Oh, he feels a raving fit coming onhow the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love.
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are “yours” and which are “mine”. It’s past sorting out. We’re both being someone new now, someone incredible…
He is crying for persons, places, and things left behind: for Scorpia Mossmoon, living in St. John’s Wood among sheet-music, new recipes, a small kennel of Weimaraners whose racial purity she will go to extravagant lengths to preserve, and husband Clive who shows up now and then, Scorpia living only a few minutes away by Underground but lost to Pirate now for good, no chance for either of them to turn again … for people he had to betray in the course of business for the Firm, Englishmen and foreigners, for Ion so naïve, for Gongylakis, for the Monkey Girl and the pimps in Rome, for Bruce who got burned … for nights up in partisan mountains when he was one with the smell of living trees, in full love with the at last undeniable beauty of the night … for a girl back in the Midlands named Virginia, and for their child who never came to pass … for his dead mother, and his dying father, for the innocent and the fools who are going to trust him, poor faces doomed as dogs who have watched us so amiably from behind the wire fences at the city pounds … cries for the future he can see, because it makes him feel so desperate and cold. He is to be taken from high moment to high moment, standing by at meetings of the Elect, witnessing a test of the new Cosmic Bomb“Well,” a wise old face, handing him the black-lensed glasses, “there’s your Bomb …” turning then to see its thick yellow exploding down the beach, across the leagues of Pacific waves … touching famous assassins, yes actually touching their human hands and faces … finding out one day how long ago, how early in the game the contract on his own life was let. No one knows exactly when the hit will comeevery morning, before the markets open, out before the milkmen, They make Their new update, and decide on what’s going to be sufficient unto the day. Every morning Pirate’s name will be on a list, and one morning it will be close enough to the top. He tries to face it, though it fills him with a terror so pure, so cold, he thinks for a minute he’ll pass out. Later, having drawn back a bit, gathering heart for the next sortie, it seems to him he’s done with the shame, just as Sir Stephen said, yes past the old shame and scared now, full of worry for nothing but his own ass, his precious, condemned, personal ass….