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been drawn from me. So was I.
    “I’ve only started,” you said, “and will keep company alike with brilliant Children of the Millennia and street-corner fortune tellers who deal out the cards of the Tarot. I’m eager to gaze into crystal balls and darkened mirrors. I’ll search now among those whom others dismiss as mad, or among
us—
among those like you, who have looked on something that they do not believe they should share! That’s it, isn’t it? But I ask you to share it. I’m finished with the ordinary human soul. I am finished with science and psychology, with microscopes and perhaps even with the telescopes aimed at the stars.”
    I was quite enthralled. How strongly you meant it. I could feel my face so warm with feeling for you as I looked at you. I think my mouth was slack with wonder.
    “I am a miracle unto myself,” you said. “I am immortal, and I want to learn about us! You have a taleto tell, you are ancient, and deeply broken. I feel love for you and cherish that it is what it is and nothing more.”
    “What a strange thing to say!”
    “Love.” You shrugged your shoulders. You looked up and then back at me for emphasis. “And it rained and it rained for millions of years, and the volcanoes boiled and the oceans cooled, and then there was love?” You shrugged to make a mock of the absurdity.
    I couldn’t help but laugh at your little gest. Too perfect, I thought. But I was suddenly so torn.
    “This is very unexpected,” I said. “Because if I do have a story, a very small story—”
    “Yes?”
    “Well, my story—if I have one—is very much to the point. It’s linked to the very points you’ve made.”
    Suddenly something came over me. I laughed again softly.
    “I understand you!” I said. “Oh, not that you can see spirits, for that is a great subject unto itself.
    “But I see now the source of your strength. You have lived an entire human life. Unlike Marius, unlike me, you weren’t taken in your prime. You were taken near the moment of your natural death, and you will not settle for the adventures and faults of the earthbound! You are determined to forge ahead with the courage of one who has died of old age and then finds himself risen from the grave. You’vekicked aside the funeral wreaths. You are ready for Mount Olympus, aren’t you?”
    “Or for Osiris in the depths of the darkness,” you said. “Or for the shades in Hades. Certainly I am ready for the spirits, for the vampires, for those who see the future and claim to know past lives, for you who have a stunning intellect encased beautifully, to endure for so many years, an intellect which has perhaps all but destroyed your heart.”
    I gasped.
    “Forgive me. That was not proper of me,” you said.
    “No, explain your meaning.”
    “You always take the hearts from the victims, isn’t it so? You want the heart.”
    “Perhaps. Don’t expect wisdom from me as it might come from Marius, or the ancient twins.”
    “You draw me to you,” you said.
    “Why?”
    “Because you do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written—behind your silence and your suffering.”
    “You are too romantic, friend,” I said.
    You waited patiently. I think you could feel the tumult in me, the shivering of my soul in the face of so much new emotion.
    “It’s such a small story,” I said. I saw images, memories, moments, the stuff that can incite souls to action and creation. I saw the very faintest possibility of faith.
    I think you already knew the answer.
    You knew what I would do when I did not.
    You smiled discreetly, but you were eager and waiting.
    I looked at you and thought of trying to write it, write it all out . . . 
    “You want me to leave now, don’t you?” you said. You rose, collected your rain-spattered coat and bent over gracefully to kiss my hand.
    My hands were clutching the notebooks.
    “No,” I said, “I can’t do it.”
    You made no immediate judgment.
    “Come