A dream of wild-fires, earthquake, tidal waves.
He wakes and opens his eyes.
The city is there, stretching to the white horizon.
He blinks, and the city is gone.
*
Daybreak on the 101: mountains on the right,
the Catalinas far behind, and the Channel Islands – Santa Cruz
and Santa Rosa – gleaming like flakes of coal in the new sun.
As the highway straightened north, away from the ocean,
the view thinned down
to chicken-dinner shacks, roadhouses, motels,
the oil fields of Santa Maria.
The colossal woman in the seat across
watches her daughter
running up and down the aisle of the bus –
glares narrowly at her
over a root beer and a giant sack of funnel cake.
Snapping, at last: ‘SPATULA!’ she blares.
‘I got two words for you. Be-have.’
After four hours of this,
when he finally saw the ocean again at Pismo Beach,
he knew he’d had enough:
when they pulled in for a rest-stop at San Luis Obispo
he took his bag and got out,
made his way to the turn for Highway 1.
*
‘Don’t normally pick up hitch-hikers, but you’re a soldier, right?’
He was looking at the duffle bag.
‘I was, yeah. How far you heading?’
‘Frisco.’
‘Same here, eh. Thanks.’
The coastal fog like battle-smoke, but burning off
as they drove north, through the morning,
ocean on one side
and the black slopes of the canyons on the other, showered
with the arrow-falls of pale white pampas grass.
‘Name’s Ed. Ed Newell.’
‘Walker.’
‘I need to take a break. Get some coffee.’
They pulled in at a rest-stop with a beat-up shack
and the ocean below, and a steep path to the beach.
The fog had cleared from the heads of the redwoods
and he could see enormous birds
hanging in the thermals above the trees.
‘Condors,’ Ed told him, ‘Ten-foot wingspan.
And look. You ever seen the Statue of Liberty?’
‘Yeah.’
Ed nodded to the redwoods: ‘Them trees grow taller.’
They took their sandwiches and coffee down;
sat on the rocks by the sea.
The beach was strewn with huge green cables of kelp
alive with beach hoppers, rove beetles, roly-polies
– what they called slaters back home.
Beyond that, an outcrop of boulders that suddenly shifted
and there was a snuffling, snoring sound
as a great stone rose up on the back of another
with a grunt and a low growling. A roar.
When you made out one, you saw them all:
beasts the size of automobiles – elephant seals.
‘They’re molting, look.’
Walker saw that their fur was trailing in ribbons
like the torn clothes of the men out on the street.
‘I’ve seen a lot of seals,’ he said, ‘But nothing like this.
They must be twenty feet long.’
‘I do this trip every week,’ Ed said.
‘Always try to stop on this headland.
Last time I saw sea-otters out there,’ he said, grinning,
‘lying on their backs eating abalone.’
‘What line of business you in?’
‘Oh, y’know. Sales. But I like looking at things, y’see?’
‘Yeah,’ Walker smiled. ‘I see.’
Half an hour down the road, around Point Sur,
he pulled in hard to the shoulder, and threw open his door.
‘Blue whales!’ he shouted, ‘A pair of them . . .’
They just stood there, then, at the cliff-edge,
staring so hard their eyes teared up.
Standing together, wiping their eyes and laughing.
*
The smell of the sea; the larks rising in the wind over Dunvegan, tiny banners broken open. The sound of the stream’s fast-running water, on through the high wood. Her soft eyes, her mouth. Those days under the lenient trees, as I lay in the shielings with Annie MacLeod.
*
‘Hey, Walker.’
‘Hmn?’
‘It’s Monterey. You want to get some proper food?’
He parked up the Mercury right by the harbor,
and they walked down to the wharf and its forest of masts.
The nets were out drying, getting mended,
the decks hosed down, some men already taking a drink.
There were a few places open, though it was barely six.
‘This one’s on me, by the way,’ said Walker,
seeing a place on the corner, Tarantino’s Seafood.
‘How about here?’
‘Nah. There’s a real one farther down. Authentic.’
The Liberty looked the same as all the others:
checked table-cloths faded by the sun, tin ashtrays, battered chairs.
They had a plate of oysters, grilled sardines,
clam chowder in sourdough bowls.
‘How’s that?’ said Ed, wiping his mouth.
‘Tastes like home.’
‘What time you got?’
‘Twenty of seven.’
‘We better get on the road. Keep the light.’
*
They hit the city by nine, with the neon coming on.
‘This is Union Square,’ he said, ‘and here’s my hotel.’
It was like the Biltmore, only smaller, and just one doorman.
‘Welcome to the St Francis, sir.’
‘Sorry I can’t take you on, Walker. I’m pretty bushed.
It’s North Beach, right? You can get a cab here.’
‘Nah, I’ll walk. Thanks, eh – thanks for everything.’
‘No problem. Two blocks that way, then left on Grant.
Keep walking till you reach the top. Adios!’
He had an address from Overholt, some alley off Grant,
above Union, it said, so he started north in a straight line
through a Chinatown that seemed familiar,
feeling the land rise under his feet and the air clearing
till he felt himself climbing, like he was
on the 3rd Street steps again,
rising above the city and its lights.
He recognized the white tower, lit up above him
on the top of the hill, then gone from sight,
and next thing he was there, at the right address:
ringing the doorbell, and the house super giving him his key
and pointing: ‘Top of the stairs.’
The room was small – a Murphy bed, a table and a chair –
but the view made up for it:
the last red stains of sunset and the bright, rolling lights
of the city streets like a fairground underneath.
He pulled out the pint he’d been saving
and raised it to the window: ‘To San Francisco,’
he heard himself say: putting the bottle’s
open mouth to his, and drinking.
*
I turned to her in the night, again and again, in some dream, stiffening against her, shined her through and through.
Lying there afterwards, completed, emptied out, staring at the ceiling hand in hand.
Her clear blue eyes.
*
He found himself misplaced in his bed all night, mislaid.
His watch said morning, but the window’s light was milky,
like gauze on the lens,
and there was nothing to see but fog,
the occasional rooftop, tree or church spire
dipping in and out of sight.
He took a shower, dressed, looked again.
There was a hole in the weather
he watched the sun smoke through.
He was near the top of Telegraph Hill, so he climbed Coit Tower,
saw the last scarves of fog still caught in the valleys,
in the deep slots of narrow streets, in the ficus trees,
and the city was slowly unwrapping itself
in its gray and gold, with its bridges – lit, dazzling, high-
wired across the blue panoply of the bay
and its yachts, the far headlands, the scuttled ship of Alcatraz.
It was like living in a dune of Bunker Hills,
with proper weather and a better view;
the switchback streets like the rides on Coney Island,
the bay as bright as the Gulf of St Lawrence.
*
A postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge, to Annie MacLeod, Dunvegan, Inverness County, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada
Dear Annie, I told you I would reach the other side and here I am! Not much to report. I have a good job on a newspaper in Los Angeles and they’ve sent me up here for a spell. Weather changeable – just like home, which is good! But much warmer: 70°! I should have written before, but it’s all been so new. Such a change. I hope you are well, and keeping up with your piano lessons. I think of you often, mostly of the times by Lake Ainslie or up in the meadows that summer, before all this. Before the war. We were so happy. I want to be happy again.
Please give my regards to your mother and father.
July, 51
*
He walked it, easy, those first weeks: the produce market
down at Washington and Davis,
the ferries and wharfs of the Embarcadero;
the hidden gardens of Telegraph Hill; the Presidio, the park.
He remembered, now, how he knew that hotel in Union Square,
Edmond O’Brien stayed there in D.O.A.,
and why he recognized that bar in Chinatown, Li Po, because
Orson Welles is chased past its door in The Lady from Shanghai.
Months later, he finds Bacall’s apartment in Dark Passage,
high on Montgomery, by the Filbert Steps,
guarded by hawthorn and dragon trees.
*
The sun wobbles in the water of the bay: lattices of light.
The nets of sunlight in the water, the same nets as home.
August, 51
*
He got to work. From the heights to the depths: Howard Street,
south of Market, between 3rd and 4th,
a few blocks away from the Chronicle.
He found a Salvation Army troupe with tambourines
singing in a semi-circle round a bunch of bums: men oblivious
to everything but their jugs of wine.
There’s deep discussion, laughing, hugging,
then a shower of loose punches, and the Army scattering,
some solemn gulps of wine
then more laughs, back-slapping, fumbled rolling of cigarettes.
Everyone wanted to be somewhere else:
the Chicago Café, the New York Hotel, the Mars Hotel.
They panhandled from 3rd to 6th, Tehama to Minna,
bought their booze at Pete’s Place – 40¢ a jug –
slept it off in a cot in a flophouse for pretty much the same.
There was a guy on his own, in his forties maybe:
no socks; cuffs and collar black with grime, hands
empty and shaking; famished eyes.
On his lapel, a Silver Star.
‘How you doing, buddy?’
‘Could use a little lush.’
‘You serve in the war?’
‘Yeah. Fought all over, then came back to nothing.
My girl gone. Job gone. Got played for a chump.’
He poured the last three fingers from a fifth of white port.
‘How old are you?’
‘I dunno. What year is it?’ He gave a flat laugh. ‘Who cares.
I was born in ’20.’
‘Same year as me, friend.’
He lowered his eyes like an animal does, losing the fight.
Walker closed two dollars in the soldier’s hand, shook it and left.
*
He learned the city was a place of pockets.
The Row was small and barely spilled; two blocks either side
and you wouldn’t even know it was there.
It was the same with the weather. Constantly changing
but always local. You went east round a hill
and it rose ten degrees.
The west had a different climate, kept its haar, its sea mists –
it was where the winds came from.
He took a streetcar to Point Lobos
to see it, the edge of the ocean, Cliff House,
looking out over Seal Rocks, the fog
rolling in like smoke.
There was that end-of-season melancholy about the rest:
the pleasure palaces of the Sutro Baths,
with its neon sign reading ‘Tropic Beach’,
and the amusement park, which he wandered through,
with the wind chasing paper wrappers round in circles –
Playland-at-the-Beach where Welles
came to, in the Crazy House,
and blew out the mirrors, walking away
past Laff in the Dark and Shoot the Chutes
and leaving it all behind, heading for the gray Pacific,
in The Lady from Shanghai.
*
The fishermen with the long stares would say the haar is the sea’s breath, and the sea over shingle a dying man’s rattle. It was true for Lachlan from Pleasant Bay, with his face full of shrapnel and the death-shudders. I spaded his pack in after his remains; we were under fire, so a foot-deep had to do.
*
On the way to his diner on Columbus
or one of his bars, La Rocca’s, Tony Nik’s or the Northstar,
he passed Washington Square.
The winos are there: sprawled around
all day with their paper bags,
before some outrage sets them squabbling like gulls.
*
Do they notice the air has sharpened, that the trees are letting go the last of themselves, the maple’s red dress already spilled to the ground?
The trees in fall like my father: dying from the head down.
October, 51
*
She was sitting up at the counter in an empty bar that afternoon.
The hydrangea-pink and mauve of her flowery hat
picked out the redness in her eyes,
those thread-veins round her nose.
She was talking to herself, or to the whiskey glass,
it was hard to tell, but she was in the middle of something:
‘He was getting fresh, putting the make on me,
shooting me some line about being a Hollywood hot dog,
getting kick-backs from the Mob or something.
I said, You know what? Are you fucking kidding me?
Give me a break. And he says, C’mon, don’t be a sap,
I’m on the square, sweetheart, honest to God!’
She paused, and took a mouthful, then looked over at him.
‘Buy me a drink?’
He nodded to the barman. ‘Leave the bottle.’
‘Say, that’s mighty generous. You’re okay, fella.
You’re an okay guy in my book!’
He joined her at the bar, studying her closely.
She was picking at a darn in the elbow of her cardigan,
scratching an itch, readjusting her position on the stool,
eyes fixed on the one still point: her glass.
He could almost see where she lost her way.
It’s the first crease in the leather, a fold in paper,
the way the smile or frown goes
and the shape is made, the direction taken.
She was pretty bombed already; started singing
a verse of a song, then forgot it.
She looked like she’d been drunk for years;
a piece of metal
that’s been worked so often it’s lost its give.
Next time someone tried to bend her, she’d just snap.
‘I’ll remember you,’ she said with a sloping grin.
‘Lady, you’ll remember me till the bottle’s gone.
And don’t forget what they say:
there’s a message in every one of these bottles.
But you can’t read it till you got it empty.’
*
Cadent rain through paper birch, the days sliding through each other; the search for some way to make a mark, some kind of legible life.
*
There’s a film-crew outside The Paper Doll on Union,
and a framed poster At the Piano – Jean Darr
but it’s Marie Windsor in the photograph,
and there’s a bullet-hole in the glass.
A few days after, they’ve sealed off Filbert Street at Grant,
and cops with megaphones are keeping back crowds
at the auto repair shop on the corner.
He knows the director from a mugshot in the papers:
Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten,
back in business after naming names.
On the cover of Time magazine a week later: Senator Joe McCarthy.
*
He walks downtown on a Saturday night, the cable-cars
clanging through the streets. Long after they’ve gone
you can still hear their cables, rattling underground.
At the Powell Street turnaround outside the Owl Drug Company
he heads west for the Tenderloin, to hear Dave Brubeck
and his quartet, live at the Black Hawk: to watch
Chet Baker watching Paul Desmond
on alto, gliding through his solo on ‘Take Five’.
*
He strolls the Barbary Coast at night, or where it once was,
down on Pacific and Montgomery,
now known as the ‘International Settlement’,
where the military shore patrols in their overcoats and gloves
pair up with regular cops
and watch their boys don’t get into trouble
in the sex-clubs or queer bars or brothels.
One time he saw two men bust out of a crib-joint, naked,
both with knives, it looked like: one black,
one white – though it was pretty hard to tell as they jabbed
and parried under Margie’s sputtering bulb –
and over real quick:
one slash opened the black guy’s buttock
like a plum, then this neat stab to the throat
and with it
a twisting rope
so hot it steamed
as it splashed on the cobbles;
the blood that ran out of him
till he ran out of blood.
It could have been any of us, he supposed,
weltering in our own muck,
all bled out in that back alley
three thousand miles from home.
*
I was talking to this North Shore corporal and I’d just looked round to check the road and turned back and he wasn’t there. He was down in the culvert. Sniper got him in the middle of his forehead. The back of his head was gone, brains and everything, gone.
*
He thought about Billy, all those men on the street in Los Angeles.
About Overholt. Even Sherwood and Rennert.
He tried to remember the Mexican girl,
how all she wanted was a house in Bel Air –
to go to Hollywood parties, watch television, and gossip,
but he couldn’t gather her together in his head.
It snagged at him every time he thought about her,
the way of a rag-nail in a pocket’s silk lining.
Strange that:
his memory full of holes, hers always tight as a fist.
*
He loved having weather again,
the way it changed every minute.
They closed the Golden Gate in December, for a tempest
wrecking boats on Ocean Beach,
and the next month there was snow.
*
He’d been given some name by Overholt: a guy in UC Berkeley
he should talk to, Walter Friedländer in Social Welfare,
so he made the call after Christmas,
took the Key train over the Bay through banks of fog
so dense he couldn’t see the water.
‘Please sit down, Mr Walker. You look tired.’ The tall man
with clever eyes and a slight German accent
would meet him many times that year, preferring lunch
at Spenger’s Fish Grotto down by the marina –
for the clear light, as much as the shellfish, he said,
‘You can see San Quentin from here . . .’
A Social Democrat and Jew, who’d lived through Weimar,
got out of Berlin in ’33, knew his history of displacement, tyranny.
They talked about all the émigré directors and cinematographers,
writers and actors, and the old man laughed: ‘At last!
German Expressionism meets the American Dream!’
He’d worked with the homeless, with ex-soldiers,
all through the west coast,
said it would get worse when the Republicans won that year,
which they would, he knew,
that he was frightened for the first time here in America:
‘McCarthyism is fascism. Exactly the same. Propaganda and lies,
opening divisions, fueling fear, paranoia. Just like the thirties:
a state of emergency, followed by fascism, followed by war.
You’ve just defeated Hitler.
Can’t anyone see you’ve made another, all of your own?’
The last time they met, walking round the marina after lunch,
he said his worry now was the streets would get worse –
whatever happened in the election – because of mental-health reform.
‘They’re calling it deinstitutionalization,
– which is a hard word for me to say! –
and the theory is good: close down asylums,
which are medieval, dirty, corrupt and over-crowded,
and give community care with cheaper drugs.
In practice, though, this is all about money. As usual.
The sick will miss their medication and – how do you say it? –
fall through the cracks. They will be homeless,
ending up in prisons or out on the streets.
There will be thousands of them.
This is the future, my friend. This is the future.’
*
He sees the Dmytryk movie, The Sniper. All filmed round here.
It could have been him at the end, running uphill,
running to ground: Filbert between Battery and Sansome,
the Lower Filbert Steps, Vallejo at Montgomery,
then up from Union through Varennes to his place, finally,
an upstairs room at 450 Filbert Street, east of Grant,
where the cops find him sitting with his rifle, crying.
*
The view from the window was west, over to Russian Hill,
and the bay, and the Golden Gate.
He doesn’t deserve this city,
its play of height and depth, this
changing sift of color and weather.
The water held in it a shimmy of light
and the days were warming through June and July
and the road that threads through the hem of the Highlands
would now be decked with wild stock, lupins and apple blossom
all the way to Chéticamp and Pleasant Bay.
She will be wearing her sleeveless dress, cornflower blue
and walking away.
He could not call her back to his life: which is a horror,
which is the dead calf in the bank-head field, a black flap
bubbling with maggots,
ugly and wrong.
Her clean eyes could not see this,
what he has become.
*
A postcard of Telegraph Hill, to Annie MacLeod, Dunvegan, Inverness County, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada
Dear Annie, you would like San Francisco I think. It’s very dramatic with all these houses scrambling up over the hills, and the bay and the bridges and everything, but you might not care so much for the crowds. You’ve never seen so many people! It’s not like New York or Los Angeles, mind. Halifax seems like a village to me now.
Do you ever think of those days, those summers?
My best regards to your parents, and all those that remember me.
August, 52
*
Summer was closing, and he walked through the last of it,
finding a park with fairground music
coming from somewhere behind the trees.
Walking round, he understood that the funfair
is nothing to do with cork-shoots or coconut shies,
the carousel, the booster or the bumper rides,
not balloons-and-darts, not the cotton-candy,
ice-cream, salt water taffy or fries – it’s fear,
it’s the high-wheel of fortune and despair: that
thin glimpse of joy and freedom, before
rattling back to earth, loose-legged and spinning.
The real carnival is the other side –
beyond the midway, the concession stands, ‘Hot dogs
a nickel, three for a dime’, the merry-go-round
with its lights and bobbing horses, the churning calliope,
shouts, screams, sprays of laughter, gimcracks, baubles,
stuffed animals, those feather-headed
Kewpie dolls on sticks,
the children crying out, the barkers calling.
Follow the lights:
the colored electric bulbs strung up
on spitting wires, the smell of burning fat and engine oil,
cheap perfume, sweat and food and dung.
Here are the pinheads, the half-boys, the lobster-boys,
snake-men, midgets; the cage
and the geek inside, the man with the horrors,
waiting to eat the heads off chickens
for a bed of wet straw and a pint of rye.
This is not the worst.
The worst is the hall of mirrors
where you catch sight of yourself, twisted,
swollen, unrecognizable.
Then a beautiful woman – your wife, your lover.
Then it’s you again: old, crippled;
her as a turning witch, you as the held man.
And you blow every piece of your glass apart.
It’s the worst thing in the world,
catching sight of yourself.
The next day, the carnival is gone.
All that’s left is the flattened grass
and trodden ground,
the litter of popcorn boxes,
Dixie cups and empty bottles.
It looks like the place
where some huge, fantastic beast had foraged
and lain for a while
before moving on.
*
All the tourist films call California a playground, solely designed for our entertainment – colorful, exotic, transporting, like a carnival – and it is just that: a carnival. A crude travesty of childhood happiness: a pageant of loss.
I feel closer to her here, with the water all around. The light.
Annie.
Torn apart, the length of our lives.
September, 52
*
There was a ticker-tape parade in town for Eisenhower:
A hundred thousand, the papers said,
the headlines: WE LIKE IKE.
A month later he was in, on a landslide,
soldier on a soldier’s ticket: get us out of Korea;
get the Communists out of here, and everywhere else.
*
The view from the window was gray, tumbling. The fog,
breaking in waves from the west,
had already taken Russian Hill
and only the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge still stood
above the layer of mist, pouring
its dry ice into every crack of the city.
The occasional sunbeams like search-lights; the two-tone
moan of the foghorn blowing.
Our boys laid smoke so you could hardly see the beach
and the black dots. Some of them moving;
most of them not.
A sudden blazing, like gas flares from an oil-well, but lateral –
the flame-thrower tanks
burning off the sides of the beach – and you could hear nothing
but the drumfire that beat in our faces,
shivered our ungrounded souls.
Only the sea opened its arms to us.
Welcoming, drinking us down.
*
The waters of Loch Ban steam in the white dusk. The pines creak under fresh snow, and squirrels watch as I pass, each holding on to the base of their tree. The gull-like screech of the bald eagles, high in a stand of balsam fir, their blood-call over the wastes where the trout or the rabbit feel the closing claws: their drawing-up and their down-fall.
*
When he was working with the derelicts downtown
he’d taken to using the Hotel Utah,
a few blocks south of Howard.
Today was quiet, just a few in, and the owner,
who sat in the same corner each day,
staring out, on guard,
until you got real close
and saw his trick, how he’d had eyes
tattooed on his lids – that he was
asleep, or out cold. Like those
French façades with the shutters spread,
not windows at all
just paint on a stuccoed wall.
Eyes shut, tight as clams,
saliva pooling on his vest.
‘Howdya like that guy?’
Some boozehound he’d never seen in before,
holding grimly onto the counter like it was the gunwale of a boat.
His mouth moved a bit before he came up with:
‘Hey, Mac. Talkin’ to you.’
‘He’s the head honcho round here, so don’t make a book of it.’
A couple in the corner were taking notice. The man strolls over.
‘You’re outta line, bud. Take a walk,
or you’ll be wearing your asshole like a collar.’
The drunk swings round, eyes loosening:
‘You can take your lousy bar an’ shove it, fuckin’ . . .’
The guy knocked him down, and out,
then bent over
and hit him again: a savage one-two to the face.
The way his girl looked at him then.
Like she’d let him do anything.
*
The fighting over in Korea, and our boys were coming home;
just as he was finishing all this
in San Francisco and going back to what felt like war.
He went down to Fisherman’s Wharf for a last meal,
past the steaming kettles of the crab-stands,
all the restaurants, Alioto’s, DiMaggio’s, Sabella and La Torre,
but just wasn’t hungry, and kept walking,
stopping at Speedy’s up on Union and Montgomery
for a sandwich and a bottle
and went back, and sat at the window.
*
I was walking in the high country, among the cave-systems, when I found it: that bone knife laid down in the sixth century and picked up again in this.
American cities have no past, no history. Sometimes I think the only American history is on film.
August, 53
*
The echo of running feet still loud on the waterfront,
down the Montgomery Steps, and all through Chinatown.
Rita Hayworth is still driving up Sacramento
past the Brocklebank; the sniper
still crying in that upstairs room on Filbert Street;
from her window at the Tamalpais, and Bogart
– always running – still scrabbling down its fire-escape.
Joan Crawford leaves by the door of that building,
still chased in one sequence
from Greenwich and Hyde in San Francisco
to Cinnabar Street, three blocks from the Sunshine – flickering
from Russian Hill to Bunker Hill in twenty-four frames.
Jack Palance, trying to drive into her
down 2nd to Olive by the Mission Apartments,
only seeing in the last moment
it’s really Gloria Grahame, his lover –
crashing, and killing her, and himself,
at the dead-end parapet above the 2nd Street Tunnel.
The street he’ll be walking, in under a week.
*
He dreamt a plane carrying troops crash-landed
onto the cemetery outside Caen, and the long-dead
were churned up with the newly-dead
and he had to walk through it all.
Looking for himself.
*
The view from the window is black,
with a hundred moving lights – red, green and white –
the way he always dreamed the flight-deck of a plane.
Another sunset bloods the bay
back into slaughter, back to
bodies on the barbed-wire
– the larder of the butcher-bird –
back to taking that house in Villons,
grappling with the German.
Feeling the panic
triggering at the other’s neck, the pump
of the rounds going into him,
underneath you – the jolts – and he was reaching
in between you for your Browning
and you could smell his skin burning on it,
they get so hot, the barrels.
Till you emptied the magazine;
pulled away wet, and spent.
That dream of the mess hall, cavernous in shadow,
full of all the fallen,
line after line of the regiment’s dead, who raise their eyes to you,
the living betrayer, then lower their heads.