Barney had been hauled away on his painted coffin lid across the Celtic Nile to the music of Jack Kersarge’s irritating snark horn crooning, “Nurse, nurse!”

Finally, as he hovered next to the naked Meroe stone mason, ebony skin glistening with sweat under the anachronistic Celto-African sun, he felt some calm, the music of the flute having returned. His arm extended god-like into the sky, out of his sight, behind a cloud that should have hung over an Ulster sky. His unseen wrist was the subject of some manipulation by uncaring hands. Slowly, the Meroe stone mason carved something on the lid of the Inebriated Mick Pharaoh coffin.

He heard something rise from the banks of the Celtic Nile as the flute played, as the zombie craftsman carved on his coffin lid. Something rose sucking up out of the marsh margins of the sacred river.

He was afraid to look.

“I need a drink, Mo,” he said to the stone mason. “You wouldn’t happen to know where the nearest liquor store is, would you?”

The man continued his work, blowing dust from the symbols he was carving into the side of the coffin lid.

East of sober for—well, it was looking like eternity now—Barney Mancuso, dead levitating Pharaoh of his one man kingdom, which was at least blessed with 100 percent employment, feared what had risen from the muck behind him. A sickening shiver wracked his body and a chill sunk into his heart.

“Oh hell,” he said, as he rolled over to face the bird-headed god. Then he saw that it had been a jackal-headed god that had risen from the muck, and that he had not been levitating above his coffin lid at all, but laying upon it. He now pitched downward into a muddy river that, as it turned out, was merely the wading poll of a giant crocodile that might have swallowed a city bus…

The smell of rat shit was stronger in his nose now. He looked up from his back as he heard the crunching tread of combat boots walking away, looked up into the smart-ass face of the writer faɡɡot Jack Kersarge, who was being absolutely no help what-so-ever, as he stood above him and read from a large book.

“The pseudo-religious cosmology of W. D. Fard was drawn from the Book of Revelations, from a rather dim understanding of the Quran, a cursory reading of the many Atlantis myths that abounded in the nineteen-twenties—promulgated by groups such as the Theosophists—as well as a fascination with Egyptian cosmology. In the hands of a confidence man such as Fard, who, while of Afghan origins could pass as a light-skinned American Negro, at a time when colored men of slight complexion—such as W.E.B. Du Bois—were recognized advocates of—”

Barney, sick to death of listening to this dirge from his painful alley couch, snapped, “What numbskull wrote that shit?”

Kersarge looked down at him along his long bony nose, his small dark eyes fixing Barney with disdain, and said, through his bearded clam of a mouth, “I wrote this—have, indeed become the darling of my reading group since the research into your last unsolved case has driven me into the curious Lovecraftian search for a black avenger out of the past.”

“I must be having a nightmare? Am I in the loony bin?”

Kersarge looked down at him, thoughtfully, and eased the book closed, saying with smooth tones, “Barney, you are in hospice. Your wife signed you out of mercy hospital last week. You have asked me to continue your work, on your last case, the death and mutilation of Arbese Jackson. I’m reading from my notes, in which I have profiled the killer as a radical adherent to an all but extinct branch of a religion founded by fraud, and based on equal parts African American folk superstition and one con man’s reading of the Bible, the Koran, and fanciful interpretations of ancient Egyptian theology.”

Barney winced as he hauled himself up off of the hard concrete of the alley, only to have it give beneath him as if it were a hospital bed and cause him severe pain in his side.

Kersarge closed the book and stammered something about a nurse.

Barney moaned, as he swung down out of bed, “So I’m not really the Irish-Italian Pharaoh of the freagin’ hundred percent employment Nile Nation?”

“Oh, that’s rich,” chuckled Kersage, in his half-cackling tone. “You should have been a writer. No, stay—nurse!”

Barney shoved the writer faɡɡot across the room into the curtain behind which Darth Vader apparently breathed his last, lumbered toward the single door that was beckoning him like a fifth of Beef Eater on Boxing Day, and then got all caught up in some tubing and wires—and some gay fucking tinker-bell wheel stand for a baby bottle, and fell forward with surprising quickness.

The onrushing floor did not even hurt when it kissed his face at the speed of a falling drunk.

He was laying among the shattered ruins of his painted stone coffin, on the trash-blown banks of the Celtic Nile, the Marine Terminals dominating the sky line where a majestic pyramid emitting a bird-headed god once stood. The stone mason of Meroe, the one and only citizen of his perfect dream nation, was a shoe shine boy scrambling to re-assemble his once beautiful work of art, unable to decide if it was a painted stone coffin or a book.

He looked at his single citizen, and as pathetic a an intercessor as he had been a husband, said

“Sorry, Mo.”

The massive crocodile spit him out into the hands of the jackal-headed god. As he floated into the waiting hands of that malevolent deity at a maddeningly slow trajectory, he just wanted to spit in its glossy face, but lacked the saliva for it.

He was yanked bodily from his realm and placed on something metallic that groaned. The shock brought his eyes open under the soft white gay light, and illuminated the four faces above him, all peering down into his eyes: there was Kersarge, for some reason seeming to care, a Mexican twerp with a huge fat shaved head, a big black fellow with blonde hair, and an ugly, white dyke with pig face, all wearing their medical bullshit.

The dyke said, “Barney, please remain in bed. Anything you need will be provided.”

Coming back to earth from his Celtic Nile Minedom to look up into the united gay nations of do-gooder queers, he felt like he was going to lose it, and could not help himself—and did not want to in any case—as he blurted, “Unholy Christ, three faɡɡots and a dyke at my service. So I’m Louis the Fourteenth and you’re the Four Muskequeers?”

The pressure on his arm came again. But rather than being returned to the gloriously under-populated Celtic Nile, he found himself being walked to the head of the class by Sister Mary Rose, to the hollow sound of the echoing classroom at the Shrine of the Little Flower Church school, bent over her desk as the class giggled, and biting his lip so as not to cry out when he heard that aluminum yardstick cutting air like Boog Powell's bat.

And, in his ten-year-old defiance, he lashed out, “You know, Sister Mary Rose, I bet you’re the product of Nazi cross-gender experimentation—ouch!”