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Temple Eleven is deserted, derelict, decaying, vandalized by akiras. Among their graffiti, their beer cans, we find the remains of cooking fires, silver foil sachets of camping ready meals, condoms, needles, rotting biomotors and batteries, empty cartridges.
    “I don’t like this,” says Mas, clearly spooked. Pigeons explode from beneath the eaves of the ruined Daishi Hall. Some, I notice, have parasitical zoomorphs clinging to their bodies. Reading it for an ill omen, we press on.
    From Eleven to Twelve is half a day’s ride past two bangai —unnumbered temples on the pilgrimage route that are not Sacred Sites. Both, like Eleven, are deserted and desecrated. On. Uphill all the way. I find my mind withdrawing, shutting out the sensual world and its insistencies, drawing veils of memory. I am no longer conscious of the cold and rain, the ache in my thighs. I remember.
    I remember his life.
    I call him “he” because, though he shared the same face, the same name, the same body and mind as I, he is dead. Unarguably. Indisputably. Dead. He was killed. Not with bullets or knives or monomolecular wire in an alley in some anonymous central European city, not with drugs or poisons. He was killed with guilt. What survived him, this thing pushing its gaudily colored MTB up the side of a Japanese mountain, is only the slag. Only the ashes.
    I remember…

O N THE DAY THAT Ethan Ring was conceived, West Germany won the World Cup to the refrain of Luciano Pavarotti singing Nessun Dormas as Nikki Ring, twenty-something, unemployed, unemployable, engaged in five minutes of intense coitus in South Mimms Services car park off the M25 with a Dutch truck driver hauling a consignment of salad vegetables.
    On the day that Ethan Ring was born an armor-piercing smartbomb hit an underground shelter in Baghdad and incinerated five hundred men, women, and children while Bette Midler sang about God watching us from a distance.
    On the day that Ethan Ring kissed his first girl—Roberta Cunningham at the back of Miss MacConkey’s P2 class—Europe very quietly, very unremarkably, without any embarrassing mess or fuss or anyone noticing, united.
    On the day that Ethan Ring took his first date, Ange Elliot, age thirteen, to the local Pizza Hut for a double-cheese, diet Coke, and under-the-table footsie, Doctors ten Boom and Huitsdorp of the new, respectable, fully integrated, and racially harmonious South Africa won the Nobel prize for biology in recognition of their work on designing an artificial organism that converted sugars into useful electricity—to layman Ethan and his contemporaries, a living battery.
    Too tall too early, red hair—too much of it—socially crippled by acne and self-consciousness, Ethan Ring would almost certainly have grown into neurotic teenhood but for the shelter, succor, and support of the Nineteenth House kinship. From the moral ruins of the HIV-haunted nineties, strewn with the desiccated bones of broken relationships, a new sociological order had emerged of clusters of single women—separated, widowed, divorced, never partnered—joined together under a common roof against a sea of free-floating males. The kinship: average size five point three: three point two generating the income to support themselves and the average two point one career mothers who parented the children. Men come, men go at the individual partners’ discretions, but are never considered part of the family unit. 2003: the kinship achieves legal recognition in the European courts. 2012: one third of all permanent relationships are kinships. 2013, early May: Nikki Ring joins the Nineteenth House gaining a telecommuting designer of European farming magazines, a home-delivery sandwich Empress, a jewelry maker, a co-mother who has retired thankfully into parenthood out of Futures, two new daughters, one new son, a condominium on the South Coast (the eponymous Nineteenth House) with sun terrace and shared swimming pool, peace, stability, love,