Love potions brewed from cinnamon and the boiled sperm of ancient giants. An intoxicating liqueur distilled from a diabetic’s pancreas. Oriental smelling salts to awaken your inner chi, derived from rendered corpses provided by the Great Leap Forward. Other liquid aids for memory and alertness. These concoctions advertised in the pages of Soldier of Fortune and Werewolf by Night in their November 1972 installments, sold by mail order: cashier’s checks sent to a post office box in Omaha.
         Some weeks later, a string-tied brown paper parcel arrives. You take it to your garage to unwrap it. Instructions for use in purple mimeo: The ingurgitation of this substance to be accompanied by these particular gestures of the hands, these particular concepts strongly focused upon in the mind, no sexual intercourse for a week beforehand. Not a problem for you, you think.
         You are looking for a sense of freedom. Other men have affairs, abandon their families, write Rabbit, Run. Tinker with cars. You drink this gritty brown elixir derived from the weeping sores of asteroids and dream of traveling through space with Buck Rogers and John Carter. Nothing happens.
         You go to work, you go to the bar, you go home, you go to sleep. Your kid bothers you about homework. Your wife bothers you about money and booze. The next day you drink the seawater and ambergris potion and in your mind you hold the idea of the deep black sea and the curious luminescent fellow travelers there. Nothing happens.
         You go to work, you go to the bar, you go home, you have a fight, you go back to the bar, you go home, you go to sleep on the couch. The next day you drink the potion made from the vaginal secretions of virgins strangled with silken cords. You’re beginning to doubt the efficaciousness of all this.
         Shouldn’t you be at work? your wife asks, after the kid is gone to school. The spring day is bright and blue; you are lingering in the driveway by the car while the bees buzz and the neighbors eavesdrop. You look pale, she says.
         Your skin looks flaky, she says.
         You wave away her concern. A few winged things float free from your hand and fly away.
         What was that? she asks. Drymouthed you try to answer, but pink moths detach from the inside of your throat and the ones not mashed by your teeth escape into the morning sky.
         She backs away. Ten thousand tiny black eyes open on your skin. You flutter beneath your clothes. Then the surface of you unfolds into thousands of beautiful silken moths, which stir their tessellated wings into alertness and stream out from your sleeves and pantslegs and collar—your skin taking flight in a cloud of white wings and eyelash-fine antennae. They soar and disperse; the rest of you, abandoned, sunlight-gleaming muscles leaking, collapses in a red cascade, accompanied by your cordless screams and Mary’s terrified stare and the perplexed barking of the neighbor’s spaniel as it leaps and snaps without effect at the many parts of you now winging among the flowers and the shade.
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