From the Fire Hills

The Last Crusade

25 THE LAST CRUSADE I was It, the unnamed, the great criminal echoing a dead Venetian’s name off stones my friends’ variously sized heads made at water’s rim. During the second golden age of suburbia, I was blind but could speak one word, Marco, to which the indigenous quid-pro-quoed their Polos before vanishing beneath my dog paddle in the deep end. Saracens, they gathered at the floodlight’s eye, or circumnavigated gunite, revealing like vowels their inevitable emptiness, voices mere mirage—islands I imagined baptized in chlorine at the edge of the new world. And since that world was cruel, I burned secretly in the space between the game and my crusade: to catch them slipping out, establishing outposts at the far corners of the known, they who simulated with mere hands a body flailing. Ask any kid or medieval Venetian: to cheat was nothing if not blind justice, payment for our being born into savagery 26 masked only by the smell of gardenias or the intricate shattered sea of a mosaic. Meanwhile, I, the ascetic, the other, traveled interminable routes strung in the silk of my own wake, chased the disembodied as they silenced, returned to the water itself in that citadel of gated homes and oleander, like saints who whirl in their church lazuli eyes closed, perspectiveless, and hammered thin. ...