Partway to the elbow is a spot, an otherwise innocuous patch of skin, that has the capacity of producing extraordinary visions when you touch it with something hot -- the coal end of a cigarette, the surface of a recently removed light bulb. I’m not saying what you see is worth the pain endured, but I am saying this spot is there for you to experiment with and make up your own mind about once you have returned from wherever it is those visions take you. D------ re-introduces me to this spot shortly after we have left the fish to spawn free of our fascinated gazes. She stands astraddle a motorcycle she has recently purchased with funds she squirreled away over the years in jars she buried in the ground when her man was asleep, which was pretty much all the time once he had come down with that ailment no one knew how to pronounce. D--------- looks like something I might have dreamt up on the spot, her legs long and tapered and butter white, her eyes following me from one place to another like those of a Doberman when it is chained. Its mobility, by definition, is restricted, and you are free to circle around it at a certain distance. You must be careful, though. Even D--------- knows circles are no longer what they used to be. Not since this particular corner of the cosmos and its inherent perfection was tainted by the recent opinions of those who inhabit it. Anymore, a circle can fall in on itself. It can collapse on one side and take you down with it. I know what you’re thinking. Who is he to make judgments of this nature? Where does he get off lecturing us concerning concepts that necessarily influence the manner in which he conceptualizes? The fact of the matter is, I used to be an egg. Or at least, I thought I was an egg, and maybe there is no difference between the one and the other, the thinking and the being, the visualization and the becoming. But it doesn’t really matter anymore. I am a man now and the likelihood of my changing back into what I was before I became one seems to be growing fainter and fainter every day. Though there are those who will tell you they see in me – in my face, in the irises of my eyes -- the rudimentary elements of some other, less sophisticated, less acceptable entity, and it is only a matter of time before those elements, whatever they may be, begin to coalesce. To alter my outer appearance so violently (and, they add, for the better), anyone in the vicinity during this transformation will likely be affected in some or all of the following ways. They will be amazed and dumbfounded and will run home to inform their spouses and their children and their uninterested neighbors of what it is they’ve seen and in the very act of re-telling it, they will most likely go blind. For the memory is not a repository where the things of this world go to slowly and inevitably fade and disintegrate with time, but rather a kind of magnifying glass and the holder of it (this is not -- can not be, please understand -- the possessor of the memory itself) wishes to concentrate the beams that are thrown through it onto the closest surface so as to inflict a great deal of damage. The sort of damage consistent with something being reproduced an infinite number of times within a finite space. You find something similar in feedback loops which eventually, if left ungoverned, grow so enormous and unwieldy they destroy both themselves and the glass in the windows of the rooms in which they originated. Or a child’s drawing of a flower photocopied over and over again so many times that there is finally nothing recognizable left of the flower, or, for that matter, the mind or the body of the child who at some point in the distant past (let’s say this was allowed to go on, just to make the point, to illustrate what needs to be illustrated, for a hundred and fifty years) who first decided for no particular reason that she was going to draw a flower using a broken black crayon for the stem and pedals, and, of course, a green one for the leaves.