2

Pace remembered that in her letter to him following Lula’s death, Dalceda Delahoussaye confessed that she had never really believed in God or the devil—who she dismissed as “an excuse exists in stupid peoples’ minds”—or in the Big Bang Theory, either. Pace was on a similar wavelength. He did not discount entirely the physicists’ explanation that the universe was a result of a big bang, but who or what lit the fuse? There was still a long way to go, he figured, toward explaining the set-up for this explosion. He would ask the small grays what they knew about it, if he got the chance.

“Disney against the metaphysicals,” Ezra Pound wrote in the last of his Cantos. Truth in fantasy versus falseness in science. It was useless to expect a definitive answer, so why do people try so hard to sell one? For money and power, of course. Those were temporary rewards but for some—perhaps most—they were enough. True believers were better off for providing a fix for their own insecurities; and The Road to Enlightenment should have been the title of a final Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movie.

Pace was in a cynical mood. He rose from the kitchen table and went outside to chop kindling. He looked up and there was the constellation of Cassiopeia, queen of Ethiopia. Perseus had arrived there holding the head of Medusa, the Gorgon, whom he had slain. Did Rangoon Angola know that story? If Gagool were here, Pace would tell her about Perseus and Andromeda and Cassiopeia, who, according to the poet Milton, was black, like her, and was so beautiful that after her death she was placed among the stars. Had Gagool become a star yet?

Pace cut into a block of wood with his hatchet. Among all of the people he had known, there were only a few Pace truly missed, and Gagool Angola was one. He would see her again, if it was in the stars.