In a World in Which Fear Is Extinct

Abstract

I walked in a military cemetery. A woman walked toward me. She was my height. Long bones in her face, the spacing and contours of Bedouin faces. She was not looking at me. She was on a phone, I was not. I had stopped. I was listing, breathing an index of pollen and wind and the evenly spaced white stones of Eden, and I was not talking to anyone, true, but a “voice,” not a God (without fear, what’s a God?), said, “Take off your shirt,” and I thought not much of social order for a moment, and I think she felt the same: she said “Okay” to the phone and closed it and stopped a foot away and took off her shirt, and I took off my shirt.