I said have you eaten, would you like to go eat? --No, I'd like to stay in. The three of us on the porch talking about writing books. About the dying plants and how I haven't watered them. I am being teased too because Zali brought me a gift, "an icon from the Holy Sepulchre," and it comes wrapped in an Arabic newspaper, goldleaf madonna and baby, Byzantine style, handmade stamped, and all I can ask is "where?" Where did it come from? "What do you mean 'where,' Catholic that you are, the Holy Sepulchre, in Jerusalem, in the Old City. Do you know the Old City? You want me to describe to you how to get there?" But I'm astonished. It's never occured to me to make a pilgrimmage, to Jerusalem, to Golgotha, to the place where one could say a god chose to die and be buried. And to come back from the dead? That part of the story, that it has a place you can get to, that Zali visited and returned from there, for me, that the place arrives in a plastic bag and newsprint swept in Arabic, that he carried it in his suitcase? It has no place in my mind. But in his place the place and all its worries are commonplace. The place and its fires. He walked in, made a purchase, walked out, flew here, hands it to me. Here.
***
They are nailed to the wall above the shrine. They are exquisite.
***
I said I'm going to the store I'm going to cook and they said are you sure and okay okay because I wanted avocados and cilantro for our chicken and a green salad and a yellow bell. So I cooked a few simple things when I got back and Herman said I know what we'll do! And they moved the kitchen table out to the porch and we ate suspended in the dark with the trains and the red lanterns and the candles Herman lit, outside on the balcony by the tree tops, and we talked about writing books and about things we dream.
***
"The dream procrastinates because it doesn't know what the secret is yet either."
***
