There was a cave he knew of whose floor was a sandy beach. The man ran there without knowing why. Jet black water became black and green there as it descended into bubbling pools close enough to the entrance to reflect the jungle, from the branches of which the black-and-orange-tailed birds hung like seedpods. The widest tree-boughs were festooned with vine-sprouts like the feathered shafts of arrows. Behind them, where it was cool and stale, the cave's chalky stalactites hung in ridge-clusters like folds of drying laundry on a line. The man ran in. He splashed through the first pool. It was alive with green and silver ripples intersecting with one another like a woman's curls. A single bubble traveled, white on black, then silver on silver. He ran crazy through the next pool. Farther in the darkness was a chalky beach, cratered with rat-prints and raccoon-prints. This was the place where the cave-roof was crowned by a trio of stalactites. Here, where everything but the river was quiet, a pale whitish bird fluttered from rock to rock, squeaking like a mouse. The bird flew back and forth very quickly. It hovered over rock-cracks' wrinkled lips. It landed on a crest of lighter-colored rock like a wave that had never broken. It darted its beak between two studs of shell-fossil and swallowed a blind ant. Then it departed into deeper caves within the cave, floored with silence and white sand. Water shimmered white on black rocks—
The man opened his mouth to scream again and the white bird came from nowhere. The white bird was the soul of one of the girls. The bird stabbed the man's tongue with its beak and drank blood. Then it flew away, not squeaking anymore.
The man swallowed experimentally. The taste was only half as strong.
Farther back still was a pit. He had learned from the white bird that a tiny black bird flew there. The man clambered down. It felt like being inside a seashell. Deep down, the flicker of his lighter showed him pink and glistening rock-guts. Smoke streamed from the little lighter like a beam from a movie projector. He held the lighter below his mouth, so that the black bird could see him. The bird came swooping and cheeping. It was not much bigger than a bee. It flew back between his tonsils. He could feel the bird's pulse inside him. He longed to swallow it, to recapitulate his triumphs. But then the taste would strengthen again. The black bird pierced him and drank a drop of his blood. It took him again. Then it flew away in silence.
The taste was gone now. The man shrieked with glee. The cave was empty.
Outside, it was so brightly green that the hunger of his eyes (which he hadn't even known that he had) was caught: as long as he looked out upon it, he thought himself satisfied, but the instant he began to look away, back into the darkness, then his craving for greenness screamed out at him.
He ran outside trying to see and taste everything. He ran down the streambank to a kingdom of pools in bowls of baking hot rock. He drank water from rolling whirlpools; he dove down Whitewater to brown water, beneath which his open eyes found chalky sand-valleys, green-slicked boulder-cliffs; he grabbled at these things with his fingers and then licked his fingertips. In the best whirlpool rushed the two girls, lying down against each other, kissing each other avidly, eating each other's soft flesh.
Down the fog-sodden wooden steps he came that night to the street walled with houses, every doorway a yellow lantern-slide suspended between floating windows, connected to earth by the tenuous courtesy of stairs. Earth was but sidewalk and street, a more coagulated gray than the silver-gleam of reflected souls in car windshields, heavier too than the gray-green linoleum sky segmented by power wires. He went fog-breathing while the two walls of houses faced each other like cliffs, ignoring one another graciously; they were long islands channelled, coved and barred, made separate by the crisscrossing riven of gray streets. Somewhere was the isle of the dead girls' canoe, which he needed now to get away from himself. All night he walked the hill streets until he came to morning, a foggy morning in the last valley of pale houses before the sea. He stood before an apartment house whose chessboard-floored arch declined to eat him as he'd eaten others; the doors were shut like the sky. The curving ceiling of the arch was stamped with white flowers in squares. Black iron latticed windows as elaborately as Qur'anic calligraphy; white railings guarded balconies. Spiked lamps smoldered at him from behind orange glass. Timidly he hid behind the sidewalk's trees whose leaf-rows whispered richly down like ferns. .
Once he admitted that this house was not for him, he turned away from all hill streets side-stacked with rainbow cars and went down further toward the sea. So he came to the street of souls.
