kahlil gibran hourani was a dreamer. He’d always had the tendency, but as he approached his fi fty-third birthday, he got much worse. In and out of dreams he slipped without warning to himself or others. “Kali, Kali,” his wife, Sophie, pleaded as he slumped heavily on her, his cheek pressing hers into her pillow, his generous sides wrapping over her like warm crust around a ripened fi g. “Wake up. Can you hear me, Kali? Kali?” He wanted to please her. He tried. It was no use. She sent him to the doctor. “No, no headaches,” Kali answered. “No dizziness. No heart palpitations.” The doctor, a young man, spoke in brusque, confi dent tones in a single continuous phrase, neither emphasizing one word more than another nor looking into the face of his patient. He scribbled on a little square of white paper, then suspended it in midair: “Your wife says you experience this dysfunction when you’re engaged in sexual relations with her. This is nothing to be ashamed of. It happens to men of your age. Here’s a prescription.” “Actually,” Kali said, “it happens all the time, whoever I’m with, wherever I am.” He shivered, naked and exposed, beneath the paper gown with the opening in the back.

“Mr. Hourani,” said the doctor a little more respectfully. “You surprise me.” “Oh, yes. It happens everywhere. And all the time. At the Oasis, when I walk in the park, when I’m at church, when I’m having lunch, when I read the paper, when I play cards, when I add sugar to my coffee, in the middle of a conversation, before I start my car, after I . . . ” The young doctor referred him to a psychiatrist, the one who was on the radio whenever someone tried to assassinate the president, the one who’d written all the self-help books and chaired the university department. The psychiatrist began. “So, it’s impotence which has driven you to such distraction?” “No, it’s Situe, my grandmother. Since she came to me in my dream and promised me the answers.” “Answers to what?” “My questions. Why men have to die; why what you do doesn’t change anything in the end; how to keep from being split apart when one foot reaches for youth and the other drags you to old age. And so on.” In their second session, the psychiatrist asked about the dream. Kali lay on the doctor’s couch, eyes closed, his hands folded loosely across his chest. His shoes, unlaced and lightly scuffed, waited close by on the fl oor. “I was asleep at home in my bed with my wife when this giant white bird, an eagle with piercing eyes, come down through the ceiling and landed right over me. The eagle’s feathers were only a few inches above my nose. ‘Do you want to see Situe again?’ it asked. ‘How is that possible?’ I said. ‘She died when I was a little boy.’ And the eagle said, ‘Everything’s possible. If you want to see her, come with me.