3.

Joshua opened his eyes as if from a deep sleep, and again found himself in the shadows, cool concrete under his jeans, the chilly air pressing into his skin. He sat for some moments in relative peace, as the dream left off from him and he looked at its terrors from the perspective of the comfortable Real--until he realized he was still in the same damp cell, among copper water pipes that dripped and moaned with their charge of fluid.

The man--that bald, burly old white man, shirtless and miserable--was back there, alive again, unscathed.

He ambled over, his movements curious, and reached his hand forward to touch Joshua's eyes.

"Are they open? Ha! They're open!"

Joshua swatted the man's hand away. "Don't touch my face!" he cried.

"I--I couldn't see. Not in this dark--I couldn't see if you was awake. But now I see a little glimmer there--yes--the moon is shining in your eyes."

"What happened?" said Joshua. "Was it a dream when--when we fought--when--"

"Ha! Nothing is a dream where nothing is real."

"What is going on?" said Joshua. "I'd think this was a dream but, but it's so real, and, and it's gone on so long."

"Ha!"

The man ambled away from him, went into a corner of their cold cement cell and began to inspect the walls a foot from his eyes, looking the corner up and down with jerking movements of his neck. Up and down he looked, side to side and up and down, his face turned intently toward the smooth cement of the corner.

"Do you know what comes next?" he asked.

"Next?" said Joshua.

"Next you ask me what is the solution. That's why we're all here, after all, in life, in existence--whether in hell or in heaven--what we want, all we want is the solution."

"Okay," said Joshua. "Okay, so I'll ask."

The man turned around, and waddled in a half-crawl and half-walk over to him. Joshua only now noticed how very large he was, how he seemed to rise up five feet while his body was crouched and his buttocks nearly touching the damp floor.

"If you want the solution, stop looking for the facts--stop looking for it to make sense! Nothing can be clear without being--without being false! The answer--the answer is this. That you cannot know truth, but truth can be understood. That you cannot know what is real the way you know the Earth is round--you know Truth in the way you know a man, the way you know joy or agony. The intellect strangles the life out of the world, replaces blood and viscera with notions and propositions, refuses to allow for that wasteland between Existing and Not-existing, True and Not-true. The intellect reduces God to a dictionary definition. Grasps a murder with legal standards and principles--none of which know murder as murder, the naked horror of its reality. The world--the world is a lie. There is no such thing as "history" as "a life"--these things are games I play with my mind; the story of my life is a fiction I have abstracted out of an eternal, incomprehensible Now. I was never born. I will never die. I--I--I," now he began to weep--"I killed my daughter, I killed and ate my loving wife."

Joshua remembered the conclusion he'd reached formerly--that the man was insane. He also remembered that the man had tried to kill him.

He began to call out past the bars of their cell. He saw nothing through the rusty iron bars but purple shadows, gray cement, the water pipes dripping all their moisture onto the floor and into the humid air.

"Hey! Hey! Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me?"

The bald man with blue-gray skin began laughing. It was a deep throaty laugh that made him mad with pleasure.

"What in hell is going on here?" said Joshua when the stranger stopped laughing.

"Ha!"