Lila said, "Sir, you’re talking to a big stone."

Sarvaduhka ignored her. "Izzy couldn’t make it, oh Terrible One. He is being held by the authorities here. They think maybe he is a terrorist, but Izzy says not to worry. He asked me to give you this message, Ineffable Ancient Great One.

"Number One, he apologizes that his gambit did not work exactly as planned…"

"Number One, Number Two!" Lila Kodzi slapped Sarvaduhka on the shoulder. "He’s been rehearsing this all the way from Cairo. Number One, Number Two! Bah! There is only Number One! Is this not so, Ancient Greatness? All is the divine holy Christ Nature, and the divine holy Christ Nature is one." Now she whispered into the clefts of my badly mortared posterior.

The sound and light show had reached the reign of Cheops. People here seemed to consider that fairly ancient. They should have seen the first lungfish. They should have seen the nucleotides I netted from the asteroid belt, how I landed them and nursed them, turned them inside-out, left-to-right, and said to Myself, "Let us make Man." That, they could more justly have called "ancient."

"Quiet, whore!" Sarvaduhka said. Lila grumbled. Sarvaduhka went on. "Number One, Izzy wanted the Sanduleans to save you from Shaman, but not to take you so far away from Earth. So, that didn’t work out so well, and he is sorry, Greatness."

"He’s right here," Lila said. "What?far away? Obviously, you are a dualist."

"I am not a dualist. I am your employer. You don’t know what you are talking about, Lila. The Mel Bellow person is in outer space somewhere."

"I thought you said he was the Sphinx now."

"Yes and no."

"Dualism."

"Quiet, whore!" Sarvaduhka honeyed his voice. "Number Two, Izzy requests that you employ your vast powers to bring Johnny Abilene to El Giza. This appears to be the only way that you can be saved from eternal slavehood to Shaman, who is also Tuthmosis IV."

"Dualism."

"Lord Abu al-Hawl, Great Beneficent One, please make the whore shut up."

I bolted upright, like a stricken dreamer. "Who am I?" Gypsy sat across the table from me, a half-peeled banana, the dendritic bulb sprouting from his crumpled human thorax like fungus from the crotch of a dead oak. He wasn’t moving. Nora sat beside him, still and silent. Her mouth was slightly open; she stared dumbly past me. Nora was naked?still human?and her long hair was splayed all over her face, shoulders, breasts. I touched her arm. It was cold.

From the kitchen: the whooshing and humming of the dishwashing machine, and sometimes a knock, as from badly vented plumbing; then the whole cafe shook. Each sound was accompanied by a change of scenery out the window. The streaks of starlight shifted angles, they grew dense or sparse, or danced in circles, or split into planes like layers of grenadine and liquor. We passed through glittering banks of sperm-like particles, auras of colored light, moments of darkness so profound they seemed to darkle the cafe pitch black, nullifying our fluorescents.

Tools clanked. Shaman grunted.

"Nora?" I said.

The noise in the kitchen abruptly stopped. Shaman appeared at the door. His white pants were stained with grease. He held a box-end wrench in one hand. He looked tired. "I’m you, you little shit."

I slumped back into the chair.

He took a few steps in my direction, then barked, "You’re not here." I was gone. It was night on the Sahara. On the fringe of my mind, fast fading, was the image of Shaman coming closer, jabbing at Izzy’s bung with something like an ice pick, doing it without much spirit, as if he’d tried it a dozen times before to no effect and didn’t really expect it to work now. He slapped Gypsy and Nora to see if they would respond?they didn’t. Then he returned to the kitchen, to the dishwasher, in the same disgruntled, hopeless frame of mind.

"I’ll have to do my own epoche," he muttered, "if this doesn’t work. God help us all then."

Then nothing. Then sand, sound and light, Sarvaduhka and Lila Kodzi shouting up my stone ass.

" ‘Who am I?’ Did you hear that, Lila Kodzi? The Sphinx spoke." Sarvaduhka shivered.

"It was one of the camels. Hamad snorted. He snorts, that’s all."

Sarvaduhka persisted. "Oh Great One, I will convey your question to Izzy: ‘Who am I?’ I myself am but a poor, small person in the hospitality trade. I have two, three motels jointly with my cousins, although they hardly do anything but watch TV and drink alcoholic items. I will ask Izzy, who knows many things like that. But can you get Johnny Abilene, Wondrous One? Izzy wants to know, will you do it A.S.A. of P.? He would do this himself, but he is indisposed."

"Maybe Abu can give us a sign." Lila nudged Sarvaduhka.

"Exactly, but please be quiet, Lila. I am doing this… Great One, can you give us a sign?"

My selfhood was significantly in disarray. I was being addressed by creatures whose formation I had initiated some seven hundred million years before in an attempt to disembark from the Milky Way, where I found myself stranded. On the other hand, I was being held in a Texas highway rest stop cafe a good ways out in space toward the Large Magellanic Cloud. Besides which, I was some sort of tourist attraction.

Shaman wanted to eat me. I wanted to go home. Yet I couldn’t find my center. To me was lost that Archimedean fulcrum from which the soul can act.

"A sign, oh Great One! Please, a sign!"

It was like trying to sit up when your back is out?Where are those muscles? My desperation drove me deeper and deeper away from my senses, deeper and deeper away from thoughts and feelings too. Sinking in, even the desperation dwindled above me like bubbles rising away from a skin diver.

Through murk and roil, I squinted as an artist squints, bracketing the details to understand the whole. Fish and weed of mind tumbled by, denuded of names and relations, continually devouring one another, blurring boundaries. This wasn’t the swill of Shaman’s hole, for now I was the diver and the pearls I found would be mine.

But then the word "I" grew goosefeet. It emptied. "I" was just a mark, a convenience of thought, vacuous outside the quote marks.

The voices of Shaman?I’m you!?of Sarvaduhka, Lila Kodzi, the sound and light show?upbeat, mendacious?all merged in a current without source or destination. The moan of the wind, an atom bomb, nostalgia, the planet Mars, the number three, oneself, the South of France, all lines all gone!

DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME.

Place went. Sequence went. Time was ungetatable. No thought to think and not a thing to think it. "I" kept diving. "I" allowed "myself" to be swallowed further until, dissolving, "I" melted into a dark, pliable mass one could only call the bottom. Sea creatures here, murky, inchoate, that altered as one’s gaze changed, inseparable from one’s gaze.

A stirring here, continually! Not the blank void of the mystics! Call it an urge, call it Der Wille Zur Macht, call it Tao or Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, impelling the contractile world back out of its own navel:

says Lao Tze of this foetal state.

"I" had unwittingly performed an epoche, and this was its crux. "I" had found the fulcrum. "I" was utterly free. "I" could do anything.

I broke wind.

All at once, the goosefeet fell away. Iwas there, little me and big me, as before: Mel and Abu al-Hawl, the one space-bound in a helpless stupor, the other grounded in a strange galaxy, both on account of Shaman. Yes, Shaman existed and Gypsy and Nora in the Magellanic Stream, Izzy in his lockup, Sarvaduhka and Lila Kodzi holding their noses, the camels huffing and turning away, the tourists… oblivious.