CHAPTER XIII: TWO BITES

   I was still drowsy, for I thought that after coffee I went back to sleep a bit, and perhaps, in a stormy lethargy, I woke up suddenly, perhaps screaming. I guess that it would be 9 o'clock in the morning. At that time, the vision of a new face attacked me as unexpectedly as a storm of warm wind. The newcomer was a man who would be, in addition to more or less my age, of a stature similar to mine, or perhaps was somewhat shorter. Brown hair and brown eyes, a beige corduroy jacket, brown trousers and  boots, and a pretty dirty clear shirt which, however, seemed to retain the light of day. He seemed a tree trunk well clinging to the earth. So I saw him for the first time, retaining the first sun in his worn clothes and his radiant smile. He smelled a bit of sweat and enough of dirt, but his soul struggled to peek through his filth. Still drowsy, my thought lost its clarity and I failed to guess his name when I greeted him:

− "Bruce?" –I hopefully asked.

− "No −he said shaking hands− Luke. Did you expect to meet us all?"

− "I wanted to meet you all. Forgive the confusion."

− "There is no reason to do so. I haven’t followed the chronological order either, with which we were going to see you, once we knew that you wanted to see us -in his gaze you could see some anxiety, as if they were going to reproach him− but I guess you know that the others were on guard at the door in case your state of health worsened, and I think I have heard a cry."

− "I mighat have had a nightmare. Well, let me try again. Let’s see if this time I am right –I ventured− you're the seventh and you're married to Lucy, I think that she is the third."

− "She is actually the third −his smile gave me security. I had the impression that with him there would be no subjects that we could not talk− and it is true that we are married, but by the laws of the Earth, without any paper showing it. But she is my wife, and you must have heard that we are going to be parents very soon."

− "Yes, I've heard it –and I had to say something urgently so that he couldn't think I censored this situation. As it is true, Protch, that I had no objection, let alone when I met Luke and later Lucy− and have you got a name for your child?"

− "Yes. We have two names: if it is a girl we will call her Kirsten, as her grandmother's, my wife's mother's sister; if it is a boy, Paul, like my father. But you might think that bringing a child into this mud is not the wisest thing to do mud."

   It was the first difficult question to which he made me reply. How to find an answer without offending him and which could also express my own thoughts?

− "And why not?"−I answered with enough conviction, but my transparent face had more effect than my words− to bring a child to life, the only security that parents need to have is that they will love the child and that they will know how to take care of it, and of that I am sure."

− "Do you know what they say about you?"

− "I guess it is nothing good. Years ago I offended Miguel, but mainly John. I wish I could retrace my path paved with offences –I said ashamed− but Miguel and John have given me a much needed slap in the face."

− "A slap?"

− "I've failed to explain. It is as if these past three days they had given me a slap like those given to those who are asleep, telling them something like this: wake up, you child, there is a life full of promise as an ocean of beauty that is awaiting you."

-"The fact that you had offended them I did not know. However that explains why now they only have good words for you. It is true that these three days all of us wanted to meet Nicholas, or Nike, as now I know that you prefer being called. But we had some references. Rather than words it was... let’s see if I can explain it, yes, it was that in our two mates' faces I could see were impressed. So calm down if you ever thought that we could have a bad impression of you. By the way, I have still not asked you how you are."

   After informing him on this matter, and after he explained to me that now, with his pregnant wife, he was going to the street, morning and afternoon, he added:

− "But I will stay a while to make you company, if you really want."

   I needed it. Not only because I didn’t want to be alone, but because, although from the first moment I felt I still didn't know anything about this unknown man, and some things about him could, perhaps, annoy me, after all his company soothed. It is difficult to explain, Protch, but it all started because we needed each other. And the road between need and like has a short walk. I had to ask him what I has been intrigued about for several days.:

− "Luke... Let me ask you a question. You'll see, I hope there's no offense, but Miguel and John these days have not said any word, and... It is this: with what name would you define yourself?"

− "With what name would I define myself? –He didn’t seem to understand but didn’t take long to see clearly− Ah, now I can see what you mean. You want to know what name I give, say, to my profession, isn't it?"

− “Yes, I mean that."

− "No offense –he calmed me− A beggar, of course. It is what I say at least, but don’t think that all those who are use it. There are those who prefer to say something different and say something like "those who live in the street", or those who prefer not to say anything. You see, not all beggars live on the street: a few stay with a relative in a home with a good roof, but need then makes them outstretch their hands, I think that it is where the word beggar comes from in other languages. Here we all use it, all of us, Miguel and John too. If they have not used that word, it would be out of respect for you. It could offend you to spend a few days with people who use that word -since he observed a protest in my, again, transparent face, he added−: but as it seems not to be your case, you can call me Luke, or you can call me, without offence, a beggar. Whatever your heart might ask you."

   It was useless to not say what I was thinking:

− "I don't know whether I have a heart, Luke"

− "Come on –he said to me with a smile that pierced my flesh−, everybody has one."

− "I suppose that so it will be. Or perhaps it is that I do not know where it is. I do not mean the place, but the association that is usually done between it and feelings. Perhaps, if I ever had one, I have lost it. Well, sorry, I don't want to bother you with what, surely, you will not be interested in."

− "Perhaps I can understand you better than you think, and certainly you are not annoying. I have also gone through something similar, or say that I'm still going through. But believe me when I tell you that your heart is always found. Perhaps you have the fear that I have to lose it again."

− "It will be much easier to lose it in my place, among raiders. In other countries I know we are called sharks. It is a better name. I don't know whether Miguel, or mostly John, have told you something about what my job is −his look, also sometimes transparent, made me understand that they had−. Sharks: they thus tend to call us. And they are right. Like sharks, we are somewhat predatory, become fat with the blood of our preys, and our teeth can destroy. The rest of people flee from us and they are terrorized; with good reason, because we don’t only eat when we are hungry. It is a derogatory word, but certainly very suitable. And it has come, in my case, with an addition of a sharpe tongue and disdainful language to everyone. I think the word that defines me is arrogance. And I have certainly had my fair reward: loneliness, pain and emptiness."

− "Nike –he said to me warmly, calming me− a lost heart appears like that, with the first blood. Which pumps the first self-criticism –and he sighed-. You got a heart. You, at least. Perhaps me too. It has been working the past few months. But I would like to know something more. It seems that you can talk of everything."

    It was the same I had thought about him. The first impression I had from Luke is that, although I still did not know why, we looked very much alike. Both of us had that unmistakable aversion to what we had been. For that reason, although it took me some time to know, also for Luke I was necessary. It was as if contemplating me, he was watching the same penumbra.

− "But I would like to know more about your name; I had not heard it before."

− "Neither have I –maybe it was the first time when I was able to smile−. I don't know for sure. As you already know, my name is Nicholas, but I had never heard anyone named like that before. I think that a former servant transformed it into Nike. And even if perhaps I have heard rumors about the reason of the name, I'm not entirely sure. Something to do with victory, I think. If so, she erred. All my life is failure."

− "Nike –he said when he saw my continuous laments− enough of crying. I'm wondering... Yes, I have the time... but I don't know how long you'd be willing to hear me before I end up tiring you. In fact, I'd like to tell you the story of my life. ”

  Every event those days was like open nails ready to make a painful incision in my flesh. Everything went through my muscles and upon entering, lacerated me, but just then it was when they began to tear. After three days I had had a new start, the day that I was 29 I started anew. I'd like to tell you the story of my life... Luke was afraid there could be parts of his story I did not want to hear, episodes that he was ashamed of. And I was... like that almost sleeping beach which is terrified by a gigantic wave that can devastate it, like the mountain which sees what it thinks it is pernicious cattle which will deprive it of pastures. But the coast does not know that the furious tongue will clean its sand; nor does the mountain know that from the attack of the enraged cattle will come the new harvest. I started again unaware that no one brings you a compass for that hour of deep disorientation. I promised to listen to him: I didn't know whether I had any feelings, but it seemed that the first rays were arising from the desired heart.

   He began narrating the facts I've already told you, but I must say something else, because we lack a perspective. If I don’t explain to you what I was feeling, you will never know me. His life, in short, took him little more than one hour to tell and I thanked him for thinking I was a good listener to know it and, eventually, to judge it. It was unlike and yet so similar to mine. I was finding, not meaning to, parallels with my dark journey. And I was being moved by what I had already sensed it was my need: someone to surround with the arms of my affection, whom to love without barriers of circumstances or surnames. It was a new bite, the most unexpected one. Because the danger of liking when nobody has explained it before, without the security of having any heartbeats, is that blood might confuse the veins and lose its way. Perhaps because love always begins like that, at a crossroads prepared lovingly, but perhaps for other travelers, and one is in the path by chance, in search of other flowers, and sees that roses die and its onslaught comes. But water that fertilizes comes without the land knowing it has to be first soaked up in order to be able to flourish, and I did not know that Luke's fruitful water was going to be rain one day.

    His childhood was, as almost all of them are, unaware of its own happiness. The nebula of his first steps dissolving in his first gift. When he was five, Margaret, his mother's fruitful womb, opened showing the ribbon of a new surprise: his brother James Prancitt.

− 'My name is in fact Luke Prancitt' −he said.

   But sometimes a watch which is not working is preferable to the fact that its hands move again, because the cycle of their hands always end up marking the hour of pain. About to enter adolescence, still beardless, unexpectedly a cruel morning hurricane took forever the fertile machinery of his mother's worn heart.

   A valley of tears that did not flow into any paradise, promised or imagined. And Luke openly cried, evoking that time of icy solitude. And soon my ice began to crystallize with his and made the first diamond with which he and I ended up creating a stained glass window. He had known her, and cried her. I never had my mother's embrace. But both of us were the sons of the same absence and our tears for so long had lacked the same salt that crystallized us. I felt his desert as if it was mine and this beegar's blood, for he did have a heart, began to bathe me.

   Then there came the search for faith, hard to find because his father had lost it. The holy books were not enough now. They were years calling all doors to beg for it and all were aggressively closed. Under these conditions he could hardly turn his sore feet into a walking stick for his father. They could only walk hesitant unto a youth that had come prematurely and cracked. Without ways out or faith, he sought his impossible breath in the air force, where the breath of stability without strong beliefs sometimes blew into his unprotected parachute.

   Poor flame that illuminates timidly before finding its candle. What has become of you, poor Nicholas, destined to die before reaching an old age, because you wanted to give birth to the boy Nike, who struggled to be born among mourners? What happened to your sumptuous bedrooms? Where have you ever lost your forgotten lands? If eveything in my life was cold, I had surely been traveling in search of heat and I had left the splinters forgotten with which Luke was preparing an unexpected fire. I don't know whether so as not to burn I took my face away of his glow so that he might not notice that his light had managed to reach me and his heat was roasting me. Although a lightning had torn my skies by surprise, he had left me enough time to see what lands there were down on the plain, foreseeing a long and necessary reflection which while I heard him I postponed, but which waited its turn trembling. Because if what I had just seen was true, and how was it possible? The dimly seen plain was watered by unexpected rivers. Therefore I tell you, Protch, that you beware the beggar love, which has the habit sometimes to crawl in our miserable tents, but which was never educated in our patience, and you can find it accommodating in the living room when you are still debating whether to let it into the lobby.

   Moby Dick had awakened the need in me to read, but Luke’s literature was coming to me without a book. Honest pages that did not seek to transcend but to help me explain and understand. And it let me be that reader with dignity who lurks in the same landscapes with the hope of swimming with you in the same waters, if warm are the waves. And maybe he was reading with me, both as implacable voracious readers impatiently waiting for new chapters. And I've never closed the cover of the book Luke, whose pages I have not yet finished to decipher. So even ignoring whether I had a heart, but suddenly pleading that this beggar could not see in what unusual direction it was starting to beat, I paid attention again to his words.

   Still waiting for an uneducated faith to settle in his parachute canopy, distracted as he smelled the wind of heights, a new blow almost made him crash. And not very sure that I wanted to hear what remained, he interrupted his story on his father's death to tell me:

− "You won’t think well of me when I continue, but I want to tell you. But I won't do it without giving you the power to judge me. Because you believe you have been miserable, but I know that I have been. Nike, have you ever heard the word bonehead? I now only say bald man, but I used that word because I was one."

   The fascist shinheads and the anti-fascists. The boneheads and all their world of bigotry and contempt. It was not easy to see even the ghost of one in Luke, who was now only warm sand and calm waves. But I had no grounds to judge him. I only saw the man he had become later, who without violence was beginning to be my blood red. So I heard him surprised, but calmly and with an umbrella to protect me. I was beginning to understand why he had thought that we were so alike.

   He didn't want to wear any masks or compassion with himself before me. Only vaguely he hinted at me his deep sadness and his lack of faith as the slabs that had been installed in his road, which led him to hatred. Lost evenings of watching football matches among insurgent walks to their lair in Churchway. Heated fights with punks who did not avoid them, friends that never were, lost steps. But he could not hide the disdain with which he uttered bald men; nor could he hide me that he had already apologized to his few victims, some of whom forgave him, others did not, but he didn't know he had already put and end to all that when apologizing, because true forgiveness he had never expected.

   In that river with black blood he had only spent six months, stalking unwary beggars and poor foreigners, until Miguel and John's careless passion had made them forget where they were and started to naively kiss on the street as these wily birds were crossing  the street. Clearly marked and perfect victims: two men who loved each other in rags: a double sign of unforgivable sins.

− "But if you had been patient in getting this far, Nike, I pray that you hear me now. Because my head was soon to recover its hair. In my most shameful hour my motif by Verôme found me."

   Motif by Verôme. I could not know what he was talking about and so I told him. The explanation he gave me then, Protch, I still remember letter by letter, and due to remembering it so well, so I told you the first day. Even if I subsequently heard new definitions of this spectrum, none, maybe, was so successful. But you don’t have to recite the psalms that are by now a part of my Bible.

   Verôme awaited him on Knights Hill, where Miguel, precisely him, would transform him, recovering some lessons for him which he had already forgotten. Miguel since then in his desk, and Lucy suddenly appearing in a bend of fog, to be forever within the books of love that he was going to start reading. And with heart beats, when he remembered where he had left his heart, his decision of becoming a parent and to stay, a beggar at the end, in a canvas of wisdom with her, and other five souls protecting him in the same esplanade. He also spoke of his short time in Knights Hill and their move, somewhat reluctant, to that prodigy of the Torn Hand. And there he stopped, saying that he could not continue without my judgement.

   And how could I censor with no guide his road of foul-smelling darkness, if my stinking words toward the same men had emerged out of the same sewer?

− "I don't know what you expect of me, Luke, but sorry, because I neither want nor have any arguments to judge you. One day you will also hear where my repentance comes from. And to the dark spot whence we come neither of us would like to return, but you already have another road. And if it weren't because of its smell of asphalt, that makes us different, I would say that we are twins.   Twins... Thus began the names Luke and I gave to each other. Very different were the fathers that had given birth to us, but one was our mother. Breastfed in the same desert, we had walked the dust of the same path and both were looking for a crossroads that led us out of it.

− "Nike –he interrupted my thoughts unexpectedly−, I have already told you my story. And although I have things to do, I could stay longer. Do you really want me to stay?"

− "I really wish you stayed awhile more –and I didn't know how to conceal what I already was aware I was feeling−. I almost beg you. I think we understand each other very well."

− "You haven’t told me whether my story has helped you."

− "Yes, Luke, I have a lot to reflect, but now I know that I am not alone, as I thought, there's another human being that is going through the same doubts. It is really worth to know that you've already got it; now I'll have to see if I'm able, or maybe I must think whether there are things in me that I want to bury. It could be that what I change today will return tomorrow, and I never stop being the same asshole."

− "It could not be otherwise –it was his most used expression, as if it were his faith that everything was predetermined−, everything you say is familiar to me. I revive reflected in your anguish. It is as if we had known each other all our lives and so we are talking now. As if you were my miracle worker, my surgeon, a shard that has loosened from a glass, as I... don't know, the blood of my blood. I needed to meet you."

− "I understand perfectly. I feel the same –I didn’t understand how I could speak like that to a perfect stranger, but it was what I was feeling−, it is as if we were brothers."

Brothers. I could not know yet that I was destined to share with him my new childhood days. Two parallel lives. The absence of the same parents. A path of mud and puddles, dirty and grim, the same need to find the trees, the gentle river, the flowers of hope, leading to another path. From a different birth but from the same source, I would always feel my brother Luke's wounds, identical desire to share in the future the same school, the same backpack. Brothers know and love each other, accompany in future battles, will mourn and will comfort together. Nothing of him could, in the future, be foreign to me.

   He abruptly stopped the chiaroscuro of my erratic thoughts:

− "Would you like another coffee? –he surprised me− It would take me very little to prepare it. But I don't know whether we have any milk"

   I interrupted him to say that I usually had it without milk. When I asked him whether he had time, he told me that he would devote me some more, because that day his pantry was full.

   His pantry was full –I thought when I was alone−. I realized that he would not lack food that day. Upon returning he would tell me that Lucy should eat better now, so her breasts were fertile, but added he could remain by my side all morning. Because he had liked me and wanted to be with me. That was the day that I ate better, Protch, but I can't remember very well what food. Perhaps, a vampire for the first time, I had enough with Luke’s blood. Then there came a fleeting early impression, without any intention yet of making it come true. The indignity of begging to eat, fatigue and humiliation, the streets... and for me the anxiety of knowing that they fed me with it, but not living it.

   A natural thought led me to John. I would have liked to know so many things. How he had lived the streets, his first days? And an atrocious flash scorched the bread, the placid breakfast, I was having. A dirty memory of a bar, two beggars and a hurtful mouth: mine. I had the security of having fed them with an offense, but were they not two? To this day I have not been able to decide whether I also insulted them for beggars

   When Luke returned with a new coffee, in my treacherous face he saw such embarrassment that he could not help asking me what I was thinking. I told him crestfallen. He tried, once again, to calm me down.

− "I do not think you did, Nike, because, frankly, I don't think that you had then met many beggars, and may not have had many occasions to think about us and despise us. But I did insult them. Miguel and John soon forget and redeem you if they can see a different man in the same skeleton. Don’t think about it anymore. Get out of your ashes and outline a new Nike dressed in a fire capable of building.  You have enough fuel.

   The conversation could have been repeated, but my thoughts reached a new point. Fire and fuel. What I had drunk in three years could have burned me. But in those first four days I had been able to attend my baptism and the water I was poured out was a brief lucidity, a desire to be a new man if I could see, as that beggar had just said, I had some fire capable of building. I wanted to fly over the fog that was over my grove and keep the flight on my greenwood, if it wasn't withered. But how long would this flight of sobriety to the next drop last? Unexpected wood, things that I would never have been able to see, was growing on me and I didn’t want new chips to escape me. Even with pain, it should be flowering and I could not darken the flight to the new insects who wished to inhabit me. That morning I decided for the first time burying away the poisonous concoctions, if not forever, because I did not dare, miserable wreck, to think in a very long time, at least for those eleven days. I did not believe I would be able to, but I had to try; and the psalmody of the beggar uncovered to help me.

   He was about to say something, but I interrupted him:

− “Luke, tell me something more –I was going to say of you− of the seven, of your life. If I have understood correctly, you have been here since November. And since then they have been..."

− "Nine months –he cleared up−, throughout pregnancy, as my child, but I don't know whether I will be born with it or have already been born. And of all this time of desired rags, what do you want to know? What are you wondering?"

− "Everything you want to tell me, as far as you don't have to go."

   He spoke of a fruitful time that had been clay for him. And he just mentioned, briefly, the ones he called beggars from outside, the fellow travelers who were not of the Torn Hand. Many that he was afraid to love because he could see them with a cloud in their minds, with an abrasive river in their throats that would evaporate in more cloudy skies, with their heart in a cemetery. What linked them all was the elusive gaze of those he named as on the other side, the same indignity in the currency. He spoke to me of lonely sheets in "the house" and gregarious charity in the RASH. I knew then of that ghost hitherto unknown, because if ever they had named it, I had forgotten it. He didn't seem to love it much but the street, he told me, is the mother and the whore, and shows its two faces, the bird that seems to shelter its chickens but unexpectedly goes mad and pecks at them. But he also had good moments to tell. He had gone with Lucy to places that she mentioned as her previous abodes. And so he met Wrathfall Bridge, where the Kilmourne came humming from its agony at Rage Bridge. Luke stopped a second there to look at me, as if what he wanted to tell me was going to hurt me, and since then I was never sure I have not betrayed myself. Lucy and him making love below the same throbbing cosmos, fouling of stars, the moon as soap, scented of lavender.

   But the one you really love you do not want to transform. And I accepted him with Lucy, as his transformative sap. He never hid me his love, and for that I loved them too. If something I had to beg, it wasn't him I had to beg to. He continued speaking to me of river and nudity, new and assumed pores, a spring which had been warm and March like a cotton on your skin that rather than cover blood, spills it in a stream, the stars the night sticks, spring the fan.  

   I listened to him with chapped lips, my skin with stretched marks of old sores, blood darkened by heartless toxins. A humidity of alcohol had desensitized me and if I never had a night like him of a March wet with moon, is because I sought moisture in bottles filled with dew that was not the one which the stream shrubs drank. He had cleaned himself with Lucy, his river; I was dirty like the bridge that, when being crossed, promises a bath in the river. For a few days, at least, I deserved to swim in humidity without poisons. It wouuld be worth crossing that bridge without darkness and see what lights hesitated on the other shore. I doubted somewhat frightened in its wood, but solid were its buttresses, which allowed me to ford it.

− "Until that day I was fond of her –he continued− but being fond means to stay in the serenity of the river. To love, which came later, is the desire to capture each animal swimming, each bouquet of turbulent water, every sandy shore, and every pebble soaked in its surface”.

   All he talked about was water and I liked swimming and I wanted to get wet. And his blood, a troubled flow, was lifting stones where to secure me a new heart in my muddy wetlands. Which if in three days I had sensed in the waning phase, entered the new phase now, with hardly a light for its shine, but already influencing my tides. I interrupted my thoughts of water and his explanation of being fond of and love: two thugs who look like twins, but have not come from the same birth. Not having completed a sluice gate so that on that channel the blood that was already beginning to create my new heart could flow, a heart born in the dark, I spoke the first wave of urgency:

− "I was wondering− In reality I was wondering whether I would be not going too far, whether the unborn child that was in my thoughts had any possibility to live− whether our friendship is possible."

− "Nike −he said with another smile-. For you there seem to be no impossible issues. So far you do not know the goddess Urgency, but she is already whispering at your side. Tell me if it be possible, our circumstances are very different..."

− "But not unlikely..."

− "You didn’t let me continue. But I was going to say something like that. If you think so, it will be possible. When you've gone, there will be no distances, because just meeting we have both assumed our previous life is mud, and if we want it to be fertile, no frenzied tornado can destroy our sculpture. Friendship is born of the same need, the same search, and if a destructive wind comes, its whirlwind we will turn into a pirouette and its devastation into breath."

   Friendship of the breath on your side and a stick for the road, friendship: wings for flight. To make it possible, I should persevere in the acceptance of freedom and respect. And finally Luke left, saying a devastating goodbye, my friend, and I started feeling his absence as if Bruce’s tent had new cracks.

   His words had been water, and with its dirt, not being aware, were creating the mud where the mould was that was stabilizing my heart which I did have but which swam lost in my chest. But in order to take its proper place new blood was necessary, which Luke donated so that red it would glow and was never purple.

   If Miguel and John had been busy planting, Luke had been in charge of watering the fields, but I knew there could only be harvesting if I was not afraid of the new lights that I perceived on the other side, because the bridge I was going through was solid but unsteady with slippery pebbles, and the river beach that I could make out opposite oscillated in my vision, flavoured of unexplored trails. July died and in its coffin it carried the ashes of Nicholas Siddeley down the river as the child Nike watched them frightened on the bridge.

    Because Luke had spoken to me of the other side, mine then, and I didn't know whether to stay in this bank or to cross. And how to recognize my hunger if I had always been in my opulence busier in porcelain than in food? Luke had given me water, blood, light, the necessary appetite, but drops soaked, blood froze me, his light dazzled, hunger made me faint, and the bridge could either be reached by a rainbow or collapse in this storm.

   If the clarity on the other side of the bridge that I had been able to glimpse was consistent enough, how could so many things have been? Perhaps my throat always occupied in drinking darkness prevented me to discover what I had not seen in 29 years. That day I did not read Moby Dick, but when Luke left my desire began to be a whaler. My heart, my white whale, and the same obsession to find it... thar she blows. No hurry, Ahab, for perhaps when you no longer chase it, because you've just found it, death will come. July died giving birth to Nike, who was born trembling and startled.

   To be born, I had to bury many things. The poisoned long nights, the dawns of delusions, bitter hangover awakening, my pale monsters who never came to flesh, the lost years in the drunken swings of each day. So much darkness... You should allow the sun to follow its course, away from the toxic moon that eclipsed it. I had already had the purpose of being sober in those 11 days. Only then I took the decision not to drink again. But the harbour of arrival had no lighthouse. Shy fireflies, somewhat terrified, on the coast of departure were hardly shining. I would never drink again. My mind was busy now with new delusions.

   But I took long to see Luke’s more disconcerting light. And no teacher had told me that you should not lose time in seeing whether you're in love, but in knowing what to do with this love later. I could accept it or not, but I would not change the silhouette that I perceived in the mirror. Never had I been able to imagine love bed could be rocked by male hands. And they shook it violently, before the child knew which one was its cradle. They had covered it, in addition, with rags, but that I never minded. In reality, there was nothing to decide. The perception was clear; I just needed to learn to dance with its ghost and see if I could accept it.

  There were flying, obsessive then, images of countless women, and without mercy, I began to analyze, one by one, what I had felt. I saw clearly that I had never loved Anne-Marie, and down the same drain left many former faces, but I could not detach from Alison's light, a newcomer to this city. Maybe I was obsessed and confused it with love for the frustration of knowing that she never loved me. I thought that if her drawing finally faded too, no luminaries of the past would be left, and maybe then I would have been playing with them, never abusing them, but really treating them badly. What I tell you in such summary lines occupied me almost all day 30. That idea and giving up alcohol. But there was something else.

   The lights on the harbour of departure began dancing ghostly. They looked like a kaleidoscope where a single silhouette could be perceived but various images. A clear face, eyes that had bitten me once... but when? Lips in a cup of coffee, an illuminated star smile. Suddenly I almost started to scream when to all these effigies I could give a name: John! So that was that. One morning in January, an insult, a farewell that had seemed permanent. I didn't know whether I wanted to see it, but that new light explained everything. I never minded the rags, but to see him in Miguel's arms. Perhaps that is why I insulted him. Perhaps therefore I began to drink, poor castaway Nicholas, without a buoy to cling to. I had a heart, but had not helped me at all. It was not a bright and clear mirror; it did not reflect anything. I now had a heart and a mirror, but the image stunned. So Luke was not the first man in my life. John struggled to make his name clear in the first pages. Or perhaps they were not the first. But the prologue Simon was the last thing I wrote that day.

   Perhaps your birthday is not the best time to write. It was better to feel Luke in the green of the tent, in the absence of my hands, in the tumultuous awakening of my wound blood, in every memory of his voice and his words. He had taught me to see things in a different way, and I could not know where my life was going, but I was going to a path of discovered beauty. If that day my motif by Verôme had begun, Luke had surely been the pianist who plays all the scores. And I wanted to hear his fruitful melody, as long as Nike lived, the child listener, and hoped his new notes wouldn’t die in my heart. I remembered the name of where I was and thought that they would not die, but if they did not soon grab the light, I could lose my hands. I began to enjoy the harmony of my long motif by Verôme, but also music bit.


 

   He could lose his hands. Nike had been somewhat carefree and would have let them into a burrow. And the Scorpion bit him. And his bite had been more deadly than the mythological snake, because the stinger could never be extracted. And, the balance of his first three days had started to be the unexpected bite, from Libra to Scorpio, a Scorpion still without the fire of Antares, which he still did not know, but which already radiated in its domains, the summer sky, Nike's first starry summer.


 

−Say what you want, Protch. But say something soon please.

-So you fell in love with Luke. I had not guessed it. And what else do you want me to tell you, Nike? You did not know whether to cross the bridge. Something you have told me that there was a storm and perhaps you needed many things. An umbrella, a blanket and a light. And if you haven't found them yet, I can lend them to you with my true friendship when you most need it. Dare to cross that bridge too.

   I had not said this yet. I first needed Luke to radiate in the story that I was telling:

−It could not be otherwise. Thank you, Protch.