Once I was in love with a prophet called Cassandra. She was tall and lean, with no softness to her; even her hair was sharp. I stopped eating for awhile, hoping to lose some of the excess flesh that kept me from her purity and vision. I longed for the fits of prophecy that would take her, she would fold over double, curled around some hollowness, some cramp of vision. Her eyes would roll back in her head into whiteness crossed with red spiders of broken bloodvessels; there would be spit and blood at the corners of her mouth. At these times I wanted to clutch her to me so tightly that our skin would melt and we would fuse, I wanted to crack my skull against her sharpness until our brains flowed out and together, I want to be her.

She had lost the continuity of time. I never knew when she was living. Long before the war, when Helen was only a distant rumor, a famous name called upon to flatter or curse, I watched Cassandra thrash and cry out in horror at the rape and murder of her brother. This fit-- the first I remember, although perhaps only the first to occur in public-- disrupted a formal dinner at the palace. We all thought then that she was simply mad. By the time her prophecies began to come true-- that is, when the events occured that explained her earlier reactions-- most people were too busy with the war to trace out the connections between the events and her prophecies. I followed her around; I wrote down what she said during her fits; I left space beside the promise of her words to record their fulfillment. I watched everyone avert their eyes from her embarassing spasms of prophecy, but I couldn't look away. Her sharpness cut through the protective film over my eyes, left me dry and defenseless, so that I had to watch her lose the present as were all losing the future.

Eventually I took over the care of Casandra. As she drew further and further from the present, I bathed her and dressed her and gave her the food she seldom ate. I knew her body better than I knew my own. I wanted to save her. Bathing her I blinked away tears, wanting to protect her, to be her, to protect myself in her, and knowing that I could do none of it. Rubbing her think back, feeling every vertebrae, easing tensions that sprang back as soon as I lifted my hands awy, my throat would swell and my breathing would catch. Skin is such a delicate membrane between life and death, so easily broken. At the same time her skin awas an impassable boundary between us. However close I drew her, however tightly I held her, however gently I stroked her, I could never reach her. I could never get close enough. It was impossible. And the cuts, scratches, gashes-- several times burns, when I was barely able to prevent her from throwing herself into the heart of the fire-- rebuked me. There was no saving either of us.

Then I became thin too. Absorbed in caring for her I grew gaunt as well, her smaller echo. I even fancy that my eyes lightened, grew closer to her strange blue. Sometimes, when I bathed or fed her in an interlude between seizures, wh would remember my name, would try to describe what was happening to her, the things she was seeing, the headaches and the visions. In the middle of one fit she uncurled enough to look directly at me, say my name, and thank me. I knew that she was saying goodbye, that she was living in the final moments before being taken away to be killed.

At the time of this prophecy there was one of those brief reversals of war, an indian summer when it looked as though we might triumph. I looked at Cassandra; she looked at me. There was one of those strange shifts of vision, like looking at the flat curve of the crescent moon and suddenly seeing it as a globe partly in shadow. I looked through her enlarged pupils and they became a tunnel into her world, into her present, my future. That once I had my wish, I shared her sight in the intimacy that I had so desired. We looked at each other and we both knew how it would end.