3.

I want you to stop the dreams, Dr. Reuben.

I want the children removed from my dreams.

You see that one, the little one with the dark hair and solemn eyes? His breath is a sweet concoction of curried food, fear, and something resembling cardamom. “What’s your name?” I ask him, and he says, “Agit,” and I promise him, “Everything’s going to be all right, Agit.” That was my promise to the little face that filled the screen of my monitor. The way I tell it, the way I feel it, the way the keeping of my promise feels true to me, is the moment when I set him (so to speak) on the escape slide, which is to say when one of Sirocco’s thuggish crew gave him a push and he slid into Germany.

But he does not grow up into gratitude.

Would it have been better then, back then, to let him stay with his mother on the plane? That is the question. Would it have been better to let him slip across that line that all must cross in the end? Would it have been better then, back then, instead of thirteen years later, the way it happened, had to happen, as required? This is a grave moral question. Such dreadful accidents are the things I have been called upon to arrange.

No more, I said.

I refuse. Arrangements for Agit Shankara will not be made.

But what difference does it make when there are always others who will handle these matters?

Nevertheless, I refused. I know the price I will pay.

I am racked by what has been required. I am in blood stepped in so far, and Macbeth too started out with ordinary clean ambition and extraordinary zeal and simply got out of his depth, because one does not notice it happening, that is the trouble, until the day one takes a step too far and suddenly one is sloshing through blood and there is blood on one’s hands and blood on the ceiling and walls and blood in one’s breath and in one’s thinking and one recognizes Operation Macbeth, or Operation Blood, and yes, yes, I am stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

There is nothing new under the sun, Dr. Reuben.

You see the little girl in the blue coat? I have picked her up a thousand times in my mind. “Don’t be afraid,” I murmur, because I am in fact a very gentle man, especially and invariably with children. I slide her coat off her shoulders because it will be easier for her that way, and I stroke her cheek when I set her down at the top of the chute. Her cotton dress catches on something, a metal edge, the lever of the escape hatch, and how frantically I work to unhook her clothing and let her slide free (there is so very little time available), and I am left with a swatch of cloth between my fingers. It is white, sprinkled with forget-me-nots, and there is a fragment of smocking at one end: a few ruchings of cotton, some white thread, a smocked rosebud. On the monitor, I watched one of Sirocco’s thugs put it in his pocket, and I keep it in a pocket in my mind. It is there at all times.

She, sweet little bird, flies down to the tarmac, unharmed.

And now look. What can it mean, that such innocence should be so harsh and vengeful? She has the face of an angel. Her wings are silken and they glide like languid blue kites, fantastically beautiful, but the tips of the wings are barbed.

I cry back into the dream: You don’t understand. You do not know what riding a tiger is like. If it had not been for me, not one of you would have been saved, not one. Not one single child would have been led off that plane, if not for me.

But no one hears.