There is just enough rock and roll left in me to dance to the music that brings back the memories. I dance in the fields, where no one sees me except the sun, the trees, and my dogs, who get upset when I act crazy. When I urge them to dance with me and they jump up and down they are happy again.
I dreamed the other night that I was back in Europe standing in the gravel courtyard of my parents’ home, talking with the gamekeeper who, when I was seven years old, taught me how to shoot a gun and skin a rabbit. As we talked, and for no apparent reason, he pulled a bottle of red wine from his game pouch, uncorked it, and poured us each a glass. While he poured the drinks, another friend I hadn’t seen in thirty years joined us, and he in turn was joined by another, and a fourth, and so on until the courtyard was full of people, all men I had hunted with during my lifetime, some faces stretching the extremes of remembrance. The men were my age and older, and as we stood together in the courtyard of my youth they raised their glasses, and I realized they were toasting me, and I didn’t know why. I looked at the blurred faces of these friends, each of whom I remembered as if it were yesterday, and while the dream continued I relived the hunts we had made, the wine we had tasted, the food we had shared, and the women we had courted. And still this assembly of old men said nothing, waiting in the courtyard of my castle with their glasses raised, and I knew that something had happened.
Superimposed on these faces a new scene took shape. I saw through my dream a great red stag, chased by a pack of hounds and horses, feral men and women dressed in blue velvet uniforms, and me running alongside the stag. I ran so well, so flawlessly, I became a brother to this stag. And when my brother had swum the rivers and run his fill of fields and woods and was dark with sweat, and while he held the hounds at bay, I watched the flat, broad blade of a man’s lance touch his rib cage, and saw the terror and wonder in my brother’s eyes, alive and beseeching for an instant after everything else about him was dead. I felt the same, terrible glaze fall over my eyes, scalding my soul, and I knew someone had died, in the courtyard of my castle, and of course, it was me.