Cue intro to Jim Morrison’s “The End” in the background. It is near dusk. Mark has not returned.

I am making the trip by train. I sit in the jangling car that ferries me to end of the world. I walk from the deserted elevated platform to the street below. I pass a dingy, decrepit playland, bits of trash swirling around in the salty breeze.

I reach the shore, shuck my clothes, remove the elastic band from my hair and wade into the looted sea of August. It is tepid, has a fine skin of oil on its surface. I would have preferred the numbing cold of January’s version. It would have been more merciful, quicker.

I don’t get to choose.

I’m already halfway to my assignation.

Khalika’s apparition does not intervene, is going to allow the mercy of an exit free of recriminations. Perhaps she is through with me, her spirit no longer willing to inhabit such a recalcitrant and distracted vessel. I swim out, beyond the breakers. My spine is quiet. Maybe she has broken free of me.

As I succumb to the rapture of the final stages of drowning, something swims into my fading vision through the opaque brine. First, she appears as the mermaid of my dream, the image she conjured in Mexico. Her image shifts, becomes that of the unrepentant, yet merciful Goddess of that trash strewn defile, the killing floor, the charnel ground, the image in the alley, in the mirror.

She is my twin, I realize, seen across the ephemeral yet impenetrable divide where we leave our animal carcass behind and merge with the eternal. She is splendid and fearsome, draped in Kali’s finery, her macabre adornments floating in the current. Her black hair fans out around her, seaweed entwined in the strands. Though you have the will of the wild birds, but know your hair… bound and wound… about the stars and moon and sun… lights fading one by one… She propels herself toward me at lightning speed, reaches out with her braceleted arms and grabs me around the torso. She brings me to the surface. Although unconscious, I somehow see it all from that borderland, hear the familiar guidance of her voice, feel her in the column of my back that ladders down to the vestigial stump of a tail. I hear her low, soothing voice.

Oh no, my darling sister, we are not through yet. I have much bigger fish to fry, and we are only getting better with repetition.

I am upon the shoreline, unaware of how I got there, gasping, then choking on the sand. I watch my silver tail become two naked legs as my sister sits beside me and leans into me, a hen consumed with her newly hatched chick. She radiates the heat of a raging funeral pyre. She enfolds me in her arms until I cease my gasping and shivering.

Get up and get dressed before you’re spotted! We need to get you packed and out of your love nest, or perhaps we’ll just leave it all behind. I will acquiesce, promise you a parallel life, free of my mission, until I summon you. At that time, we will discuss all particulars. I will sign it in blood if you require it, but it will have to be virtual.

Then she kneels beside me and whispers in my ear, her hot, insistent breath bridging the narrow-to-vanishing border between all that is, has been, and forever would be. She recites, from memory, the long poem by Alistair Crowley she left for me that night at the Westchester house, before a new world erupted from the ashes of the old, as all worlds are destined to do:

There is an idol in my house

By whom the sandal always steams.

Alone, I make a black carouse

With her to dominate my dreams.

With skulls and knives she keeps control

(O Mother Kali!) of my soul.

She pauses in her recitation as I heave salt water.

She cradles and rocks me, continues the poem to the very end:

There is no light, nor any motion.

There is no mass, nor any sound.

Still, in the lampless heart of ocean,

Fasten me down and hold me drowned

Within thy womb, within thy thought,

Where there is naught—where there is naught!

There, on the damp, gray sand, where so many millions of footprints have been reclaimed by the relentless, patient tide, I think I begin to pull myself upright, just as the distant streetlights flicker on. I hear the rumble of the elevated train ferrying its oblivious passengers to wherever they are destined to be. I cannot, for the life of me, tell whether I am dreaming.