How did you hate me? 

Katharine whispers in the Cave of Swimmers, talking through her pain of injuries. A broken wrist. Shattered ribs. You were terrible to me. That’s when my husband suspected you. I still hate that about you—disappearing into deserts or bars. You left me in Groppi Park. Because you didn’t want me as anything else. Because you said your husband was going mad. Well, he went mad. Not for a long time. I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me, will you. Stop defending yourself. Kiss me and call me by my name. Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth, as if they each could grip character there and during love pull it right off the body of the other. (Now there is no talcum on her arm, no rose water on her thigh. )You think you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you. (How many women did you have? I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, so wordless sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character. In the Cave of Swimmers we talked. We were only two latitudes away from the safety of Kufra. ) The English patient pauses and holds out his hand. Caravaggio places a morphine tablet into the black palm, and it disappears into the man’s dark mouth. Then he continues, I crossed the dry bed of the lake towards Kufra Oasis, carrying nothing but robes against the heat and night cold, my Herodotus left behind with Katharine.