Some evenings, the moon changing colors rapidly as if possessing human moods and aesthetic sense, as if it has a message to send and is anxious to send it, Eulalie throws her arms out serpentine-fashion in front of her body, her back arched at an angle to make one cringe, and the effect is one perhaps you have witnessed before. In the service, say, far from home, your mind occupied with miniature glass bottles and what can be transported from one place to another in them. Your eyes mere shadows of their former selves, though these shadows seem somehow more expressive than their originals if only because what isn’t there of necessity makes comment upon what is. Eulalie conjectures the monk has replaced one form of worship for another, exchanged a less relevant deity for one that occupies a body and so walks around on two feet and glows a certain way when harried, another when aroused. And the two are not as far apart as one might assume. To the monk’s delight and  surprise, he finds Kia returns everything directed toward her sevenfold like a the disc at the heart of a laser, the birds that mimic human speech, as well as any other sound in the environment. The clicks and flurry from the shutter of a camera, foghorns on the barges coming in. Eulalie loves the rehearsing, the hashing out of what occurs in Kia’s bedroom where the mirror captures the lines in his face in such immediate detail, the monk is startled almost into silence upon first turning toward it, the simulacra there witness to some other man who shares his name and habits, whose desires now are so mighty they show in the flesh and the lips, the angle at which the mouth attempts to escape itself, but that is where the similarity ends. Imagine if you were to stumble upon a scrap of information, a paragraph journal entry, say, penned by someone you didn’t know, found it torn, isolated from the book within which it was originally set down, and now it has come to rest on the pavement of the alley between the building where you live and the building where other people live but they don’t seem to have any windows. Or if they do, these windows are on the other side of the building where you can not see them. Your first reaction, of course, is to scan the text briefly, to try to find some sense of whether or not it will be worth your while to have at it more thoroughly, to draw from it an idea of who might have written these things down and why. The careful delineation and naming of past geological epochs. The oblique references to placing one’s hands on the body of another. The countdowns and the secret codes composed of letters and strange symbols and entirely unfamiliar pictograms. After a few moments of studying all of this, you are likely to become convinced that what you have discovered is the key to unraveling a great many mysteries pertaining to your own existence, but you don’t know yet what these mysteries consist of nor exactly how the key functions. Best to take care of it, then, until such time as you can decipher it. Best to place it in a glass frame and that frame in a trunk hidden away in the closet where no one can get his hands on it and ruin everything by crumpling it up in his fingers, say. By asking you over and over again what certain of the words on it – multisyllabic words mostly, scrawled on the paper in a child’s, or maybe a lunatic’s, unsteady hand -- mean.