The Colonel

"I doubt you can regain your shadow," speaks the Colonel as he sips his coffee. Like most persons accustomed to years of giving orders, he speaks with his spine straight and his chin tucked in. It is greatly to his credit that his long career in the military has not made him officious. Rather, it has bestowed an order to his life, along with many decorations. Exceedingly quiet and thoughtful, the Colonel is an ideal neighbor for me.

He is also a veteran chessplayer.

"As the Gatekeeper warned you," the old officer continues, "one of the conditions of this Town is that you cannot possess a shadow. Another is that you cannot leave. Not as long as the Wall surrounds the Town."

"I did not know I would forfeit my shadow forever," I say. "I thought it would be temporary. No one told me about this."

"No one tells you anything in this Town," says the Colonel. "The Town has its own protocol. It has no care for what you know or do not know. Regrettable…"

"What will become of my shadow?"

"Nothing at all. It waits and then it dies. Have you seen it since your arrival?"

"No. I tried several times and the Gatekeeper turned me away. For security reasons, he said."

"Predictable," the Colonel says, shaking his head. "The Gatekeeper is entrusted with the care of shadows. He shoulders the entire responsibility. The Gatekeeper can be a difficult man; harsh when not called for, blind to his own faults. Your only move is to wait for his mood to change."

"Then I will wait," I say. "Yet what does he have to fear from me?"

The Colonel finishes his coffee, then takes out a handkerchief to wipe his mouth. The white square of cloth, like his uniform, is worn but clean and pressed.

"He fears that you and your shadow will become one again."

At that, he returns his attention to the chessboard. This chess differs from the game I know in its pieces and their movements. Hence the old officer always wins.

"Ape takes High Priest, you realize?"

"Go ahead," I say. I move a Parapet to cover the Ape's retreat.

The Colonel nods, then glares again at the board. The tides of fortune have almost swept victory to the old officer's feet. Even so, he does not rush into the fray as he compounds strategem upon strategem. For him, the game is not to defeat the opponent, but to challenge his own abilities.

"It is not easy to surrender your shadow and simply let it die," he says, deftly maneuvering his Knight between the Parapet and my King. This leaves my King vulnerable. He will have checkmate in three moves.

"No, it is not easy," stresses the Colonel. "The pain is the same for everyone, though it is one thing to tear the shadow away from an innocent child who has not gotten attached tf> it, and quite another to do it to an old fool. I was in my sixtf fifth year when they put my shadow to death. By that age we already had had a lifetime together."

"How long do shadows live once they have Been torn away?"

"That depends on the shadow," says the old officef "Some shadows are fit and some are not. In this Town, severed shadows do not live long. The climate is harsh and the winters long. Few shadows live to see the spring." I study the chessboard and concede defeat.

"You can gain yourself five moWs," says the Colonel. "Worth fighting to the end. In five moves your opponent can err. No war is won or lost until the final battle is over." "Then give me a moment," I say.

While I reassess my options, the Colonel walks over to the window and parts the thick curtains slightly to peer out.

"These few weeks will be the hardest for you. It is the same as with broken bones. Until they set, you cannot do anything. Believe me."

"You mean to say I am anxious because my shadow still is not dead?"

"I do," the old officer nods. "I, too, remember the feeling. You are caught between all that was and all that must be. You feel lost. Mark my words: as soon as the bones mend, you will forget about the fracture."

"You mean to say, as soon as my mind vanishes?" The Colonel does not answer.

"Excuse me for asking so many questions," I say. "I know nothing about this Town. How it works, why it needs the Wall, why the beasts are herded in and out every day. I do not understand any of it. You are the only one I can ask."

"Not even I know all the rules," says the old officer under his breath. "There are things that cannot and should not be explained. But there is no cause for concern. The Town is fair in its own way. The things you need, the things you need to know, one by one the Town will set these before you. Hear me now: this Town is perfect. And by perfect, I mean complete. It has everything. If you cannot see that, then it has nothing. A perfect nothing. Remember this well. That is as much as anyone can tell you; the rest you must learn for yourself. Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can."

If the Workers' Quarter, where the Librarian lives, is a place of past brilliance, then the Bureaucratic Quarter, which spreads to the southwest, is a place of color fading into parched light. Here, the spectacle of spring has dissolved into summer, only to be eroded by the winter winds. All along the gentle slope known as the Western Hill stand rows of two-story Official Residences. The buildings, originally three-family dwellings with common entrance halls, are painted white. The siding and doors and window frames—every detail is white. None of the these Official Residences have hedges, only narrow flower beds below tiny porches. The flower beds are carefully tended, with plantings of crocus and pansy and marigold in spring, cosmos in autumn. The flowers in bloom make the buildings look all the more tawdry.

Strolling the Hill, one can imagine its former splendor: children playing gaily in the streets, piano music in the air, warm supper scents. Memories feign through scarcely perceived doors of my being.

Only later did this slope become the Bureaucratic Quarter, which, as the name suggests, was an area for government officials, undistinguished ranks of officialdom lodged in mediocrity. They too have gone, but to where?

After the bureaucrats came the retired military. Surrendering their shadows, cast off like molted insect shells, each pursues his own end on the windswept Western Hill. With little left to protect, they live a half dozen old majordomos to a house.

The Gatekeeper indicated that I was to find my room in one of these Official Residences.

My cohabitants proved to be the Colonel, four commissioned officers under him, and a sergeant, who cooks the meals and does the chores. The Colonel passes judgment on everything, as was his duty in the army. These career soldiers have known numerous battle preparations and maneuvers, revolutions and counterrevolutions and outright wars.

They who had never wanted family are now lonely old men.

Rising early each morning, they charge through breakfast before going their own way, as if by tacit order, to their respective tasks. One scrapes peeling paint from the building, one repairs furniture, one takes a wa£on down the Hill to haul food rations back up. Their morning duties done, they reassemble to spend the rest of the day sitting in the sun, reminiscing about past campaigns.

The room assigned to me is on the upper story facing east. The view is largely blocked by hills in the foreground, although I can see the River and the Clocktower. The plaster walls of the room are stained, the window sills thick with dust. There is an old bed, a small dining table, and two chairs. The windows are hung with mildewed curtains. The floorboards are badly damaged and creak when I walk.

In the morning, the Colonel appears from the adjacent room. We eat breakfast together, then repair to a dark, curtained room for a session of chess. There is no other way to pass the daylight hours.

"It must be frustrating. A young man like you should not be shut indoors on such a beautiful day," says the Colonel.

"I think so too."

"Though I must say, I appreciate gaining a chess companion. The rest of the men have no interest in games. I suppose I am the only one with any desire to play chess at this late date."

"Tell me, why did you give up your shadow?"

The old officer examines his fingers, sun-strafed against the curtains, before leaving the window to reinstall himself across the table.

"I wish I could say. It may have been that I spent so long defending this Town I could not walk away. If I left, my whole life would have been for nothing. Of course, it makes no difference now."

"Do you ever regret giving up your shadow?"

"I have no regrets," speaks the old officer, shaking his head. "I never do anything regrettable."

I crush his Ape with my Parapet, creating an opening for my King.

"Good move," says the Colonel. "Parapet guards against penetration and frees up the King. At the same time, it allows my Knight greater range."

While the old officer contemplates his next move, I boil water for a new pot of coffee.

Appetite, Disappointment, Leningrad

While I waited for her, I fixed supper. I mashed an umeboshi salt plum with mortar and pestle to make a sour-sweet dressing; I fried up a few sardines with abura-age tofu-puffs in grated yama-imo taro batter; I sauteed a celery-beef side dish. Not a bad little meal.

There was time to spare, so I had a beer as I tossed together some soy-simmered myoga wild ginger and green beans with tofu-sesame sauce. After which I stretched out on my bed, gazed at the ceiling, and listened to old records.

The hour was well past seven, and outside it was quite dark. But still no sign of her.

Maybe she thought better of the whole proposition and decided not to come. Could I blame her? The reasonable thing would have been not to come.

Yet, as I was choosing the next record, the doorbell rang. I checked through the fisheye lens, and there stood the woman from the library with an armload of books. I opened the door with the chain still in place.

"See anyone milling around in the hall?" I asked.

"Not a soul," she said.

I undid the chain, let her in, and quickly relocked the door.

"Something sure smells good," she said. "Mind if I peek in the kitchen?"

"Go right ahead. But are you sure there weren't any strange characters hanging around the entrance? No one doing street repairs, or just sitting in a parked car?"

"Nothing of the kind," she said, plunking the books down on the kitchen table. Then she lifted the lid of each pot on the range. "You make all this yourself?"

"Sure thing. I can dish some up if you want. Pretty everyday fare, though."

"Not at all. I'm wild about this sort of food."

I set out the dishes on the kitchen table.

We sat down to eat, and I watched awestruck as she, with casual aplomb, lay the entire spread to waste. She had a stunning appetite.

I made myself a big Old Crow on the rocks, flash-broiled a block of atsu-age fried tofu, and topped it with grated daikon radish to go along with my drink. I offered her a drink, but she wasn't interested.

"Could I have a bit of that atsu-age, though?" she asked. I pushed the remaining half-block over to her and just drank my bourbon.

"There's rice, if you like. And I can whip up some miso soup in a jiff," I said.

"Fabulous!" she exclaimed.

I prepared a katsuobushi dried-bonito broth and added wakatne seaweed and scallions for the miso soup. I served it alongside a bowl of rice and umeboshi. Again she leveled it all in no time flat. All that remained was a couple of plum pits.

Then she sighed with satisfaction. "Mmm, that was good. My compliments to the chef," she said.

Never in my life had I seen such a slim nothing of a figure eat like such a terror. As the cook, I was gratified, and I had to hand it to her—she'd done the job with a certain all-consuming beauty. I was overwhelmed. And maybe a little disgusted,

"Tell me, do you always eat this much?" I blurted out.

"Why, yes. This is about normal for me," she said, unembarrassed.

"But you're so thin."

"Gastric dilation," she confessed. "It doesn't matter matter how much I eat. I don't gain weight."

"Must run up quite a food bill," I said. Truth was, she'd gastrically dilated her way through tomorrow's dinner in one go.

"It's frightening," she said. "Most of my salary disappears into my stomach."

Once again, I offered her something to drink, and this time she agreed to a beer. I pulled one out from the refrigerator and, just in case, a double ration of frankfurter links, which I tossed into the frying pan. Incredible, but except for the two franks I fended for myself, she polished off the whole lot. A regular machine gun of a hunger, this girl!

As a last resort, I set out ready-made potato salad, then dashed off a quick wakame-tuna combo for good measure. Down they went with her second beer.

"Boy, this is heaven!" she purred. I'd hardly touched a thing and was now on my third Old Crow on the rocks.

"While you're at it, there's chocolate cake for dessert," I surrendered. Of course, she indulged. I watched in disbelief, almost seeing the food backing up in her throat.

Probably that was the reason I couldn't get an erection. It was the first time I hadn't risen to the occasion since the Tokyo Olympic Year.

"It's all right, nothing to get upset about," she tried to comfort me.

After dessert, we'd had another round of bourbon and beer, listened to a few records, then snuggled into bed. And like I said, I didn't get an erection.

Her naked body fit perfectly next to mine. She lay there stroking my chest. "It happens to everyone. You shouldn't get so worked up over it."

But the more she tried to cheer me, the more it only drove home the fact that I'd flopped.

Aesthetically, I remembered reading, the flaccid penis is more pleasing than the erect.

But somehow, under the circumstances, this was little consolation.

"When was the last time you slept with someone?" she asked.

"Maybe two weeks ago," I said.

"And that time, everything went okay?"

"Of course," I said. Was my sex life to be questioned by everyone these days?

"Your girlfriend?"

"A call girl."

"A call girl? Don't you feel, how shall I put it, guilt?"

"Well… no."

"And nothing… since then?"

What was this cross-examination? "No," I said. "I've been so busy with work, I haven't had time to pick up my dry-cleaning, much less wank."

"That's probably it," she said, convinced.

"What's probably it?"

"Overwork. I mean, if you were really that busy…"

"Maybe so." Maybe it was because I hadn't slept in twenty-six hours the night before.

"What's your line of work?"

"Oh, computer-related business." My standard reply. It wasn't really a lie, and since most people don't know much about computers, they generally don't inquire any further.

"Must involve long hours of brain work. I imagine the stress just builds up and knocks you temporarily out of service."

That was a kind enough explanation. All this crazihess all over the place. Small wonder I wasn't worse than impotent.

"Why don't you put your ear to my tummy," she said, rolling the blanket to the foot of the bed.

Her body was sleek and beautiful. Not a gram of fat, her breasts cautious buds. I placed my ear against the soft, smooth expanse above her navel, which, uncannily, betrayed not the least sign of the quantities of food within. It was like that magic coat of Harpo Marx, devouring everything in sight.

"Hear anything?" she asked.

I held my breath and listened. There was only the slow rhythm of her heartbeat.

"I don't hear a thing," I said.

"You don't hear my stomach digesting all that food?" she asked.

"I doubt digestion makes much sound. Only gastric juices dissolving things. Of course, there should be some peristaltic activity, but that's got to be quiet, too."

"But I can really feel my stomach churning. Why don't you listen again?"

I was content to keep in that position. I lazily eyed the wispy mound of pubic hair just ahead. I heard nothing that sounded like gastrointestinal action. I recalled a scene like this in The Enemy Below. Right below my ear, her iron stomach was stealthily engaged in digestive operations, like that U-boat with Curt Jurgens on board.

I gave up and lifted my head from her body. I leaned back and put my arm around her. I smelled the scent of her hair.

"Got any tonic water?" she asked.

"In the refrigerator," I said.

"I have an urge for a vodka tonic. Could I?"

"Why not?"

"Can I fix you one?"

"You bet."

She got out of bed and walked naked to the kitchen to mix two vodka tonics. While she did that, I put on my favorite Johnny Mathis album. The one with Teach Me Tonight.

Then I hummed my way back to bed. Me and my limp penis and Johnny Mathis.

"How old are you?" she asked, returning with the drinks.

"Thirty-five," I said. "How about you?"

"Almost thirty. I look young, but I'm really twenty-nine," she said. "Honestly, though, aren't you a baseball player or something?"

I was so taken aback, I spit out vodka tonic all over my chest.

"Where'd you get an idea like that?" I said. "I haven't even touched a baseball in fifteen years."

"I don't know, I thought maybe I'd seen your face on TV. A ball game. Or maybe you were on the News?"

"Never done anything newsworthy."

"A commercial?"

"Nope," I said.

"Well, maybe it was your double. You sure don't look like a computer person," she said, pausing. "You're hard to figure. You go on about evolution and unicorns, and you carry a switchblade."

She pointed to my slacks on the floor. The knife was sticking out of the back pocket.

"Oh," I said, "in my line of work, you can't be too careful. I process data. Biotechnology, that sort of thing. Corporate interests involved. Lately there's been a lot of data piracy."

She didn't swallow a word of it. "Why don't we deal with our unicorn friends. That was your original purpose in calling me over here, wasn't it?"

"Now that you mention it," I said.

She unhanded me and picked up the two volumes from the bedside. One was Archaeology of Animals, by Burtland Cooper, and the other Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings.

"Let me give you a quick gloss," she began. "Borges treats the unicorn as a product of fantasy, not unlike dragons and mermaids. Whereas Cooper doesn't rule out the possibility that unicorns might have existed at one time, and approaches the matter more scientifically. Unfortunately neither one has much to report about the subject. Even dragons and trolls fare better. My guess is that unicorns never made much noise, so to speak. That's about all I could come up with at the library."

"That's plenty. I really appreciate it. Now I have another request. Do you think you could read a few of the better parts and tell me about them?"

She first opened The Book of Imaginary Beings. And this is what we learned: There are two types of unicorns: the Western variety, which originates in Greece, and the Chinese variety. They differ completely in appearance and in people's perception of them.

Pliny, for instance, described the unicorn of the Greeks like this: His body resembles a horse, his head a stag, his feet an Elephant, his taile a boar; he loweth after an hideous manner, one black home he hath in the mids of his forehead, bearing out two cubits in length: by report, this wild beast cannot possibly be caught aliue.

By contrast, there is the Chinese unicorn:

It has the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, and the hooves of a horse. Its short horn, which grows out of its forehead, is made of flesh; its coat, on its back, is of five mixed colours, while its belly is brown or yellow.

The difference was not simply one of appearance. East and West could not agree on character and symbolism either. The West saw the unicorn as fierce and aggressive.

Hence a horn one meter long. Moreover, according to Leonardo da Vinci, the only way to catch a unicorn was to snare its passions. A young virgin is set down in front of it and the beast is so overcome with desire that it forgets to attack, and instead rests its head on the lap of the maiden. The significance of the horn is not easily missed.

The Chinese unicorn, on the other hand, is a sacred animal of portent. It ranks along with the dragon, the phoenix, and the tortoise as one of the Four Auspicious Creatures, and merits the highest status amongst the Three-Hundred-Sixty-Five Land Animals.

Extremely gentle in temperament, it treads with such care that even the smallest living thing is unharmed, and eats no growing herbs but only withered grass. It lives a thousand years, and the visitation of a unicorn heralds the birth of a great sage. So we read that the mother of Confucius came upon a unicorn when she bore the philosopher in her womb: Seventy years later, some hunters killed a qilin, which still had a bit of ribbon around its horn that Confucius' mother had tied there. Confucius went to look at the Unicorn and wept because he felt what the death of this innocent and mysterious animal foretold, and because in that ribbon lay his past.

The qilin appears again in Chinese history in the thirteenth century. On the eve of a planned invasion of India, advance scouts of Genghis Khan encounter a unicorn in the middle of the desert. This unicorn has the head of a horse and the body of a deer. Its fur is green and it speaks in a human tongue: "Time is come for you to return to the kingdom of your lord."

One of the Genghis's Chinese ministers, upon consultation, explained to him that the 't animal was a jiao-shui, a variety of the qilin. "For four hundred years the great army has been warring in western regions," he said. "Heaven, which has a horror of bloodshed, gives warning through the jiao-shui. Spare the Empire for Heaven's sake; moderation will give boundless pleasure." The Emperor desisted in his war plans.

In the East, peace and tranquility; in the West, aggression and lust. Nonetheless, the unicorn remains an imaginary animal, an invention that can embody any value one wishes to project.

There is, however, one species of porpoise called the narwhal or "sea unicorn". It does not have a horn so much as an overgrown fang of the upper jaw protruding from the top of its head. The "horn" measures an average of two-and-half meters and is spiralled with a drill-like threading. This cetacean is rather rare and does not figure in medieval records.

Other mammals resembling the unicorn existed in the Mesozoic, but gradually died out.

She picked up the Archaeology of Animals and continued: Two species of ruminants existed during the Mesozoic Period, approximately twenty million years ago, on the North American continent. One is the cyntetokerus, the other is the curanokerus. Both have three horns, although clearly one of the horns is freestanding.

The cyntetokerus is a smallish horse cum deer with a horn on either temple and a long Y-shaped prong at the end of its nose. The curanokerus is slightly rounder in the face, and sprouts two deer-like antlers from its crown and an addi-tional horn that curves up and out in back. Grotesque creatures on the whole.

Within the mammal class, single-horned or odd-number-horned animals are a rarity and even something of an evolutionary anomaly. That is to say, they are evolutionary orphans, and for the most part, odd-horned species like these have virtually perished from the earth. Even among dinosaurs, the three-horned giant tricerotops was an exception.

Considering that horns are close-range weapons, three would be superfluous. As with the tines of forks, the larger number of horns serves to increase surface resistance, which would in turn render the act of thrusting cumbersome. Furthermore, the laws of dynamics dictate a high risk of triadic horns becoming wedged into mid-range objects, so that none of the three horns might actually penetrate the body of the opponent.

In the event of an animal confronting several predators, having three horns could hamper fluidity of motion; extracting horns from the body of one for redirection to the next could be awkward. These drawbacks proved the downfall of the three-horned animal: the twin horn or single horn was a superior design.

The advantage of two horns rests with the bilateral symmetry of the animal body. All animals, manifesting a right-left balance that parcels their strength into two ligatures, regulate their patterns of growth and movement accordingly. The nose and even the mouth bear this symmetry that essentially divides functions into two. The navel, of course, is singular, though this is something of a retrograde feature. Conversely, the penis and vagina form a pair.

Most important are the eyes. Both for offense and defense, the eyes act as the control tower, so a horn located in close proximity to the eyes has optimum effectiveness. The prime example is the rhinoceros, which in principle is a "unicorn". It is also extremely myopic, and that single horn is the very cause. For all practical purposes, the rhinoceros is a cripple. In spite of this potentially fatal flaw, the rhinoceros has survived for two unrelated reasons: it is an herbivore and its body is covered with thick armor plating.

Hence it does not want for defense. And for that reason, the rhinoceros falls by body-type to the tricerotops category.

Nonetheless, all pictures that exist of unicorns show the breed to be of a different stripe.

It has no armor; it is entirely defenseless, not unlike a deer. If the unicorn were then also nearsighted, the defect could be disastrous. Even highly developed senses of smell or hearing would be inadequate to save it. Hunters would find it easy prey. Moreover, having no horn to spare, as it were, could severely disadvantage the unicorn in the event of an accident.

Still another failing of the single horn is the difficulty of wielding it with force, just as incisors cannot distribute a force equivalent to that of molars due to principles of balance.

The heavier the mass, the greater the stability when force is applied. Obviously, the unicorn suffers physio-dynamic defects.

"You're a real whiz at these explanations, aren't you?" I interrupted her.

She burst into a smile and trekked two fingers up my chest.

"Logically," she continued, "there's only one thing that could have saved the unicorn from extinction. And this is very important. Any idea?"

I folded my hands where her fingers were and thought it over a bit, inconclusively. "No natural predators?" I ventured.

"Bingo," she said, and gave me a little peck on the lips. "Now think: what conditions would give you no natural predators?"

"Well, isolation, for one thing. Somewhere no hunter could get to," I hypothesized.

"Someplace, say, on a high plateau, like in Conan Doyle's Lost World. Or down deep, like a crater."

" Brill!" she exclaimed, tapping her index finger now on my heart. "And in fact, there is a recorded instance of a unicorn discovered under exactly such circumstances."

I gulped. Uh-oh.

She resumed her exposition:

In 1917, the very item was discovered on the Russian front. This was September, one month prior to the October Revolution, during the First World War, under the Kerensky Cabinet, immediately before the start of the Bolshevik Coup.

At the Ukranian front line, a Russian infantryman unearthed a mysterious object while digging a trench. He tossed it aside, thinking it a cow or an elk skull. Had that been the end of it, the find would have remained buried in the obscurity of history. It happened, however, that the soldier's commanding lieutenant had been a graduate student in biology at the University of Petrograd. He noted a peculiarity to the skull and, returning with it to his quarters, he subjected it to thorough examination. He determined the specimen to be the skull of a species of animal as yet unknown. Immediately, he contacted the Chairman of the Faculty of Biology at the University and requested that a survey team be dispatched. None, of course, was forthcoming. Russia was in upheaval at the time. Food, gunpowder, and medicine had first priority. With communications crippled by strikes, it was impossible for a scientific team to reach the front. Even if they had, the circumstances would not have been conducive to a site survey. The Russian army was suffering defeat after defeat; the front line was being pushed steadily back. Very probably the site was already German territory.

The lieutenant himself came to an ignoble end. He was hanged from a telegraph pole in November that year. Many bourgeois officers were disposed of similarly along the Ukraine-Moscow telegraph line. The lieutenant had been a simple biology major without a shred of politics in him.

Nonetheless, immediately before the Bolshevik army seized control, the lieutenant did think to entrust the skull to a wounded soldier being sent home, promising him a sizable compensation upon delivery of the skull, packed securely in a box, to the Faculty Chairman in Petrograd. The soldier was released from military hospital but waited until February of the following year before visiting the University, only to find the gates closed indefinitely. Most of the lecturers either had been driven away or had fled the country. Prospects for the University reopening were not very promising. He had little choice but to attempt to claim his money at a later date. He stored the skull with his brother-in-law who kept a stable in Petrograd, and returned to his home village some three hundred kilometers from the former Imperial Capital. The soldier, for reasons undetermined, never visited Petrograd again, and the skull lay in the stable, forgotten.

The skull next saw the light of day in 1935. Petrograd had since become Leningrad.

Lenin was dead, Trotsky was in exile, and Stalin was in power. No one rode horses in Leningrad. The old stablemaster had sold half his premises, and in the remaining half he opened a small hockey goods shop.

"Hockey?" I dropped my jaw. "In the Soviet thirties?" "Don't ask me. That's just what I read. But who knows? Post-Revolution Leningrad was quite your modern grad. Maybe hockey was all the rage."

In any case, while inventorying his storeroom, the former stablemaster happened upon the box his brother-in-law had left with him in 1918. There in the box was a note addressed to the Chairman of the Faculty of Biology, Petrograd University. The note read: "Please bestow fair compensation upon the bearer of this item." Naturally, the purveyor of hockey goods took the box to the University—now Leningrad University— and sought a meeting with the Chairman. This proved impossible. The Chairman was a Jew who had been sent to Siberia after Trotsky's downfall.

This former stablemaster, however, was no fool. With no other prospect, rather than hold onto an unidentified animal skull for the remainder of his days and not receive a kopek, he found another professor of biology, recounted the tale, and prevailed upon him for a likely sum. He went home a few rubles richer.

The professor examined every square millimeter of the skull, and ultimately arrived at the same conclusion as had the lieutenant eighteen years earlier—to wit, that the skull did not correspond to any extant animal, nor did it correspond to any animal known to have existed previously. The morphology most closely resembled that of a deer. It had to have been a hoofed herbivore, judging by the shape of the jaw, with slightly fuller cheeks. Yet the greatest difference between this species and the deer was, lo and behold, the single horn that modified the middle of its forehead.

The horn was still intact. It was not in its entirety, to be sure, but what remained sufficed to enable the reconstruction of a straight horn of approximately twenty centimeters in length. The horn had been broken off close to the three-centimeter mark, its basal diameter approximately two centimeters.

"Two centimeters," I repeated to myself. The skull I'd received from the old man had a depression of exactly two centimeters in diameter.

Professor Petrov for that was his name summoned several assistants and graduate students, and the team departed for the Ukraine on a one-month dig at the site of the young lieutenant's trenches. Unfortunately, they failed to find any similar skull. They did, however, discover a number of curious facts about the region, a tableland commonly known as the Voltafil. The area rose to a moderate height and as such formed one of the few natural strategic vantage points over the rolling plains. During the First World War, the German and Austro-Hungarian armies repeatedly engaged the Russians in bloody confrontations on all sides. During the Second World War, the entire plateau was bombarded beyond recognition, but that was years later.

What interested Professor Petrov about the Voltafil was that the bones unearthed there differed significantly from the distribution of species elsewhere in that belt of land. It prompted the professor to conjecture that the present tableland had in ancient times not been an outcropping at all, but a crater, the cradle for untold flora and fauna. In other words, a lost world.

A plateau out of a crater might tax the imagination, but that is precisely what occurred.

The walls of the crater were perilously steep, but over millions of years the walls crumbled due to an intractable geological shift, convexing the base into an ordinary hill.

The unicorn, an evolutionary misfit, continued to live on this outcropping isolated from all predation. Natural springs abounded, the soil was fertile, conditions were idyllic.

Professor Petrov submitted these findings to the Soviet Academy of Sciences in a paper entitled "A Consideration of the Lifeforms of the Voltafil Tableland," detailing a total of thirty-six zoological, botanical, and geological proofs for his lost world thesis. This was August 1936.

It was dismally received. No one in the Academy took him seriously. His defense of his paper coincided with a power struggle within this august institution between Moscow University and Leningrad University. The Leningrad faction was not faring well; their purportedly non-dialectical research incurred a summary trouncing. Still, Petrov's hypothesis aside, there was the undeniably physical evidence of the skull itself. A cadre of specialists devoted the next year to excruci-ating study of the object in question. They were forced to conclude that it, indeed, was not a fabrication but the unadulterated skull of a single-horned animal. Ultimately, the Committee at the Soviet Academy of Sciences pronounced the embarrassing artifact a spontaneous mutation in Cervidce odocoileus with no evolutionary consequence, and as such not a subject fit for research. The skull was returned to Professor Petrov at Leningrad University.

Thereafter, Professor Petrov waited valiantly for the winds of fortune to shift and his research to achieve recognition, but the onslaught of the German-Soviet War in 1940 dashed all such hopes and he died in 1943, a broken man. It was during the 1941 Siege of Leningrad that the skull vanished. Leningrad University was reduced to rubble by German shelling. Virtually the entire campus—let alone a single animal skull—was destroyed. And so the one piece of solid evidence proving the existence of the unicorn was no more.

"So there's not one concrete thing that remains?" I said.

"Nothing except for photographs."

"Photographs?"

"That's right, photographs of the skull. Professor Petrov took close to a hundred photos of the skull, a few of which escaped destruction in the war. They've been preserved in the Leningrad University library reference collection. Here, photographs like this."

She handed me the book and pointed to a black-and-white reproduction on the page. A somewhat indistinct photograph, but it did convey the general shape of the skull. It had been placed on a table covered with white cloth, next to a wristwatch for scale, a circle drawn around the middle of the forehead to indicate the position of the horn. It appeared to be of the same species as the skull the old man had given me. I glanced over at the skull atop the TV. The T-shirt covering made it look like a sleeping cat. Should I tell her?

Nah, a secret's a secret because you don't let people in on it.

"Do you think the skull really was lost in the War?" I asked her.

"I suppose," she said, teasing her bangs around her little finger. "If you believe the book, the city of Leningrad was practically steamrollered, and seeing how the University district was the hardest hit, it's probably safe to say that the skull was obliterated along with everything else. Of course, Professor Petrov could well have whisked it away somewhere before the fighting started. Or it could have been among the spoils carted off by the German troops… Whatever happened to it, nobody has spoken of seeing the skull since."

I studied the photograph and slammed the book shut. Could the skull in my possession be the very same Voltafil-Leningrad specimen? Or was it yet another unicorn skull excavated at a different place and time? The simplest thing would be to ask the old man.

Like, where did you get that skull? And why did you give it to me? Well, I was supposed to see the old prankster when I handed over the shuffled data. I'd ask him then.

Meanwhile, not to be worrying.

I stared absently at the ceiling, with her head on my chest, her body snug against my side.

I put my arm around her. I felt relieved, in a way, about the unicorn skull, but the state of my prowess was unchanged. No matter. Erection or not, she kept on drawing dreamy patterns on my stomach.