The Bad Magician reaps a whirlwind and flies, digitzed, into the air. Imagining an ear he enters along the inner fold. He grabs hold of Senator Frist’s hammer, sings into the stirrup, sounds the anvil. It is the sound of cats being murdered, a tympanic symphony of wails and cries. Tap your toes, Bill. Tap your toes and boogie woogie: wag your whiskers full of woe.

The Bad Magician remembers the nails from Golgotha: they were in a box of notions. A lattice is constructed thereof, and nerves grow upon it, fast and hard in the Senator’s hollow. His mind, a piece of string, articulates a bird and is torn to shreds. His soul jumps. He lands in the Ocean of Being.

Bill, face down, opens his mouth on the bank of a musical shore, a dead fish among the singing children. Jesus escapes from the mouth, disguised as a Calico. The doctor’s hands grab at air and splinter into broken claws. The armies of the tide are crabs. Cats gather on the sea wall. The Eternal War ends.

The Senator awakes. His hands are bloody. He stares at nothing, the way cats sometimes do.