Getting up to go to the bathroom, I suddenly felt a terrible scratching, pulling pain in my back. It was so bad I yelped and grabbed myself there. Wyatt and the people nearby stared at me, but it was too difficult to say anything then. I was under attack; some huge mouth was trying to suck the skin off my back or something; I'd never felt anything like it before.

Walking fast down the aisle, I looked at the lights over the bathroom doors and gratefully saw one of them was vacant. Slipping into the phone-booth-size stall, I snapped the lock shut. What the hell was it? Before I had a chance to pull my jacket off, I felt something new and utterly frightening under my shirt back there. The pain had stopped, but what was moving right where it had been? Something big, big as a hand, scratching and scraping to get out.

I lost control. Ripping at my clothes, I managed to pull my jean jacket off and the shirttail out in a few desperate jerks. I think I was making noise too. I'm not sure what I was doing except getting hysterical. You know the feeling of a bug or something else small and unknown under your shirt or skirt in summer, when anything has a chance to land or walk there. Multiply that by ten or twenty, make it jerk around, give it fur or something else. Play with the idea. It was that bad. Really.

And then it was out. It flew straight over my shoulder and into the mirror. The crow. My tattoo. Our skin birds; mine was alive. Off my back and alive, scared, flying in a little metal room five miles off the earth.

I broke its neck. Not thinking, I grabbed the bird out of the air and, fumbling with its sharp flutter, squeezed. Snap! It stopped moving: from stiff and crazy to soft and curved in an instant.

5

There is so much Weber doesn't know. Where should I begin? With Venasque and his pig and bull terrier that understood everything you said? Or with Pinsleepe and the crow tattoo?

Venasque. For thirty years of hungry customers, he was only a chatty Frenchman who made delicious sandwiches because he liked to see people eat. Other things he liked? His animals, cooking, watching television, magic.

Venasque the shaman, the most powerful I ever met. He didn't know where the magic came from, but he used it well and selftessly. He taught his animals to understand, taught me to swim (particularly through the black water of my past), taught Sasha Makrianes who she really was, taught other things to other people.

If you needed to fly, he would teach you. Yes, he could do that if he thought it necessary. But most people don't need to fly. Venasque's greatest magic was helping you discover the discipline that would eventually save your life. Often it was something entirely trivial.

Harry Radcliffe told one of my favorite Venasque stories. After he won the Pritzker Award for Architecture and was on the cover of Time magazine, Harry had a nervous breakdown.

It manifested itself in an original way: In the middle of designing an important building for the 750th anniversary of Berlin, he stopped all work on it and began assembling an elaborate miniature city in his living room.

At first it consisted of paper models of the Secession Museum in Vienna, Richard Rogers's Lloyd's of London building, Aldo Rossi's Teatro del Mondo. Then he added thirty or forty schlocky souvenir statues of places like the Eiffel Tower, Seattle Space Needle, and Statue of Liberty. Stir in six chrome teapots designed by Michael Graves, a modified Chinese wok that served as part of the Spaceport for visitors from other planets, assorted other models, toys, and clay figures Radcliffe made or collected, and you have a whiff of what was going on.

Through friends, Harry's wife heard about Venasque and asked him to come over. The story goes he arrived at their Santa Barbara house with the pig sitting next to him in his jeep.

In the living room, Connie crushed half of Harry's city by walking over to the table that held his lunch. Venasque kicked over the other half, saying, "He's got enough buildings. Get him a clarinet."

The old man didn't know how to play any instrument, but he made Harry learn from a four-dollar book they bought together that day, along with the used clarinet.

I have read Pauwels, Lйvi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell, Castaneda, and Mircea Eliade on magic and shamans. But what they say is essentially wrong for one simple reason – those who can, do; those who can't, talk (or write) about it. When I first began to see what Venasque was capable of doing, I naively asked him one day if there were people who could fly.

"Yes."

"Walk on water?"

"Sure. You want more tuna salad?"

"Why wouldn't they show the world?"

"Why should they? You think they care if you know? You're smart, Phil; you want everybody to know you're a smartie?"

I smiled. "Yeah, I like it when people know."

He winked. "That's the difference between you and the guy who can walk on water. He does it to find a place on his map, not to get on the Tonight Show."

In the six months he allowed me to live with him, I learned about my "map" from Venasque and how to find certain coordinates on it. I learned I would be successful but that handling success was far more difficult than getting it. I learned how to swim. I learned how to die. I heard the name "Pinsleepe" for the first time in a dream I had while sleeping in the ocean one night. Yes, I did that too. He showed me how. It didn't help.

Sasha Makrianes has a peculiar face. From the front she's great – thick brown hair, high cheekbones, full mouth, deep-set eyes that watch carefully but openly. Her whole expression says, I'm listening. Tell me everything before I make a judgment. Not many people do that these days. Look around and see how skeptical most eyes are, how many mouths set hard and tight into "Absolutely not!" before you've ever said anything. Sasha is the old throwback – she wants to like you. Her face says she hopes she will.

That's from the front, but her profile unfortunately says other things. A short, soft chin and down-curved nose throw your first impression off. Her forehead is not as high as you thought. It is the side view of a weak person, someone not completely trustworthy. She said that about her face soon after we met in Vienna, and she was right. In Hollywood (especially behind a movie camera) it is immensely important to notice, but I was in Europe as a flaneur, not auteur, and wasn't looking at people's angles that way. It made life easier and me less critical.

When Wyatt and I moved through the last door at Los Angeles airport and saw her, she looked exhausted and ethereal, as if she might float off the earth in the next instant. Her face was Kabuki white, her long hair swept up and gone into a tight bun behind her head. She wore jeans and a white T-shirt under Phil's only sport jacket, the one he'd bought years before at Anderson & Shepard in London. When I asked him why there, he said because it was Fred Astaire's favorite store.

Sasha knew he loved it. I felt such a smash of love and pity that I wanted to hug her until we both cried from the embrace and our loss.

She wouldn't get near either of us. "It's my hands. I don't want to touch you with them."

I noticed for the first time. They were blush red, broken out in many scattered, ugly sores, looking like she'd pulled them out of a wreck almost too late.

"I'm sorry. This hasn't happened since I was a kid. Whenever I got terribly upset, my hands broke out like this. I know it's disgusting, but the doctor said I should keep them out in the air and not cover them with gloves. I'll wear them for the funeral though. . . .

"Hi, Wyatt. I didn't know you were coming."

He dropped his bag and pulled her to him anyway. She looked at me over his shoulder and her eyes said, I'm okay. I've just been crying a lot.