Blood and Guts in High School (20 page)

Genet:
Do you think that's possible?

(A long silence. Genet takes off a shoe, shakes out a stone that has been bothering him. Then he puts the shoe on.)

The desert is absolutely brilliant. Gradually the sun becomes yellow, orange. Gleaming gleaming orange. The more brilliant it's become, the more it sinks. The brilliant colour is going out of the sun as it's turning dark red and going into the orange sky, above and below the orange a violet line. The violet lengthens and darkens into blue. The sky between the dark blue is purple. Above the clouds are pale purple. They drift past, above, the dark ball. The desert is grey. The air is getting cold.

Then it is night.

The dogs are barking in the distance. You can see the pointed tips of their heads.

Genet:
Rest your head against this milestone and try to sleep.
Janey:
Sleep? If I'm walking across rocks, if I'm eating thistles, if I'm letting my skin burn in the sun, it's to murder my everlasting sleep.

Genet:
Since it's not going to croak until you do, at least let me sleep. It's no good trying to die. Up there God controls everything . . .

End:

Back in Alexandria the rebels have taken over. They're winning the city. Blood doesn't spurt to the sky like a geyser, yet from one edge of the world to the other how red the night is!

Genet and Janey travel through Cairo, through the twin cities of Minya and Asyut, down to the city of Luxor. There Genet hands Janey some money and tells her to take care of herself. He has to go away to see a production of one of his plays.

She dies.

A second of time

THE WORLD

Alight came into the world. Dazzling white light that makes lightness dazzling burning Happiness. Peace. The forms of the ancient arts of Egypt this is the time that wolves come out of the trees.

THE JOURNEY

We reached the tomb. Dead Catullus who was clutching the book woke up and told us the following story:

A rascally evil priest who cared only for money told me, when I was still alive, that the book I sought, this book which I'm now as a dead man holding, could be mine if I gave him $100,000. And two new coffins. I did what he asked and then held a knife to his throat. Just before I killed him, he told me I could find the book in a gold box in a silver box in an ivory box in a palm-tree wood box in a bronze box in a iron box