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And how many angels are in the heavens whose intercessions availeth naught save after Allah giveth leave to whom He chooseth and accepteth! Lo! it is those who disbelieve in the Hereafter who name the angels with the names of females. And they have no knowledge thereof. They follow but a guess, and lo! a guess can never take the place of the truth.

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She woke up before I did. I awoke, thinking from a greater dream than was true. If I was awake, the evening before had happened objectively, or else she had stepped out of my dream.

To tell the truth, that seemed a likely theory for a few moments.

Lifting myself up on one arm, I could see her, still nude, and examining my books. She stretched up -- bringing all muscles to an attractive tautness -- and looked for all the world like what I would imagine an urban Maxfield Parrish, a nude indoor Ecstasy, to look like. Her fingertips brushed against the tops of my poetry books -- Lawrence, Milton, Yeats. She made me want to walk up behind her and pull her back into the bed, laughing lightly, like I would a peer, a voluntary lover.

Until -- she must have heard me stir, must have heard my breath rattle in my shock -- she turned her head, roughly bound hair bouncing in a makeshift braid, and violently pinned me to the bed with an emphatically unsmiling face. I imagine my eyes shot open in a kind of distant, vacant terror. I suspect mine was not more surprise than fear. I did not anticipate what I saw -- what I failed to see. I had refused to consider it as possible, until the data violently invaded my worldview. But I could, in some sense, understand it.

Her eyes had gone out.

(I'm afraid here I must rise, or descend, to poetry, because this is not something that can be described in some naturalistic, realist manner. Those who know what I am referring to will immediately understand, and those who have never seen this -- either from lack of exposure or lack of acceptance -- will not benefit from any number of words.)

Something had been in there -- I want to say someone had been there, but I no longer know what makes a person -- that was no longer there. The Bible tells us: "For he who said, 'You shall not commit adultery,' also said, 'You shall not kill.'" I had understood that as referring to the holistic nature of the law. I was wrong.

In violating the sixth commandment, I had somehow violated the fifth. In some manner I did not anticipate, and even now cannot understand, I killed her, both the her she used to be, and the her she should have become. Someone new, someone inhuman, had been born of our lusts.

She bounced across the room and landed on the bed, next to me, her arms falling around my neck and her body uncomfortably warm against my own. I was perversely thankful for the blanket, still pressed between us. She brought her face up to mine, and looking into my eyes, above her unsmiling smile, she twisted again my soul.

"Are we us, now?"

Who could have expected such an adult question from such a childlike mouth, indeed from a child's mouth? But she had aged much in the night. Neither of us smiled, neither of us wanted to look into the other's eyes, but she held us both there trough an unforeseeable force of will. Both of us saw each other through pools of water, and we shimmered in each other's worlds. We were so close, so inexpressibly together in our bodies, almost as we had been the night before, when i thought I could take her body but hadn't realized I also had to take her soul. She waters of our pain and sorrow, though, still kept us profoundly apart, and out of the deep I could hear myself trying to talk. To this day, I don't know which of us I was trying to talk to, but I know it was myself I was trying to console.

Her nostrils flared, and her eyes dropped. I caught a glimpse of pearly baby teeth as her lower lip curled a little into her mouth. Her tongue darted between teeth and lip, and I cold see a slight tremble in her throat.

I felt the sudden urge to strike her.

Instead, I pulled her to me, and her tears flowed down my back. Together, we cried, and we cried together.

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