the artificial fire

“I don’t want you to be kind to me. I want you to act as if you’ve never met me before.”

“I would hardly allow an intoxicated stranger into my home at this hour, whether he were a patient of mine or not.”

“I’m not drunk.” John struggles to keep his voice down — there are children here, after all, even if they’re locked away in some distant suite at this time of night. No one will find them here; that’s what he’s banking on.

“Aren’t you? You’ve come to me with no vest and no gloves.” Laszlo’s eyes make an inventory of him, article by article. “I don’t believe you’re even wearing socks.”

And indeed he isn’t. Fresh out of some set of rooms that were not his own, with barely the presence of mind to rake a comb through his hair. “Coming here, I was — hasty. I need you, Dr. Kreizler. But I’m not drunk.”

Those words, like links in a silver chain: I need you.

Kreizler carries himself more warily without his heavy coat — a more insolent posture, maybe, daring John to look. His hair falls across his forehead like an errant comma; he wears a sumptuous dressing-gown trimmed in red silk, hanging close over the trimline of his shoulders, but from beneath the starched stiffness of his collar still protrudes. The incongruity would be humorous if it didn’t suggest a certain state of abortive formality. John doesn’t know how he thought he’d find him here. Fully dressed, perhaps.

Laszlo’s dark eyes flash with annoyance. “Come with me.”

John follows him down the narrow corridor into the library that doubles as a sitting room. Their blackboard stands in its usual place, and the ranks of books lying open are intimately familiar from their daylit work, the photographs in their paper frames, the innumerable ashtrays. It’s impossible to be in a room with so many dusty books and brass railings and not think of his own delinquent boyhood running up and down polished hallways.

Kreizler keeps a little gilt box of cigarettes for guests. Quite a humane gesture. John draws one out, privately hoping his offensively gloveless hands will tarnish the interior, or ruin the tobacco and really give Laszlo what-for. His hands are shaking. The match won’t strike at first, and the tremor in his hands is so severe he can hardly bring the flame to his cigarette without extinguishing it — the one thing he couldn’t bear would be friendly intervention, but there’s no sign of any such action from Laszlo, he keeps his hands firmly to himself. No doubt as a cripple Laszlo has his own private way with such gestures, and for another man to intervene would be nothing but an insult. John finds himself pacing without meaning to, anything to remind himself that he is upright and in motion.

Laszlo watches him — watches him suck desperate draughts of smoke into his lungs and criss-cross the carpet with his steps, watches how his fingers nearly crumple the white paper wrapping. He breaks the silence only quietly.

“You’re not well, John.”

John grins at him brutally, like a caged ape. “No, I’m not.” His legs feel as if they will give way under him. He is rattling with sick energy, not the reassuring looseness of liquor but unbearable wiry energy.

“Delirium tremens, perhaps. When was your last drink?”

“I don’t remember.” Terrifically haughty, for a lie. Laszlo must see it for what it is, because as intended, it irks him.

“If you think being dishonest with me will save your dignity, I assure you it has achieved quite the opposite. Why are you here, John?”

Moore draws in a deep breath of smoke, deep enough to drench his throat, and lets it go in a thin plume. In for a penny, in for a pound. No doubt Laszlo already believes he is reaping the proceeds of vice, or that he is fraying under the stresses of burdensome sobriety. “I’ve hardly slept since Thursday night. I smell flowers in empty rooms. I see things. I must be going mad.”

“You aren’t going mad,” Laszlo says, with infuriating calmness. “But you must be terrifying your poor grandmother.”

“I dream of it. I told her I’ve been with you, when really I’ve been — out.”

On the street, shuttling between whatever haunts will have him. He can’t drown his sorrows in whisky so he’ll drown them between the legs of a woman. How contemptible he must be in Laszlo’s eyes. Coming here was a mistake, when Laszlo can see in his face what a spree he’s been on, and what a wretched state it’s left him in. He needs something from his friend, something that will put this to rest.

“Sit down, I won’t have you collapsing on the Turkish carpets.”

“You’ve always been such a gracious host.”

“I’ll fix you something. Not,” Kreizler says warningly, “a drink. Roll up your sleeve.”

Left to himself, John obeys the order like a grim duty. He settles in and fumbles through the awful shakes to fold back his sleeve, baring his arm like a soldier preparing for an amputation. He’s going to need more than cigarettes to get through this. It seems like only yesterday that he awoke in these rooms in a similar state of disarray, only yesterday that he’d been wiping Sally’s lipstick off his face. Conscious awareness is a cruelty John does not need.

Laszlo returns with a slim leather-bound case. When he settles beside John the case unfolds to disclose the fearful needle — and a cluster of glass ampoules lined up in a row, banded with colored paper.

“Not chloral hydrate,” John says. A bolt of cold pierces his guts.

“No, not chloral, but paraldehyde. I find it more agreeable. It can be taken by mouth, but the taste is unpleasant.”

His hands are cool and soft, but broad. He turns over John’s arm, feeling for a vein without a trace of hesitance. Laszlo is the only man John can imagine being touched by without shuddering now, what a perverse state of affairs.

Laszlo, who holds him at arm’s length even at the best of times. Laszlo, who cannot bear anything that might smack of greater intimacy than a night at the Met. He takes his time readying the needle, allowing the anticipation to grow. John cannot still his trembling, not even with effort, and the animal closeness of him itches.

“One dose now and one later,” Laszlo says imperiously. “If I deem it necessary, and only then.”

“You make a better doctor than a nurse, Kreizler. Your bedside manner leaves something to be desired.”

“Do you think so? Shall I go and wake Mary?”

“There’s no need for that.” It would shock her to see him this way. With Laszlo’s hands on him, maybe. John shuts his eyes and waits for it — the prick of the needle, the cold push of the solution into his veins. The backs of his fingers are stuck in a restless motion against the outside of his leg.

“How long have you been like this? How long have you been experiencing these disturbances in your sleep?”

“Since Paresis Hall.”

The needle slips in as John says those words, as he says the name of the place — it must be by design. Laszlo has seen the place for himself, he’s seen what desperation does to these boys. John wishes he could burn the place to the ground, every splintered board and makeshift crib of it. Burn down Shang Draper’s place, put the torch to the Slide. Set the inmates loose and let them eat New York alive, let them tear to pieces its glittering financiers and paint themselves in their blood. John can only pity the boys who haunt these houses, robbed of every boyhood freedom. But the swanks and swells who frequent the place for the maintenance of their cherished vices — those men he can hate.

Laszlo’s manner is infuriatingly patient. He withdraws the needle and presses a square of cotton wadding to the site of it, but the sensation is negligible. “Much of what you saw there must have been shocking to you. It would be shocking to most men of your class.”

“I’ve been to a brothel before, you know I have. Women, too, wear paint.”

“New Paresis Hall holds surprises, even for men of your class who are accustomed to — low entertainments.”

Listen to him, so pure and clean, smirking past the words like a schoolmaster. He’d never dream of setting foot inside such a place unless it were to assemble a case study on its denizens. Someone should have taken him someplace when he was still a Harvard undergraduate, one of those places on Crosby Street or Bond Street where the girls speak French and play the violin for you before they take their clothes off. They would have debauched him there, thoroughly ruined him, cripple or not. He’d be a different man today.

The feeling of relief is creeping up on him — his twitching seems to still, or is he only imagining that it does? From the back of his skull a spreading feeling of coolness has begun to arise, a pleasant stillness in his thoughts despite Laszlo’s insolent manners stirring him up. Like sinking into a plush Turkish sofa in some first class parlor-house, waiting for the hostesses to turn to you and fill your glass.The first push of relief, and only Laszlo is spoiling it.

“I’m certainly accustomed to such things, aren’t I? I’ve been going to cathouses since I was sixteen years old. Admittedly, generally those of a higher tenor, but the founding conceit is the same.”

“You were robbed under one of the oldest ruses known to mankind. Drugged by the house and then rolled by its employees. Stevie found you in quite a state. Have you never experienced such a thing before?”

John’s face prickles with anger. “No, I have not. When a woman of negotiable affection has wanted the contents of my billfold, she’s asked me nicely for them.”

“How chivalrous of you. The men and boys employed at Paresis Hall or the Slide have graduated from a state of privation that your accomplished young ladies may never have dreamed of. They steal because it is their occupation. They steal in order to survive.”

“I am aware of that,” John says sharply. “If you recall, I’m not a complete babe in the woods.

“Then what have you to be ashamed of? You went to investigate Gloria’s fate and you were taken off guard by Paul Kelly and his cronies. No lasting harm came to you. Did it rob you of useful illusions about the nature of our work? The working conditions of the children this man preys upon? Their nature?”

The boy, that painted creature on his knees. Unsettling, frightened, pitiable — for him John had felt nothing but alarm and pity. To feel anything else would be unfathomable. What man could feel anything other than outrage? What manner of man could see such a tableau and be aroused by it?

“It did. I suppose I should be grateful for that.”

“Then it wasn’t a night wasted. Stevie recovered you with no greater loss than your dignity and your billfold, and you recovered for us a useful piece of intelligence regarding our killer. For that I should be thanking you. What happened there to trouble your mind?”

“Besides being drugged and rolled by a horde of impoverished boy prostitutes? Is that not wound enough?”

“Imagine then that they were women, and spare your pride.”

“I fear that’s quite impossible. There’s much I can’t recall from that night, but not that.”

“Did it excite you?” Laszlo asks, bluntly.

“Being set upon and robbed? Undergoing God-knows-what indignities? Of course not—”

“Would it strike a blow to your image of yourself if it had?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You were very nearly a married man. You are a man of leisure. Are you frightened that you may be more like the inhabitants of the New Paresis than you’d hoped?”

“Frightened? I’m not a child, don’t treat me like one. I’m not frightened, I’m repulsed. You know about the manners of men who’ve been with men.”

You are one of them, he wants to say, an accusation as blunt as a table-knife — he wants to stick it between Laszlo’s ribs, he wants to confront him with what he knows, with what they both know. Laszlo thinks these inclinations in himself go unseen, because he cannot believe that lesser minds than his own could possibly understand them. In lesser men’s eyes he cannot embody two opposing qualities at the same time. He cannot be both gentle and harsh, both cruel and tender with ambidextrous ease.

Laszlo’s face is indifferent. “Of course I do. They aren’t rare specimens.”

“Not boys. Men.”

Laszlo sighs with irritation. “You’re a devil of a houseguest, John. When do you plan to reach your point?”

John leans back into the corner of the sofa, knees thrust apart at a queasily jaunty angle. “I want you to have me. If it would make our friendship less taxing for you, then I’d say it’s downright necessary.”

All the ways a man’s body may be had — at times the phantom passes over him of a man’s teeth fixing in the back of his neck, a man’s hand pressing his cheek to the floorboards, and it makes him shudder. Does Laszlo want to hear that? Would it overturn his cool cruelty, even for a moment?

His face does not flinch. Laszlo’s dark eyes look darker than ever, impossible depths of darkness. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“To have me, to fuck me. I want you to fuck me. Is that too obscure? Shall I say it in Latin?”

John tugs open his shirt, pressing with an obscene hand.

“That’s very presumptuous of you. John, are those bruises?”

“On the couch or on the floor, I don’t care. It makes no difference to me.”

His manner is both lewd and insulting — just as he’d intended, and it’s a delight to watch Laszlo squirm and tug at his collar, temporarily at a loss for words. Imagine that, Laszlo at a loss for something cruel to say. The dusty books, the portraits on the walls, the Turkish carpets, all of it is as cheap as marble mantelpieces and Parisian plate-glass and overpriced champagne. Cheap and sordid. This place is nothing more than an intellectual’s brothel, a place to house the perverse delights of the mind. Its inhabitants are nothing more than its inmates, its diversions, young and old alike. Laszlo may make his living managing the overindulged children of wealthy families, but it’s his charity cases that give him the most pleasure — lovely Mary, valiant Cyrus, and now Sara, now John. They are nothing more than his playthings. Let him play with John if he wishes.

His body is heavy, sinking away from him, but his mind is clear — it’s the delicious kind of clarity he associates with a generous drink, the clearing-away of all distractions. Laszlo looks as if he might strike him, but the color has risen in his face — how can he so coolly discuss the farthest limits of human debasement and blush at a proposition?

“If you think you’re scandalizing me, you underestimate my usual social circles. You would need to debase yourself lower than this, John. I’ve been to every penal institution in New York, every madhouse. You don’t yet know what men will do.”

“Don’t I?”

John yanks him down with the last of his strength — wrenching him by the wrist down to his level. Laszlo cries out with disgust, but John has him now, he won’t relinquish him. And Kreizler has been waiting for him, as desperate for this as John is for relief — he bites John’s lip when they first kiss, and swallows up the noise of pain he makes with the fierce press of his mouth. John tears the robe from his shoulders like a parody of a lover’s disrobing, a parody of the moment when the silk robe drops from a woman’s body and discloses her true shape. Laszlo’s knee presses between his legs with near-assaultive urgency, but John takes it in the spirit in which it was intended, tugging the stiff collar from around his throat. Straining hips and knocking mouths, kisses that rattle John’s teeth in his head — John pulls him apart with his hands, yanking out his shirttails and freeing the erection from his drawers. Laszlo is gasping before he even touches skin.

John thrusts back his head, baring the raw length of his neck, ready for teeth or for a grasping hand. If he wanted a genteel love-bite he’d have gone somewhere else, somewhere the madam can vouch for his tastes.

“Hurt me.”

It makes Laszlo stammer and arc against him. “You don’t know what you’re asking for.”

“I know what I want, for the love of God. I know what I want.”

He had already decided what he wanted, even before coming here — he already knows what it is he needs. A reenactment, a repair of what has already been done to him unwilling and unwitting. Does their man seek this remedy out as well, their imaginary man? Should John be playing the crueler role, should he be making Kreizler suffer if he wants to be released from this waking torture—

“Then you’ll have it,” Laszlo snarls, with renewed intensity. He wrenches John over onto his face, onto the blade-edge of his side, and fumbles down his trousers. It feels familiar and yet unfamiliar, knowing it is Laszlo’s strange neat body moving heavily against the muscles of his back — the cool stripe of his bared buttocks is only there for a moment, before Laszlo’s hips cover him like a woman is covered by a man, and the pearl buttons of his shirtfront scratch the unfamiliar skin of John’s lower back.

John finds the secret parts of himself with his hands, and his fingers press between his legs to guide him in unseen, working slick and inept — the strange slackness of his body affords easy entrance to the places that once were raw. Laszlo’s left hand wraps around to brace him, clasping at John’s throat — he can feel it tighten with every thrust, the raw plunge of penetration against which John himself cannot help but tighten. He wants to fit himself to this, to conform the hot flushed interior of his body to this invasion.

He is breached, he is entered — the strain is exquisite, the effort of taking in too much makes his muscles hitch and he withdraws his guilty fingers to brace himself against the upholstery. Laszlo wants him prepared for this, physically if not psychologically. How could any man ready his spirit for this? With a friend it’s worse than with a stranger, if John had wanted a stranger he could have sought out one of those houses or beaten a path to some place like the Slide, some place even lower and more debased — but Laszlo has much to lose, even more than John. He’s not a feckless layabout or a mere good-looking flâneur, he is a respected expert in his field — a man of science with a reputation to preserve. He can’t afford to sink this low. Blackmail is scarcely a question.

His fingertips press past John’s lips, John wants to bite but instead he sucks, resentfully tasting the sweat of his skin. Laszlo’s body is flush against his own, in an uninterrupted animal line. But the heel of his useless hand is braced against John’s side, in the most sublime touch of all.

Laszlo’s voice is thick and heated, so close to John’s ear that he can feel the exquisite brush of his lips.

“We are animal, John, just like any of them. The mind cannot overcome the body. We’re foolish to think that it can.”

John gasps, “What would Sara say to that?”, and Laszlo pays him back by pressing a sucking kiss to the hollow of his jaw. Sara is not a factor in this. Sara is not between them; she cannot be situated here, in this cruel world of men.

John is not passive, he does not suffer. He permits. He could lie still and allow the drug to sweep over him, to fall away into sound and restorative sleep — where has he heard those words before, restorative sleep— or he can struggle against it, twisting in the toils of dreamless rest.

Laszlo finds some unfamiliar place inside of him. John makes a sound like a sob, and presses desperately into it, driving him deeper. It’s like being pierced, like being transfixed — his body struggles to accommodate another man’s cock inside it and yet John wants it, John wills it, John made it happen. He is quickening and stiffening with every touch, and whenever the head of Laszlo’s cock grazes that place it sends him surging with a need he can hardly understand.

He is helplessly wet with spunk, but he doesn’t dare to bring himself off with his hands — John presses his mouth to the back of his wrist to stifle a groan at an especially well-placed thrust. Laszlo rubs along the crease at the base of John’s neck, not firmly enough to oppress John’s already shallow breathing but firm enough to suggest he might like to. That it might give him pleasure.

An expected part of the act, John thinks. The sexual act.

It wasn’t like this at Harvard — it had been perfunctory, it had been awkward. Furtive mutuality, with slippery hands and no kisses. Perhaps Laszlo remembers it differently. John has never been with another man, not even for convenience’s sake, not until—

John gasps, and lets himself be washed with memory. There is nothing else, for a little while.

Laszlo finishes with John still on the brink, he must know how near he is to paroxysm because he doesn’t let up — rolling him onto his back and fingering the slick insides of him where John is most raw, making John twist and curse. The doctor’s face is flushed from his climax, wonderfully abandoned, but John’s vision slips in and out of focus.

He can feel the slickness against his own belly, at the apex of his own thighs. This much is proof. This much he can know. Laszlo brings him off with his mouth and every moment of it is agony — too far, too much. His mouth is a wet sheath, slipping around John’s cock with painful ease

John can’t bear to touch him, but he wants to ruin him, to destroy him for what he’s done — he forces a hand through Laszlo’s hair and pulls, desperate for an interruption, but Laszlo makes a sound with his mouth wrapped around John’s cock and it sends an electric bolt directly to the pit of him. His cock aches, and the flick of Kreizler’s tongue against the sore slit of its head makes his balls twitch up — Laszlo’s clever mouth wrenches the pleasure from him when he can bear it no more.

Kreizler swallows — which seems like an unthinkable obscenity — and fumbles for a handkerchief.

For a long moment, John lies stupefied. After that, he fumbles at his trouser flies and tries to sit up, but the sofa is astonishingly small for two men even at their most acrobatic and his head is swimming like he’s had a decanter’s worth of brandy. Like he’s a boy again, drunk on rowhouse champagne. He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and what he sees is some sort of monster — heavily shadowed and unshaven. Laszlo is looking away. He will not look at him now.

“I’m afraid to go home. I’m afraid to be alone with myself.” His voice is ragged in his own throat,

“What happened Thursday night?”

“I remembered something else.”

“What did you remember?”

“It’s not — it can’t—”

“Tell me, John.”

“I remembered — a man touching me. Not one of the painted boys, I could have forgiven them. A man.”

The memory of a man’s hand. The memory of a man’s mouth at the back of his neck, and the mark of a bite.

Laszlo’s spine perceptibly stiffens. “Oh, John.”

“I went looking, asking questions. You feel yourself being watched, in a place like that. Evaluated. I remember there were eyes in the walls — through the slats in the doors. I took a drink from Ellison before following the boy to his room. He said he knew Gloria — Giorgio. He said his name was Sally.”

Laszlo’s left hand tightens on the arm of the sofa. “He told you that Gloria’s room was locked from the inside. He told you one of her swells took her away. The man with the silver smile.”

“I remember that much. After that it becomes — indistinct. I remember Paul Kelly and his man Ellison, and… I remember Connor. Kelly was angry, but Ellison… he found it amusing.”

(What do you want to do with him, he’d said to the others, like a man who already had some idea—)

“One of the bigger boys must have stolen my cufflinks. The boy who knew Giorgio had my wallet, so there wasn’t much more to be had. They were too familiar with their hands, but they were only Biff Ellison’s creatures. Like apes at the zoo. They only watched.”

Laszlo’s voice is rigid as iron, hardly raised above a whisper. “What have they done to you, John?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Would it be easier if you did?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were drugged, John. The mind draws a veil over certain things efficiently enough without chemical intervention.”

“It never seems to do that when I wish it would. Now every man I meet, I wonder, was he there that night in Paresis Hall? Did he see me? Does he know?”

“Does he know what you can’t know?” Laszlo supplies, with dark exactness. As if he knows.

John can only lamely say, “Yes.” He is marked for life by this. Other men will find him and know him for what he is. “I don’t remember anything after that. Do you want me to say it? I don’t remember.”

Laszlo turns to him at last, with an expression on his face that is perfectly inscrutable, and his hand brushes John’s temple — some comfort that is, until it becomes clear that comfort is not what Laszlo is extending to him.

“You’re going to close your eyes, and an impression will come to your mind. Don’t summon it up. Permit it to come to your mind.”

“This is absurd.”

“Whatever it may be. No matter how inappropriate it may seem. Let it pass into your thoughts.”

“This is cruel even for you, Kreizler,” John begins to say, but Laszlo’s hand passes over his face. It rests against the bridge of his nose, covering his eyes — for long moments John is slipping into blackness, submerging in dark water.

His mouth has fallen open. His breath comes shallowly.

“What did you see?”

“Don’t make me say it. Don’t make me say it.”

John is weeping now, his eyes are shut tight and the tears cut their way past despite himself.

Not a sight but a feeling, a suffocating scent. The smell of lilac water, the smell of Ellison — the reek of his body underlying it all, darker and fouler than the odor of sweat that had clung so tightly to the bodies of the boys. The smell of sex.

Who was manning the bar while Biff Ellison was playing jocker? While he had John at his mercy? Connor had watched and done nothing, he could not have been ignorant, he could not have claimed not to know — or had he taken part?

Foolish, reckless, helpless. He remembers too much, Christ, he remembers too much — raw flesh, and blood on his shirttails, and the ring still on his finger where he’d been accustomed to wear it for years, why would a mere robbery leave him with a pretty bauble like that one? It should be gracing some freckled boy-whore’s skinny finger or dangling on the watch-chain of some Bowery pimp. No, they took some other prize off of him.

— and afterward, with the blood running fresh again between his legs and the boy Stevie brushing the filth from his hair and propping him up as if this were business as usual, recovering handsome indolent sons of New York’s aristocracy from the worst back alleyways of the Bowery. Stevie had suffered worse, as a young boy undefended in a penal system shaped for the whims of men. But he was a child. No one could say he had invited what he suffered, or even that he knew what it meant.

And in another sooty alleyway, Connor’s voice, Connor’s pistol in his face like a lewd suggestion: down here with all the fairies — the sodomites. Connor made it sound like Hell itself. Beneath, below, where men like John Moore are punished for their sins.

Laszlo plucks out a match, turning it over in his fingers. John is fascinated by the gesture.

“Paresis, meaning the insanity caused by late-stage syphilis, of course. Paul Kelly’s little joke.”

“Laszlo, you don’t think—”

“You don’t have syphilis.”

He can’t know that — not so early, not from a visual inspection, even an unorthodox one. But he wants it to be true. He is lying to spare John, or he is lying to spare himself.

John emits a mirthless laugh, laying his wrist over his eyes. “How far do you trust Biff Ellison?”

Laszlo’s dark eyes are lowered, almost drowsy, but they flash with anger. “I would kill him for you, John. Truly, I would. I wouldn’t have thought I could hate him any more, but I do.”

Leave it at that. Laszlo lights another cigarette and presses it to John’s lips, before letting it brush his own. Somehow his fleeting tenderness hurts more than his scorn — it is impossible to imagine he is anything other than a friend. If they were truly friends, John would never have used him like this. He would have left their past together where it belonged, buried in the ash-heap of their university days. This drowsiness is unfair, it’s too soon, not when he’s still unclean and Kreizler is left with the wreckage.

John opens his eyes, lifting his head and surging with dizziness. “Let me help you. Let me help you dress.”

“You’ll do no such thing.”

John lurches upward, only to fall back again — Laszlo disentangles himself from him, freeing a little more space on the sofa for the sprawl of John’s limbs. He is slipping downward, out of lucidity. John lets his head fall back, and shuts his eyes, breathing the smell of dust and silk upholstery. The smell of sex is only a chemical phantom.

“I’m finished. I’m finished. I want to sleep.”

Laszlo reaches over to lay his dressing gown over John’s prone form — John nuzzles into him, desperately, but Laszlo pulls back.

“It’s time for your next dose. Sixty minims, intravenously.” Another vein, another secret and mystifying place on John’s body. The bite of the needle, and the grateful swell of unconsciousness — Laszlo’s hands are steady and the swell of fearless unconsciousness is sweeter and softer than any pillow. John moans like an animal and draws up his arm to his body beneath the robe, spotting his shirtfront with blood. Laszlo’s crippled hand passes over him, light as a shadow. “Sleep now, John.”