I dream of Escha's goat. It's funny. A little boy and his goat. He gave his love to a goat that only wanted to bite him, following it with a slim stick.

They boy that I knew was petrified of chickens, but afraid of very little, otherwise. He would suck on almonds until their papery skins dissolved in his mouth. He hated the whistle grass makes, when blown on between the lips. He learned to put up my hair, patiently folding it into a white cloth. He practiced sailors' knots with his head between my knees, sitting on the floor in my room on hot days. He liked a piece of honeycomb better if he thought it a special secret, only for him. Secrets tasted good to him, if they spoke of a quiet, private love. He winked sometimes, when he was happy, as if something were in his eye.

In my dream, he sits beneath a tree and I cannot see him. In this dream, he is grown, but the goat is there, chewing in the shade. The light is like that time of day before evening, when the light becomes murky. Escha reclines, nude, his back to me. If he is peaceful I do not know it. If it is that on the other side of him, his intestines spill, I know nothing of it. I am happy to understand this dream as pleasant.

Where I am not meant to tread I do not go, what knowledge I am not meant to know I do not seek, because it is good to remain living. Where I must not trespass, I set not a foot. In the dream, I am contented to look, to gesture at the black goat who haunts him. In this dream, I know that there is no one but the two of us, and that beyond what I can see, nothing exists. A blackness, a chasm.

"I dream of Escha," I said to Leechtin, only once, because when I said this, he turned to look at me with such a look as I had never seen on him. A startle. A disgust.

I had to learn the why of it from his little dog, his Cuca, from the litter I had been meant to kill. A child saved by a child. I learned that Leechtin had been talking of dreams, casually, as if about nothing substantial.

The infant Miou-Miou picked up on the day that he died, Cuca, was twenty-three when Laurent passed, and still living at the time of writing. He slumps around the house all day, not bothering to stand up straight or assert himself in any way except that he refuses to die. He is not allowed to work for fear of upsetting the man who he insists is not his master, and is allowed into town only rarely, in case that he learns habits that cannot be untaught. He is a creature of Leechtin's only because of the void left by Laurent's death; a carefully cultivated toy too stubborn to understand what it is. And it speaks loudly. It speaks to its friend Marcello as if no one else can hear.

Cuca says to Marcello, who is pale and wan and does not listen, "Leechtin has dreams of Laurent. He thinks they are real. They are always the same dream." Because Marcello does not listen to the twittering of foolish boys, and knows that one way to be obedient to your elders is to shut out prattle you are not meant to hear, Cuca repeats it over and over. A little dog that cannot stop barking. A little dog that does not know not to tell tales on he who feeds it. What is a secret? What is it at all?

The same dream. In it, Leechtin hears the sound of washing up, of calm limbs in a bath. He pushes open the door, already half-open, as if this door were waiting for his hand. He pushes it and there is a white porcelain bathtub that he has seen somewhere else before, perhaps in Paris. There are white subway tiles on the floor and water slopped across them. He sits beside the tub, nodding with sleep. He rests his head against the lip of the tub, and he knows what is there.

He hears, "Naranj," orange, in Sanskrit. A language Escha never spoke. He does not look. It is dark. The blood in the water is nearly colorless by this light, nearly silver, as it slops over his arms, over his nodded head. He smells the blood, as if it were real. He closes his eyes so that the water will not get in. His child does not touch him, though he would welcome the touch, whether violent or gentle. His child lies there, bleeding, features obscured by the light but still knowable, and Leechtin asks Cuca, "Is it that I choose to see him this way? I do not know if he is hostile toward me, or indifferent. I feel that it is real but it is always the same. If he would only touch me, I would live there in the dream, and instead when I wake I am already speaking, strange things, to help me. But Saumana," he says to Cuca, his private name for the boy, "it is too much for you to hear. Go and have some snack for your hunger."

I heard Cuca saying that, over and over to his friend, and I know that Leechtin is not the only one to have dreams like this. I have heard others say that they do not know what is real and what is not, that they are existing in a space unlike one they have known before, both when sleeping and when awake. This is the face of grief.

And yet when he wakes, saying "strange things", I cannot help but feel things that I should not feel. How do I help but to remain quiet, when I hear him speaking to his dead wife and to his dead son, speaking to them softly in a language I dimly remember from being half dead myself?

Before I learned of his dreaming, his periods of warmth and abject coolness were mysterious to me. At times he seemed almost his old self, and at others, he withdrew from the known world entirely, speaking of other times and eyes fixed upon the unseen. Never, in those times, did he touch me. Never, in those times, could he look at me.

In 2013 woke to him whispering, hearing him in my sleep and imagining his voice in my own head. I shivered. I had woken to him in that way many times in the past. I woke to darkness thick enough to disorient me.

"Stop," I said. "Stop."

But the sound of his droning appeal persisted, like the undulation of waves washing up, with the fluidity and force of depthless ocean. I sat with my legs drawn up for awhile, listening. Then, unable to sleep, I dropped my legs down and pulled from the floor something made of silk and draped it over my shoulders, my legs weak and trembling from having been drunk of. He had wanted barely anything of my blood for half of a century, and yet of late, I found myself the occasional subject of a great, powerful, animal gaze; this, demanding of me great gouts of blood. It disturbed me but what power have I to question him? As I have said, and yet I question what is acting upon him that makes him want of my blood, of himself, of a self that I am not familiar with, for the Leechtin whom I know wants none of it. A poor substitute for intimacy. Troubling for the mind to hold onto for long, to probe, to ask questions.

I do not know why I wail at times and yet wailing gutters in my throat, like breathing. I try to swallow them, my sounds, and I hear whimpering, as if I do not know who makes the noise. What is it that I want? Can it truly be that there are some who want nothing? 

I opened the door to a daylit hallway, dim and yet white light.

Downstairs, I went left away from the kitchen, through the living room, and passed down a hallway and a set of short steps into the study. The study itself is part of the hallway, a room without doors where the curtains are always drawn so that weak eyes may read.

"Huh," I heard as I passed, a soft intake of breath. Nonus, sitting quietly. Open upon his lap, a book of maps.

I stopped and turned to him.

"They should burn it," Nonus said, continuing a conversation we had been having for a decade.

"No," I said.

"No, it is not my business or no, say nothing to you now?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Distressed?" he asked, seeming uninterested, which is Nonus.

"Have a walk with me," I said.

"You are looking for Iovita, not for me, for what you are thinking now. I know not how to comfort you, and that is known. They should burn the body." Beside his foot, on the floor, a lacquered box of ashes.

I looked at it. 

"What, I do not like to listen to men speaking," he said, feline eyes upon me, "but I have heard that Leechtin is poorly."

Nothing.

"And so I see now that he is poorly," he said, turning back to his maps.

"Are you disappointed that the master's condition has power over me?" I asked.

"Odd question. Confrontational. I do not need to know the fine details of your life."

"Not proper to know them?" I asked. I am not his brother, who can share a burden with him. The little master, whose private name only Iovita speaks.

He narrowed his eyes. It is a nasty expression on some people, narrowing. It is charming on him. Coy.

"What's this expression?" I asked.

He wet his lips and made a soft popping sound. "Only that you are looking for Iovita, and not for me."

"Leave you to your maps, will I?" I asked.

Gently, he held out his hand and I took it, moving closer to him. He pressed his other hand on top of mine, looking into my eyes.

"Nonus," I said.

"You do not think that I do not know what went on in the room where he kept your body? When for a month you hovered on the banks of the dark river? You do not think that I did not hear his begging long-flown spirits to accept evil dealings and trade you for bloody oaths? But you were near. Laurent is dead. He has made away into the underplace. He is dead, my dear, and they should burn it."

"What if they know something that we do not? You yourself insisted on burning Aulus's body, indeed, because you feared he would come back. Leechtin believes that Escha speaks to him from the beyond."

"And indeed, as you say, I got something back," he whispered to me. "And yet even then, there was something to appeal to. Escha is dead. And what of other times, when appeals have been made, that we know nothing of? What is it that the younger ones say that they have seen? That Escha said that he had seen? What of that? What is that? Burn it. Have done with Escha, and risk."

"Leechtin does only what he can bear to do," I said, trying to convince whom?

"Fantasy. Fantasy. And that is what I must say to you, that what is done this day is made from that same fantasy of grief. Fear of hurting the feelings of the dead compels one to complete orders made by corpses before they became corpses. Fear."

"Which is what, that fear has made? What are you talking about?" I asked, my interior smarting still from waking to the sound of my good master weeping for the touch of his wife. It was not only that he spoke to them, but that in his lonely grieving, he ached for them. What part do I play in such a life? A feeling like raw flesh, easily made to bleed if touched. The hairs on my arms did not raise for talk of things summoned from the underworld. I am familiar with darker things. I am frightened by love, and the devotion it powers.

"I went to visit this corpse a week ago, for I have heard rumors of his living, too, and I caution you, hear this as yourself and not as the wreck you currently are. There has been some vandalism, and it is gruesome in my eyes."

"Say no more," I said.

"It is the young one, Marcello. I have heard it upon his own lips, whispering to his friend. It was not my will to tell you until I knew at whose hands it were done. Guilty lips making guilty words."

He clutched me, knowing that I would go to see it for myself, knowing that I must be ill tidings' courier.

**

Fingers make a particular-looking wound upon the body. They bruise in the shape of a tear-drop, in ovals. Fingernails make half-moons. Tearing produces a raw wound that in a living body bleeds, but in a corpse remains almost sterile, pulpy, yielding. Dead flesh separates differently than does the flesh of the living. I could not close my eyes to it. And yet, looking upon Laurent's body, I did not feel rage.

The coolness of anger supersedes emotion when it comes too hot to know it is hot. That is what I felt. Anger that rises above petty feeling and becomes focus. And so, coolly, I found that I was able to walk back to the house as if there were nothing wrong, and coolly, able to pound my fist upon my master until he looked at me, sitting upon the couch and staring away. His green eyes. His level gaze. His parted lips, as if surprised to find that he were indoors, in the times we live in now.

I told him what I knew.

And in a voice, as flat as a sea without wake, he said, "Tell Cuca that I mean for him to vacation awhile."

"Tell him yourself," I said, sharply.

His eyes warmed at that, surprising me. 

"Will you come to bed?" I asked him, anticipating him, wanting this warmth to be affection. My body, stiff with tension, with the feeling of opportunity above anything else that was happening. 

He extended his hand to me, cool and dry. There was dirt beneath his fingernails. He had been digging. Had he?

"We will wash?" I asked him.

I have seen him transition so quickly from lucidity to weakness, to confusion, to coldness, to distance. A blink. A snap of the fingers that I cannot hear, somewhere and something inside of him unmappable.

He didn't say anything. If I am good at being quiet, he is better. He let me help him up from the couch.

"Raining," he whispered.

"Yes, it's raining."

He leaned upon me, heavy, easy. He let me sit him upon our bed, and take his foot in my hands, and slip his socks away. He wears thin, nylon socks. He has worn them ever since Laurent began to send them to him, from Paris. He has nicely shaped feet, nice toes. I kept my head down while I rubbed them, waiting to hear him tell me to stop. I waited to hear him say anything, listening to the rare and distant sound of thunder far away. How funny it is to know light so intimately these days, that I knew that outside it was darker than it should have been. I rested my head against his shin, weighed upon by feeling. The soft sound of his laugh woke me a little, and yet left me still burdened. He petted my head and it would have been easy to have wept. "Lie by me," he said.

It had been at least a week already since the trauma had been perpetrated against Laurent's body. Leechtin did not rush his words. He stroked my back. He kissed my skin through the silk I had picked up from the floor hours earlier, in a room far darker than this, far wealthier in fear and oppression, his silk. He kissed my skin. He rested his hand against me, his steady hand. I closed my eyes.

"I will tell you what I want," he said.

The memory of someone else, briefly. The memory of Alois, pleading with Leechtin. The memory of a nose, of an ear. A face that would never be able to seduce, again. A memory of years ago.

"It will be after Cuca goes," he said.

"Oh yes, yes," I whispered.

And Cuca went across the continent, to North Carolina to stay, and then in the house it was only the three of us, and Marcello knowing that he was not amongst friends. He would have known what was about to happen, and yet why did I creep, as if I had to hide? 

The younger ones, they are all terrified of me. To a one, they are terrified. Why that is, I cannot say for sure. I am told that there is a quality to my movements that does not seem natural to the gazing eye. I am told that there is something in that I do not blink enough, of the way I take in a room. Of stillness. These are not unnatural to me. 

But I am an animal. And I am not afraid of it. I have said already all that I fear.

So it was only a boy and me, a young boy, who lay between my thighs and tried not to weep as I told him, a courtesy, what I had come to do.

"You will not butcher me?" he asked me, Laurent's Marcello. 

"I am not interested in butchering you," I said. "I am only interested in teeth."

"Why do you take them?" he asked. "Why not my eyes? Why not my fingers? That have seen him and touched him. My tongue, that told him that I loved him?"

"Those are Romantic things," I said, speaking more than I wanted to. I have still a softness for children, for the passion of youth, for boys who weep because they are only boys. 

"What, please tell me why," he begged me, my hands pressed against his shoulders.

I did not do what I did for revenge. I did not take the sharpest of his teeth for vengeance. There was no unnecessary butchery in what I did. For it had reason. For it had shape in the mind. 

I held him down and I took what he needed to live. And that is all.

And the week following, when that other one came, the child, to ravage, he was my opposite. 

And then, when still the boy lay convalescent, unseeing, without tongue to make words, Leechtin went for the child, who is blinder and dumber with passion than the boy whose eyes and tongue and ear and dignity were taken. And yet, the child lived. Both did, Laurent's Marcello and his Nicolas, and Leechtin quieted again.

There were no more words for a little while, no strange words or oaths or promises or pitiful appeals from the lips of the one whom I loved, who is made master of me by that love. No longing for the dead in the dark as he lay between the worlds of sleep and wakefulness. And that is because there were no more dreams. No more dreams after what Marcello did.

Instead, something else. 

Something that walks.

I will not go. I will not go. I will not seek knowledge. I shall not seek. I do not trespass. I do not trespass. I shall not fear. I shall not fear.