous, even.”

“Is that how it was for you?”

“Until the end,” he says. “It got solemn then. When things grew calm. But before then—”

“Frivolous?”

“Very frivolous, Katya.”

“For me it was solemn all the time. A great quietness.”

“Is it different for everybody?”

“Of course,” she says. “What did you think?”

“Oh.”

“You thought, when you met me in your dream, that I was actually there, talking with you, sharing your experiences?”

“I confess that I did.”

“No. I wasn’t there.”

“No. I suppose not.” He laughs. “All right. I wasn’t thinking. For you it was somber. For me it was all games. What does that say about you, about me?”

“Nothing, Shadrach.”

“Really?”

“Nothing at all.”

“We don’t express something about our inner selves in the dreams we choose for ourselves?”

“No,” she says.

“How can you be so sure?”

“The dreams are chosen for us. By a stranger. I don’t know more than that, but the woman in the mask told us what to dream. The broad outlines. The tone.”