ABSTRACT
God willing, I’m going to tell you a love story. A skeptical old man, whose great forehead and gray forked beard most favor (when I flatter myself) those of that towering sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, I am hardly a man to conjure a fabulation so odd in its transfiguration of things, so strange, so terrifying (thus it now seems to me) that it belongs on the pale lips of the poetic genius who wrote Essentials and that hallucinatory prosepoem called Cane. But even though I’m an old man (I know my faults: failing memory, an infernal Faustian leer), I can still tell a first-rate tale of romance.
