HE LED ME LIKE a toddler down a passageway. It was black as pitch. My eyes would not adjust to the sudden gloom as I blundered along behind. How he was able to see his way, I do not know. Why did he not simply light a candle for my benefit? I assumed it was for the sake of thrift, theatrics, or possibly he was just showing off his owlish capabilities.

“Watch head,” he said at one point, and placed his palm on my brow, pressing down as we squeezed through an invisible doorway. The stink of dead fish drifted from his fingers. I was at his mercy. I sensed we were passing through the bowels of the ship – through the hold and barrel rooms where the carving tools and slaughter hooks and blubber peelers had once been stored alongside the boilers and vats of whale oil. The air reeked faintly of bygone carnage. A taste of rancid tallow lighted on my tongue. I prayed my silk-clad midwife was delivering me to a good place, and not merely leading me somewhere better suited for my murder and subsequent mutilation.

At last, a lunar glow appeared before us.

We approached yet another curtain, and then the Chinese man parted the drapes like a cloud and let me pass into the lighted berth at the very aft of the ship.

*****

She is carved of a moonbeam!

This was my thought upon first seeing the comely telepathist.

Her skin was white as pearls, as was her flowing hair. She wore an ivory-colored gown, and its pallid redundancy worked to compound the lady’s already embellished etherealism. She seemed to glow. Her figure was thin as bone, with a minimal but pert bosom contained within the bodice of her apparel.

I will not lie – my second thought was of her nipples, which I could detect protruding just faintly from behind their gauzy wrapper. Were they, I wondered hungrily, but spiced albino gumdrops?

I suppose it could be argued that my thoughts were the easily predictable sort had by any starving man who had been deprived of feminine companionship for a good long while. I chastened myself for this, as it was not in keeping with my gentlemanly ways. But in that moment, the lady gave me a coy nod that indicated she was in fact reading my mind, as well as affirming my aforementioned question concerning the coloration and flavor of her nippular accouterments.

Surely I was in the presence of a strange and wonderful power!

“Bienvenu chez moi,” she said, and motioned with her hand to her quarters.

“Oh,” I answered. “I beg your pardon?”

She raised an eyebrow, as if amused. “You are not French?”

“Uh,” I stammered. “No. Er…” But then I remembered that I was talking to someone who purportedly knew me better than I knew myself. “Well,” I smirked, “at least not anymore.”

*****

The truth of the matter was, I had grown weary of who I had become in recent years, a direct result, at least in part, I concluded, of an inability to shake the lingering traces of my bastardized French-derivation. I was in want of a new start in life, a new set of personality garb, if you will. I sought a metamorphosis. To this end, I had set about vehemently denying my legacy and my past. Recently, I had made elaborate gestures, the foremost of these being to bury an effigy of my old self in an actual grave. It was a symbolic act, to be sure, but one I hoped would work wonders for the sloughing of my careworn shell. I wanted to be rid of Erstwhile Me once and for all. I even went so far as to carve a grave marker and say a few words over my former self’s resting place.

“He was a scalawag,” I had said, with bowed head and hat in hands. “A ne’er-do-well nincompoop and butt hook with unreasonable aspirations. The two-legged stuff of tragedy. A word twister. A cut-rate rhymester and a bastard besides. An assonant ass with alliterative tendencies. Good for not much.” I sniffled and wiped my nose on my sleeve. “Although irrefutably, he was somewhat suave and handsome to the ladies, willing to serve them with an unbending and upright bravado whenever allowed to so do.”

I gazed over the rain-sodden hillside I had chosen for my former self’s eternal resting place. A crow flapped like a rag across the wind.

“I cannot say he will be missed,” I concluded. “But nevertheless, adieu. May he rest in peace.”

The gravestone read –

Here lies one Didier Rain

Once a Bard, now a Carcass.

NEVERMORE HIS POESY WILL BE HEARD

My honest hope was that anyone finding that grave mound would determine that my jellied corpse was moldering underneath. Truth be told, I was somewhat on the lam at the time, as a certain contingent was after me for an infraction they felt I had committed against their sect. Maybe now they would give up their chase. Either way, I was pleased to be nameless and, more or less, naked as a newborn, with hope in my heart, and a fresh beginning most assuredly awaiting me as I set out to discover my next life.

Sadly, it had been somewhat rougher than I had foreseen. Even in the gold-lined streets of San Francisco. Thus, my current state of destitution. And twice thus my irrational eagerness to hear if my fortune would soon turn more favorable.