And rising from his vision, he cried: “I am not there among the cities. I have sought down a million streets, until the goat-cry died within my throat, and I have found no city where I was, no door where I had entered, no place where I had stood.”
Then, from the edges of moon-bright silence, Ben replied: “Fool, why do you look in the streets?”
Then Eugene said: “I have eaten and drunk the earth, I have been lost and beaten, and I will go no more.”
“Fool,” said Ben, “what do you want to find?”
“Myself, and an end to hunger, and the happy land,” he answered. “For I believe in harbors at the end. O Ben, brother, and ghost, and stranger, you who could never speak, give me an answer now!”
Then, as he thought, Ben said: “There is no happy land. There is no end to hunger.”
“And a stone, a leaf, a door? Ben?” Spoke, continued without speaking, to speak. “Who are, who never were, Ben, the seeming of my brain, as I of yours, my ghost, my stranger, who died, who never lived, as I? But if, lost seeming of my dreaming brain, you have what I have not—an answer?”
Silence spoke. (“I cannot speak of voyages. I belong here. I never got away,” said Ben.)
“Then I of yours the seeming, Ben? Your flesh is dead and buried in these hills: my unimprisoned soul haunts through the million streets of life, living its spectral nightmare of hunger and desire. Where, Ben? Where is the world?”
“Nowhere,” Ben said. “YOU are your world.”
Inevitable catharsis by the threads of chaos. Unswerving punctuality of chance. Apexical summation, from the billion deaths of possibility, of things done.
“I shall save one land unvisited,” said Eugene. Et ego in Arcadia.
And as he spoke, he saw that he had left the million bones of cities, the skein of streets. He was alone with Ben, and their feet were planted on darkness, their faces were lit with the cold high terror of the stars.
On the brink of the dark he stood, with only the dream of the cities, the million books, the spectral images of the people he had
