If you do, you come to these iron men, men with hands and heads of iron, who grew out of the earth. You can’t see them in the darkness, but they’ll wring our necks if they catch us.”

I threw a desperate glance back at the hole leading into the cellar and the light coming from a clear and simple world where there were no men of iron and where there were plants and houses and ordinary people as far as the eye could see. Walter had found a board somewhere and the two of us sat on it for several moments in silence. It was pleasant in the cellar, cool, and there was a heavy aroma of moisture in the air. I wouldn’t have minded spending hours there alone, away from the steamy streets and sad, boring town. The cold walls felt good beneath an earth sweltering in the sun. The futile afternoon hum coming through the hole in the cellar was no more than a distant echo.

“This is where we bring the girls we catch,” said Walter.

I vaguely understood what he was referring to, and the cellar took on a new attraction.

“What do you do with them?”

“You mean you don’t know?” Walter said, laughing. “We do what all men do with women. We lie down next to them . . . and then we take our feather . . .”

“Your feather? What sort of feather? What do you do with it?”

Walter laughed again.

“How old are you anyway? Don’t you know what men do with women? Here, have a look at mine.” He took a small black feather from his jacket pocket.

Just then I felt my usual crisis coming on. If Walter had not taken the feather from his pocket, I might have been able to endure the atmosphere of complete and utter isolation to the end, but all of a sudden my isolation there in the cellar was deeply painful to me. Only now did I realize how cut off I was from the town and its dusty thoroughfares. It was as if I had cut myself off from myself, alone as I was deep down under the ordinary summer day. The shiny black feather Walter had shown me meant that nothing more existed in the world as I knew it: everything had fallen into a swoon, while the feather gave off an anomalous brilliance in the middle of this odd room with its moist grass and cold-mouthed darkness avidly drinking up what little light there was.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” Walter asked. “Don’t you want me to tell you what we do with the feather?”

The sky visible through the hole grew whiter and whiter, hazier and hazier. The words ricocheted against the walls, flowing down me as if I were a fluid. Walter went on talking, but he was so far from me and so ethereal that he seemed no more than a pool of light in the dark, a patch of mist in the murk.

“First you stroke the girl with the feather,” I heard him say, as if in a dream. “Then you stroke yourself . . . You’ve got to know these things . . .”

He came up to me and started shaking me, waking me up, and slowly, ever so slowly, I came to. When my eyes were fully open, I saw Walter leaning over my pubis, his mouth pressing against my member. I could not for the life of me comprehend what was going on.

He stood and said, “There, you see? That felt good, didn’t it . . . That’s the way Indians woke their wounded on the battlefield. Our tribe knows all the Indian spells and cures.”

I felt drunk and exhausted.