When I was done, I rolled the paper into a ball and tossed it out over the edge of the pit. The rising steam prevented it from falling, and it floated for a minute or two before my eyes. Eventually the upward current overpowered it and carried it out of sight. I wondered what this phenomenon stood for in the mind of Corporal Matters of the day watch. If the mine was his mind, his mind was a hot stinking pit riddled with holes, holding the brittle remains of the dead. This struck me as humorous. But later, as I again dug away at the yellow wall, it dawned on me how accurate he had been.

The day was eternal. I passed out twice more and thought, once, that my blood was literally boiling. In my brain, I heard a constant sizzling sound. Soon after I had eaten, the cremat dug into my stomach like a demon and gave me no rest from its fury. In addition to these tortures, the abrasions I had received from sliding down along the sharp face of the wall stung from the salt of my sweat mixing with the poisonous air.

Finally, like a voice calling out of paradise, I heard my name echoing down through the emptiness of the mine. "Sundown, sundown, sundown," the corporal yelled. I gathered chunks of sulphur into the canvas sack I had been given and slung it over my back. On the other shoulder, I hefted the shovel and pick. The string for the water gourd, I held in my teeth. The ascent was brutal. My legs ached beneath the weight, and my arms shook with weariness. I stopped three times to catch my breath, but I made it out into the open air.

It was dark outside, but the air was filled with a night breeze that carried the smell of the ocean. I would have traded ten vials of the beauty for just one gasp of it. The corporal propped his torch in a hole in the ground and weighed my load on an antique scale that operated somehow with shifting stones and springs. He beat me with his stick when he found I had brought up ten pounds instead of seven.

"Does seven sound like ten?" he asked me.

"No," I replied.

"You are a moron of the first water," he said.

I nodded.

"You aren't the first physiognomist I've seen reduced to ash. I remember a Professor Flock. Oh, how I flayed that idiot. It was rich. I blinded him with a beating one day. Taking his sight was like pulling the wings from a fly. When he eventually went under, I stole this from him," he said.

He held his stick out to show me the handle—a carved, ivory monkey head. "Some evening Harrows hindquarters will not shit you out, and I will find you down there in a pose of agony, surrounded by the smell of baking flesh," he said. "Now get out of here. I will be by to fetch you early tomorrow."

The corporal took the torch with him and left me standing there in front of the mine. Above, the moon was shining and the stars were bright. My body stung all over as if I had a bad sunburn, and the cool night wind made me shiver. The abundance of fresh air caused me severe dizziness as I staggered forward onto the winding path that led through the dunes. It took me two hours to locate the inn.

The light was on in my room. The bed was made, and someone had drawn a warm bath for me. For a moment, it was a battle between the water and sleep. I ended up opting for both. I lay in the tub in my underwear, feeling the warm perfumed water wash the mine off me as I fell asleep. I was awakened sometime later by a soft hint of a sound coming from downstairs. I tried to ignore it and continue with my dream of Aria, but it was as persistent as a mosquito. After a while, I gave into it and discovered that someone was playing a piano.

After dressing in just my trousers, I went barefoot down the stairs, through the inn. I followed the sound of the music across the main bar, through a dining room toward the back of the place. A chair had been left in the aisle, shrouded by night, and I stubbed my toe against it. I held my voice, but the chair scratched along the floor and hit another one. With this collision, the music abruptly stopped.

At the end of the dining room, I pushed through a door and stepped out onto a large screened porch. Again, I could hear the ocean, and the breeze washed over me. The dunes beyond the screen were lit by the moon. Sitting before me was a small black piano, not very much bigger than a child might practice at. Across the empty plank floor, at the other end of the porch, was a polished wooden bar with shelves of bottles and a mirror behind it. As I stared through the shadows, it appeared to me that there was someone sitting behind the bar.

"Hello?" I called.

I watched the dark figure and saw it raise a hand and wave. Slowly, I made my way across the porch. When I was within a few feet of the bar, a match flared. I stopped but then saw he was lighting a candle and continued to take a seat before him.

"Silencio?" I asked.

He nodded and I saw his face. The caretaker appeared slight of build, a miniature old man with a wrinkled face and a long beard. My attention was momentarily distracted by something moving in the air behind him. Suddenly it became clear that what I was looking at was a long tail. Silencio was a monkey.

Seeing the look of recognition in my eyes, he reached below the bar and hoisted up a bottle of Rose Ear Sweet, which had been my standard cocktail at all political functions and social gatherings. With the other, he pulled up a glass. Putting the cork of the bottle in his teeth, he opened it. A smile grew around that cork as he poured me a double.

"Silencio," I said and he nodded.

We stared at each other for a long time, and I wondered if I had not died in the mines that day. "This is the afterlife, eternity for me—sulphur all day and a monkey at night," I thought. Then he nodded slightly as if he had been thinking the same thing.

"I am Cley," I said.

He brought his hands together and clapped twice. I was unsure if he was mocking me or letting me know that he understood.

I realized I didn't care. Taking up my drink, I sat back in the chair and sipped. He seemed to approve of my decision to stay.

"Thank you," I said.

With this, he hopped off his chair and went through a doorway at the end of the bar. A few minutes later, he returned holding a serving tray. He climbed back up on his chair and then laid the tray before me. It was a complete dinner of pig shank covered with pineapple slices. There was bread and butter and a separate dish of potatoes and garlic.

I did not realize until that moment how insane my hunger was. While I ate like an animal, Silencio got down from his chair, went around the side of the bar, crossed the porch, and sat down at his piano. It was the combination of the pineapple and the music that made me think of paradise. I gulped the Rose Ear Sweet and jammed potatoes down my throat as I saw the golden gates sweep open to let me in.

I was still at the bar when Corporal Matters of the day watch came for me. He beat me roundly but I was too drunk to feel it. Out in the sand, in the circle, the dice showed two sixes. I heard the corporal's laughter all day, spiraling down through the mine as I stood before my hole, swinging the pick. Even after I had passed out and was deep in a cool dream of salvation, it was there, like a cricket in an egg, threatening to hatch.

On Doralice, the days were near infinite and filled to the brim with physical suffering. The nights were a candle going out, a few brief moments of shadow-laden solitude, underscored by the persistent whisper of the ocean and the baying of the wild dogs. The moonlit pain was mental anguish, bubbling up from dreams in which my guilt was revealed both literally and symbolically. Sometimes, when the corporal of the day watch woke me with his stick across my back, I almost thanked him for retrieving me from some memory of myself in Anamasobia.

The only thing that seemed to change on Doralice was me. Over the course of a few weeks, I had become physically stronger from my efforts in the mine. Silencio was a wizard at curing my wounds when I returned beaten up or scorched or delirious from the fumes. He had large green leaves he sometimes dipped in water and then wrapped me in to ease the fire in my flesh. There was a certain herbal tea he prepared that increased my strength and cleared my head. With his hairy-backed hands he gently applied a blue salve to the places where the corporal's stick had landed and broken the skin. But even with all of his efforts, and the fact that my muscles were becoming as hard as the rock I worked, I could feel I was dying inside. Day and night, I thought longingly ahead to the time when I would exchange my haunted remembering for a complete forgetting.