He returned often to the pile of stones behind the bushes to look at the Faiyum portrait – the hope, barely acknowledged, was that this icon might prove a window ... that something of the spirit of the hospitable monk might smile on him. His relationship to the images of Mani had been rocky of late, especially before his fall from grace. He regretted defacing the Christ icon in the church above, but life mediated by images had become hard to bear: he was losing the memory of what a real face looked like. He judged it unfair that his first human contact in ages was with the hirsute holy man, a (presumably) living image cloistered behind locks of dirty black hair.

Why was this portrait different? He was honestly stirred by the act of devotion showed by the pirate, but the image itself was moving too. He wished he could talk to this face, wished he could unburden himself to the priest in the picture, not really because he had so much to confess (though he really did), but because he shyly imagined that repentance was the cost of entry with such a one as this.

Arpaxos thought about the time that was left to him. There were many things that one might do before The End ... most were unavailable to him, but a single act of service remained that he might perform. He would take a cue from his predecessor and prepare the sanctuary for the next wave of pilgrims, who would never come, at least not in the flesh.

He began to order and clean the chapel. He swept the floor, burned empty boxes and wrappers, and buried the unburnables. With that done, Arpaxos took up the duties of prior acolytes, and arranged the altar for a last service: he trimmed the lamps and prepared the incense for burning. But there was no coal for lighting under the resin, and every other piece of fuel had just been burned as trash. Frustrated, he began to search ... under the fringes of the carpet, along the edges of the cell, behind the icons. He looked at the small box of books and was a little ashamed to consider burning one of them for fuel. He ran his fingers along the bindings, and, out of curiosity, took up one of the leather-bound volumes. It had no title, and a quick flip through the pages revealed that It was largely blank ... except for the sketches that filled the front third of the book. Behind it, wrapped in newsprint, a stash of charcoal.

With a shock of recognition, he understood that he was holding the pirate’s portfolio. The drawings were in the same style as the one that topped the monk’s grave, and – now he could see it – of the icon at the center of the altar.

The discovery meant that he now had something that could be burned for worship: he lit a small pile of the artist’s charcoal in the censer and placed a few pebbles of sacred sap over the embers. As incense filled the room, he lit a candle, and opened the book of images to the beginning. The dedication page had several inscriptions: a child’s handwritten words για τον μπαμπά ... for daddy, next to a rough drawing of a stick figure holding a pencil aloft like a great sword. There was a name, A. Λογοθέτης, and an address in Mezapos. And also this – a pirate’s song for the dead from Deep Mani, written without the skill of the miroloyistrias, but with all the reverence of a witness:

O Cyprus Tree of deepest root,O flow of holy water!Thy ruined church(with quaking dome)yet bore a beaming welcometo thy warm and humble hutch;to host a prideful sinner,to cleanse of direst soot.

Arpaxos held the book tenderly, like an ancient manuscript, and with gentle reverence began to turn the pages. On each were icons of the sublime, or the mundane; every picture sacred. An urban square filled with couples dressed for spring. A small metal table on three legs overburdened with delicacies for an afternoon meal. A chapel in the shade of an impossibly great flower. A cemetery framed by an overgrown plane tree. Saints and Angels .... In each drawing he found himself before a familiar face. All the characters from his life and from his journey into exile were represented here. For so long, he’d been so focused on Evie: he understood that he had stopped seeing, stopped acknowledging those around him, and that he had really stopped seeing her as well. It was only when she was gone that he began to realize he really had no memory of her. Arpa could imagine her face, but now even hers became the face of a girl looking for something she would never find in him, because what she wanted was to be seen, truly, as a person, not as a priceless treasure to be locked away.

With an aching heart, Arpaxos turned through this series of images, each of them resonant with qualities he had become blind to. Each portrait was a window into a reality that he’d ignored, or rejected, for too long. He found Eva in a sketch of a young girl; with a look of sad understanding, this face become the face of the Virgin. He could see now that when she looked out from the page, it was with a heart pierced to know that her loved ones were all doomed to die, and that she would have to carry on alone in some secret upper room to bear inside of her the story of humanity in hope of a new Pentecost, some future day when words would have meaning again.

Also there, a widow in black, cast in the role of Wisdom: long-suffering, creative, sheltering. She was as old and unchangeable as the hills, but also quick-witted, serious, and able to shape or move the hills when necessary, with a word. Next, the adolescent boy from behind the church who’d watched Arpaxos steal a can of fruit. He’d insisted at the time (to himself) that the boy had no cause to complain. But now he was forced to admit that this face – of an angel, one of the holy ones – would not be denied. Today, this image was a window letting in a righteous complaint from the world outside his cell. Was it a rebuke? A call to repentance? A challenge to forswear robbing his fellow refugees, coveting their perceived abundance, or murdering with hatred those who dared reveal weakness? He was chained in the dock, could not escape. The presence of the boy was growing now, his face becoming the face of Christ seen in the stranger, the beggar, the broken one. Now plaintiff, now judge.

Arpa couldn’t defend himself. Nor did he want to: he felt the same painful longing as at the priest’s grave – to meet the living face behind the portrait. His heart was thumping, and he felt an air of invitation in the space. With a freedom he hadn’t known in ages, he began to speak.

Tenderly, to the page in front of him, he asked, ‘What’s your name?’

He felt his attention drawn to the painted icon nearby, where Christ from his nimbus replied, ‘Ὁ ὬΝ’. The One Who Is. ... I am; I exist.

Arpaxos was set reeling by this, not only because of his concern that yet another icon was coming to life to provoke him, but because now he felt that windows were being thrown open all over the room. The boy was alive, and he could feel that this was no simple, spiritual affirmation – somehow he knew that in the world, today, the boy existed, and that he still waited .... That Evie was also out there, and many still lived that he had secretly sped on their way to the grave with his indifference. He felt the air warm and close in the room, but in his stomach he felt cold. He felt all were waiting, holding their breath.

Quietly, with an unpracticed reverence, he continued the conversation in the only way he could: acknowledging the presence behind the portrait, he asked in a rough whisper, ‘Where are you?’ The question was addressed to the boy, whose image was still laid open in his lap.

‘I am with you’, came the gentle response.

More quietly, almost wincing as he worked out the words ... ‘How?’

‘I am’

He shook his head, ‘You are ...?’

‘With you’

‘How??’

‘As I am’

Though this conversation was bound to the portrait of the boy, he knew that it belonged as much to the Christ icon, and there hung a holy confusion in the air. As if he was being carefully but forcefully rebuked in his desire that God would tear the top off the churches or the mountains, and come to him on a thundercloud, when such as this young boy still existed in the world, unmet. ... I am with you as I am.

Arpa was willing to receive the reproof that came by means of the image, because of the irresistible presence he felt, and the grace revealed in the eyes of the youth, in whose presence he sat for some time. He began to feel profound sadness at so many lost opportunities. At the same time he felt some gratitude to know the charges against himself, and he resolved, if need be, to accept death cut off from all others and from the true image of God, at least until the end. For now, he would turn his face to the open windows.

He moved to the altar, took up the prayer book, and completed the liturgy of Agia Eleóusa for the last time.

Arpaxos imagined he ought to approach death with a measure of dignity, though he really had no idea how to pull that off. He decided that a good start would be to work his way to the bottom of a bottle of tsipouro. He saw no reason to put off the inevitable, and spent hours drinking, and eating through the last of the supplies. Tomorrow? Maybe he would throw himself off the ledge to die in the graveyard of broken ladders. Smiling, he thought, no more need for climbing or descending – ‘We’re all dying where we stand, now. Who we are is who we are.’ But, no, he still couldn’t stomach the thought of harming himself (and, truthfully, he wasn’t entirely confident in the state of his soul, here at the end).

What he would do is tidy up one last time, and celebrate his life with a last meal before it was spent. Then, when the time came, he would lie down between the old priest and the cliff wall, and trust the winter rainstorms to bury him under red Mani earth, washed down from the cliffs above.

So he danced, unsteadily, and sang, and allowed himself to feel gratitude ... for Evie, for the boy behind the chapel, and even for the widows and their simple and (now he was able to admit) honest philosophies. He loved them all from a distance, repenting of his lack of generosity, wishing them well, and letting his heart open to them all. He came with the boy into the divine presence and, because he still could not pray, merely wept as he and all his burdens were laid out, finally bare before the face of God, no longer hidden. In this meeting space, he encouraged the boy ... ‘Go ahead and add to the pile of indictments; you must tell all that I have done!’

Arpa swayed at the edge of his platform, halfway down the cliff, teetering. He thought, wisely, that he should take a step back. He swayed again, and nearly fell, dropping the empty bottle, which rolled over the side. Foolishly, he lunged, but could not stop it. More foolishly, he cried out and felt shame to litter this holy place, kept so clean by its caretakers. With a drunken breathlessness, he scrambled to look over the side in hope that the lost bottle was within reach. He saw it, five feet below. And, just above it, protected by the rock overhang that he was now leaning over, he saw a rope, fixed to the stone by a great, rusty, iron eye. It was coiled and hanging off the anchor, waiting to be deployed with its now-decayed basket. He looked at his salvation through watery eyes for minutes, barely believing it was true that there was a way down.

When enough time had passed for him to sober up sufficiently, he considered the implications of his find. If he could get down to the water, he could at least swim out and look for a path up the hill. He knew that if his strength held out, he would be able to find a way.

The next day, just before the sun transited the cliff top, he stood thigh-deep in the water with a great grin, looking out over the small cove, and thinking about how best to survive the sea. He stretched his arms and checked the knots in his plastic bags one final time. Inside those bags were the remainders of the crackers and one small tin of sardella. The last half-bottle of booze (and a couple empties he’d filled with spring water) were lashed between the bags on a makeshift raft created from a couple of dry planks found in the cove, and this assembly he set adrift secured to a length of rope he tied to his waist. None of it should slow him down too much, he hoped. With a final nod of satisfaction that he was able to leave the cave in good order, he waded into the sea.

Within an hour, he had landed on a narrow beach from which a path ascended up a wash to the flat plain that made up the southwestern hip of his peninsula, this plateau bare but for some low ruins, and exposed. He stood for a while reacquainting himself with the expansive reach of the open sky, chose gratitude once more, muttered, ‘Thank you’ with a shallow breath, and began to walk. His steps slowly became more confident.

He walked for a while along a dirt track hemmed in by purple wildflowers and heavy with the smell of anise and lavender in the midday sun. He saw another pedestrian, walking in the same direction but more than a mile distant. He recognized the black-robed and sandaled figure to be the priest. He cried out with a dry yell. Nothing. He began to walk faster, then ran, unsteadily, calling out in between gasps for breath. It took almost half an hour for him to gain enough ground, mostly walking for fear he might collapse, before his call could reach the man, who halted, and turned. As Arpaxos closed the final distance the priest stood, facing him, a monolith of inscrutability. Finally, the pilgrim, almost collapsing, came to a stop opposite the figure. He looked him full in the face. The other, alarmed at the bruised and broken image of the revenant, shakily raised his hand; was he defending himself? ... or trying to pay off a pauper with an empty blessing that said, again, ‘You see I have nothing to give you!’?

Arpa lifted his own hand as well, mirroring the gesture. Then stepping forward, he took the raised hand gently into his own. With increasing resolve, he allowed his other hand to take hold as well, as if to prevent an escape. Three hands in a knot bound and brought together to rest against his own chest. Warm stinging tears flowed as he looked into this face, gaunt with hunger and darkened by encounters with death; yet to see past the shadow and into his eyes and to smell the pungent sweat through the curtain of black wool, and to know the truth. Finally, here was another human being.

He could find no words, and the priest seemed to have nothing to offer. Arpaxos slowly released the imprisoned hand, and gently lowered his bags to the ground. He took out the liquor and the last handfuls of food, carefully spread out a meal on an empty sack, and opened the bottle. A beggar’s communion shared by Abram and Melchizedek in the wilderness between wars, two wandering kings in battered crowns, reunited. But who would be the one to bless the other? Arpaxos provided the food, but who could spare a benediction?

Earlier in the day, the thought had occurred to him to cross the distance to his little church one more time, though he suspected that if he went there, he might find it difficult to leave. And now, at this moment, the priest, merely by being present and alive, rebuked him for his impulse to complete some business at the church with its frozen images. (His Tía joined the imaginary chorus, with a shake of her head: Είναι ντροπή να σκοντάψετε δύο φορές στην ίδια πέτρα ... It is a disgrace to stumble twice against the same stone). Besides, he hadn’t forgotten that in the breakup that preceded his fall he’d left his icon without eyes, and indeed the living face of the priest seemed to communicate (likely without that one’s knowledge or consent) ‘here is what you seek: look on me!’

A new world was opening up to him, as if the old planet was a giant buffet: a feast, not of foods, but of folks; all the good people left in the world. With a growing urgency, he recognized the quickly fading abundance of true human goodness and felt he shouldn’t let one morsel go untasted. He was starving. As epiphanies go, this one seemed to be the epitome of bad timing.

Though Arpaxos read much in the face of the priest, he wondered that the man had nothing to say. He knew that he could speak, had heard his voice from within the church during their prior encounter. So, Arpa chose to make the offering: he began to pray, knowing that the old liturgies are repeated for times like this. There would be more to say on other days; other liturgies for other congregations. But this was a moment for prayer.

He wasn’t sure he’d be able to remember all the words. It didn’t matter. The voice of the priest could be heard, softly, but growing in strength, and the pilgrim was no longer praying alone.

She was right to be angry. She was right to be angry at the machine for grinding her down until she could be made to fit into the fearsome hole at the center of the world. She was right to be angry at Arpa for his selfish, monomaniacal protectionism. She was right to be angry at being told how to bear the burden that nobody but she would have to bear. His heart was more broken than the rest of his body after the dream encounter. It all felt so real that he was certain, ‘If only I had reached out, and held on to her, I could have stayed with her forever’. But now he was awake, and alone again, and he really didn’t know what was real. Maybe Orpheus never had a chance. Grab ahold, or don’t. Eurydice was lost.

It was time to consider his own circumstances. Getting up took him more than an hour, and when he finally rose to his feet he stood for some time in the midday sun, unsteady, warming his bruised limbs, and slowly moving his jaw to reassure himself that he could depend on it should he ever need its services again.

He surveyed the boundaries of his perch: he was able to see his position more clearly now and was not encouraged. A brief anxiety drove a frenetic attempt to spy out an escape (he still valued his freedom!). Some evidence of a path down to the water remained in spite of the damage done by his avalanche. Even before the slide, the descent would have terrified him. There were no visible steps, but a stream of loose earth and rocks along the fall-line spilled first over the north lip of the ledge where he had been deposited, then descended rapidly to a stony cove with a chaos of broken planks and pulleys once capable of lifting a small boat out of the water. There was no boat today, nor was there access. He could not trust the way down, and even if there had been stairs, all possibilities were governed now by new rules that said that cliffs are not stable. He also saw no way up. It seemed he really would have to find a path through the underworld, if he was to ever return to the land of the living, such as it was.

When he finally turned toward the darkness and risked the narrow passage, the news was better than he could have hoped for, at least on the lesser point of whether he would be starving anytime soon. Where the cave opened up, he was not surprised to see evidence of habitation; he was surprised to see evidence that monks and pirates each had taken their turn in the cell, though it was hard to know who was resident last. In many ways it boasted finer ecclesiastical trimmings than his little church up above. But, more importantly, the furnishings included a case of liquor and other boxes with cans of fruit, jars of olives, and tins of fish. There was honey from Kalamata. Several unopened boxes of crackers may have been old, but were worth the risk. He tore into one, opened a jar of olives, took as deep a breath as possible, and broke his fast.

After an intense (and careful) meal, during which he was forced to stop more than once so that he could let out a groan of tearful joy (and a few tears associated with the sharp pain of loose and missing teeth on his wounded side), he finally allowed himself to take a break; he turned with a mad grin and oily chin to the alcohol. Here he was not so lucky. The case was filled with tsipouro, a Cretan moonshine made from grape mash left over after all the good is wrung out of it. He chose gratitude, and drank in several deep swallows, grimacing as the medicinal spirits washed over his wounds.

When his belly was full and warmed, he began to survey the room.

It was lived-in, and rich with byzantine details. There were old but still colorful woven rugs laid across the floor, and another hung from the ceiling on the north wall to drape over a low, rough shelf. There were brass candle-holders, censers, and other accessories. Toward the back of the cave was a wooden box with faded beer slogans on the outside (“Το Υπέροχο Ποτό!”) and old prayer books on the inside (υπέροχες λέξεις). Two icons centered the altar: the Lord, and the Theotokos, the tender one, Ἐλεούσα.

Shame returned to him: his last interaction with a holy icon had ended in violence. But he felt reassured by these two that the windows into heaven were still open – he smiled weakly and made a mental note, this time, not to touch the art. This Christ was a surprise: there was a kind of charming innocence to it. As an icon, it was rougher, but the image was more playful. It was painted by an artist who was clearly no master of the form, but who also, clearly, had something to say.

The icons sat on iron easels along the carpet-lined shelf. Brass incense burners bookended the altar and a small six-sided wooden box held a stash of resinous olibanum. Though there were no frescoes on the walls, it was a colorful room, with the feel of life in it, especially when the sun was in the west. Apart from the pirate’s stash, there were baskets with some old bread. Salted fish hung near the entrance.

In an alcove past the tiny library, the floor was worn in ways that suggested a long history of reclining men. Who were they? At one end of the blanketed bedchamber a marble box held a tarnished metal cross, crusty amber beads from an unstrung kompologia, and bones – the collection indicating the presence of at least one priest, this one long gone.

As for the other tenant? It was only relatively recently – a matter of a few hundred years – that the pirates of Mani began to hide out in caves along the western cliffs, and there were signs of their chaotic hermitage everywhere. The pirate who’d climbed to this cave had the respect to keep the place clean, and the altar organized for worship. But, how could it be that this scoundrel served the spiritual needs of the parish, while pillaging the yachts of tourists on the open water? How did the man reconcile these two parts of himself?

Or was it in fact two men? Arpaxos considered the surprising possibility that the priest and pirate lived side-by-side. Could they have shared this room, the holy man and the villain? He smiled and took another drink. The Mani conundrum. One thing he knew: the pirate would have been the only parishioner to the old monk. Who else could find their way to this retreat? You either climbed from the hidden cove below or were cast from above like Satan.

A week passed in the hole. Arpaxos made some enthusiastic attempts at finding a way up the slope. Climbing along the runout, which was still active with a drizzle of little stones and dirt, was really out of the question. That there used to be a way down started to make a little more sense when he pictured the descent spanned by a series of ladders, several of which he could now pick out dashed on the rocks below.

The tiny flow of water, which first alerted him to the opening in the side of the mountain, ran along the south wall of the cave via a roughly carved channel in the floor. At the rear of the cell, closer to the source, water pooled into a round basin that reminded him of the stone hollow at the rear of the cave on Patmos, believed to have cradled the head of St. John. The pocket before him now contained no obvious prophetic treasures, only distracted the current briefly, until it spilled over the rim and continued its journey to the sea below.

He himself became distracted by the stream, it being the only dynamic feature in the place. He dug his way back toward the source and cleaned the basin of a decade’s accumulation of silt. He spent hours contemplating the long journey taken by the river through the dark before it escaped the mysteries of the underworld to pass through his cave. He fell into a reverie. The water was an object-lesson, a map, a timeline of life on the planet: it was the story of humanity, hidden for ages in the dark recesses of time, invisible, prehistoric, until ... as the water gurgled its way into the dim light of this chamber, he saw the beginnings of human self-awareness – a flurry of activity following what had been an extended prologue. The carved basin, which slowed the stream for a spin before releasing it, was like our first efforts to capture a history, to shape a narrative, to help us remember how we got here. But any attempt to resist the now quickening passage of time could only be momentarily successful, before the living flow of history breaks free to spill into a narrowing channel and race toward the brightening light, unconstrained, authoring new and more fleeting stories until finally we escape the dimness of the cave to bask in the enlightenment of the present moment, under the open sky. Arpaxos recognized, with little emotion, that the stream, like humanity, was doomed after only a short time under the sun to pour over the edge of the cliff and disappear into the endless sea.

Nobody who knew him would have been surprised at this obsession with wringing philosophical meaning out of the simplest things, nor that the results of his explorations tended to be depressing. On the other hand, there would have been some surprise to learn the number of hours he spent launching tiny leaf-boats downstream for an epic series of races, during which he served in the dual roles of competitor-champion and exuberant announcer.

Some of the mystery of the previous tenants was solved with the discovery of a burial mound concealed behind some bushes and small trees to the south where his ledge narrowed. The site was covered by soil and rocks, not very long ago by the look of it. Atop the mound lay a charcoal portrait made on a plank of wood. Arpa guessed that the monk, whose face it was, had been buried by his roommate. But where had that one gone to die? Why did he not stay? Probably this was not his only home: maybe he’d returned to a family who believed he caught fish for a living. Arpaxos wanted to believe the man got his reunion, and hoped he’d found peace after all. The thought of a good end brought his attention back to the portrait. There was great love in it, the face obviously well-known to the artist in life. Unique features were detailed with care – the delicately sketched lines a map of one man’s ministry; it was no caricature. The overall impression was of a vitality and connection, revealing much about the last secular assignment of the priest, who must have thought he was meant to live out the final years of his life in solitary, isolated prayer. The portrait, made by the pirate, said that the monk did not hesitate to meet the need at his threshold.

Arpaxos had been able to stretch his provisions, but now as the boxes emptied he was forced to contemplate the end of the food, and this had the predictable effect of making him thoughtful. This was challenging. He found himself thinking about the wider world and he was tempted to imagine how others might be facing their final days. Arpa had not been very impressed with humanity in the end. His perspective was colored by memories of the troubled journey from Athens through Corinth and into Mani and of being threatened, beaten, and regarded with mistrust (was it easier or harder, knowing that he deserved it all?). The tone of these memories became darker still if he reached further back to recall years that included the revealed doom of the species, the death of his father and sister, and the loss of Eva. This final loss was the most complicated. She had been taken, but was not gone, really. Everyone had losses to grieve at the end. But how many people in the world faced this uncanny grief? ... That their greatest love be taken from them, that they would face their last days alone not knowing where their love had gone, unable to truly grieve because that one had been selected by some mad lottery to live forever in a hidden place, away from everything and everyone. There was simply no way to share that burden. If she had only died, he could lean on his neighbor and weep. But how do you share the story that you also suffered loss ... but that your beloved had not died, would not die, and would probably one day bear witness as the last of the great temples of humankind finally become dust. There could be no sympathy for Arpaxos.

He did not know where she was, but if his dream was any indication, she was currently out there, somewhere, making the lives of the Men in White Coats miserable. That was some consolation. But his secret pleasure was short-lived. Eva’s face appeared in his imagination and, with a familiar sideways look, rebuked him for his cynicism, and for his reductive judgement of her and the rest of it. She always demanded more from him. More thought. More care. More of his humanity. He couldn’t help but soften.

And it was at this moment that the world closed the final distance, confronted him, ready to make its rebuttal against all his dismissive judgements. Now, his great catalogue of antagonisms was crowded by other memories, long suppressed, of frightened faces looking to him for understanding, for comfort, or for hope. He recalled a boy, about Evie’s age, behind the church in Gytheion. The boy – he remembered him clearly – was broken, lost, and searching for something in Arpaxos, but would have been disappointed. At the time, Arpa felt anger at the solicitation. And if he was angry, it was because he was the wounded dog who would not permit himself to be moved, but growled at any hand, however harmless; he acknowledged this with something like remorse, but he wasn’t sure he was quite ready to rewrite his history: he tried to push the thought out of his mind, before he’d have to consider what this boy would have seen in his eyes.

But here at the honest end of things, these thoughts would not be ignored. He felt the least he could do was offer a prayer for those who had been made to face the slammed and locked door of his spirit. But he wasn’t able, after all – he felt too great a burden; what could he say? Again, he tried to retreat from the pain. But if he truly had nothing to offer out of his own broken spirit, a secret part of himself resolved to permit some prayer, from outside, to come to him. He could only allow it after turning away ... as if the keeper of the castle drew all the bridges up, but left a small gate unguarded, so that only the invader need ever know that the king wanted nothing more than to be overcome.

In his dream, Arpaxos was in a cavernous, cold, and sterile room. He wasn’t alone. Two men in flowing lab coats could be seen, sitting opposite a child. The two leaned in, clutching their clipboards, and showing intense interest in their subject. The taller one looked nervous and frustrated, biting his thumbnail and glaring at the child from under wild and scowling eyebrows. The shorter, and younger, of the two appeared more focused and confident in his task, an effect only a little undermined by his overgrown crew cut, thin beard, and disheveled appearance.

The setting was a clean room, a room within a room – double doors, raised floor, sealed and separated from a womb-like larger space by a tangle of umbilical cords, hoses, and ventilation tubes serving to mediate between the inner and the outer chamber. Through the glass, the surrounding edifice revealed details as he looked up and out from the scene at the center: a monumental stone enclosure whose perimeter was described by giant square columns supporting an ornately carved ceiling. Rich saffron-yellow beams of light streamed between the columns and through the larger temple-like space, and floating particles highlighted the rays of a late-afternoon sun. But inside the fluorescent and dust-free atmosphere of the interior room, there were only a few objects half-lit in the warmer cast. The temple space was ancient. The interior room was, Arpaxos could tell, very much in the present.

The two men were animated in their interaction with the younger one, who did not move, and sat bolt upright. Something in each character’s bearing made Arpaxos believe that this dialog had been going on for days, or maybe for far longer. In his dream-confusion he wondered whether the interview belonged more to the greater, surrounding space, or to the smaller sterile box. The tableau in the center of it all paid no respect to any boundary – it belonged to them both: it was a staging of the Disputation of The Young Christ Among The Doctors, only these doctors’ costumes suggested that they were more concerned with infectious disease at the moment, than with discussions of the ancient law. Then they began to speak.

The shorter one began. ‘Young talmid, you have answered many questions well. Your knowledge of these matters is ... is ...’

With a toss of his eyebrows, the tall nervous one said, ‘Impressive.’

‘Impressive. ... Who did you say your father was?’

The youth spoke, without moving. ‘I’m adopted.’

At the sound of the voice, Arpaxos realized, with a shock, that the speaker was a girl. He knew that this girl would be about twelve, because he knew that it was his daughter Eva who had been taken from him two years before. His adopted daughter.

His heart pounding in his chest, Arpa perceived that in this dream space he was seeing her exactly as she was in that moment, wherever she was. But where was she? And what were they talking about? ... He felt he was watching an ancient drama staged for the modern theater according to an unchecked avant-garde sensibility.

‘Well,’ said Crew-cut. (‘Well!’ chimed in Eyebrows, with a congested and non-committal grunt) ‘It has been three days since the end of the Passover feast ... my esteemed colleague and I have been discussing the arrival of the Messiah and in what month he should appear.’

The tall one released a cough, and in a tone that suggested the question had not adequately represented the relevant details of a discussion that was, in matter of fact, concerned with many irrelevant details, added, ‘Also in what year the Anointed will come.’

Crew-cut nodded and leaned into the question, ‘What do you think, child? Will the Messiah come in the month of Tishri or the month of Nisan?’

She was silent, and with a heartbreaking look of confusion she searched the corners of the room for answers, or for an escape. What her eyes settled on was the earthy beam of light that pierced the dusty atmosphere of the temple on the other side of the glass, and, in its purified form, illuminated her upturned face. She spoke, and it was Arpa’s turn to be confused. ‘Can the months or the days of the messiah be known ahead of that time? Days come and go. Their final meaning cannot be determined by their place on the calendar, nor months by their constellations, but time is given meaning by what is done to fill it. Should we not rather pay attention to the comings and goings of the people of God, to the works and words of God’s children? Isn’t this how we should look for the appearance of God’s Righteous One, who will be known not by the measure of stars and their trajectories, but by the measure of fruit in the balance?’

After of moment of pained silence, the teacher rebuked the student: ‘When you are older, child, you may be able to supply a wiser response!’

His colleague, who almost smiled, said, ‘I think that was a pretty wise response.’ The younger kept his eyes on the girl who, with some exasperation, provided the correct answer. ‘But if we must look for the month of God’s deliverance, we should look for it during Nisan, the time of the Passover, when God rescued our ancestors from slavery.’

Crew-cut recovered his composure, and said to his colleague, ‘A good answer, don’t you think, Doctor?’

‘Yes. But I am not sure your question was answered willingly. Child, what do the teachers say about the year of the coming of the messiah?’

‘Some teachers pick a year when the world is old enough. Yet, doesn’t the Prophet say that when the time is right, then the promise will be fulfilled? Does the age of the earth make the time right? Or is the time right when the hearts of the children are rain-soaked and ready for seed? Do we think that God is waiting for the old trees to grow tall enough ... so the redeemer may descend through the branches to the soft earth below?’

Eyebrows took his turn to rebuke her. ‘You might consider your answers with more care!’

And the other said, with a curious expression, ‘I thought that was a pretty well-considered answer.’

Then, she gave an answer calculated to satisfy: ‘But some teachers say that the Messiah will come when the world is 4,250 years old.’

‘And when do the teachers say that the world will reach that age!?’

She again searched the spaces on the other side of the glass enclosure, and with a sigh, she spoke: ‘These teachers propose that only after 450 more years have passed will the world come of age.’ She faced her questioner. ‘Then the messiah should arrive; and in that year, one ought not pay a pound for a field though it cost a thousand.’

He recovered to form a satisfied smile. ‘A good answer, don’t you think, Doctor?’

‘Hmm ...’

She straightened in her chair and extended an open hand: ‘But what if somewhere buried beneath the dust of that field was a treasure worth risking it all for? Wouldn’t you give anything to have it? ... If your plow turned up a fortune on Friday as the sun went down ... would you cry out, “Sabbath”, and walk away? ...’ And, shifting to face the younger, she said, ‘If the savior came before you, and announced the end before the stars lined up, would you say, “Please come back next month!”?’

Suddenly the walls of the inner room became opaque and chilly white (the ancient space receded), and the room also became colder. Though the space felt closer, more contained, Arpaxos felt suddenly more exposed. Light filled the space and became so bright as to make it nearly impossible for him to see. The last words of the ancient Eva came clearly, but sounded flat across the space: ‘You’re casting for your masterpiece, a golden child – straight from the mold, perfect and polished ... and your fingerprints will be all over her. She’ll be just like you, and you’ll be just like her: blind and deaf; the last good words of this good planet doomed to echo in her hollowness, and no one to hear, until there’s nothing left but silence.’

Then the two men were bickering quietly, and the look on her face reminded Arpa of the resolve she showed on the day that she was taken. No. it wasn’t the same: at this moment her face, flush in the fluorescent light, had no love in it.

‘What are you so afraid of?’ And Eva, as Arpa knew her, was back.

‘Sorry, Eva.’ Suddenly the younger of the two was slumping forward, and his hand went to his face. ‘Sorry. We ... um, we have to ...’

With a violent adjustment of his lab coat, the older spoke with severity: ‘You understand we have to be sure! This isn’t a game.’ And to his colleague, his lowered voice betrayed a greater fear, ‘Finish the damn questions.’

Crew-cut spoke, weakly. ‘Remember to provide a “true” or “false” response to each statement.’

‘Why?!’

He chose to ignore the question he knew she was asking, and he read from the paper in front of him: ‘The, um, the items elicit a wide range of self-descriptions scored to give a quantitative measurement ... of an individual’s level of emotional adjustment and, um ...’, a cough from the tall one, ‘... attitude toward test taking.’ This got no visible response from her. His eyes now fixed on a spot on the floor between them, he stumbled, ‘We’ve been ... concerned about the level of ... of the significant increase in dysphoria we, um, we’re seeing ...’, here he glanced up at her, ‘... with you ... sometimes.’ Eyes down. ‘It’s a simple assessment, just to get a look inside ... as it were.’

And Eyebrows, with none of the obvious affection or care of his younger colleague, said, ‘This precocious rebellion, this resistance has to stop! This is not going to get easier, and whatever advantage you are pressing for, you will not win. The sooner you give it up and submit to the process the better. For all of us. Do you not understand what’s at stake here?’

Again she gave no response to this, and remained unmoved. Crew-cut unenthusiastically began to read questions off of the stack of papers.

‘I maintain psychological distance from other people’

Turning her head to the side with a shake, her tone proved the answer: ‘true.’

‘I withdraw from activities in which I previously participated’

‘True!’, then, ‘If you count being kidnapped as withdrawal.’

He winced. ‘I have difficulty making decisions’

‘I have no more decisions to make. How long is this test?’

‘Once in a while I think of things too bad to talk about’

‘True. I’m doing it now. Sorry, how many questions are there on this test?’

Eyebrows butted in with forced levity: ‘A little more than 350 questions, which means that you are coming up on nearly halfway done!’, and his weary colleague picked up the questions without pause ... ‘I feel overwhelmed when faced with major life decisions’

‘I think I already answered this question.’ Eyebrows administered a rebuking sound from his throat, and with a little slump, she said, ‘True.’

‘I have not lived the right kind of life’

‘Absolutely true.’

‘I am very cautious and conventional’

She looked suddenly surprised: ‘False! That one’s false. I’m not those things. Got one! That’s good, right?’

‘At times I feel like smashing things’

After a deep breath: ‘Increasingly true.’

‘I am sure I get a raw deal from life’

Silence.

‘I wish I could be as happy as others seem to be’ ...

‘Are you kidding me!’ she almost yelled, the look of surprised amusement on her face quickly turning to baffled frustration.

The reader slumped forward and his grip on the papers appeared to relax.

She was almost desperately looking for some sign in their faces, some reason; finally her own face revealed despair – she would find no satisfaction here .... ‘Well. OK. Maybe ... I’m broken. Maybe I’m depressed. Maybe I’m crazy and a danger to my fellow human beings. But how does that matter now?!

She spoke faster now: ‘I know you wish you could control who goes inside your precious cocoon, or egg, or whatever it is. Well I’m sorry you didn’t get to raise me from birth to be a princess. I’m sorry that I can’t pass your tests. Maybe, if you’re lucky, I’ll die, and the others will live, and you can be happy that your vision of the future will come true. I don’t want to be the reason for any more groaning from dead people.’

A painful silence descended to swallow the sound of her words, leaving nothing to echo in the cold space. Evie hid her face, and Arpa guessed she was crying.

The tall one suddenly straightened, became rigid, and appeared even more ancient than before. He spoke as though he was carved of stone, ‘It is written, “In those days youths will insult their elders ... daughter will revolt against her mother and feel no shame in the presence of her father.” Surely you would not try to bring about the end by fulfilling these words?’

Then she, in turn, appeared so radiant with life that all three of the men looked away. Yet Arpaxos found himself seated now in the chair before her, and she was standing over him. There was righteousness in her eyes, demanding his attention. ‘If you old fools could get over yourselves for a minute, if you would pay attention to what’s right in front of you, maybe you’d live to see the hearts of the young and old restored once more to one another.’

Now, even as the broken man began to wake, her face remained before his eyes, rising like the sun. She looked down at him, but the image of her was slowly eclipsed by a wall of soldiers in combat fatigues as Arpa’s head filled with the sound of running water.

He stumbled out of the church, down the marble walkway, and moved with increasing speed toward the top of the high cliff to the west. He arrived at the edge with no respect for the drop, repeatedly advancing and retreating, as if picking a fight with the open expanse. And the wind whipping up the face of the cliff and stirring the waters of the Mediterranean before him seemed to call his bluff, buffeting him, exposing his impotence, like a smirking schoolyard bully gently pushing open fingers against his chest, softly, repeatedly. He felt the buttresses of his fatalistic tower crumbling, revealing the folly of his belief that he was secure in his isolation, that nothing more could be required of him, that he would simply cease to exist in solitude, that there was nothing left to say. These facts he had long ago accepted and takens as a comfort. But no more. Alone! ... Not alone! Barking anger, he punched and swung at the vast openness, and bellowed a final agitation. ‘I’m dying! Let me be!’ This was as close to a prayer as the solitary figure could manage, before falling to his knees.

The ground beneath him, damp from the sea air and a recent storm, surprised him with its softness, provoking in him a sense of wonder. It was open, breathing, like fresh-turned soil, and he thought in that moment that the earth had chosen to receive him in answer to his nihilistic prayer. He felt his arms lift, allowing a moment of gratitude (of worship?), as he reveled in the feeling of unexpected release.

That is what it might have looked like from a little distance: like relief, like worship, until the figure disappeared from view. Because within one horrible instant, Arpa realized that he hadn’t lifted his arms at all, that they were only floating up beside him, while the rest of his body first sunk, then tipped forward, as the edge of the cliff quietly gave way. ... Not received by the earth after all, but shaken off.

He flung his hands behind him like a mad bird only able to flap backwards, and flailed once. As he cartwheeled to meet the churning ground below the cliff top, his arms, first, were pinned to his sides, useless, as he launched down the slope; then, desperately he paddled to keep himself atop the wave of moving earth. The chaos of the slide allowed no further petition, became everything: he rode the fall, it seemed, until the world itself came apart, turned inside out, and a burning hell broke free of its prison to swallow the sea and mountain and him with it, to steal him and everything from the light. He lost consciousness.

Arpaxos woke in the early morning darkness to the fading sensation that he was the last solid piece in the mouth of a chewing demon. His own mouth was packed full of dirt. His right arm was numb and cold, while he felt as though the rest of his body were on fire. He had the irrational sense that he was still sliding: it took a long time for him to feel certain that he had come to a stop, that he had not died, though this was only a small comfort. He did not know how long he’d been asleep.

The left side of his face felt swollen and useless, but through his open right eye he could see a half-dome of stars overhead. In his new reality, he understood that the other half of the sky must also have been swallowed up by the earth demon; he did not, however, know why he himself had been spit out. There was no wind. He could hear the sound of water washing over tiny stones somewhere nearby.

Lying there, a bitter feeling of defeat came upon him. It was like the feeling he’d had when news of the disease broke. Back then, it only felt like falling, like the whole planet had gone off a cliff for an epic plunge that had yet to end. Today’s sharp hurt surprised him by its unfairness. He had been alone and living in quiet resolve for months, almost wishing he could feel the pain, even to die.

But now he had to reckon with the wrath that came quickly on the heels of other feelings. He couldn’t tolerate that such (relatively) simple humiliations still had power over him. The world was ending. He’d made every effort to get away from the prosaic follies of humankind to die alone in peace. Now he was tortured by the realization that he had not really gone far enough – the appearance of the priest had ended that fantasy. Nor, apparently, was he prepared for death. It frightened him, maybe for the first time. Something in the experience of being very nearly buried alive, maybe. Buried, unburied, and buried again, twisted into every shape recalled in plaster at Pompeii (but Arpa’s final shape had not yet been discovered). There was no feeling of release for him in the moment of death, no peace in it, just a child’s horror, which embarrassed him. Grief piled on top of grief with the final realization that he couldn’t pretend to welcome the end any more, as if he knew what it meant; nor did it appear that his opinions on the subject mattered in the slightest.

He let out a small muffled whine, and his face scrunched around his mouth, wincing in protest against each muscle’s attempt at movement. His mouth began to work, automatically, to expel the dirt and pebbles that had collected there. His arms were of no use at the moment. He turned his head gently to his right. His tongue, which itself felt an icy-hot burn at the slightest movement, slowly began working the ball of earth around, while his jaw clenched involuntarily with each contraction of his facial muscles. He directed all of his willpower against the impulse to throw up; he was getting barely enough air through his nose as it was. As he accepted the fact that one of his teeth would be coming out too, he worked his tongue harder, crying out as exposed roots grated against the stone slurry being pushed out of his mouth. Finally it was free, and he resisted the urge to swallow gulps of air until he could work the dregs out.

As the night sky gave way to a pale dawn, his situation slowly came into focus. He could now see the stony ledge he’d landed on, and that he was on the bank of a tiny stream that emanated from within a dark cleft in the surrounding wall. To see details in the looming cliff face awoke him to the fact of it again – and he chided his assumption that half the stars had been eaten; now he felt prepared to concede the likelihood that the missing sky was behind the cliff itself. Probably, he thought, wisely, a demon had not consumed any stars in its ravenous attack on Arpaxos.

He tried to learn more. His right arm was submerged in the frigid water, which explained the numbness. He lifted it out, and carefully raised his head to look around. He could see the earthen chute by which the cliff had delivered him – more gently than he deserved – to this spot; a pile of soil to the left was peaked like sand at the bottom of a giant hourglass. He was trying to work out how he survived the fall, and how it was that the mound of dirt was not on top of him; he had no memory of moving himself from the base of the cliff, nor any clear memory of the fall itself. But he felt encouraged in this moment to respect the proverbial wisdom of forgetfulness.

Finally, looking past his feet, he saw that the cleft in the wall enclosed a narrow, whitewashed archway formalizing an entrance to the dark space behind it. An uneven cross-shaped embrasure, like a keyhole, topped the passageway. It was a cave.

A cave. Perfect. His Hero’s Journey was about to take a turn. He would descend into the darkness and confront ... his fears!, or himself!, or something, and he would learn the Valuable Lesson. Then he would be permitted to return ... to return ....

His head lay back. He laughed quietly until the pain became too great, at which point the exhaustion and the trauma of the day, and all the years, overwhelmed his consciousness and he passed out once more.

And he dreamed.

Eighteen months had passed since the arrival of Arpaxos in Mani, and his relationship to the silence and solitude of the place remained complicated. He was, for the most part, glad for the quiet: before he’d escaped the city, it had become clear that most people had lost all sense of purpose or power, and in the bargain were losing what remained of their voices. But old wives like his aunt were not so easily silenced. They confidently offered up impotent proverbs and pithy wisdoms, each a self-assured attempt to toss salt back in time to correct the obvious misalignment of the planet and misunderstandings of men. He could not bear the simplistic bickering of the gray-haired, black-clad elders of the city, each of them with their metaphorical side tables over-decorated with the wreck and ruin of ancient philosophy. Wasn’t it obvious that the wisdom of the world was passing away? If the scientists could not save the species, what purpose did the old words serve? (To her credit, Tía Íno soon abandoned the annoying – and popular – debate over whose fault the plague was, and turned her proverbial attention to stirring the doomed to reverence. ‘Regard well the end of life!’)

Arpa left it all behind – his father’s rants, the widows’ judgements, the endless bickering sadness – and in the bargain he might have lost what remained of his own voice, and his connection to the human race. Leaving the city may have seemed like a choice to die hungry and alone, but he meant it as a choice to die in peace and quiet. Finding food turned out to be easy; finding peace not so much.

Little challenged his belief that he would never encounter another soul: the apocalypse was one thing, but this place had always been desolate. Until one day, after what seemed like endless days passed in isolation, and as he sat in front of the half-ruined stone shelter that leaned against the low cliff above the church, a priest approached, without ceremony, on sandaled foot, from the southeast. Arpaxos was shocked to see the man, but surprised himself by freezing in place, unable to move or talk. On a good day, on a normal day, he would be unsure of how to interact with a member of the consecrated class, or whether to do so at all. He had never really known what to say to them, or what to ask for, and today was no different in that regard. But these were different days, neither normal nor good; he questioned whether even the priests knew what to say any more. Memories of prior encounters with locals (and of his last brush with a holy man for that matter) led him to expect at least a rebuke for squatting, if not worse.

His mind raced as the man came closer. Maybe the goat that had been keeping him in milk belonged to this one? Maybe he had news, or would enjoy a little conversation before the end of the world? Certainly, at least, he would be surprised to see that the parish population had grown from 0 to 1, defying the general trend?

But no, it seemed not. The dark-robed figure entered the chapel straightaway, and soon the sound of a monotone prayer came flat on the wind. The sound of the voice almost tore Arpaxos apart. His heart fought to escape his chest; his body nearly collapsed under the oppressive sensation that his veins were filled with lead, cold and heavy. Within minutes the prayer was done and the priest hurried out of the building. Without at all adjusting his hurried posture, he raised his forearm in an awkward gesture, his only acknowledgment that there was another human being present. Was it meant as a blessing? He never stopped walking and Arpaxos never raised his hand in reply, because the man never turned to face him.

The encounter left Arpaxos with an excruciating curiosity. He waited until the shy itinerant was a safe distance away, then quickly entered the room. Everything looked as it had before. The carbon smell of a spent match hung in the air and a thin trail of smoke rose weakly from a wick propped up in a dolma tin, but the flame had already been extinguished.

He was rattled at the intrusion, could feel, somehow, that the space itself had changed, though apparently only a single match had been lit and everything else remained undisturbed. He stood in extreme discomfort, now suddenly aware of how invested in being alone he’d become, while at the same time he was almost desperate in hope that the visit of the priest might have made a difference, might compel the Almighty to finish the work of centuries, to rip the dome open and enter the derelict space. What he felt was not the right kind of change. It was now merely the scent of the man and his impotent devotion that filled the room. There was nothing else, and now he was more desperately alone.

The face of the icon caught his attention, and he thought, almost with a laugh, of course! Never really alone. He only wished he could laugh, but something stopped him, a feeling that what he wanted to turn into a joke was in truth not funny at all. The face – it appeared in this moment that the image was alert, attentive. His immediate response was to feel embarrassed, that this change in attention was not because of him, not meant for him. But changed it was; and now alert, waiting. But waiting for ... what? What was he supposed to do?

Surprised by a groan escaping his own throat, he silenced himself, tried to settle his nerves in the presence of the now activated image. But he could not settle. He was becoming angry, and had the urge to chase after the priest, to tell him that he was required back in the church. A childish thought: had the priest done something wrong? Shouldn’t the visit, the recitation, have been enough? Prayers had been spoken, a flame had been lit, the obligation fulfilled. But the eyes of the image grabbed him and insisted. Perhaps the priest had failed to acknowledge the Savior as well, had only offered a mechanical greeting, as he had outside the church.

Stupefied, Arpaxos stood in that space with a growing heat behind his chest (of longing? Of despair?) until he decided he was a fool and, with a terrible, cold and rational resolve, rejected the feeling. He had been torn between the wish to never see another person again, and the starving desperation to look into another face. Now a painted picture seemed alive, seemed to confront him with his own willful blindness. In a seizure of febrile rebellion, he cast the image down, and tore at the eyes, scratching with his dirty fingernails, until in his pride he croaked out the words, without believing any of it, ‘Nor shalt thou make unto thee any graven image, for I am the Lord thy God!’ It then became terribly quiet.

He cursed the priest through clenched teeth, and reached his trembling fingers toward the altar, moving them through the fading trail of rising smoke.

He might have stayed in that apartment for the rest of his short life, except for the fire. Just days after losing her, he found himself outside in the middle of the night looking up at the building as it burned. How had the fire begun? He could not, or would not, remember. The only clue was that he felt no emotion as he swung his pack over his shoulder and turned to walk down the street. There were no sirens, no shouts of alarm.

Before he started university, Arpa’s father took him to Mount Athos, to live with the monks for a summer, in what must have been an attempt to put Lent before Fat Tuesday. But the young man needed no encouragement toward the contemplative life. During his stay, he wrote of his new community in his journal:

‘The wilderness accepts pilgrims of all kinds. Some are driven there, some are led. Others flee comfort and then preach from the simplicity of the desert, inviting travelers to look into the face of the ascetic, to mine the poverty there for understanding.’

At the time, he could not see that there are also those who escape because they can no longer bear to look into another’s eyes, or risk being seen themselves – they seek the simplicity of death without understanding. The arrival of the elder pilgrim Arpaxos into the wilderness (he was of this last category) came at the end of a journey marked by humiliation, and inauspicious signs.

He traveled as far as he could by car, looking for a place to finish out his days away from the madness, grief, and complications of the city. However, as he quickly discovered, trouble just manifested differently in the rural places. When enough doors had been slammed in his face, or swung open to some horror, and when enough guns or other improvised weapons had appeared in windows, he gave up on hope and hospitality. He tried fending for himself, stealing food to survive. But the shame was too much and his skills not enough: in each village, he was marked within a day, might have been killed if he hadn’t kept moving. When it was clear that he’d become a stranger to all, he headed southwest on a single-lane road, resolved to leave it all behind.

A day south of Gytheio, he lay down in the back of an old derelict truck and rested his head on a bundle of canvas. The dome of sky above him resonated with a deepening indigo that seemed to contain within it all the energy of the cosmos, both the light and the dark, together. It was unseasonably warm, and he’d just begun to read by a small lamp, when he became aware of a flash of light from above. A star was glowing extra bright, and green, and moving. He watched with growing unease: he knew what a falling star looked like. This one was too slow, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether it was descending or rising. For more than a minute, it seemed, the thing burned hot, then dimmer, then bright flecks of orange and yellow broke off. The profound discomfort he felt at this moment recalled childhood terrors ... the mountain storm that blasted roof tiles off the family’s summer cabin, and made his mother scream; his sister’s cruel taunt of tearing back his covers and grabbing at him when he was asleep. Even the heavens, the eternal dome, could not be trusted to provide covering, or comfort, in these days.

Soon, he realized that what he was seeing was the end of some great work of humankind. He understood. Space-faring nations, having recently lost the will to project their curiosity, hopes, and hubris into the void, were leaving such works – satellites, and deep-space telescopes, and floating research stations – unsupported. Many had begun to fail, and some were falling to earth. At least that was the story. Arpaxos was not alone in speculating that these things were being brought down, that what had been happening with increasing frequency was the rocket scientist’s version of throwing a brick through a window after an earthquake – belligerent, disconsolate hooliganism, which apparently lurks inside us all. There had been several reports of these ambiguous re-entries in the last year, but this was the first he had seen. He marveled at it, briefly, then felt a little sick. As the trail of light faded, a supersonic crack and rumble punctuated the rending of our delicate planetary veil.

What he could not have known is that those space platforms that remained under the control of caretakers not yet given in to nihilistic vandalism were being turned off. Not neglected, not abandoned to entropy, but powered down on purpose as a potential liability at the boundary of a defenseless planet and it’s shrinking and increasingly vulnerable population. Before we ever had a chance to discover our place in the heavenly neighborhood, we were turning off the lights and drawing the blinds.

Moments like this were the very thing he would have stayed up late to watch with his father when he was a boy. And his father would have spoken some cold and comforting words, explaining how this monumental destruction made sense in the grand scheme of human effort and progress. As a student at the Polytechnic, Arpa would have marked the moment with a poem about how the fiery conclusion of such a venture highlights the pride and folly of men, the poet calling our attention back to the earth, to the plane of our rightful existence, to each other. He would not have shared the poem with his colleagues at university, nor would he have shared it with his father. But he would have found the act of writing comforting in the face of such waste.

Tonight, he just felt incomplete, and he wasn’t sure which he longed for more: the complacent confidence of his father or the romantic arrogance of his youth. Since neither of these perspectives was available to him on this day, and since he had no one to share the experience with, he forced himself to regard the moment as meaningless in the grand scheme, only a fallen leaf signaling autumn and colder days to come. To regard the event as mundane – even pretty – helped him feel less sad.

In the end it was to him one more sign of the failure of the human experiment. He knew there would be no going back to the way it was. Considering his circumstances, he wasn’t sure what he was going toward either. Looking down the dirt track that lead to the next village gave him a familiar feeling of dread; the thought of returning the way he came was worse. When he woke the next day, Arpaxos left the road, and left all comfort behind.

He wanted to go someplace with a guarantee of solitude, and there was no place more lonely to him than the Mani Peninsula. It was on childhood visits here that Arpa had learned about his father’s almost pathological preference for escape and isolation, which Mani satisfied perfectly, even if, in recent years, young entrepreneurs were returning from abroad to renovate (and monetize) the family estates. The occasional medieval castle turned bed-and-breakfast did little to challenge the overall impression that outside the walls, there were few comforts to be had.

Mani remained the most forbidding part of Greece, the great middle finger of the Morea, pointed straight to Hades, complete with a cave at the southern tip understood by the ancients to be an entrance to the underworld. The fiercely independent Maniots were usually the last of the Greeks to bend the knee in the face of any attack or occupation (and even then, it was always with a dagger behind their back). Not only the men deserved credit for this reputation: in response to a sneak attack off the Bay of Messinia, the women of Mani were said to have fought off the Ottomans with garden tools, while the men were engaged elsewhere. In subsequent times of ‘peace’, quarreling families shot at one another between towers in the villages one day, and packed into one of a thousand tiny churches on the next. The fire-lit feudalism – and weird juxtapositions – of the Middle Ages lasted well-into the modern era in this place. If the last of us are doomed to die alone, Arpa thought, I want to be somewhere already acquainted with loneliness and desperation, a place that will not take offense at my own.

But before he would find his way to the sun-bleached, wind-sharpened wastes of the Deep Mani, he had to cross the mountains that ran along the peninsula, from Taygetos in the north, where a morbid legend said that ancient Spartans climbed to abandon their weak, and Sangias in the south, where he figured someone such as himself might have a better chance of survival. To avoid the highways, he’d have to travel south along the east coast, and spend most of a day walking in roadless places while looking for a passage to the west. At least, he noted as he crossed this last barrier, he wouldn’t be alone – the hills were home to a sizable population of goats, who wandered among the pale green vegetation covering much of the east- and south-facing slopes. Arpaxos was hopeful that he’d be able to sleep in the shade of the bushes and pick his way through the scrub when it wasn’t so hot. He remembered too late that goats devour pretty much whatever is in front of them, and if you are traveling among bushes of the kind that goats refuse to eat, then maybe you don’t want anything to do with these bushes either. When he stumbled out of the mountains three days after his escape from Gytheio, he looked as though he had been whipped with barbed wire, and his will was nearly broken. Terrible thorns had been his shelter, and he shared refuge in the heat of the day with great yellow spiders and the sound of hidden cicadas, whose rasping call was like being subjected to electro-shock therapy for hours at a time, only without the benefit of relief from emotional distress.

When he finally left the mountain behind, he took shelter in the courtyard of the church Agnosto Onoma, which in the late afternoon hid in the shade of one of the region’s many towers – this one had it’s black-clad watch-woman, who eyed him with honed suspicion from a seat in a high window. She lifted a hand in greeting; the other hand stayed on a shotgun in her lap. Looking up at her, Arpa honestly wondered if she had any idea what was happening outside of her fortress; she gave the impression that she had not approved of external events for decades and might have greeted news of the apocalypse with a dismissive shrug. He made what he imagined would be his last attempt at a friendly greeting, simply so that he could rest for a few minutes without fearing for his life.

Sitting in the empty square, where the dirty plastered walls were slowly being decomposed by the roots of old pine trees, he gritted his teeth against the wind. Arpaxos hated the sound of wind blowing through pines. As a boy, he’d spent his summers in Filothei, where plane trees gently swayed in the warm Athenian breeze, their leaves filtering the blazing sunlight like delicate green shadow dancers. Pines were nothing like that. Pine needles didn’t dance: they were fixed in their contempt for the wind, or maybe out of spite for their more liberal cousins. When the wind passed through pines, it was like a vital spirit passing through the fingers of a creature long-dead, fingers that could not embrace the living any more. Or would not.

Arpa squirmed in the corner of the square, his own spirit unsuited to the challenge of the journey, yet the hard wind drove him ever southward. And his encounter with the pines of Mani was a cold brush with ancient shades, whose ghostly needles dragged against his insides, mocking his belief that he himself was still solid.

Evie looked down at him from the threshold. She stood apart, appearing untroubled, as if she existed in a reality entirely different from the one in which he lay pinned on the ground with a soldier’s knee on his neck. Gloved hands held his limbs, and something cold and hard was pressed to the side of his head. But he was no longer struggling against the small army that had filled his sister’s apartment, and it seemed they no longer regarded him as a threat: hands and voices gradually softened. A soldier, almost completely obscured behind full armor, was leaning down to look into his face, asking questions. He couldn’t make out her words in the general confusion. ‘Sir what is your ... [ringing in his ears] ... Can you ... [a shout and hail of gunfire outside the apartment] ... relationship to the ...?’ The commotion outside got the attention of the two by the door. One of the soldiers quickly raised his weapon and moved toward the noise. Two concussive gunshots, far louder than the previous volley, and out of the silence that followed he heard Evie’s strained but steady voice and knew that she was saying that he was her father, because that had been his instruction to her. From the way the soldiers looked at each other and the tone of the brief conversation that followed, he could tell that her mother and father were known to be dead. A man in civilian clothes began to survey the pile of bags near the door, easily identifying those belonging to the girl by the bright colors and cartoon branding of an earlier age.

There were more voices, but he couldn’t hear what was being said above the rising static in his head. He knew that he was losing her. He had really known for some time. But he wanted to believe that he had a right to steal her away and keep her to himself.

And she, in the middle of all this chaos, managed to look down at him with something like compassion. She was only 10 years old, but she was towering over him, and breaking his heart with a look that said ‘I understand, though I really don’t understand ... and it looks, Uncle, like it will have to be me that is brave in this moment.’ Her parents had both worked in the refugee camps; now they were gone, both dead from too much affection for the human race. He could see a similar nobility in her gaze. He wanted to scream at her to wipe that look away, to put on her war face, or she was going to be destroyed. They would eat her alive.

He himself was teetering on the edge ... between fighting, or falling into the abyss. Her kidnappers made sure that he understood the time for intervention was past. They would be taking her: she belonged to the world now, and he must stay face down in the dust, or be destroyed.

Pale orange sunlight poured in from the street and outlined her form in the doorway. She looked to him like she was on fire, if only because he was seeing through tear-flooded eyes; his mind allowed the effect to soften the sickening reality. In the moment it took for her to disappear from view, he also turned a corner: everything that came after that moment was forgotten almost immediately after it happened, filtered out, so that he could hold onto her in the only way left to him. There were shouts, but he ignored them so that he could listen for her voice; a cough provoked a sharp stab of pain in his ribs, but he forgot about his own pain so that all his senses would be attuned to her diminishing presence; the sound of a helicopter and a mob of shouts (he had no way of knowing whether they were connected, but each was fighting to be heard above the other); a final gunshot in the distance, the shock of it sliding easily into the past – he thought only of her, as if his attention could surround her and preserve her. Finally there was silence and he could find nothing to hold onto anymore. He was alone.

He was the proverbial, foolish mother hen, hiding inside the shell with her chick; and now, because no one had kept watch, their world was cracked open like an egg by the devourer, leaving only Arpaxos to contemplate the emptiness as it grew cold and dry. He knew that there was nothing left. There was nothing. She was gone.

He had been meant to adopt her. It was arranged after her parents got sick. They had been working with migrants at the port when they became deathly ill, in the old sense. Nicola and Brahim were much more comfortable living on the rough edges of the world than Arpaxos. Years after running away, his sister had reappeared in Athens with an ill-defined plan to confront their father, and try for some kind of peace. But the unhealed wounds of childhood, and the dry spring that was their dad (he couldn’t even look her in the eye), doomed her plan. Instead of running away again, she went to work with street kids in Piraeus, looking for something to fix, something to believe in. It was there she met Brahim, himself a refugee from an earlier time, and fell in love.

Unfortunately, a fondness for alcohol combined with the chaos of the border made them vulnerable to disease – both of them became sick with a particular drug-resistant form of tuberculosis. Now, Nicola was even more stubborn than her brother: she didn’t trust doctors and rarely acknowledged weakness of any kind. She and Brahim were vaccinated when that was still a thing, but drew the line when it came to being injected with an encoded swarm of little medical machines. So it was that when she got sick, she would be entirely on her own, a condition she was used to but never got any better at. Brahim dragged her to the hospital, unaware that he also was ill. There, a series of tests revealed that she was 1) likely to die from complications from TB, and 2) the possessor of a surprising resistance to the more significant affliction of the age. She was sick with disease, yes. But she was also not sick ... with that disease which had not, until this point, skipped over anyone. This more fearsome malady had traveled everywhere courtesy of the efficiencies of modern logistics, and had been hiding in the cells of the entire developed world, waiting with improbable patience for the conditions necessary to erupt almost all at once in what Arpaxos was calling the Incurable Cure for the disease that had been afflicting the planet for some years now; Humankind, that is.

Around the world, money and resources poured into finding a solution to this latter-day plague. In the search for a cure, all the tricks had been tried, some to the collective shame of the species. In one particularly heartbreaking footnote (in what would have been the very last history book), the zeal to find a solution drove a group of American pathologists to approach one of the last few isolated cultures in the world, one distinguished by their disconnection from the global network of goods and services, and more importantly, by their ancient and isolated gene pool. It was hoped, maybe foolishly, that if these peoples knew what was at stake, they would have offered themselves up for study, for the sake of the human race. However, when first contact is mediated from inside a sealed helmet and when your face is obscured behind thick plastic, there can be no efficient way to communicate your already questionable intentions. Or to warn your hosts about the dangers of shooting arrows at visitors wearing biohazard suits intended to prevent the spread of infectious disease.

In the end, as hope receded like the tide, what remained to be revealed, like a submerged ruin, was the resilience of the Greeks, famous for last stands in the face of impossible odds, as the proverbial clock runs out. Doctors around the world had been going nonstop and many were giving up on the work in despair – hospitals were becoming hospice centers when there were not enough doctors to care for patients. A group of internists at Nikaia Hospital in West Attica had resolved to work to their last breath to find answers; they were rewarded for their diligence with the arrival of Nicola Evangeliou. Their discovery of her resistance to the ultimate disease was considered a kind of miracle, though ultimately there would be no medical revival, no pilgrimages to take the healing waters at her shrine, because there would be no sharing in this miracle. That is, not for anyone except Eva, who had arisen from these waters, and had thereby been gifted with the resistance, a biological rebelliousness learned in the womb.

Nicola was the first, but because she was already on death’s door, Evie herself would take on the mantle. She and two others, who were identified not long after. Only these few would be found who had any hope of survival. However, nobody could discern a way to make use of the miracle of the three. No one had been able to find in their cells a formula for salvation; so they were taken to be salvation themselves.

It was a minor miracle that Arpaxos had gotten her out of the hospital, but there was no way she would be allowed her independence. The machinery, of which she would soon be a critical part, was already in motion. Because, as efforts to find a cure diminished, and every other machine slowed to a halt, qualified survivors were rallying at the California bioscience concern that had until recently been gaining fame by promising a win in the fight against disease. This was not at first an empty promise: a single treatment of a plasma that carried an encoded swarm of microscopic bots provided the ultimate treatment, boutique health care at the molecular level, available to all. In the end, one disease had come along to subvert this towering achievement – and now the technology was being repurposed in a last-ditch, moonshot effort to preserve whatever life remained when the disease had run its course. By the time Arpaxos and Eva had said goodbye to her parents, the world had given up on conventional disease, given up on healing, and would soon be solely concerned with the singular effort to preserve a single life for as long as possible. Researchers and thought leaders from every field of study were making their way west to spend their remaining days solving the final problem.

All talk of leaving the planet to colonize other worlds was ended. All talk of beating cancer (or any of the old diseases) was ended. All talk of extending the life-span of the rich and powerful was done (which desire the rich and powerful were no longer being shy about, though no amount of money in the world could rewrite your genetic code and save you from this Great Recession). All talk of lifehacking, of chasing your bliss, of Five Simple Tricks to Burn Off the Belly Fat ... of miracle drugs to end depression and anxiety ... all of this was done. Sure, everyone was depressed and anxious, but it does get easier when you know the exact reason why you feel the way you do.

Before Nicola’s immunity (and her daughter’s existence) came to the attention of the world’s scientists (and of the U.S. Military), Arpaxos was called to the hospital where both of Eva’s parents would spend their last days and recruited to be a father.

He loved the girl of course. She stayed with him whenever her parents traveled to the camps. He knew that she preferred his pure cynicism to her parent’s cynical idealism. This was not because she hadn’t learned compassion from her mom and dad, just that Arpaxos was the uncle who could make her laugh, and her parents rarely laughed any more. Now they were gone, and she was stuck with a cynic who would be witness to the end of all debate. Soon there would be nothing to be angry at anymore because everyone was dying, and nobody knew whom to blame. Evie would never get to see her parents let go of anger, because they did not live long enough. She did, however, get to see her uncle lose his sense of humor.

As it turned out, a legitimate adoption would be impossible. Though, in a private ceremony in her parent’s apartment two days after the death of her dad, a document was drawn up with a sparkly purple ball-point pen, wherein the two affirmed their decision before God and no other witnesses that Arpaxos would be father and caretaker to Eva until her 18th birthday, or until the end of time, whichever came first.

His niece had won (or lost) the last great global lottery, possibly to be the sole survivor of the human race. Or perhaps to be witness to something new, somehow, sometime in the next hundred-thousand years. Whenever he thought back to the moment when he lost her, he felt a grief so great that his mind quickly fled to anger. If anybody had been near enough, he could be heard to mutter to himself, with a groan, Ω, Εύα, δεν ήσουν ποτέ υποτιθέμενη να είσαι η πρώτη ή τελευταία σε τίποτα ... Oh! Eva! You were never supposed to be the first or last of anything!

Standing up from the single, rush-covered chair, the philosopher Arpaxos broke the chill silence with a sharp intake of breath. He took two shaky, sibilant steps across the marble floor in the direction of the apse, extending his hand toward the icon. At the sight of his dirt-stained fingers he drew back in a grip of shame.

But why? This was no museum. No alarm would sound if he touched the art. In fact there was little sign this tiny room had benefited in 900 years from either curate or curator. The single portrait was tilted a little too casually against the back of the chapel. White plaster walls rose to a half-dome above the narrow, uneven shelf littered with spent matches, thin beeswax candles, and a dented plastic water bottle holding decanted oil for a makeshift lamp. Leaning a little more carefully against the image were three tamata: a hand, a ship, and an eye. The hand and the eye, stamped from real silver, were tarnished and dull. Miracles had been done here. Or had been looked for.

In front of this collection, assembled like a hedge around the shrine at the center, modern analogues of these ancient concerns had been placed: there was a bricked device, itself the size of a small icon, which, when there was signal to be found, could once have accessed all the images and answers the world had to offer. An unused airplane ticket lay flat next to the phone, a key fob for a Mercedes and worry beads next to it. Also there, a spent Medalion ESPlasm injector, which had recently, but only briefly, supplanted both the Internet and the Almighty as the answer to all our hopes and fears. These latter-day votives suggested that we preferred to mediate divine provision through devices of our own design. Where the tin sailing ship said, ‘Please watch over my son while he is on the open sea’; the phone said something like, ‘Please fix the damn internet so I can return to my private devotions.’ Any way you looked at it, it was a dubious move to bring a smartphone to the local altar.

As for the image presiding over these petitions, it was no museum piece, but the likeness was technically impressive. The face was gentle, expressive, and strong, though its beauty had been somewhat mortified behind a veil of soot, and the wooden surface that bore it warped by ages spent under the eggshell white of the dome, itself cracked in many places but never fully opened to the sky.

The faded pictures of saints on the walls were more sorely abused by time and its attendants – mildew, earthquakes, and vandals each had left their mark. Centuries before, those vandals, in a brief campaign informed by deep reverence or deep hatred (no one knew for sure), had taken all the eyes. Arpaxos did not like to look at the pictures on the walls. He came for the Christ, though he had not yet acknowledged the degree to which he avoided the gaze of that one as well.

He stood there, silent, still, not willing to leave without making some contact with the image. He settled on a more hygienic salute: lifting his right hand to mirror the sign the Savior made.

Awareness of his surroundings slowly came back to him; of the small, barrel-vaulted church, the wide barren slope surrounding it, and the cliffs above and below. The close echo of the mostly empty room gave a tin-pot resonance to the sound of the sea that came in through two small windows, and of the sharp wind that carved the impermanent rocks and brought ocean moisture to the hard grasses. At one time, a seashell held this sound to the ear of a curious child; it must be the man had grown smaller than the boy, or the shell grown larger, that the adult and all his dreams could fit inside.

Turning suddenly, he moved to leave. As he stepped past the thin steel door, disappointment came upon him as it always did when crossing this threshold. Weakly, he sank into the depression worn in the old marble step, and leaned wearily against the doorpost. His hands were clenched. What he wouldn’t give to look into a living face, one not over-darkened by devotion.

Outside the town, a short distance down a dirt track, a simple structure could be seen, next to the foundation outlines of more buildings, yet to be raised. The work was slow, even with the help of the neighbors, who provided the mortar to bind the rubble of ancient buildings together again. The neighbors! She was trying to find new, less-disparaging ways to acknowledge the creeps, on whom their survival continued to depend, and whose help was, now and then, still very much appreciated. They could, if they wanted to, rely on the collective for all their needs. But the two of them preferred to work by hand, lifting and building together. Time and effort were gifts, and she treasured being alive and awake; it didn’t matter how hard the work was. The important thing was that the toil had ended. Her yearning against the crushing burden of eternal solitude was over: from now on, all effort was shared, and all effort would be joy. Her hands were becoming rough like his.

Nor did it matter that their home was currently little more than four walls and a roof – it was a real house, made of real stuff, and it soon would have many rooms. The walls were thick and painted white with lime from the lowlands to the east. They’d settled below the summit of a gentle rise: from their porch they could see hills to the west, and sometimes smell the sea. In the other direction was a long low valley with a great body of water stretching away to the north.

She soon learned that she was not the only living thing to have survived, and that the world contained somewhat more than memories and their avatars. The great redwoods, famously tall, vivid in her picture-book memory, could still be seen on the hills around the valley. She wondered how far descended these were from the trees that existed when she’d arrived. Or could it be that some of them remained alive since then, communicating ancient truths, root to root, across the forest?

A complete natural survey of the region would have to wait; there was work to do. And, anyway, for ages her view had been so constrained by the inward facing facade of her prison, the old town, that she wasn’t used to seeing great distances. She didn’t often look out across the landscape; it made her anxious to confront the expansive reach of the world.

As for the town itself? The games had ended: there was no longer any reason for her to pretend the townspeople were alive, or to interact with them at all. He also kept his interaction with that crowd to a minimum. But he did not avoid them altogether; there had been interviews between the collective and the artist, the content and significance of which were hidden from her. That suited her just fine. She didn’t have to fear any secrets with him, for on the day he became solid, he had also become (somewhat shockingly) transparent. If she wanted to, she could know his thoughts at any time.

And the in-laws? She didn’t care anymore what was going on in their machine mind. If they trusted her to live her life, she could trust them with the rest of it. There was a new honesty and practicality to all interactions with the local population. They, after all, continued to serve as liaisons with the machinery of the world, and as a kind of techno-repository of folk wisdom about how the natural world works. In that respect alone, the creeps had job security. They were all settling into this new relationship: the code had functionally adapted to become supplier to the Do It Yourself enthusiast, and occasional urgent care provider for the inevitable DIY casualty. This is probably how it should have been from the beginning.

Even before their home was finished, they’d begun designing other buildings. These didn’t look anything like the old architecture: as they envisioned a new environment, the old was slowly disappearing. The town was shrinking, but what remained felt more purposeful now, and was beginning to make a little more sense. On the night they met, at the moment of the change, the barrier that isolated the town from the wilderness had vanished. What was needed now was a new kind of building, one suited to the real world and the real people at the center of it. They were exposed: the view was better, the weather was worse; life was good.

Between the two of them there was laughter. There was joy. She felt alive and free in ways that she had not believed was possible. And he: he was alive and free in ways that should have been impossible. But alive he was, and he wore an unrestrained look of happiness on his face much of the time. There were still moments when he got angry. But, it was a human anger, and that was alright with her.

Most days, the two of them liked to sit on their porch and watch the sun set over the mountains. On one of those days, as they rested in the dimming afternoon light, and felt the early chill of the coming autumn, she was distracted by a growing sense of unease. The wide world seemed in that moment more vast, more threatening, and she shuddered and leaned against his side. Something within her signaled that change was coming, and it was coming with a familiar, gnawing sense of destiny. The last time she had felt this way, despairing of her endless cycle of sleep and forgetfulness, she was fighting the power that kept her alive. At that time, she had reconciled herself to the possibility of death as she fought for her right to live. She survived that battle: her life had become worth living, even if she was now speeding toward her own death at something like a normal pace. Was this fact just now sinking in? The knowledge that she was going to stay awake, live her life in full awareness, and die – soon enough – as the last human being?

But that wasn’t it: she had no reason to grieve her passing, or the passing of the human race. There was little reason to fear the end at all – she had experienced something worse than death already and was now fully alive. What was eating at her?

She felt his hand come to rest on hers, warm and heavy; it sent a shock through her whole body, and her insides churned with sudden understanding. With her other hand she felt her belly, and thought, with a shiver, ‘Not the last?’

The following day, the two of them descended rough steps in front of their home, and passed through the garden gate to walk out into the welcoming silence of the landscape under the cover of a sleepy, saffron-yellow sun. They came to a place, past crumbled fields of stone, where pale white flowers lined a path along the rich ground, which unfolded ahead of them like a living carpet rolled out for a queen and her consort. She didn’t exactly discourage the impression: she strode along the path with her chin lifted and her eyes lowered. He bowed with such delicacy and seriousness that she blushed. He moved aside without raising his head – and then she was embarrassed. She made a dismissive sound in her throat and shook her head with a laugh.

Kicking off her boots and shedding her stockings, she took a few, more tentative, steps in the dirt. He stooped to gather a collection of stones into a mound. She walked on, down a gentle slope in the direction of a stream.

Before she’d gotten very far, the feeling of vulnerability returned, an awareness of danger that brought her to a stop. Her skin prickled as she consciously registered the sound.

A snake. It wasn’t a sound she’d ever heard before, but the warning was obvious: a thin, dry-but-ominous rattle that stood the hair up on the back of her neck. She searched in the direction of the sound, and saw the serpent at the edge of the grass. It was huge, almost as thick as her arm and twice as long. The beast was writhing, and she felt the sound of its warning burrowing into her head. Her sweat felt cold, and she shifted, almost twisting in response. Her insides kicked in protest, before solidifying against the threat. She felt a power rise in her and knew that she had no need of fear. Primordial heat, lava-like, rose in her like anger, like wrath, like life. And as the serpent made a number of aggressive adjustments in preparation for a strike – head fixed in space; body coiling and contracting – the woman’s eyes flashed and her teeth shone in the sun.

It really was perfect. This anger. Anger would be the correct response to her endless rejection of the gift of life, her bitter ungratefulness, her grandiose selfishness. The other had finally allowed itself some feeling, and the feeling was wrath. The conscious awareness of this tectonic shift came only partially to her, because it was competing with a more primal response. She was afraid.

As she frantically tried to make sense of the change unfolding before her, she slowly began to understand ... that anything was possible. After all, it had been an act of will that made the creeps. And this will had governed the fact that these creatures remained something only a little lower than the animals, possessors of a kind of soul, but none of the spirit. And now? Everything around her, she was daring to believe, was bound not by some limitation of technology but by choice. And where there is a choice to be made, the chooser can be moved.

But to bend the will of a power such as this? One that had been frozen in code for millennia? This would take more than an act of will; it would take an act of God.

The artist stood before her now and she was not sure whether he was one ... or all ... or whether she could trust her perceptions in the least. She was barely holding on – which was dangerous because she had come right to the edge of the abyss to shout into the emptiness; and now the emptiness was answering back. What would the answer be? Only moments ago, she might have said that the artist was simply the failed experiment of a machine trying to meet a need that it couldn’t possibly understand. But now! While she was used to resistance, this was something different. Something had clearly gone wrong. Either the machine was broken ... or ...?

Could it be that he was angry at the right things? Or was he only angry at her? Angry that she had made demands on him? Angry that she insisted on some sovereignty over herself?

When he spoke again, his was the only voice. And when he spoke again it was with a paternalistic finality that betrayed the majority opinion that the woman was not to be trusted and that her perspectives on these matters would no longer be taken under consideration. Again, a single word: ‘No.’

A dam broke within her. And adrenaline rushed through her like a flood over desert clay. Before either of them knew what was happening, she was flying across the space between them. Recklessly, she launched at him with a rage that had been denied her for thousands of years. He threw his arms up in defense, but she overwhelmed him with a shout, repeated shouts, from some locked-up cell inside her, now thrown open, repeating again and again until her voice was rasping and catching in sobs: ‘It’s not enough!! It’s not enough! It’s not ... you can’t ...! I need ...!’. She set herself against him like desperate Jacob catching hold of the angel, pushing past the veil of otherness, the terrible mystery, with all the desperation of her utter poverty. She flailed at him, threw him, pinned him, pummeled him, while he struggled to free himself, crying out to be released. She refused, insisting through ragged gasps for air on the blessing she required as the last human being.

Then she had spent it all; she was empty, lungs heaving, bruised and aching in every joint. She collapsed against him, and felt powerless to move.

She teetered at the edge of consciousness, struggling to remain awake, still afraid of sleep though she had forgotten why. Then she felt she might simply die, here, in this place; and maybe for the first time, felt anger at the possibility that she, herself, might be replaced by ... nothing. That all would go quiet. This angered her.

But Quiet was still better than silence, when silence was imposed, when words were not allowed to matter. She still had something to fight for, even if the future she fought for might not include herself.

It was then that she felt a sudden stab of shame. Shame that she would believe that she deserved to be free. Shame to recognize that her grand campaign for freedom amounted to little more than a fist-fight in the dirt and no idea about what came next. She tried to push away from him. But through bloodshot and blurry eyes, she became aware of two things in quick succession. The first was that he was beneath her and defeated, though he’d fought her; he had not avoided her assault, nor did he passively submit. He’d struggled as she wrestled him to the ground! And yes, she’d won, though she had not at all been certain of the outcome. The second thing she became aware of was his eyes: though his face was also bruised and swelling, his eyes were fixed on her, and he was smiling at her through a bloody grin. She burst out crying, and wept until she was truly and completely exhausted.

He held her, his hands like sandpaper on her skin, which was now turning purple in great spots, and the two of them remained there in the dust for a long time. She could feel a growing warmth radiating between them. She slowly began to move on him in a different way. She felt as though he was truly alone with her, and that she was alone with him. How was this possible? No. No more questions.

Closing the final distance, she would become the announcing angel. The time for begging was over. She confronted the power in him with a terrible choice. With a holy zeal she insisted, until the life buried deep within him, the real presence that until today had only manifested in pale images, until this creature by sheer force of will – yes she willed it! – bore its final miracle: a singular, flesh-and-blood other. She felt his pulse quicken, suddenly caught his scent, saw something flash as if just behind his eyes. Breath passed between them.

Now she felt a change all around her – all was fading, dimming in their presence. And she saw him, now, with a shock of clarity – immediate, individual, incarnate, mortal. Awe came upon her. His was more thrilling than any face she had looked into in ages. Was it because he also, finally, had seen her? He leaned in to her, and whispered in her ear. A name. Was it her name that he spoke?

All the boundaries, the barriers, the endless space between had been erased. She had spoken the word and he had received it even though it meant a kind of death for him. A tumult kicked up and surrounded them – she might have completely missed it in that moment except for the strangeness of the phenomenon, which slowly grew in volume and intensity. She would only realize later that it was the wind. She had never before felt the wind in this place, though her town’s windmills had always turned gently and steadily above the quiet streets. At this moment, they were spinning frantically, only now in the opposite direction.